China's Opening Up Policy Reaches New Heights.

As part of China's recent efforts to 'open up', the Chinese government has blocked the use of the popular search engine Google.com.

Although, for some people it may seem strange that block access to information would be considered an opening up move, it actually makes perfect sense to Chinese government officials.

"You see, Chinese citizens have the freedom to access any and all information," explained Xiao Wang (see picture on right), an officer with the Ministry of Information "as long as it conforms with a healthy message and it hasn't been deemed 'dangerous information' by our crack staff."

When asked what exactly constitutes 'dangerous information', Xiao Wang quickly changed the subject by inviting this reporter out for a lunch of baijiu and 'little sisters'. Note: I'm not exactly sure what little sisters are but Wang gave me a wink and a nudge while saying it.

What makes this recent move even more puzzling is that in January, Google agreed to censor the information on its search engine in response to government pressure.

As expected, the youth of China are up in arms about the government apparently blocking their free access to internet news.

"Does this mean I can't play World of Warcraft anymore?" was the response from one unnamed student. Once this comment was overheard by other net users at the cyber cafe, a small scale riot ensued, with many youths threatening to attack local government offices with various weapons accumulated from their net games. It wasn't until it was explained by the friendly officers shown on the right that Google being blocked would have no effect on their net games or 'soft' porn did the short-lived riot end.

So what effect will this recent move have on net users in China? It will mean that people will have to type yahoo.com rather than google.com or simply use software such as Dynapass, Ultrasurf, Freegate or Garden Networks to break the impenetrable 'Great Firewall of China'.