Internet Filtering in China in 2004 2005 

Figure 8   Summary of In State Testing Results 

Status 

URLs 

Percent 

Accessible Twice 

5271 

66% 

Accessible Once 

699 

9% 

Inaccessible Twice 

1959 

25% 

Total 

7929 

We treated URLs that were accessible once as accessible (not filtered) in our analysis. 

To provide comparison, our testing included 813 Web sites found within the .cn top level domain.  

We assumed that these sites, which are in a top level domain controlled by China, would not be filtered 

and would generally be accessible within China.  The statistics for tested sites in .cn are below. 

Figure 9   In State Testing Results for .cn Web Sites 

Status 

URLs 

Percent 

Accessible Twice 

730 

90% 

Accessible Once 

83 

10% 

Inaccessible Twice 

Total 

813 

These results support our definition of inaccessibility due to filtering; countries generally do not 

use technical means to filter content that is within their top level domain, since they can exercise more 

direct forms of control over this material. 

2. Long List Results 

To explore further the accessibility of Web sites containing content potentially sensitive to China, 

we created a testing list (the  long list ) containing the top 100 sites returned by the Google search engine 

for queries on Chinese and English keywords related to sensitive topics, such as  Falun Gong.   The charts 

below report the results of in state testing of this long list, divided by topic area.  This data represents the 

percentage of the sites on the long list that testers could not access (we defined a site as inaccessible if it 

could not be reached in two or more test runs). 

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