The website of the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper being
bought by Internet giant Alibaba, has become inaccessible in China during a
series of high-level government meetings in Beijing.
Attempts by AFP in China on Friday to open the newspaper’s English and
Chinese-language websites returned only error messages saying that the pages
could not be displayed.
The scmp.com website was blocked starting on March 3, according to the
security website GreatFire.org, which monitors online censorship in China.
China’s Communist Party oversees a vast censorship system — dubbed the
Great Firewall — that aggressively blocks sites or snuffs out Internet and
TV
content and commentary on topics considered sensitive, such as Beijing’s
human
rights record and criticisms of the government.
Popular social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter are inaccessible
in the country, as is Youtube.
Several Western news organisations have accused China of blocking access to
their websites in the past, including the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal,
Bloomberg and Reuters.
The SCMP’s Chinese-language public account on WeChat, a popular chat app,
was also inaccessible.
The paper’s account on China’s Twitter-like Weibo had also disappeared by
Friday.
Alibaba’s purchase of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post for 266
million US dollars, announced in December, has sparked fears the newspaper
will lose its
independent voice, in what analysts see as part of a gradual erosion of
press
freedoms after the semi-autonomous city was returned to Chinese rule in
1997. (AFP)