Censorship in the People's Republic of China

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Censorship in the People's Republic of China refers to the government of the People's Republic of China's policy of controlling the publishing, dissemination, and viewing of certain information. The special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal systems and Taiwan (the Republic of China) is not controlled by the PRC government, so censorship does not apply in these regions.

Censored content often includes that relating to Falun Gong, Tibetan independence, Taiwan independence, police brutality, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, pornography, certain news sources, certain religious content, many blogging websites, and the Chinese and English versions of Wikipedia.

Censored media include essentially all capable of reaching a public audience including television, print media, radio, and the Internet.

Reporters Without Borders ranks China's press situation as "Very serious", the worst ranking on their five-point scale.^[1] China's Internet censorship policy is labeled as "Pervasive" by the Open Net Initiative's global Internet filtering map, also the worst ranking used.^[2]

[edit] Unblocking

Psiphon^[3] is a software project designed by University of Toronto's Citizen Lab under the direction of Professor Ronald Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab. Psiphon is a circumvention technology that works through social networks of trust and is designed to help Internet users bypass content-filtering systems setup by governments, such as China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and others.

"We're aiming at giving people access to sites like Wikipedia," a free, user-maintained online encyclopedia, and other information and news sources, Michael Hull, psiphon's lead engineer, told CBC News Online.^[4]

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China
• Areopagitica: A speech of Mr John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England