New York Times site still blocked in China

The Chinese authorities continued blocking access from mainland China to the Web site of The New York Times over the weekend despite having lifted some of the restrictions they recently imposed on the Web sites of other media.

Some computer users abruptly lost the ability to view the site Thursday evening. When many in cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou tried to connect on Friday morning to nytimes.com, they received a message that the site was not available, a problem that persisted through Saturday and Sunday. The International Herald Tribune is the global edition of The Times.

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But the Chinese-language Web sites of BBC, Voice of America and Asiaweek, all of which had been blocked earlier this week, were readily accessible by Friday. The Web site of Ming Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper, was blocked last week and was still restricted on Friday.

Chinese officials had few explanations for the restriction on The Times's site. "Concerning your particular question, we're not really familiar with the details," a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing said Friday, declining to give his name. "Web site maintenance is not within the job purview of the Foreign Ministry."

Tang Rui, an official with the government's International Press Center in Beijing, said that he also had no specific information. "It might be a technical problem," he said Friday.

Access to the Web site was not restricted in Hong Kong on Friday or over the weekend, however. Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, but the territory still allows freedom of speech, including on the Internet.

Internet users in Japan and the United States were also not experiencing difficulties in viewing the site. A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine Mathis, said Friday that there did not appear to be a technical issue.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a researcher at Hong Kong University who specializes in China's Internet controls, said that the reasons for the restrictions were mysterious. "All anybody can offer is speculation," she said.

China has been sending seemingly contradictory signals this past week about the extent to which it will preserve the somewhat greater openness to international media that it tolerated in connection with the Beijing Olympics in August.

In the months before, during and after the Games, the Chinese government temporarily unblocked access to some Web sites and eased curbs on the ability of foreign correspondents to travel within China. China has not tightened the travel restrictions since then.

At a reception last Tuesday as part of several days of celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of China's decision to embrace greater economic openness and even some political changes, Wang Chen, the minister of the State Council Information Office, said that China was committed to providing greater access to journalists who wanted to report on the country.

"The best experience of 30 years of opening up and reform is that only through them we can better communicate with the world," Wang said, according to the official China Daily newspaper. "That's a policy we'll never depart from."

But Liu Jianchao, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, took a more restrictive position toward the availability of information on the Internet for Chinese citizens during his twice-weekly news conference last Tuesday in Beijing.

Liu said that the Chinese government had a right to censor Web sites that violate the country's laws. He mentioned that "some Web sites" had violated Chinese law against secession by suggesting that there are two Chinas - a reference to the Beijing government's longstanding position that mainland China and Taiwan form a single China.

"I hope that the Web sites in question will be able to self-regulate," Liu said.

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BY Keith Bradsher

Source：International Herald Tribune