Beijing tightens censorship of Google

[FarCenter]

By Kathrin Hille in Beijing and Richard Waters in San Francisco

Published: March 23 2010 09:44 | Last updated: March 23 2010 12:50

Chinese internet users were left with less information from Google on Tuesday as their government appeared to apply an unusually strict censorship regime to the US search engine following Google’s move to stop self-censorship in China.

Google on Monday carried through on its January promise to end censorship of its local Chinese search engine.

The US internet company sought to lessen Chinese anger by redirecting all search requests on its local Chinese service to its Hong Kong arm, which it said stood beyond the reach of Chinese censors.

“It’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said in a blog post announcing the move.

That statement was challenged by many in China on Tuesday as many politically sensitive searches done on the Hong Kong engine out of China turned up blank pages. This happens often with content from foreign websites as a result of the Great Firewall, but the filtering of Google appeared stricter than normal.

Searches for the names of any of China’s top leaders turned up an error message saying “the web page cannot be displayed”, while the same searches delivered results on websites inside the mainland as well as other foreign search engines.

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