China blocks Comedy Central
Jokes too much for the Beijing regime
The Chinese regime has blocked its people from visiting the Comedy Central website.Beijing officials have apparently deemed the site – which hosts clips from South Park, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and stand-up shows among others – unsuitable for its people.
The so-called Great Firewall Of China has previously banned sites critical of the regime’s human rights record. BBC News has been blocked for its coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre while hard-to-regulate blogs and other user-generated sites have often fallen foul of the censor.
However, the Comedy Central ban - reported on the site's official blog - seems to go against a recent relaxation of the policy, with the BBC, Wikipedia and YouTube all recently unblocked.
Comedycentral.com has an increasingly political edge, thanks to the satire of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which is only likely to increase in the run-up to this summer’s Beijing Olympics.
Monday’s Colbert Report, which is available in full on the site, featured an item on the Games, mentioning China’s human rights violations, including its denial of press freedom and people’s right of assembly.
Published: 18 Jun 2008
