Surfing blogs for news and information about how Chinese authorities restrict their citizen’s access to the Internet, we came across the Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China. This is a study from Harvard Law School, conducted by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The study is based on tests performed in 2002, but it is still interesting and relevant. It is an analysis of the methods, scope, and depth of selective barriers to Internet access through Chinese networks.

The authors attempted to access approximately two hundred thousand web sites and document some 19,000 sites that were inaccessible from China.

The results of the study include an interesting list of bloced search terms containing classics such as Tibet and Taiwan, along with famine, HIV, justice, and democracy.

There are alsohighlights of sites blocked in China. Among these sites you find universities and churches as well as news agencies and military institutes.

The conclusions of the study are:

1. “that the Chinese government maintains an active interest in preventing users from viewing certain web content, both sexually explicit and non-sexually explicit;
2. that it has managed to configure overlapping nationwide systems to effectively — if at times irregularly — block such content from users who do not regularly seek to circumvent such blocking; and
3. that such blocking systems are becoming more refined even as they are likely more labor- and technology-intensive to maintain than cruder predecessors.�

And the Chinese regime now has the help of the world’s leading search engines to further refine this repression of the freedom of expression.

For further information about the search engine giants and their dealings with the chinese regime, take a look at these articles:

• Reactions to Google’s censored search results in China
• Yahoo! helped China jail journalist
• Microsoft deletes outspoken Chinese blog
• On Google’s Taiwan blunder
• China’s search engine censorship continues
• The Great Firewall of China