Web sites dealing with subjects such as the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, Tibet and regional independence movements could all be accessed through Google's Chinese search engine Tuesday, after the company said it would no longer abide by Beijing's censorship rules.
Despite a report in the China Daily that Google China was still filtering content on its search engine and the firm's own insistence that its policies had not changed, people in Beijing found that it wasn't necessarily the case.
NBC News, using the publicly accessible Internet, tried searching for three sensitive topics normally blocked in China.
The first phrase typed into Google.cn was “Xinjiang independence," and the top result was a Wikipedia entry about the East Turkestan independence movement.
The second search attempted was the “Tibet Information Network," a former non-profit group that was critical of China's policies in the region.
Tank man image now available
When NBC News in Beijing did a search for the words Tank Man in Chinese characters, the iconic image did appear. But it was only one image came back as a result, not several like you likely find on U.S. based Internet search.
And when June 4, the term used for the Tiananmen protests in China, was searched with Chinese characters, again just one image of the Tank Man appeared.
For the final search, “Tiananmen Square massacre" was typed in, deliberately choosing the more controversial phrase instead of “Tiananmen Square incident."
Google denies censorship lifted
However, a Google spokesman in the U.S., Scott Rubin, told the U.S. that censorship had not stopped and would not confirm whether Google.cn might close.
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