Chinese government blocks Google.com, Gmail, Google+, Maps, Docs and more

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/11/09/chinese-government-blocks-google-com-gmail-google-maps-docs-analytics-drive-more/

by derpenxyne • 14 years ago

184 102 14 years ago

thenextweb.com

mtgx• 14 years ago

It seems they want to make an example out of Google: "If you disagree with our censorship, this is what will happen to you, too", and create chilling effects for any other company who's considering being "moral" in China.

I wonder if Obama will do this to China, too:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/us-imposes-sancti...

Hermitian• 14 years ago

The Chinese government is going through a transition period at the moment, so much is undecided. But it is unfortunate (especially being Chinese) that the central government is becoming more conservative overtime (politically conservative, fiscally liberal). I do hope that this is just a phase rather than something persistent.

With regard to foreign policy, the US had been playing a very interesting game of hard-soft combination. Obama and the executive committee had been relatively soft on the Chinese government. At the same time, the US representatives to WTO and other trade organization had been pretty persistent. I don't know how things will turn out, but I am pretty certain that the US government will not impose sanction on China. That is a foolish move giving the trade and the status of China in the global market.

Undulate• 14 years ago

"politically conservative, fiscally liberal"

Fiscal politics are still politics so this doesn't make much sense, do you mean socially conservative?

desbest• 14 years ago

That will never happen.

China is producing lots of consumer goods for American companies (and global markets), and China doesn't take criticism lightly, so if they get criticised, China will cut off trade.

There was an Anti-Counterfeit goods event at London with lots of big name execs from corporations there who were trying to stop counterfeit goods. Not one of them wanted to name the perpetrators, who was responsible.

bitcartel• 14 years ago

Android sales are strong in China but that might change as despite Android being open-source, over-the-air updates are a potential risk.

Thus it's quite likely that home-grown solutions will be encouraged to grow market share, at the expense of Google. Just recently, Acer started selling a phone based on Aliyun, a fork of Android backed by Alibaba.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyun_OS

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

> Despite Android being open-source, over-the-air updates are a potential risk.

If Verizon can control OTA updates, then no doubt the Chinese government can.

From the Chinese govt's POV, Android is preferable to iOS, where they have no control.

revelation• 14 years ago

They deny its a fork, but since its clearly based on Android both in software and functionality, you could say its a "ripoff".

Shank• 14 years ago

They even took down the country specific access points - including Google.com.HK. Have they ever done that in the past?

karlsun• 14 years ago

This is pretty par for the course, given the once / ten years party congress that is going on.

Every year around June 4 (anniversary of Tiananmen "incident") and typically around Oct 1 (national day) Google gets blocked for a few days.

China is much more adept at censoring the Internet than everyone thought 5-10 years ago.

lgleason• 14 years ago

If the Chinese want to block a US software company from doing business in China by blocking access to them, then the US should impose tarifs on any software outsourcing to China with stiff penalties for any companies trying to circumvent it.

iwwr• 14 years ago

It's not the generic 'Chinese' who are at fault, but their government. Economic sanctions, like always, will just hurt the people while strengthening the government's power base.

taf2• 14 years ago

to a point... enough economic pressure will eventually trigger revolution... or can at least make it very unpleasant for the government to continue it's ridiculous position

seanmcdirmid13• 14 years ago

Its definitely the government, but not officially. Officially there are various technical problems...that are never the ISPs fault. If you get on the phone with them and ask why Facebook is not working, they'll actually say "it must be facebook's problem!". The censorship is not official and all shady, and so going through the WTO doesn't really help.

mongol• 14 years ago

Google Docs were blocked earlier this year when I was in China. I had put part of my travel plan there so it was an inconvenience, but as I did not expect it I felt very offended by that.

seanmcdirmid13• 14 years ago

Google Docs is always blocked, along with YouTube. Google search engine is sometimes blocked, gmail is rarely blocked as that would cause too much disharmony, but something has changed...these congresses are a pain in the ass anyways, I'm glad I'm out of country this month.

dak1• 14 years ago

If I had to wager a guess, I'd say this is probably due to the 18th Party Congress going on in Beijing right now, and that the block will be lifted sometime in the next week, once the transfer of power is over.

