YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google Inc, was inaccessible in China for at least a second day after Tibet’s government-in-exile released video it said showed Chinese police beating protestors.
The website, which lets users post videos for others to watch, is working to resolve the shutdown, Google spokesman Scott Rubin said on Wednesday. He said he didn’t know the cause of the near total blockage, which is restricting access to video clips. Marsha Wang, a Beijing-based spokeswoman for Google, declined to comment when contacted on Thursday.
The footage showing men in green military fatigues beating men — some in Buddhist monks’ robes — lying handcuffed on the ground, was released by Tibet’s Dharamsala, India-based government-in-exile on March 20 and described as a fabrication by China’s official Xinhua News Agency on Wednesday. In March of last year, China ordered 25 Web sites to stop showing videos because they provided content that it said was pornographic or violent, endangered state security or wasn’t licensed properly.
“China’s government manages the Internet according to law,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said yesterday at a briefing in Beijing in response to a question about YouTube. The ministry on Thursday referred questions about Google to Qin’s comments.
The seven-minute video was available on YouTube’s Web site outside China Thursday.
The government-in-exile said the footage was taken from protests in Tibet in March 2008 that were the region’s biggest riots in almost two decades. YouTube was blocked in China during the protests last year.
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Tibetan uprising anniversary
This month is the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising that resulted in the Dalai Lama, the nation’s spiritual leader, fleeing into exile. China, which annexed Tibet in 1951, rejects criticism of its policies there and says it saved the population from feudal serfdom. Chinese authorities have declared March 28 as “Serfs’ Emancipation Day” to mark the date troops put down the armed revolt.
At least 19 people were killed in the Tibetan riots in March last year, most of them ethnic Han Chinese, according to China’s central government. In the ensuing crackdown, more than 200 Tibetans were killed, according to Tibet’s government-in- exile.
More than 1,000 people in an ethnically Tibetan region of northwestern China’s Qinghai province protested on March 21 after the disappearance of a monk who was detained by local police, according to the Students for a Free Tibet Web site. The monk had been detained for flying a Tibetan flag and distributing leaflets calling for the nation’s independence, the group said.
China had 298 million Internet users at the end of 2008, according to the government-backed China internet Network Information Center. It passed the US to become the world’s biggest Web market by users in the first half of last year.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, fell 0.4 per cent to $347.17 yesterday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have risen 13 per cent this year.
YouTube was also blocked in Thailand in April 2007 after the site showed clips that the government said were offensive to King Bhumibol Adulyadej. The nation lifted the ban in August that year after YouTube agreed to block clips that are illegal or that Thai people deem offensive.