China is seemingly obstructing Google’s Gmail service in the most recent move by the nation to control foreign Internet services.

Internet performance monitoring firm, Dyn Research, said that China was blocking Gmail in the IP level when served from Hong Kong.
All Gmail traffic to China is influenced by the block and through Hong Kong, unless users set up evasion techniques, wrote Earl Zmijewski, Dyn’s vice president of analytics, in an e-mail.

Google’s real time measure of traffic patterns for its services also signaled a sudden fall after Christmas in Gmail traffic in China. The business couldn’t be reached for comment due to the Christmas holidays.

The Domain Name System, or dNS, is a naming system for resources online that translates a domain name into numeric IP (Internet Protocol) addresses that computers can understand to get the Internet. IP address blocking is usually used by regimes to censor content to a specific area.

“DNS returns simply Hong Kong IPs from our places throughout China,” Zmijewski wrote. “These IP addresses are subsequently blocked on backbone routers, so the Hong Kong servers are unable to be reached from the mainland.” Google returns Hong Kong IPs to their Chinese users as these are the servers that were closest, he added.

Zmijewski pointed out that Gmail servers operate in 20 different states when doing a spot check, and he is able to get their Chinese users from China. “So, using a non-Hong Kong server ( in case you chance in order to find the correct IP address) or a VPN based in a different state, should empower Chinese users to circumvent this block,” he added.

China has an extensive history of interrupting and censoring websites which could be utilized for broadcasting anti-government content and has blocked some international services like Twitter and Facebook. Google pulled out somewhat from China in 2010 rather than self-censor its search engine, after it said it had discovered a cyberattack that targeted human rights activists’ reports. The business began redirecting users seeing its Chinese search site to its Hong Kong web site.

Several Google services were interrupted this year, ahead of the 25th anniversary on June 4 of China’s crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, based on GreatFire.org, a site which tracks Internet access in the nation.