I think we may see some more moderates come to power, so I wouldn't expect this to continue. Whether or not Wang Yang gets a seat in the Standing Committee will be a good bellwether though.

seanmcdirmid13• 14 years ago

Ya, its the party congress hopefully. We'll have to wait until next month for things to get back to normal, and see what the situation is at then. I'm not sure who the moderates are, and whether they even have any control in this; I've heard the dinosaurs that control censorship are fairly embedded and hidden from even the top brass.

dageshi• 14 years ago

Yeah, China tightens up things a lot around important dates and arguably this Party Congress is the most important for a decade due to the leadership change. My guess is that this is to prevent rumours/gossip from spreading quickly via channels they don't control.

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

Where can I read more?

squid_ca• 14 years ago

Moderate fascists are still fascists.

wisty• 14 years ago

To elaborate, there are 2270 delegates who will choose the next standing committee. But those delegates will have been told who to vote for. Premier Wen, former Chairman Jiang Zemin, and other powerful members will have strong opinions, and may be unhappy with the make-up of the next committee. A deal has presumably already been struck, but that doesn't mean they can't possibly have a change of heart. The current leadership is leaving, and the new ones aren't entrenched, so it's a delicate situation.

Chairman Hu retains control of the military for the next 2 years, to discourage things from getting all Game of Thronesy, but they don't want to take any chances.

BryanB55• 14 years ago

Does anyone know what this means for US websites that use Google Analytics and are visited by people in China? Not that many of my website visitors are in China but I'm wondering if it will also stop the tracking code from working. I'm guessing it would since it won't be able to connect back to GA.

seanmcdirmid13• 14 years ago

The same thing that happens when we visit websites with Facebook embedded. It just fails.

andybak• 14 years ago

'it' being the embedded component or the whole page?

My guess is that it would depend on whether the old sychronous code or the newer async GA code was used. Not sure if the former is even still supported.

Torgo• 14 years ago

I maintain sites using both the older synchronous and newer asynchronous Google Analytics. I also personally as a matter of course block Google Analytics using a few adblock rules. As a user I have never experienced page breakage due to blocked analytics, and as a site maintainer I have witnessed that you simply don't get analytics information from those users. I've had clients freak because their Google ecommerce data doesn't add up, but in the end that information relies on trusting the client.

Intermediate• 14 years ago

I had problems accessing google services from China long before. I just started using proxy for all google websites, so I didn't even mentioned last changes

caycep2• 14 years ago

Hope this shoots the CCP in the foot. The interwebs are awash w/ the latest US election results, and viral youtube videos of Obama thanking his young twentysomething campaign staffers.

To give young Chinese such a glimpse of this and then brutally remind them that they don't have such luxuries of idealism and empowerment just highlights the failings of the CCP system even more...

Volpe6• 14 years ago

A glimpse of what? That money buys power, and the "shining light" of democracy is just a plutocracy much like their own system... That IS brutal, but not in the way you think.

aes2562• 14 years ago

> The interwebs are awash w/ the latest US election results, and viral youtube videos of Obama thanking his young twentysomething campaign staffers.

Strangely enough, those kind of images remind me of a Chinese-style dictatorship. Legions of apparently adoring fans worshipping their benevolent leader, chanting slogans, etc.

To the rest of the world, the presidential election is a reminder of everything that is wrong with America.

wololo2• 14 years ago

you're from the UK, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britishness In November 2007 The Times' Comment Central asked readers to define Britishness in five little words. The winning suggestion was "No motto please, we're British."

seanmcdirmid13• 14 years ago

They don't care about their international image. Wondering in the press on why "the world doesn't trust China" is a complete red herring, they really don't care and think they are in a strong enough position not to care.

Everything went downhill after the 2008 Olympics, I mean, Twitter, Facebook, everything was open before that. Now? Its getting worse and worse every month.

caycep2• 14 years ago

I know there is a tendency to be cynical, but I think a lot can be said about the following:

The public appearances of the President as well as the candidates are not sycophantic party propaganda. While the Wen Jiabiao's and Hu Jintao's of the world are lionized in The People's Daily and other party organs, the US media regularly shows American officials getting grilled or having to explain one thing or another. That not only are critical things said of Obama regularly in print or on air, but also often horrendous things from his opponents, and who can "get away with it" (meaning, no trip to a labor reeducation camp), says volumes.

