China shuts down media freedom site 'within hours'

BEIJING: China's Internet police took between five and eight hours to track down the new location of Reporters Without Borders' Chinese language website and block it, the media freedom group said on Wednesday.   

The site www.rsf-chinese.org was first launched on May 3 but access within China was quickly denied, the media watchdog said.   

So the group moved it to a new portal three weeks later, only to see it closed within hours.   

"On 25th May, the site was moved to a new Internet Service Provider and within a few hours -- we estimate between five and eight hours -- access had again been blocked within China," the group said in a statement.   

It said that Chinese cyber-police were using detectors containing subversive and pornographic keyword filters to identify undesirable new sites.   

"Tens of thousands of Chinese websites are currently inaccessible online as a result of such measures," the group added. The Paris-based press freedom advocate has already labelled China's government an "enemy of the Internet".   

Experts say 30,000-40,000 Internet police are employed to implement the country's extensive Internet censorship system, known as the "Great Firewall of China".