Limited Internet services slowly began to return to far western China on Tuesday, almost six months after ethnic rioting led the government to shut down Web and phone links to the outside world. This mass shutdown resulted after China’s worst communal violence in decades.
Residents of the Xinjiang region on Tuesday could access Web sites for the state-run Xinhua News Agency and the People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, and other Internet, text messaging and international calling services will slowly resume, according to a notice on the Web site of the Xinjiang government.
The change comes to “satisfy economic needs and to make daily life more convenient for everyone,” Xinhua said of the notice.
A woman from the press center of Xinjiang government confirmed the statement in Xinhua’s report. Like most Chinese government officials, she refused to give her name.
The Xinjiang government site, however, was unavailable Tuesday afternoon.
The mass shutdown came after rioting July 5 between Xinjiang’s native Uighur minority and the majority Han Chinese. It was China’s worst communal violence in decades. The Chinese government said nearly 200 people, mostly Han, were killed. The government blamed the violence on overseas groups agitating for broader rights for Uighurs in Xinjiang, though the groups denied it.
China has a old history of strictly regulating the Information and Press Freedom in the country. Beijing’s pervasive policing of cyberspace and attempts to block the Internet are already among the world’s most stringent.This incident is a clear indication of how strictly the internet and press is controlled in China.
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