Reports suggest that the Chinese may have blocked the official website of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. However, it has allowed access to former Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s official website.
The country of China, especially under the current regime, is known to heavily censor the information coming in and going out of the country. It has for long regulated domestic internet usage and has blocked access to many websites that would possibly contain information against the Communist party. This is often termed as the Great Firewall of China.
This practice is regarded as the most successful internet blockage in the world even as it restricts access to widely used platforms such as Google and Whatsapp. Apart from that, the social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook from where dissent originates nowadays have also been blocked in the country.
Great Chinese Firewall Test
There are various tools that are available on the internet outside China that would tell us if a particular website is blocked or banned in the People’s Republic of China. This is known as the Great Chinese Firewall test. As the tensions among the two countries along the line of actual control continue to intensify after a violent clash took place on Monday evening, the news media portal Opindia decided to run the Great Chinese Firewall test.
In the test, the websites of Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi were tested and it was found out that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s website failed the test as it turned out to be banned in many provinces of China. However, the official website of the opposition leader Rahul Gandhi passed the test and therefore was available in the People’s Republic of China.
The portal Opindia even has released the screen grabs of the test and has put out the link of the Great Chinese Firewall test if anybody wants to cross verify. Also, another online tool, similar to the firewall test, View DNS, also provided the same results for both the websites. Thereby, it was concluded that the Chinese have blocked the website of the Prime Minister while it has allowed the website of Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi to be accessible.
Source: OpIndia
