Freedom of expression is alive and kicking in the Special Administrative Region. Priyanka Boghani reports
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Google’s Hong Kong question page has been blocked in some parts of mainland China. The page allows users in China to ask questions of any description, acting as an open forum. The Chinese government uses a “Great Firewall” to censor and block all overseas websites that they consider controversial. Google China closed its offices earlier this year after disputes with Beijing about censoring and has since then relocated in Hong Kong.
The South China Morning Post issued a formal apology on Wednesday after misprinting a front page photograph caption of President Hu Jintao arriving in the US to meet President Obama. Instead of printing Hu Jintao’s name in Chinese, the paper accidentally published that of Hu Jia, the Chinese political dissident who was recently denied medical parole by Beijing authorities. On its front page, the South China Morning Post stated that it “sincerely apologises for the Chinese name translation error”.
Google has announced that it is to redirect all Chinese users to its uncensored Hong Kong service, in a move to circumvent the Beijing government’s attempt to control the Internet.
Peter Barron, Google’s Communications & Public Affairs Director for North and Central Europe, told Index on Censorship: “It was clear that if we stopped censorship on Google.cn we wouldn’t be operating within Chinese law — so we redirected to our Hong Kong servers which are not subject to Chinese censorship law.”
Writing on the official Google blog, David Drummond, Google’s Senior Vice-President for Corporate development and Chief Legal Officer commented:
Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced — it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.
