Even though the amount of sites that are accessible in China is growing, the Chinese government continues to shut down websites by record numbers.
BBC News reports that Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said the government ordered 1.3 million websites to shutter their digital doors, equating to 41 percent fewer websites in China in 2010.
Nevertheless, the number of web pages available in China has grown to approximately 60 billion, a 79 percent increase from 2009 to 2010.
Although that might not seem like much, and there would likely be many more if it weren’t for the strict rules that some critics dub as the “Great Firewall of China,” it could still be construed as impressive considering the amount of censorship on the Internet in China. After all, even Facebook is blocked to Chinese IP addresses. It’s not like that firewall is coming down any time soon, but is there room to wiggle in?
However, unlike many other nations (especially the United States, Brazil and the United Kingdom) China apparently did not submit any requests to have sensitive items removed from Google according to the search engine’s most recent Transparency Report. Of course, it is questionable how many Chinese citizens actually have access to Google these days given the pair’s uneasy relationship.
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