海角大神

In recent weeks, China has tightened its censorship of the Internet, mainly directed at Google, frustrating users and causing some international companies to leave the country.

Following a series of terrorist attacks, China has tightened its Internet censorship, often called the "Great Firewall of China," which is making it difficult for Google customers to use the services. The crackdown has made Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Play almost unusable, according to The New York Times.

鈥淚t鈥檚 a frustrating and annoying drain on productivity,鈥� Jeffrey Phillips, an American energy executive who has lived in China for 14 years, . 鈥淵ou鈥檝e got people spending their time figuring out how to send a file instead of getting their work done.鈥�

This is the latest battle in the Google-China saga. In 2010, Google shutdown its Chinese servers to avoid Chinese censorship. Instead, Google directed users to use its Hong Kong services to avoid filtered results. That led the Chinese authorities to block the Hong Kong site by making users wait 90 seconds for banned results.聽

Earlier this year, Google began聽encrypting聽searches, which made it difficult for Chinese authorities to track users searching for banned topics. In response, all Google services were blocked on May 29.聽The ban has hurt Google's business in China. In 2009, one-third of of all searches in China were on Google. Now Google only has one-fifth of all searches.

Rising fears of terrorist attacks and a rising nationalism focused at Japan and the US is causing Chinese officials to take a harder stance on censorship. Head of the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi聽Jinping, said he is placing more聽importance聽on Internet security and is聽taking the top position in the party鈥榮 to cybersecurity group.

鈥淚nternet security is being raised to a much higher degree,鈥� Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese Internet censorship at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, told the Times. 鈥淚t overrides the other priorities, including commerce or scientific research.鈥�

Google isn't the only company Chinese authorities have censored.聽Facebook and Twitter are already banned in China, and in July, anti-monopoly investigators raided four Microsoft offices, interrogating managers and copying large amounts of data onto hard drives.聽

Businesses aren't the only ones effected by the crackdown, reports the Times. Many academics are saying censorship is hurting their ability to conduct research.聽Jin Hetian, an archaeologist in Beijing, said he had a hard time conducting research using the available search engines, such as the Chinese search engine聽Baidu.聽

鈥淚 know some foreign scientists are studying the rings of ancient trees to learn about the climate, for example, but I can鈥檛 find their work using Baidu,鈥� Ms. Jin told the Times. 鈥淲hen in China, I鈥檓 almost never able to access Google Scholar, so I鈥檓 left badly informed of the latest findings.鈥�

Internet censorship and other infrastructure problems is leading some companies, like General Motors, to leave China for other regional countries, like Singapore.聽

鈥淐ompanies overlooked Internet problems when the economy was booming,鈥� Shaun Rein, managing director of the聽Shanghai-based consulting firm China Market Research Group, told The New York Times. 鈥淏ut now a lot of companies are asking whether they really need to be in China.鈥