China lifts restrictions on BBC News website

The BBC reported on Tuesday that its news website is fully accessible in China. This appears to signal the end of a long-standing, though never officially acknowledged, blocking of the site by Beijing. The firewall remains in place for the UK broadcaster’s online Chinese-language services as well as for links to content in Chinese. The BBC claimed the number of people reading stories from Chinese computers surged past 16,000 on Tuesday. Previously, the number has been below 100, as users were typically redirected to an error message, saying "the connection was reset." Linking through other computers based outside of China was one of few ways around the firewall. Experts said that local internet service providers would never have lifted the access barrier without approval from the Beijing authorities.