Chinese government blocks Google.com, Gmail, Google+, Maps, Docs and more | Hacker News Reader

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

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184 pointsderpenxyne102 comments

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.

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.

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.

Where can I read more?

Moderate fascists are still fascists.

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.

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...

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.

"politically conservative, fiscally liberal"

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

It appears to me that They're opening up their economy more to western influences, but they're trying to maintain control of their own party and keep everybody in line, similar to what Putin has done in Russia.

My theory is that as they open up more economically, the citizens will be "enlightened", so to speak, and there will be more protests. If China officials know this, they may be trying to stop this enlightenment before they're put out of power.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Downvoted, because "X happens in every dictatorship" does not mean "every place where X happens is a dictatorship", and also because I think there is a noticeable difference between Gmail and Wikileaks (even though I supported the latter).

Government doesn't want X to be said about it, and thus pressures/censors company Y to stop it.

(X = "Anti-Communist sentiment" or "War crimes") (Y = "Google" or "Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, Wikileaks... etc")

Not a huge noticeable difference.

The point I was trying to make, is everyone is quick to taint a discussion on china with words like "Dictatorship", when in fact, china isn't (You know they can vote!?), and all the 'evidence' of them being one are scenarios played out in all countries.

Let's take it even further then,

Government doesn't want X to happen against its interests, and thus implements measure Y to counter-act it.

Now all governments and governmental actions are the same.

Also, people in Eastern Germany could vote, that didn't help a lot. I am not sure if dictatorship is the proper term when it's actually a one-party state / oligarchy, though.

There is a conservative wing and a progressive wing to the CCP... much like there is a Republican party and a democratic party. one party state is techniquely true, but in reality it plays out much like a 2 party system.

Government is oligarchical by nature. i would not rank the US much better than china in that regard.

"If that is your qualification for a dictatorship"

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...

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

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.

And it's back.

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

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.

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?

Each ISP has their own implementation of the golden shield, so different regions will block different things. The system is entirely opaque to us, I wouldn't be surprised if blocks were determined at the decentralized local level rather than by the central government. Beijing ISPs blocking more during this "sensitive time" would be consistent with that thought.

Sounds about right - pretty wild. What else surprised me was the strobe light / camera systems at the chokes points to cities / neighborhoods. Overall, I don't think China seemed that bad - not like military with AKs everywhere, but this stuff was quite interesting to see first hand.

The bizarre thing is that its a much freerer society than even the states in some ways. The police don't really bother you unless the situation becomes "visible," lots of sketchy things happen out in the open. You don't have to wear a helmet when cycling, etc...

Yea, I felt the same way - it's almost libertarian in some ways. I felt far less paranoid around their police / security people because it seemed like their default position wasn't: hassle.

Though to be honest, the police in the states aren't really hard to beat - what culture of BS that is...

I've heard of some "situations" involving raves and outdoor parties where weed was involved, but in each case the foreigners get a free pass while the Chinese get to spend all night in a police station getting drug tests. Anyways, we will never be Chinese and won't see the real China.

I actually heard that regular policemen in China couldn't recognize the smell of marijuana.

These aren't regular police men, they are the police guys who are in plain clothes and drive black Audis. Quite a bit different from the regular traffic cop.

You can drink beers in the street, nightclubs and bars don't have a closing time, policemen are not armed, there is no law about where you can or cannot smoke, it's ridiculously easy to get a visa and stay in China as long as you want. You will never ever get a fine in China for a civil offense (not wearing a seatbelt, spitting on the floor, peeing in public, crossing the street on a red light, etc.). At worse, you are going to get a friendly warning. Traffic policemen are not allowed to chase speeding cars. They will rely on license plates and CCTV cameras instead.

China is surprisingly more free than many western countries as long as you don't step into political territory. Being a foreigner also helps a lot. Some people might argue that those freedoms seem anodin compared to freedom of speech or political freedom but in many ways, those things have a bigger impact on your everyday life than the latter freedoms. If you're libertarian leaning like me, you'll probably like China.

What would happen if a law was passed banning smoking in a particular area? Would ordinary Chinese be able to object to it, would they be able to petition the legislature that passed the law without fear of reprisal? What if your kid's school adopted something in the curriculum that you found objectionable - could you complain without fear? I am not being snarky, I really am curious about how bright the line is between the political forbidden territory and uncontroversial.

> What would happen if a law was passed banning smoking in a particular area? Would ordinary Chinese be able to object to it, would they be able to petition the legislature that passed the law without fear of reprisal?

