Wow.  I just read this morning on China View that China has blocked LiveJournal bloggers.  I was a little skeptical at first, although not overly as China is well known for its cencorship practices. Live Journal actually announced the block yesterday and sited that the block wasn’t initiated by them.

I checked a few other sources to confirm the story and by all accounts, it seems true.  The story has already been dug on Digg by Next Lust.  Then I checked the Great Firewall of China and sent my URL in to be tested.  My URL is blocked too!  Take a look at some of the other websites that have been blocked.  If you scroll over the website you can read how many times that website has been blocked.  Is this thing for real?  I have to admit, I’m pretty bothered by this.

I’ve never written anything bad or reported anything negative about China on this blog until today.  Admittedly, the testing is based on one server in one location in China.  It would be interesting if I got the same results from somewhere else.  The site also mentions that blocking could be a result of technical difficulties.

The full story by Quinn Norton at Wired News reports:

“The Chinese government began blocking access to the popular blogging site LiveJournal on Friday, cutting off its citizens from the roughly 1.8 million blogs the service hosts.

SixApart, the company behind LiveJournal, says there are 8,692 self-reported Chinese bloggers on the site, a number that’s likely low since it’s based on information volunteered in user profiles.

LiveJournal announced the block Monday. Ginger Tulley, director of worldwide strategy and analysis for Six Apart, says the company isn’t certain when the censorship began. But the site GreatFirewallofChina.org, which tests connectivity to popular websites from within China, first spotted the block Friday.

China has blocked the site before, for no clear reason — then unblocked it again just as mysteriously, without any concessions from the company. “We would just follow our standard procedures, which honor free speech,” says Tulley.

The timing of the block coincides with the National People’s Congress meeting in Beijing, says Xiao Qiang, a Chinese dissident and founder of the China Digital Times.

According to Xiao, the event is often accompanied by stepped up security and a worsening of China’s notorious internet censorship policies.

“The security is tight and the control is upgraded because they don’t want (political voices),” says Xiao. While he is not sure the block is related to the March event, it’s very possible, he says.

While China has reached an accord with some blog hosting companies, including Microsoft’s MSN Spaces, it has a history of blocking others, including Google’s Blogger.com. Other SixApart sites have also been censored by the so-called Great Firewall of China, which briefly blocked Typepad in March 2004, then again in June 2005.

The wall has gone up and down for Chinese users since then. SixApart’s movabletype.com, which is not a hosted blogging service, is still available.

The Great Firewall is a filtering system that sits on the edge of China’s connection to the internet, and also in software installed at PCs at internet cafes. It looks for a wide range of sites that the government finds unsavory — a list that changes from month-to-month — and which includes everything from online pornography to sites holding discussions on democracy or Tibet.

Livejournal, with its diverse user base and highly personal voice, has plenty of content that might trouble Chinese censors. Xiao says the site’s block could be the result of a single blog with content that China’s Communist regime finds objectionable.

“For whatever reason (if) you’ve been blocked, it’s almost impossible to get open again,” says Xiao. “It could be one of the blogs in Livejournal has the content they want to block. They are very bluntly over-blocking sites.”

While Livejournal might be unblocked after the march meeting, Xiao warns, “You never know when they are going to block it again.”