Leaping the Great Firewall of China

Wondering if your website is blocked in China? Plug your URL into www.greatfirewallofchina.org, and you’ll know instantly if your page is reaching the Middle Kingdom’s 125 million Internet users. The slick site is the work of a group of artists and journalists who want “to make the censorship system transparent and keep open the discussion on censorship.” The site keeps a record of every URL tested and the result, revealing that the status of many blocked sites changes almost daily. If your site is available, you can even see a preview of how it appears to Chinese surfers. 

Here are some blocked and available sites, according to the Great Firewall:

FP is not blocked. For more on Chinese censorship, don’t miss Mike Boyer’s interview with Li Wufeng, China’s top Internet censor.

UPDATE: Robert Mayer over at Publis Pundit points out that Chinese bannination doesn’t just happen on a site-wide scale. While FP Passport‘s main page is available in China, some individual pages, such as our previously mentioned interview with China’s top internet cop are blocked. Could China’s filters be so sophisticated that they can whittle down websites to knock out individual, offending pages? Looks like it.