Google Site Is Blocked in China

SHANGHAI — Google’s search engine was apparently off limits for much of China late Tuesday, a sign that this country’s Internet censors may have decided to punish the company for its decision last week to move out of Beijing and operate an uncensored Web site from Hong Kong.
Users trying to access Google in Chinese and English were able to reach the home page of the Web site but unable to complete a search. The screen displayed an error message.
Some users in Shanghai said late Tuesday that they had occasional access to Google’s Chinese-language site, but mostly the site was inaccessible.
It was unclear whether Chinese censors shut down the site or whether there was simply a glitch in the system, but the widespread outage seemed ominous.
“It’s definitely the government,” said Duncan Clark, chairman at BDA Consulting in Beijing. “But we have to see if it’s sustained. Maybe they are just tweaking the filters.”
Beijing did not make any statements regarding Google, and the company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., did not respond to a request for comment.
On a Web page that monitors the availability of its products in China, Google reported that its mobile search service had been “partially blocked” in China since Sunday. But that page showed no problems with its search engine there.
The incident is not surprising to analysts here. The so-called Great Firewall of China — the country’s powerful blocking system — has been known to cut off access to sites that run afoul of Beijing.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have all been inaccessible here for much of the past year.
As of 11 p.m. Tuesday in Shanghai, Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, was still accessible.
Because Beijing seemed to be angered by Google’s strident comments last week and in January about the country’s strict censorship controls, many analysts believed it was just a matter of time before China’s sophisticated Internet filters blocked the Google site.
Last week, citing frustration with Chinese censorship controls and online attacks that seemed to be coming from China, Google officially pulled its Chinese-language search engine out of the country and relocated it to Hong Kong, which still operates like an independent state.
The move ended Google’s four-year experiment with operating a Chinese-language search engine from Beijing under Chinese censorship rules.
Shortly after Google’s announcement, the state-controlled Xinhua news agency quoted an unnamed official at the State Council Information Office calling the decision “totally wrong.”