Google Drops Censorship in China

BEIJING - Web sites dealing with subjects such as the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, Tibet and regional independence movements could all be accessed through Google's Chinese search engine Tuesday, after the company said it would no longer abide by Beijing's censorship rules.

Despite a report in the China Daily that Google China was still filtering content on its search engine and the firm's own insistence that its policies had not changed, people in Beijing found that it wasn't necessarily the case.

NBC News, using the publicly accessible Internet, tried searching for three sensitive topics normally blocked in China.

The first phrase typed into Google.cn was "Xinjiang independence," and the top result was a Wikipedia entry about the East Turkestan independence movement.

The second search attempted was the "Tibet Information Network," a former non-profit group that was critical of China's policies in the region.

When NBC News in Beijing did a search for the words “Tank Man” in Chinese characters, the iconic image did appear. But it was only one image came back as a result, not several like you likely find on U.S. based Internet search.

And when “June 4,” the term used for the Tiananmen protests in China, was searched with Chinese characters, again just one image of the Tank Man appeared.”

Tank man image now available
For the final search, "Tiananmen Square massacre" was typed in, deliberately choosing the more controversial phrase instead of "Tiananmen Square incident."

Once again, a long list of results appeared, detailing the military crackdown on protesters on 4 June 1989. The famous picture of a lone man blocking a line of tanks was among them.

Each time, simply clicking on the links to the results enabled the sites to be accessed without any difficulty.

"It does seem that the filters are not fully working," said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of danwei.org, a Beijing-based Web site that tracks media and the internet in China.

"But no one knows exactly what's going [on]," he said.

The searches proved erratic and on some occasions access to controversial Web sites was denied. But there was a significant change compared to six months ago.

Messages from NBC News Beijing at Google China's offices have been left unreturned.

Chinese news reports say Google is on the verge of shutting its China site, Google.cn, and some say it has stopped censoring results.

Google denies censorship lifted
However, a Google spokesman in the U.S., Scott Rubin, told the U.S. that censorship had not stopped and would not confirm whether Google.cn might close.

"We have not changed our operations in China," Rubin said by phone from Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

CEO Eric Schmidt said last week something would happen soon, and Rubin said he had no further details.

Another Google spokesman told msnbc.com that the company suggested the change may have resulted from alterations made by the Chinese government.

Google says it is in talks with Beijing following its Jan. 12 announcement that it no longer wants to comply with Beijing's extensive Web controls.

But China's industry minister insisted Friday the company must obey Chinese law, which appears to leave few options other than closing Google.cn, which has about 35 percent of China's search market. w

Such a step could have repercussions for major Chinese companies as well as local Web surfers. It would deliver a windfall to local rival Baidu Inc., China's major search engine, with 60 percent of the market. But other companies rely on Google for search, maps and other services and might be forced to find alternatives.