Yes, this is a bit of a lionizing Obama video, but can you picture Xi Jiping doing anything this candid to his supporters? The whole idea of young students eagerly volunteering for a candidate they believe in is unheard of in China:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBK2rfZt32g

And: despite the whole money thing. Yeah, it's bad, the problem definitely exists, etc etc. But the Super PACs lost and Karl Rove melted down on TV.

beck5• 14 years ago

I was in China just last month and was surprised how openly everyone circumvents the blocks. I stayed in a very large 25+ floor 4* hotel where the entire free wifi went through a VPN. My Chinese friend said the government turn a blind eye because they know business needs it and they want the business.

wtvanhest• 14 years ago

Sounds like the paper bag system reference on The Wire.

EDIT: Brown paper bags cover open containers so people can drink on the street without police intervention so that police can focus on real work, but people still show police some respect.

camus• 14 years ago

you mean, as long as one is not saying something the government dislike anything goes... just like in any dictatorship.

Volpe6• 14 years ago

If that is your qualification for a dictatorship, then the U.S falls in that category as well. See WikiLeaks, and Assange.

jamesbrennan• 14 years ago

I wonder how much revenue Google is losing from this.

jdelsman• 14 years ago

What else is new?

CWuestefeld• 14 years ago

Aargh. I'm leaving for a vacation in China in a week and a half. I guess I'm going to have to set up my own VPN tunnel to ensure that I can still access my email, etc.

I'm assuming I can set something up through my dd-wrt router at home. Off to read the docs...

pav3l• 14 years ago

Yes, set up a private tunnel, don't rely on Tor, Google blocks a lot of their exit nodes, so it's just unusable most of the time.

jcampbell1• 14 years ago

When I was in China for a year, I just used a company dev server with a ssh socks proxy. It worked well, and it is one command in the terminal, and changing 1 setting in network preferences.

This is much easier than trying to find VPN service that isn't blocked.

monkeypizza2• 14 years ago

if you have shell access to a hosting account...

autossh -M 25841 -ND 127.0.0.1:8088 -i /home/.ssh/id_rsa user@host.com

and then tell your browser (or foxyproxy) to use it. one-line vpn that probably won't get blocked by china, ever.

zrgiu_• 14 years ago

I've been using StrongVPN.com for over a year without any problems. It's speed is decent too. I am not affiliated with them in any way.

oohaba• 14 years ago

I have OpenVPN set up on a linode server in the US. That was working fine until a week ago. Switched hosting to Tokyo instead and that worked fine for a few days. Now my colleagues and I have given up and are using a friend's account with Astrill.

SystemOut• 14 years ago

I used to use a socks proxy via ssh to a box in the US when I traveled to China. I have my own server for this but you can also use a micro EC2 instance as well I believe.

After my last trip, though, I got tired of the speed over an ssh based proxy and installed open vpn on my server and just used a tunnel. Wayyy faster. It's fast enough to watch Hulu and Netflix if your hotel has enough bandwidth.

The other option is to just purchase an openvpn based proxy subscription for a month and use that. Same thing and less fuss. I think running it myself is less likely to result in a blocked IP address since I won't garner as much attention but who knows how much they actually watch and actively block IPs for those services.

olalonde4• 14 years ago

I'm located in Shenzhen, China and all those domains work as usual except for Google+ and Google Docs which have been banned for a while. Google DNS also works as usual. Even Google.cn redirects to Google.com.hk as usual. Guess I'm either lucky or this was a very short lived ban in the middle of the night.

edit: Reading the article again, it seems Google didn't actually confirm the block. They simply stated there was nothing wrong on their end. I also strongly doubt they got in touch with a Google China representative in the middle of a friday night. I smell link bait...

mbreese• 14 years ago

Is it possible that this is a more targeted block, meant to block access in and around Beijing? The original source for the story (greatfire.org) doesn't disclose enough information about how they test to see how broad their testing is.

https://en.greatfire.org/faq/where-does-our-data-comes

barry-cotter2• 14 years ago

On my Chinese Android phone gmail will load enough for me to see it's gmail but I get “no offline messages”. In Shanghai.

Google.com is blocked too. Neither google.com nor gmail were blocked yesterday. Youtube has always been blocked and Docs has worked once since I got here.

barry-cotter2• 14 years ago

And it's back.

salimane• 14 years ago

I'm in Beijing and I'm experiencing this as of now. This is real

monkeypizza2• 14 years ago

from my testing, google.com and gmail have been blocked in Beijing for a few days now.

