China’s fortnight-long block on the Google.com search engine has ended, Internet users said on Friday, adding to a chain of events which has mystified — and angered — many of the country’s web users.
The US-based site, which had been inaccessible since the start of this month, appeared to be working as normal, users in different parts of the country told AFP.
A programme devised by the Harvard Law School which tests blocks on Chinese servers also reported Google as accessible. However another US-based search engine, Altavista, which was blocked a few days after Google, remained barred, both users and the Harvard programme showed.
Google has a highly popular Chinese language facility, and many Internet surfers around the increasingly tech-savvy country have expressed irritation that their favourite search tool was unusable.
Adding to their confusion, earlier this week users trying to access Google began being automatically transferred to a varied and apparently random series of Chinese-based search engines — a move the Chinese sites denied all knowledge of.
China’s Ministry of Information Industry said on Friday it knew nothing about the blocks, a position it has maintained throughout.
”The ministry has received no information about Google being blocked, and we have received no information about a block being lifted,” said an official from the information section, giving his name as Wang.
”It is quite normal with some Internet sites that sometimes you can access them, and sometimes you can’t,” he told AFP.
Observers in China have speculated that the blocks are connected to a general information clampdown by Beijing ahead of a vital Communist Party meeting in November.
A whole series of decisions on top-level changes are due to be announced at the 16th Communist Party Congress beginning November 8, including whether a series of elderly leaders, including President Jiang Zemin, will step down.
China routinely blocks a large number of foreign-based sites, primarily those featuring dissident views or banned groups such as the Falungong spiritual organisation, but also certain foreign news sites and pages showing pornography.
However it has not previously blocked entire search engines, which carry links to other sites but do not generally carry information themselves.
Google is somewhat different, as it holds its own caches of archived Internet pages — some of which have been deleted from the Internet proper — which it also searches. – Sapa-AFP