I’ve seen some reports lately that “WordPress is blocked in China”, including some Mashable articles. To clarify, it’s WordPress.com that is blocked, not all sites that run self-hosted WordPress.

Mashable’s “China Blocks Twitter (And Almost Everything Else)” seems to suggest that the block relates to the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen massacre on June 4th. That may be the case for the other major web publishing and social networking sites, but WordPress.com has spent much of the time since the beginning of 2006 blocked by the Chinese government.

It’s an incredibly frustrating, sad situation.

In “Blogging guru chips away at Great Firewall of China” my boss Matt Mullenweg shares:

After some discussions, Mullenweg realised the site would be allowed back online if he agreed to block certain words or topics and give up information to the Chinese communist government about users.

“I started thinking about the DNA of the company,” he said. “That sort of company is not one I would wake up every day and feel passionate about working in.”

The site remains blocked, although Mullenweg, unable to suppress a giggle, points out that the official Chinese line insists it is freely available.

There was a break in the blocking around the time of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, but that ended with the games. That was the longest time I know of when people could consistently access WordPress.com from across China.

Part of the Chinese government’s approach seems to be to sometimes allow western hotels access and other specific points — likely to deceive Westerners and cause confusion.

There does not seem to be a reliable way to automate detection of WordPress.com being blocked, regardless of what tools might promise. I’m not surprised that http://greatfirewallofchina.org/ gave up. This is the message on the site’s homepage:

“Because of the ever stricter measures of censorship China imposes on the Internet, the team of www.greatfirewallofchina.org at present can no longer vouch for the reliability of its test tool. We have therefore decided to take the test tool offline.”

Herdict <http://www.herdict.org/>, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, seems to be a novel, survey based approach to find out which locations are blocking or censoring web sites.

The tool of choice to let people dodge surveillance is Tor <http://www.torproject.org/>. Please consider your own safety and technology expertise before using any such tools. Reporters without borders <http://www.rsf.org/-Anglais-.html> seems like an excellent resource if you are considering reporting from a dangerous place.

Monday, June 8th Update

A reliable source in China shares that Twitter is back. The same source also shares:

Specific blockages do appear to coincide with major events, like those in Tibet last year and the recent anniversary, but are also part of general and ever-changing blanket censorship.

The Twitter blockage is really the only new story of the last week (apart from 5 second delay foreign television news blackouts) but the news media wanted to turn it into a larger story, including the WordPress angle.

WordPress has been blocked for years now. Youtube has been blocked for the last 3 months. Twitter went done last week.

While the dates for the last two occurred at the same time as sensitive periods or events, I think both are more about controlling new forms of communication and networking than the particular events. Censorship in China is generally a one-way street with periods of activity ramping up around specific times. I think of it in the same way tax auditors get busy around tax season and government ministries around budget time. The difference being once a site is blocked by thePublic Security Bureau (PSB) here in China, it is very difficult to get it unblocked; given the public security connection in an already opaque closed-door administrative system. A good analogy is trying to get someone off a no-fly list in a bureaucratic security system that lacks transparency.

Domestic blogging sites are heavily controlled and censored (though in an ad hoc way). Chinese video sharing sites are coming under increasing regulation and many believe it was only a matter of time before Twitter, as the newest uncontrolled networking site, was shut down.