Of course, this is the same government that forced taxi drivers to remove the handles from their taxis so passengers can't roll down their windows, because they were afraid someone would drive by Tiananmen square and drop a bunch of ping pong balls with political messages on them.

nickpinkston3• 14 years ago

Yea, I was having on-off problems with Google domains as I traveled from Xinjiang (Google blocked) to Shenzhen (Open) to Beijing (Spotty Open) - is it that fickle all the time? Is it by region, time, or whim?

edwinyzh• 14 years ago

Most of the time google.com works (but slow, maybe because the data has to pass the GFW), but periodically, or when you search some sensitive words, the search engine become unresponsive. It's been like this for many years - I'm an extensive user of Google in China.

And recently I also have found that, the search result list displays normally, until you click to open the target pages.

There are millions of things would make me hate that evil gov, but this one thing makes me...sorry, out of words to describe as a non-native English speaker.

deviloflaplace• 14 years ago

In 15-20 years, a new generation that is aware that nothing can really ever be "blocked" on the internet will come to power.

Until then, long live dns servers & vpn.

listronica• 14 years ago

I wonder if this is to do th google new offering and its possible attempts to bypass whatever firewall systems China have around its internet http://www.google.com.ph/intl/en/mobile/landing/freezone/ind...

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

"Using a DNS server outside of China doesn’t help. A lookup of www.google.com to 8.8.8.8 is also distorted, by the Great Firewall."

Probably better to try that on a DNS server not owned by Google!

anchoring2• 14 years ago

Chinese people are not just Americans without good internet access...

The Chinese propaganda/education/censorship system is set up to accommodate all levels of disbelief of propaganda - that's built in to the propaganda, too.

So there is the official line, then there's the unofficial official line - which is generated by being pessimistic relative to the official line.

If the official line is that 7 people died in a disaster, rumors will float around that it was really 70, and people hearing that will feel content, cause hey, 70 people is not a lot to pay for 20 years of good economic development. Since they're anchored by the official line, suspicions never jump to 7000 people died, 20k people had their lives destroyed, which may be the reality.

It's the same with corruption - if an official gets busted for embezzling, skeptics guess that his wife is still overseas with millions, he had a couple cars, mistresses - but now he got his due and will never get out of jail. But they never guess that he was the equivalent of a mob boss in his city, had peasants disappeared, isn't even actually serving jail time, etc. (because that story would never, ever be mentioned again.)

So, rumors slightly inflating the official line are allowed, even encouraged, since they strengthen that line. But rumors showing that the official line is totally fake are destroyed - any reporter who brings one up can look forward to a life in a small town working in a factory, no education for their child, and nobody would ever hear a word about it, anyway.

pebb• 14 years ago

Sounds just like the mass media in the United States...

(Go ahead downvote it)

Volpe6• 14 years ago

Great little rant, but provide some citation please. Which reporters are currently in re-education camps, and It's unheard of that an entire family is sent for re-education (unless the entire family committed a crime together), which makes me doubt most of what you've said.

Also which event are your referring to with the 70 (actually 7000) deaths?

It's funny you are railing against propaganda by writing propaganda, please inform your points with actual data.

anchoring2• 14 years ago

well, tian an men is a good example. chinese people have an idea something happened, but no idea that possibly hundreds of people died.

also, i'm not talking about re-education camps. just messing with someone's hukou is enough to ruin their life - they'd no longer be able to work in the city they want to and their kid would not be able to go to school.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

So , if you run a business or are a student or whatever and use gmail/google apps for email and have your important documents in google docs it's just FU I guess?

known• 14 years ago

http://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=gmail.com

antihero2• 14 years ago

Why do people not use SSH tunnels/OpenVPN?

b62• 14 years ago

People who know how do. But most people just work with whatever software comes on their device, and maybe more importantly, they've never seen the "real" Internet, so they don't feel the need to try to get back to it.

turingbook2• 14 years ago

There should be nothing new. Google services are blocked for several years. But not every service is blocked in the same way.

Google+ and Docs is wholly blocked a long time ago. Google.com is blocked intermittently. Gmail and Maps are usually OK, but not very fluent these several days.

GFW is a mysterious monolithic and complex system. No outsider knows the rules and mechanisms.

b62• 14 years ago

I agree. I just want to add that I think they have a "degrade" mode designed more to be annoying than to block access. I know people here in Shanghai who hate Google products because they're so "slow", "unreliable", etc. Of course, they're perfect through a VPN.

turingbook2• 14 years ago

Actually I have switched to Bing as my default search engine for a while. For English, Bing is good enough but very bad for Chinese.

Chinese government blocks Google.com, Gmail, Google+, Maps, Docs and more

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