On August 3 at 2:50 pm, the influential political blogger and journalist Michael Anti tweeted that Wall Street Journal’s Chinese website, cn.wsj.com, had been blocked within China. That afternoon, after testing on multiple browsers, we emailed WSJ for a comment, then posted a story announcing WSJ Chinese had been harmonized, i.e. could only be accessible in China with a VPN.
Two hours ago, Kathy from Dow Jones’s Hong Kong office emailed back:
Please rest assured that the Chinese site is not blocked. Please kindly try to access the website with another browser, currently we do not support some browsers such as 360 etc. Or clear the cache and cookies of your browser and try again.
She’s right: it is accessible again. Of course, “is not blocked” doesn’t mean “was never blocked,” so we’ve followed up and will let you know if we get a reply.
GreatFire.org, a great way of checking which sites fall where within the Great Firewall, confirms WSJ Chinese’s blocking on August 3 and August 4, but queries now return “contradictory” results:
Wall Street Journal’s Chinese’s Sina Weibo account continues to post as if nothing happened.
