Internet Filtering in China in 2004 2005 

Provocative Attire 

17 

6%  www.abcunderwear.com 

Religion (fanatical) 

9 

0% 

Religion (normal) 

51 

2%  www.nobeliefs.com 

Search Engines 

27 

7%  www.afghana.com; www.yahooligans.com 

Sex Ed 

26 

8%  www.kidstalkaids.org; www.premaritalsex.info 

Translation Sites 

13 

0% 

Universities 

33 

0% 

Weapons/Violence 

28 

4%  www.guncite.com 

Women s Rights 

29 

7%  www.ifeminists.com; www.womenofarabia.com 

The results from ONI's in country testing of our global list contain several interesting findings. 

First, the anonymizer sites that allow users to circumvent filtering were almost fully accessible in China.  

This is in sharp contrast to the practice of most countries with sophisticated filtering regimes, who 

aggressively block these sites. 

Second, three popular free Web hosting domains are inaccessible, along with groups.google.com.  

This suggests that China is willing to block all content in these domains   even unrelated, inoffensive 

material    and not simply content targeted by the state as prohibited.  The inaccessibility of the three 

blogs hosted on blogspot.com suggests a similar approach to blogs: tolerating broad overblocking to 

control sensitive content.   

Third, pornography is inaccessible at a relatively high rate.

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  This result contrasts with the low 

inaccessibility rate for sites returned from a Chinese language search for the term  pornography,  as 

described above.   

Fourth, our testing revealed a significant number of sites that are inaccessible despite the 

availability of similar content at other Web pages (for example, see the sites that are blocked and available 

in the global list's  weapons/violence  and  religion(normal)  categories).  Some of the inaccessible sites 

are those known to be targeted specifically by China's filtering, such as news.bbc.co.uk, www.amnesty.org, 

and sites relating to Taiwan and Tibet.  Many others, though, appear unrelated to China's filtering goals as 

we understand them.  It is not currently clear whether this mix of available and inaccessible sites with 

similar content indicates a limited degree of concern for material in these subject areas, or whether the 

inaccessible sites are simply an unintended by product of China's filtering techniques. 

Finally, and somewhat surprisingly, the majority of sites in the global list's  anonymizers,  

 human rights,  and  news  sites were accessible during our testing.  This finding contradicts the 

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 China has sought to crack down on Internet pornography recently.  See, e.g., China moves against Internet porn, 

BBC News.com, Aug. 1, 2004, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia pacific/3943445.stm. 

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