The Chinese government has blocked the online edition of El Pais in its territory to prevent the dissemination of research which reveals that relatives of top leaders, including the president's brother and tycoons, members of the Popular Assembly and businesses state remain opaque offshore companies. Blocking web also affects Le Monde, The Guardian, SÃ_ddeutsche Zeitung and other international media who participated in the research conducted from a massive leak of data obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ, its acronym in English). Censorship contradicts the policy of transparency that the flag officially China's new president, has announced harsh measures against illicit enrichment of elites.
HOME has had access to a wide evidence base obtained by ICIJ revealing that at least 13 relatives of top leaders of the regime, including the current president, Xi Jinping, and former prime ministers Wen Jiabao and Li Peng, as well as 15 big business and big state companies have remained very active in tax shelters, mainly the British Virgin Islands.
Blocking Digital Editions is a practice that the Chinese government has previously employed with The New York Times and Bloomberg for his detailed research on the hidden fortunes of the relatives of Chinese leaders, including the president's brother and the son of the former prime minister. Both also contained in the revelations of COUNTRY.
This Internet censorship and surveillance by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security is officially known as Golden Shield Project, although it is also called the Great Firewall. This project, which began operations in 2003, allows censor content websites, blogs or news sources that the Chinese government considers criminal, subversive or offensive.
Some of the sites that have been censored are related to the Taiwanese government, the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan independence movement or with certain events and the information on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The form of censoring is done by blocking IP addresses, filtering or redirection URLs, emails interruption or different protocols that prevent access to selected pages.
HOME has documentary support of all published data. Before his departure to light, this paper tries to seek the release of the Chinese authorities, who declined to officially comment on the data.
The ICIJ expected to publish at midnight on Thursday and Friday (CET Spanish) names of the 37,000 citizens of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan listed in its database, which derive from the massive leak two file managers operating in tax havens.
Tags: blocks, China, country, web