In general, the central government tries to maintain a good popular opinion so complaining does work in some ways. It's also fairly straightforward to join the party if you are really into politics. I believe you are relatively safe from reprisal as long as you complain about a specific policy, not the actual party.

When people are unhappy about something, the party's modus operandi is to blame local government or corruption and fix whatever is making them unhappy. The nice thing about the party is that it is highly decentralized making it easier to back off without losing face or perceived authority.

In the case of Internet censorship, it doesn't affect 99.9% of Chinese so there isn't much people complaining about it. Most Chinese don't have a clue what Google Maps or Gmail is. The prevalent websites here are Baidu for search, Baidu maps for maps and Yahoo for email. Would the average Joe in the US complain about Baidu or Youku being blocked by the government?

> What if your kid's school adopted something in the curriculum that you found objectionable - could you complain without fear?

I'm not sure who sets the curriculum and whether you could successfully get it changed. I believe it would be easier in that case to send your kids to a private school.

Personally, I feel China is freer than the US or Canada in ways that have a more noticeable impact on my life. Then again, I would probably be more concerned about freedom of speech and political freedom if I couldn't leave China as easily I can right now.

Indoctrination happens in public school in China, and you can't do much about it. There is no such thing as a private school for locals (officially at least, there are some underground schools for migrant worker kids), though there are international expat schools that are super expensive. Most public school have tuition and competitive admission anyways.

It is already illegal on paper to smoke in many areas. Just like it is illegal to sell iPhone clones. Basically when the police are passing you, you stop smoking/selling fake iPhones...

Or you offer the cop a cigarette? Anti smoking laws are poorly enforeced in Beijing.

You forgot to mention that many nonviolent crimes in China carry sentences we would consider extreme. Depending on the quantity, rather harmless drugs such as marijuana, shrooms, and MDMA can get you executed. Civilian ownership of firearms is also restricted. Then of course there's the Internet censorship and monitoring. Don't forget the banning of various books.

If your idea of libertarian is "bars stay open all night and I can smoke anywhere" then you might want to consider Las Vegas. It's much more permissive than any place in China and you won't even have to learn a new language.

Companies are also free to pollute and in some cities the pollution is so bad it seems like a weather system.

You mentioned your libertarian leaning. I find that hilarious. Yes, there's an intersection with libertarianism, but there is a lot that doesn't intersect.

It's up and down here in Guangzhou over the past few days unfortunately.

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.

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.

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.

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

> eventually trigger revolution.

These are the Chinese we're talking about..

The government is corrupt enough that they might as well could trigger a revolution themselves someday. Interference from us would hardly matter.

If anything, interference in Chinese domestic matters would solidify the ruling oligarchy's dominance.

Just a few to note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Revolution

Anyone starting a revolution now would technically be labelled as a counter-revolutionary (this is the terminology they use at least).

>These are the Chinese we're talking about..

Is this supposed to mean that the Chinese are too tame and subservient?

They already had a huge communist revolution -- and two more revolutions in the last 120 years (the Boxer and the Hsin-hai Revolution). Even the last 2-3 decades, they had massive strikes and struggles, and the Tien-An Men square thing.

How is that working out with Cuba?

The economic pressure has to be on the people in power, not the man on the street. I doubt those in power are suffering.

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.

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.

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

(Go ahead downvote it)

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.

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.

Well you raise Tiananmen, which is impossible to prove either way. But it is well known that people died amoung chinese (hence the massive emigration during and right after).

And now you've raised messing with Hukou, I hadn't heard of that happening, and again, you still haven't provided any sources for your info. I imagine it is extremely hard to mess with Hukou as you'd have to change birth records as well, Given china doesn't have a centralised system (for either birth or Hukou) records, it would be very complicated to achieve this.

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...

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.

> 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.

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."

Not sure how this is relevant?

I'm sorry, what I meant was that (stereotype warning) the British are particularly cynical-reserved about putting your identity/politics on your sleeve, and the Americans are the opposite, so part of your disgust might be from cultural differences

or to further quote, “The point I was making is, this idea of a statement of Britishness; I cannot think of anything less British than that,” said 25-year-old David Bishop, author of the winning motto.

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.

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.

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.

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

'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.

The browser will get a 404 when it tries to load the GA script, or simply get a tcp connection refused. It won't affect the rest of your site unless you are depending on other assets served from google.com.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I use DDG, as when the Chinese results far from your desire, you can easily add some key words like g! to invoke google's engine for help.

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

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.

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...

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?

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

What else is new?

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

> 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.

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

I wonder how much revenue Google is losing from this.

Why do people not use SSH tunnels/OpenVPN?

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.

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