china // Current

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5 months ago

Girls and Corpses

The hottest twins in history, how tequila can make you rich, and Conor kisses a corpse - all in this week's magazine roundup.... more

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Facebook Inaccessible in China After Violent Clashes in Urumqi

Facebook Inc.’s social-networking Web site was inaccessible in China as the government blocks information after violent clashes in one of its regions.

As of 1:36 p.m. Beijing time, there were at least 36 reports of Facebook.com being unavailable from China, according to Herdict.org, a project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which tracks Web outages. Local access to the YouTube.com video site of Google Inc. was also broken, and connections to Amazon.com Inc.’s online store were irregular.

China’s government, which maintains tight control over the Internet, media and information flow, severed access to e-mails and the Web this week in the western city of Urumqi in Xinjiang province amid ethnic clashes that left more than 150 people dead and 1,000 injured. Authorities blocked Google’s search engine last month amid criticism it spread pornography.

“The government wants to show it’s doing as much as it can to prevent links to information from overseas as well as from inside China,” Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China, a Beijing- based technology consultancy, said by phone. “It won’t work.”

Facebook.com couldn’t be accessed from Beijing or Shanghai as of 11 a.m. local time, while connections were possible from Seattle and Brisbane, Australia, according to WebSitePulse.com. Yahoo! Inc.’s Yahoo.com Internet portal and Microsoft Corp.’s Hotmail.com e-mail service were reachable from all four locations, according to WebSitePulse.com.

“It does appear to be running slowly” in China, said Larry Yu, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook. “We’re looking into the matter, what the reason is for the service running slowly.”

‘Prisoner of State’

Amazon.com, the world’s largest online store, sells “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang,” the banned memoirs of the former chief of the Chinese Communist Party, who was under 16 years of house arrest until his death in 2005. He secretly taped his account of the infighting among party officials before they ordered the military to crush pro-democracy demonstrations on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. Clicking on the book’s Web page from China blocks the whole site for at least 15 minutes, and it can be re-accessed once the Internet browser’s history is cleared.

This may mark the first time the government has totally suppressed access to Amazon.com, broadening previous restrictions on Web pages for individual books, Clark said.

“The government has blocked some individual books, but has never blocked the whole site, to my knowledge,” Clark said.Facebook Inc.’s social-networking Web site was inaccessible in China as the government blocks information after violent... more

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5 months ago

Good Morning! China riots, Iran protests and the G8

Hey everybody - Just an update of what we're following here at Current News. The big thing we're looking for today is... more

afitzgerald
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5 months ago

Did China's nuclear tests kill thousands and doom future generations?

"Enver Tohti remembers the week that it rained dust. That summer of 1973 he was in elementary school in Xinjiang Province,... more

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5 months ago

Xinjiang Riots Explode in China

Ethnic protests have spread to a second city in China's western Xinjiang province after riots rocked the region's... more

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5 months ago

China’s Rodney King Riots

Tensions between Muslim Uighurs and majority Han Chinese escalated July 5 when a peaceful protest over the deaths of two Uighur... more

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5 months ago

China president hurries home from G8 after rioting

China's president cut short a G8 summit trip to rush home Wednesday after ethnic tensions soared in Xinjiang territory, and the government flooded the area with security forces in a bid to quell emotions in the wake of a massive riot that left 156 dead.

Two helicopters dropped leaflets appealing for calm among the Xinjiang capital's 2.3 million residents a day after running battles in the streets involving Han Chinese and minority Muslim Uighurs waving bricks, steel pipes and cleavers.

A Foreign Ministry statement said "given the current situation in Xinjiang," President Hu Jintao cut short a trip to Italy for a Group of Eight meeting later Wednesday to return home. It was not known if he would travel to Urumqi, about four hours by air west of Beijing.

After an overnight curfew, streets were calmer Wednesday, but residents showed cell phone and video camera footage of the earlier chaos, reporting neighbor-on-neighbor violence and pointing out bloodstains.

Uighurs say the riots that started Sunday — put down by volleys of tear gas and a massive show of force — were triggered by the June 25 deaths of Uighur factory workers killed in a brawl in the southern Chinese city of Shaoguan. State-run media have said two workers died, but many Uighurs believe more were killed and said the incident was an example of how little the government cared about them.

Many of the Turkic-speaking group believe the Han Chinese, who have flooded into the rugged, rapidly developing western region in recent years, are trying to crowd them out. The Han Chinese say the Uighurs are backward and ungrateful for all the economic development and modernization.

They also complain that the Uighurs' religion — a moderate form of Sunni Islam — keeps them from blending into Chinese society, which is officially communist and largely secular.

In one of the biggest Uighur neighborhoods Wednesday, residents crowded around reporters to complain about how mobs of Han Chinese men stormed into their neighborhoods and assaulted them.China's president cut short a G8 summit trip to rush home Wednesday after ethnic tensions soared in Xinjiang territory, and... more