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List of words censored by search engines in the People's Republic of China

 
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The government of the People's Republic of China has set up a system of internet censorship, intending to block internet users within Mainland China from accessing material deemed undesirable, such as foreign news sites, sites with dissident political content, many Hong Kong and Taiwanese websites, and pornography.

One part of the block is to remove some websites from search results on search engines. These search engines include both the local version of international search engines (e.g. Google.cn) as well as domestic ones (e.g. Baidu, Sohu). In general, regardless of whether a term is sensitive or not, many well known websites are removed form the search result, such as western news and government websites like BBC and VOA. In addition, access to a handful of US-based universities are blocked, as these websites often contain discussions regarding issues deemed politically sensitive by the Communist Party of China.

Some words are sensitive. Attempting to search for such a term may result in the turning on of the "safe search" feature, and limiting the result pages in China. However, the general internet traffic filter may interrupt a HTTP connection between the browser and the server if it detects intensive sensitive words in plaintext, as it does with other protocols, such as the Post Office Protocol, and any sequence connection to the server is also denied. This filter affects self-censored search engines, since their censorship is filtering websites, not keywords. This system is described in greater detail at Internet censorship in mainland China.


Any sequence containing the term is also blocked. For example, since (traditional Chinese: 法輪; simplified Chinese: 法轮) (falun, or "dharma chakra") is blocked, so are 法轮功 (Falun Gong) and ((traditional Chinese: 轉法輪; simplified Chinese: {{{s}}}) ("Turning dharma chakra"). Also, only the Chinese terms are blocked, while the English terms are freely searchable (unless specified otherwise).

This list is not intended to be exhaustive. Most were verified for Simplified Chinese searches for the Baidu search engine. It is known that trying from different locations inside and outside China, on different search engines, and at different times can yield different results.

Contents

General concepts

Chinese phrases are given as traditional / simplified where they differ.

Events

Xinjiang & Tibet

Dissident groups

  • Since 民主 (democracy) is blocked, any political group with that name is also blocked. This includes both dissident groups like 中國民主正義黨 / 中国民主正义党 (Chinese Democracy Justice Party) [10], 民主中國 / 民主中国 (China Democracy) [11] and government-sanctioned groups like 中國民主同盟 / 中国民主同盟 (China Democratic League)
  • 天安門母親 / 天安门母亲 (Tiananmen Mothers)

Dissidents

  • 魏京生 (Wei Jingsheng)
  • 王丹 (Wang Dan)
  • 吾吾爾開希 / 吾尔开希 (Wu'er Kaixi)
  • 柴玲 (Chai Ling)
  • 封從德 / 封从德 (Feng Congde)
  • 丁子霖 (Ding Zilin)
  • 王若望 (Wang Ruowang)
  • 劉賓雁 / 刘宾雁(Liu Binyan)
  • 吳弘達 / 吴弘达 (Harry Wu)
  • 司待華 / 司徒华 (Szeto Wah)
  • 方舟子 (Fang Zhouzi; his real name 方是民, Fang Shimin, is not blocked, however)
  • 張戎 / 张戎 (Jung Chang, author of Mao: The Unknown Story)
  • "Tank Man" [in English] leads only to a terse warning about the questionable legality of the material one may be seeking in Google.cn. However, a search for "王维林," ostensibly Tank Man's real name, in the same search engine shows the Chinese-language Wikipedia's article on Tank Man as the first result.
    • not blocked: 王若水 (Wang Ruoshui) and 孫文廣 / 孙文广 (Sun Wenguang)

Politicians

Dissident news

Falun Gong

  • 法輪 / 法轮 (falun, or "dharma chakra")
  • 法倫 / 法伦 (falun)
  • 輪功 / 轮功 (lun gong, the second and third characters of Falun Gong)
  • 輪大 / 轮大 (lun da, the second and third characters of Falun Dafa)
  • 大法 (dafa, or "Great Law")
  • 洪志 (hongzhi, given name of Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi)
  • 弟子 (disciple)
  • 真善忍 (Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance) — the principles of the Falun Gong practice
  • 明慧 (Minghui, official website of Falun Gong) [19]
  • བོད་ཀྱི་དུས་བབ། www.tibettimes.net, the official website of Bod-Kyi-Dus-Bab Tibet Times
  • falun
  • hongzhi
  • minghui

Taiwan

Pornography

Others

External links

Sister project Wikinews has related news: Bi-directional Censorship from the Great Firewall of China

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "List of words censored by search engines in the People's Republic of China".  Read more

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