China: Blocking and framing Google

Last night, Google including search, gmail, document and other applications was blocked for 2 hours, although some ISPs have restored the access in couple of hours, a number of twitterers said that Google has still been blocked in some parts of China.

Guardian quoted Xiao Qiang, the founder of China Digital Times, that “this is definitely a warning to Google, as well as other foreign companies. It is also a strong warning to Chinese netizens. The government is showing its determination to keep the internet under control.”

At the same time, Chinese netizen found out that the CCTV news report about Google's obscene and indecent “associated search term” was in fact a set-up.

In the CCTV news report, when a netizen key in “son” in the Google search, the top three suggested associated search terms appeared to be:

Son and mother inappropriate relation
Son and lover
Son and mother having sex

google-son-search

Since the suggested search term is a listing of most searched terms within China, it is a bit odd to see “inappropriate relation” to be one of the popular search term (the expression is strange in Chinese). A netizen looked into Google insights for Search and find out that 100% of the search for “son and lover” and “son and mother inappropriate relation” came from Beijing between June 10-17, and the CCTV's program was on air on June 18th!

Below are the screen capture of Google insights for search on “son and lover” and “son and mother inappropriate relation”:

google-search1

googlesearch2

Here for more background about Beijing propaganda department's campaign against Google.

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