China blocks Twitter and Internet access
6 Jul2009
China is upto its blocking activities once again. This time around China has blocked people access to Internet in the western province just Today owing to the ethnic riots that caused death of at least 140 people in the remote region. In a related move, China also blocked the popular microblogging network Twitter across the country.
As many of you would have guessed that these actions were taken in an attempt to cease the flow of information out of Xinjiang province and to prevent further rioting there. About 800 people were injured, official death toll is likely to increase a Xinhua news agency said.Wu’er Kaixi, an ethnic Uighur who 20 years back lead pro-democracy protests said
They cut off the Internet to shut down communications.
Wuer believes that Chinese government wanted to stop any attempts to upload pictures and videos by the Internet users. This time China has been much faster in blocking access to the Internet, the ethnic Uighur said.
Twitter become unreachable and inaccessible in China around 3 pm (local time), as gathered from user’s complaint on the site. Users were using Twitter to provide updates related to the riot. However Chinese websites were not blocked in today’s afternoon.
China’s telecommunication operators were also part of the rather shameful action of blocking internet access in Urumqi, the provincial capital where riots started. Wuer said that this incident is of a larger magnitude than before.His words were:
This is very big. The government always alters the death toll but this time the number came in astronomically high.That can only mean one thing.This time it’s brutal.
Majority of Uighurs are Muslims, they speak a Turkic language. Their culture resembles closely to that of central Asians.
