BEIJING -- For information-hungry citizens here who had been kept off major news sites by Chinese government censors, the sudden ability last week to access several prominent media outlets online seemed too good to be true.
It was.
Less than a week after Chinese censors unblocked the sites of The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the BBC, the sites were reblocked on Saturday.
Yet, as further evidence of the seemingly haphazard method the Chinese government applies to govern cyberspace, The Boston Globe remains unblocked after becoming accessible at the same time as the other sites.
China's Ministry of Public Security, which oversees the nation's Internet censors, refused to explain why it blocks or unblocks certain sites. Yet many question whether any coherent explanations even exist. As CNN's Beijing Bureau Chief Jaime FlorCruz insisted, "There's no rhyme or reason."
The reblocked sites join again a lengthy list of blocked media outlets that include CNN, Voice of America and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. China also blocks the sites of several human rights organizations and denies users access to links found through Yahoo or Google in searches on "Falun Gong," "Taiwan," or "Tiananmen Square Massacre."
The New York Times, unblocked in August after the paper's top editors personally appealed to Chinese President Jiang Zemin in July during a face-to-face interview, remained accessible. The Boston Globe is owned by The Times' parent company, but it's unclear whether its ownership is related to The Globe's ability to remain unblocked.
Zhu Feng, an international studies scholar at Peking University in Beijing, who said last week he believed the government had opened the sites to meet the demand for news on the U.S. terror attacks, admitted he was puzzled by the latest development.
But Sophia Woodman, research director for the New York watchdog group Human Rights in China, was not surprised. She had speculated the site openings might have been the result of a computer glitch, although she also thought perhaps they were a Chinese government effort to garner better international press.
"The fact that they continue to block these U.S. newspapers despite the fact that the number of people in China who are likely to access news on them is so limited should indicate the level of censorship that's going on," Woodman said.
