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YouTube blocked in China?

This morning I was informed that YouTube has been blocked in China. I had not noticed it yet, because I access the internet through a proxy most of the time. But when I went onto a Chinese connection YouTube indeed did not load (message: “The server stopped responding”).

The reason? Probably not directly the ongoing 17th National Congress in Beijing, then they would have blocked the site last week already (unless someone right now uploaded some video’s that would upset the government). I suspect the real reason might be that YouTube just launched a Chinese version, which would make the site much more accessible for Chinese users. Not a very smart idea to do that in the middle of the National Congress, and I am surprised nobody at mother company Google’s China offices rang an alarm bell about this before the launch. A typical example of the mistakes foreign companies make while trying to do business in China.

I hope for YouTube it is just a problem with their content delivery system or something similar, and not a real block. I don’t like sites to be blocked, even not those of our competitors. But it will be an interesting discussion point for our Tudou board meeting tomorrow, that’s for sure.

Update: While going through my RSS feeds I noticed that Jeremy from Danwei already noted the problem a couple of hours before me.

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19 Comments

  1. !!!!!!!!
    En……..

    Can I talk about human rights? 🙂
    We were dicussing about it last night.haha:)

  2. This arbitrary on again, off again blocking of sites must cause real frustration for many people. It’s a minor inconvenience for me but there are some sites that have content that is heavily hosted on Youtube in the same way that all the images on my own blog were once hosted on Flickr until the authorities blocked the images (but allowed the site to be accessed).

    I often marvel at how fast China is progressing, so I feel deeply disappointed to hear of these types of issues.

    The worst example in my opinion, being the ongoing block of Wikipedia.

  3. This arbitrary on again, off again blocking of sites must cause real frustration for many people. It’s a minor inconvenience for me but there are some sites that have content that is heavily hosted on Youtube in the same way that all the images on my own blog were once hosted on Flickr until the authorities blocked the images (but allowed the site to be accessed).

    I often marvel at how fast China is progressing, so I feel deeply disappointed to hear of these types of issues.

    The worst example in my opinion, being the ongoing block of Wikipedia.

  4. thank god, i have tor and jap, so web block doesn’t make any effect on me except speed is slower than before
    in order to access wiki and gmail, i have to pretend i am not chinese or at least i am not from china, this is a sick socity

    i will backup tor setup file in my computer in case download of tor is blocked one day

  5. so true, I’ve spent most my working day tryna figure out how to get access to an interview with the Founder of “Millions Of Us”, a virtual world development company, only to be completely denied. Forget about the fact that I now miss my weekly doses of anime, comedy stand-up and genereal tom-foolery, I also have to go without youtube as the vital FREE research tool I’ve come to use it as.

    For anyone interested, I was able to find a non-free alternative in Shanghai, if Marc doesn’t mind me posting it here..

    Its the only proxy site I’ve managed to use that supports youtube video:

    http://aniscartujo.com/webproxy/

    After loading 6-8 web pages, it’ll prompt you to purchase credit to continue use. What a bitch that there aren’t any free ones!!!

    Please post if you come up with any..again, with Marcs’ permission

  6. so true, I’ve spent most my working day tryna figure out how to get access to an interview with the Founder of “Millions Of Us”, a virtual world development company, only to be completely denied. Forget about the fact that I now miss my weekly doses of anime, comedy stand-up and genereal tom-foolery, I also have to go without youtube as the vital FREE research tool I’ve come to use it as.

    For anyone interested, I was able to find a non-free alternative in Shanghai, if Marc doesn’t mind me posting it here..

    Its the only proxy site I’ve managed to use that supports youtube video:

    http://aniscartujo.com/webproxy/

    After loading 6-8 web pages, it’ll prompt you to purchase credit to continue use. What a bitch that there aren’t any free ones!!!

    Please post if you come up with any..again, with Marcs’ permission

  7. it’s irritating because i just started to upload my videoblogs on youtube, but i signed up to metablogs just right now

  8. There are reports that search engine requests are sometines highjacked to Baidu and this has happend for me with Marc’s
    site as well – not right now of-course and I’m not using default
    dns any more as result.

    I can’t get to my googlepages site and many others – ie Wikipedia.

    FUD is worst part – you don’t know
    what’s going on.

  9. I wonder what they will block next. Anyway you guys could just use Tor to bypass the block. It’s way better then the web proxies.
    I’ve written a short how-to guide on setting up Tor on your computer.
    You can check it out at http://www.greatwall.cn.tp/?p=23

  10. While Western democratic nations allow free speech, they do have limits and they do outlaw certain offensive material, but legally. And while I don’t have a problem with the blocking of seriously offensive material, I do object to countries that block material outside of the rule of law. The China leaders go to great lengths promoting the development of their country based on the Rule of Law, yet censorship in China is totally lawless! So how can the leadership of China be respected and believed when they allow and support such lawless blocking of non-offensive material. Software development in China is very weak compared to other nations such as USA and India, and the use of such simple and unsophisticated techniques as the Great Firewall filtering is a perfect demonstration of the poor state of software skills in China. Moreso, the lawless nature of these actions is a ironic display of total disregard for the concept of rule of law by Chinese leaders.

  11. Last week I was in Shanghai and Changzhou. It was impossible to get access to blogspot. Do you know something about that?

  12. @Johnny Tastavins: blogspot accounts have been blocked on and off for the past couple of years. Just use a proxy like Tor (see in the comment above) or anonymouse.org to avoid the problem.

  13. If you want to unblock YouTube I can advice you one VPN service which always help me to bypass access restricting. It’s the http://strongvpn.com VPN Company. They provide anonymous surfing with fast connection. Hope it could help.

  14. Don’t you find it a little ironic that a site populated with content that blatantly infringes on copyrights and does little to stop these activities doesn’t get blocked (tudou) yet youtube does?

    Wow…

  15. I’m afraid it’s just a rumor. I heard it as well, but the SH expo has started and YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc. are all still blocked.

  16. youtube hasnt been working in china for many years now. the reason is that chinese people have been killing the tibet people and there was videos posted about it. i saw one. thats the reason china goverment blocked youtube.

Webmentions

  • The New York Times launches a site for China – but for how long? | Shanghaied Weblog October 27, 2010

    […] The New York Times decided to host the site outside the Great Firewall, which is probably a necessity because they would have likely never received a Chinese Internet publishing license. But by doing that they run the risk that the site can by blocked at any moment. It is difficult to judge how likely that is, but for sure the government doesn’t like it when foreign media companies start targeting their population in simplified Chinese. YouTube is a good example, they were allowed in China until they launched a simplified Chinese language site. […]