China Blocks YouTube Access

The Chinese government has completely blocked access to YouTube bringing down the traffic to that site to zero.

Apparently the culprit is a video attributed by the Chinese official news agency Xinghua to the Dali Lama, in which riot police are shown beating Tibetans during last year's uprising.

The New York Times:

The agency did not identify the video, but based on its description, it appears to match a video, available on YouTube, that was released by the Tibetan government in exile recently. It purports to show police storming a monastery after riots in Lhasa last March, kicking and beating protesters. It includes graphical images of a protester’s wounds.

“We don’t know the reason for the block,” a YouTube spokesman, Scott Rubin, said. “Our government relations people are trying to resolve it.”

Mr. Rubin said that the company first noticed traffic from China had decreased dramatically late Monday. By early Tuesday, it had dropped to nearly zero, he said.

China routinely filters Internet content and blocks material that is critical of its policies. It also frequently blocks individual videos from YouTube. Access to YouTube had been intermittent earlier in March, on the first anniversary of protests by Tibetans against Chinese rule.

“The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a particular video,” said Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of China Digital Times, a news Web site that chronicles political and economic changes in China.

Mr. Xiao said that the blocking of YouTube fits in with an apparent effort by China to step up its censorship of the Internet in recent months. Mr. Xiao said he was not surprised that YouTube, which also hosts videos about the Tiananmen Square protests, whose 20th anniversary is coming up, and many other subjects that Chinese authorities find objectionable, is being targeted.

No word whether the blocking has anything to do with the grass-mud horse controversy, the Charter 08 dissidents, the regime's compiling a journalist black list or any other of the myriad of reasons China feels compelled by to crank up its censoring machine.