Is China's Internet Censorship a Trade Issue?

Two days after Chinese officials said they were "furious" with President Bush for meeting the Dalai Lama, the communist government appears to be blocking all three major Western search engines, according to multiple reports Thursday.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's Live.com search engine have all been blocked and redirected to Chinese search engine Baidu.com. YouTube also appears to have been redirected.

Although it was not possible to confirm that the redirects were a direct response to the Dalai Lama's visit to Washington, where he received a Congressional Gold Medal, the Chinese government has made its irritation over the visit quite clear.

"The move of the United States is a blatant interference with China's internal affairs which has severely hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and gravely undermined the relations between China and the United States," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said, according to an Associated Press report.

"China urges the United States to take effective measures immediately to remove the terrible impact of its erroneous act ... and take concrete steps to protect China-U.S. relations," Liu said.

Appearing with the Dalai Lama at the award ceremony, President Bush called him a "universal symbol of peace and tolerance, a shepherd of the faithful and a keeper of the flame for his people."

The news of the search engine redirects comes nearly two weeks after reports emerged that China was blocking many RSS feeds from entering the country, and nearly three weeks after the generals that run China's client state Myanmar shut down the country's Internet and cell phone network in a bid to cut communications as they brutally cracked down on pro-democracy protests.

China has a long history of strictly regulating the Internet access of its 1.5 billion citizens, but the frequency and comprehensiveness of its censorship appears to have escalated recently.

Critics have escalated, too. In addition to blasting Chinese authority for ham-handed censorship by denying access to parts of the Internet, they are also suggesting that China's behavior amounts to a violation of international trade rules.

Duncan Riley, a contributor to the TechCrunch blog, points contends that China's censorship is de facto protectionism designed to benefit local businesses at the expense of foreign companies. He says that the United States should lodge a complaint with the World Trade Organization, the arbiter of international trade.

"The Chinese Government is clearly using its censorship regime to the economic benefit of a Chinese owned (but NASDAQ listed) company," Riley wrote, referring to Baidu. "China expects free and open access to Western nations but is now not only blocking, but also redirecting domestic traffic away from Western Internet sites that compete with local firms."

by Sam Gustin