The South China Morning Post remains blocked in China

The South China Morning Post's website continues to be unavailable in China, which reports speculate has to do with a recent column it ran that irritated Chinese government officials at the top.

On Friday, AFP reported that the 113-year-old Hong Kong newspaper was inaccessible from China.

As of Monday noon local time, Mashable's attempts to load scmp.com using two tools -- WebSitePulse and Webpagetest -- which test the site from Chinese servers failed.

China's official Internet regulator did not confirm nor deny if SCMP was blocked in the country, but told Reuters on Friday: "the state Internet information has enforcement responsibility, in accordance with the law, to carry out Internet information content management and supervision.

"Internet information service providers take on the main responsibility for any law-breaking and harmful Internet accounts that exist, and have the right in accordance with the relevant laws and rules and their user 'service agreements' to take measures including temporarily halting usage and cancelling registration."

AFP said the website became unavailable after a series of high-level government talks in Beijing, and Quartz has pinned it to a Mar. 6 column that linked Chinese premier Xi Jinping to leftist supporters in the Communist Party.

Users on Weibo started posting about SCMP's disappearance on Mar. 7.

This user says: "Thank you, I hope to see you again SCMP."

谢谢你，希望再见到你，@SCMP_南華早報

Another said: "SCMP, why can't I access your website?"

@SCMP_南華早報，网站怎么打不开了?

This person wrote: "Rest in peace, SCMP."

安息吧 @ SCMP_南華早報

In this post over the weekend, a user laments the state of censorship in the country, saying: "These days I've felt Weibo was missing something, and then realised after checking that SCMP has been muzzled."

这几天刷微博总觉得少了什么东西，刚刚认真查了一下才发现@SCMP_南華早報 也狗带了

Still, there has been no official reason offered for the outage. GreatFire.org, which reports on online censorship in China, says SCMP has been blocked since as long ago as Mar. 3.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

This is hardly the first time a media site has been blocked by the country's tough censors. Bloomberg, Reuters and the New York Times are some foreign organisations that have had their sites blocked in China before.

SCMP is unique in that it isn't a Western news site.

In 2014, China appeared to intercept Chinese users from accessing Yahoo with the intention to block certain keyword searches on the site, experts speculated. It also blocked Instagram during Hong Kong's "Umbrella Revolution", to prevent users in China from seeing pictures of the protests.

But SCMP is unique in that it isn't a Western news site, unlike these examples. The paper, long regarded as an emblem of Hong Kong journalistic integrity, was recently purchased by Chinese Internet giant Alibaba in Dec. 2015.

Alibaba has said it will maintain the paper's editorial independence when it gains ownership, but it remains to be seen, if this move by the Chinese government will put pressure on the company to tighten the control at the top.

We've reached out to Alibaba, and will update the story if the company responds.

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