China: A New Approach To Tibetan Language Blogsites?

Posted by High Peaks Pure Earth on Jan 13, 2010 in Global Contributors, SFT Global | 0 comments

Internet censorship in China is currently dominating the news due to Google's announcement yesterday that they might withdraw their PRC operations following serious hacking and attacks on the GMails of dissidents. Read the full statement "A new approach to China" here.

It remains to be seen how much longer Google and Google.Cn will be accessible in China and Tibet for. Several hours ago, a Twitter user in Lhasa posted this:

It is unclear from this Tweet, however, whether the Google search results are filtered or not. At the same time that the Chinese internet may seem more free today than yesterday (for now), High Peaks Pure Earth has been monitoring the state of Tibetan-language blog hosting sites that have been inaccessible for the last two weeks.

It is fairly common for Tibetan blogsites to be rendered inaccessible, if only for a short period of time, at particular times of the year. High Peaks Pure Earth monitored such "technical issues" last year, for example in March 2009 in these blogposts All Quiet on the Tibetan Blog Front and The Disappearing Tibetan Cyberspace. In August 2009, Global Voices reported on Tibetan blogsites being down in the report Are Tibetan Bloggers Being Silenced?

The four popular Tibetan language blogsites that cannot be accessed at the moment are:

TibetABC: http://www.tibetabc.cn/

Chomed: http://www.cmbod.cn/index.html

Tibet123: http://www.tibet123.com/tibbs

The error message for Tibet123 in Chinese reads: 您未被授权查看该页 - You are not authorised to view this page.

However, the most alarming page belongs to TibetTL that is reported as an attack site:

When clicking for more information, Google shares this advisory:

High Peaks Pure Earth has even had problems linking to the TibetTL page on our Twitter as it was identified immediately as malware:

All of the above blogsites contain Tibetan language articles and posts previously translated into English by High Peaks Pure Earth. The Tibetan cyberspace continues to disappear... check back here on High Peaks Pure Earth for updates.

Update #1, January 20, 2010: Blogsites http://www.cmbod.cn/index.html and http://www.tibet123.com/bbs/ are back online. http://www.tibettl.com is still down.