Unblocked in China, sort of

A few days ago I heard that in China, some previously blocked websites were now accessible again.  While my photo site has always been accessible, my blog was blocked.  I don't think it was because of any specific content, but rather because it was hosted at Blogger.com, and everything hosted there seemed to be inaccessible.

I became curious about whether my blog was now accessible again, so I went to the very, very handy Website Pulse website to use their tool (http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html) to test.  I entered my URL, http://blog.canghuixu.com and tried it from their servers in Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou.  The tests from Shanghai and Guangzhou worked, but Beijing was FAIL.  I guess two of three ain't bad.  I have been using the Website Pulse occasionally over the last few months to check accessibility and this was the first time the blog was accessible from any of the servers in China, so I guess that is a good sign.

Don't believe me?  Here are the screenshots, beginning with Beijing FAIL, followed by Shanghai and Guangzhou Woo-hoo...

I guess the real test will be if I actually start to get traffic at my blog from China showing up in my logs.  My photo site gets a lot of traffic from China, but my blog hasn't had a hit from China in months.  If I start getting page views from China again, that will be interesting.

I poked around a bit more at the site and a variety of other sites that I know were blocked in the past, were accessible again.  The Twitter website remained accessible.

We'll see how long this lasts.  The optimistic interpretation would be that the Chinese government is stepping back from what seemed to be a growing mania for blocking practically anything, and may move back to blocking a narrower range of sites.  This would certainly make sense because I think some of the latest efforts at blocking were so erratic and incomprehensible that sooner or later I think they would start turning off potential investors who didn't care at all about politics but did want to be sure that their corporate sites were accessible.

My cynical interpretation, and this is completely unfounded speculation, is that maybe they were trying to upgrade their blocking software to make it even more effective, and something went wrong and we have a window of a few days while they fix the upgrade to make it work.  Again, I'm just making this up, and have absolutely no basis for this, but I can't help but wonder...