Wikipedia, the web’s open-source encyclopedia, has been blocked in China.

On the main page on Wikipedia in Chinese, a sentence appeared:”Some users in mainland China are finding accessing problem temporarily for unconfirmed reasons”. It also asked the users who can visit the page to report their region and ISP in order to have some further judgement of the situation.

As Dan at the Shanghaiist says You Bastards! Wikipedia inaccessible in Shanghai:

Online do-it-yourself encyclopedia Wikipedia, every lazy blogger’s best friend, will not load in Shanghai without the aid of a proxy server. The site worked yesterday. Most assume the free information source has been blocked by the Chinese government. We can’t imagine why. Shanghaiist hopes this is just a temporary glitch, but then we just read this and now wonder if we should care

Technorati Tags: asia, china, east asia, censorship

Most of Asia still retains poor rankings in the Transparency International (TI) annual corruption index.

Singapore, Hong Kong retain solid low-corruption rankings and of the 159 states surveyed they are the only Asian states among the top-20 least corrupt nations. Japan almost makes the top-20, but shares 21st place due to a tie with Chile. Taiwan and Malaysia are the only remaining nations to score above the mid-way point for corruption while South Korea hits the median five points.

The results largely correspond with wealth of each country, with the developed states performing better than the developing states - and with high-growth China being seen as less corrupt than India, despite the latter’s more-developed justice system and democratic institutions.

Still, TI notes that wealth is not a prerequisite for control of corruption, singling out my native Canada for some targeted criticism.:

Wealth is not a prerequisite for successful control of corruption. New long-term analysis of the CPI carried out by Prof. Dr. Johann Graf Lambsdorff shows that the perception of corruption has decreased significantly in lower-income countries such as Estonia, Colombia and Bulgaria over the past decade.

In the case of higher-income countries such as Canada and Ireland, however, there has been a marked increase in the perception of corruption over the past ten years, showing that even wealthy, high-scoring countries must work to maintain a climate of integrity.

Technorati Tags: asia, china, east asia, economy, hong kong, india, korea, singapore, corruption, south asia, south korea