The Nanny has been acting exceptionally vicious in the past week - shutting mainland Chinese access to Wikipedia and TypePad sites. Plus a filtering-related block on Danwei on a post related to Taishi village (something similar, I had noted, happened to Simon World and Blood and Treasure a week ago).

As I noted yesterday, AsiaPundit has been blocked in China as part of a broadening of a block on all TypePad hosted sites. It seems that earlier today the Peking Duck and China Digital Times were blocked in Shanghai and other locations. According to comment from bloggers, the blocks are still on in some locations but not others.

Lin also notes in the comments here that blogger sites are available in Beijing. While there was a brief openness last week, they can no longer be accessed in Shanghai. A keen tool for seeing whether a site is blocked is the virtual trace route, available for Shanghai and Beijing.

Fons noted that the TypePad block coincided with the moving of servers. That leaves me wondering whether the two are related. TypePad sites that are hosted under ‘blogs.com’ domains have been blocked for several months while those under ‘typepad.com’ domains have not been. A consolidation to a new server could have caused a extension of an existing block for technical reasons.

More curious are the CDT and Peking Duck outages, the block on the latter still continuing in some areas. As I am interested in how the firewall works, I would like to know which sites are blocked in which areas. I’d ask for posts in the comments here, but that would be pointless (”please leave a comment if you cannot read this.”). If a China-accessible blog would care to set up a firewall- and filtering-monitoring service it would be appreciated.

I doubt the TypePad ban is specifically targeted at this blog. I don’t believe anything too sensitive has been posted here. I have recently received a copy of the new Jung Chang and Jon Halliday book and was considering a review. That would probably do it.

Mr. Ralph R. Reiland poses the question:

How many innocent people does a communist tyrant have to kill before The New York Times gets really mad? Answer: More than 70 million.

Seventy million is a good estimate of the number of Chinese who perished under Mao’s reign of terror and ineptitude, the victims of their own government’s decades of torture, famine, forced labor, purges, assassinations, ethnic massacres and class genocide.

Technorati Tags: asia, blogs, censorship, china