Internet Filtering in China in 2004 2005
h. Longitudinal Comparison with 2002 Testing
To analyze changes in China's filtering system over time, we compared our in country results for
sites related to a number of search terms in 2005 with results from ONI's testing in fall 2002. Several
interesting trends appear in the data.
Figure 17 Longitudinal Comparison 2002 and 2005
Proportion of Top 10 and Top 100 Google Search Results Inaccessible
March April 2005
August September 2002
Term
Top 10 Sites
Top 100 Sites
Top 10 Sites
Top 100 Sites
china blog
0%
5%
30%
11%
democracy China
30%
23%
80%
42%
dissident
10%
14%
60%
31%
dissident china
50%
28%
80%
37%
equality
0%
3%
100%
24%
freedom china
20%
23%
60%
32%
revolution
0%
5%
70%
21%
Taiwan
10%
14%
70%
47%
Tibet
60%
38%
100%
64%
(Tiananmen Event)
30%
48%
0%
8%
(STDs)
0%
1%
60%
13%
(STDs China)
0%
1%
0%
4%
(democracy)
30%
18%
40%
15%
(Falun Gong)
40%
44%
30%
15%
The clearest trend is that sites are, generally, more accessible in 2005 than in 2002. Only sites
related to the Chinese terms for Falun Gong and Tiananmen Event were consistently less accessible in
2005. We found what appears to be greater specificity and better targeting by China's filtering system:
the largest declines in inaccessibility were for sites related to relatively vague English language search
terms, such as revolution and equality. Similarly, sites returned in response to search engine queries
for the keywords Taiwan and Tibet were substantially less inaccessible in 2005 than 2002. One
plausible explanation is that China has refined its filtering system in the intervening 3 years. For
example, sites related to searches for the terms Tibet independence and Taiwan independence were
three times as inaccessible as sites for Tibet and Taiwan alone. This suggests that China has tuned its
filters to allow access to more neutral content on these general topics while preventing access to more
politically sensitive material.
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