China blocks search engines of popular Chinese portals

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June 20, 2006

BEIJING : June 20, 2006:Chinese authorities have blocked the search engines of two of the country's most popular Web portals as part of their efforts to censor the Internet, staff at one of the companies said on Tuesday.

The search engines at Sina.com and Sohu.com have been shut down since noon on Monday. Searches conducted on Tuesday brought up messages saying that the sites were undergoing upgrades.

"As of yesterday noon, all the databases have been in a state of closure because relevant government Internet supervision departments were censoring our databases," a member of customer service staff at Sina.com said. "It affects not just Sina, but Sohu as well, so our search engines are not in use," said the staff member, declining to give her name.

She said that she was unsure which content was being censored but added that the search service should resume on Thursday.

Another member of staff at Sina confirmed the government order, although the company spokeswoman's office declined to give a reason, saying that the system was only going through an upgrade.

"It is an internal system problem," said a secretary surnamed Kong.

Sohu's spokesman was not available for comment but a content editor said that the company's database system had to be upgraded because of the large volume of visits.

China has for years been waging an online battle to censor the Internet of pornographic and violent content, but also to stifle political and religious material that it believes could spark social unrest.

Sina.com and Sohu.com are among 14 Beijing-based Internet portals, which in April called on the industry to follow their example by self-censoring "unhealthy" content from their Websites.

But "unhealthy content" has increasingly appeared to cover politically sensitive material.

Searches on terms such as the banned religious group Falungong, the Dalai Lama, Tibet or Taiwan independence typically yield no results on popular search engines.

Western Internet firms such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have also been criticized by media and human rights groups for censoring their services in China.

China's foreign ministry refused to comment on the specific censorship issue on Tuesday, but defended the government's attempt at managing the Internet.

"The Chinese government has been taking an active role in the development of the Internet," ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told journalists at a routine briefing on Tuesday.

"As [well as] many other countries, China has managed the development in accordance with laws, we believe it is a rational management."

China has roughly 111 million Internet users, with the majority being youngsters.

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