SHANGHAI, Oct 16 (Reuters) - China has lifted Internet blocks on foreign news organisations, including Reuters , CNN and the BBC, in a move that coincides with a high-profile Asia Pacific meeting.
Without any public announcement, Internet sites of news organisations that have been permanently blocked were accessible on Tuesday to Chinese Internet surfers.
Reuters and the BBC are among media groups which have lobbied for their sites to be unblocked, until now with no success.
Also freely available was the Washington Post .
It was not immediately clear whether the move represented a sudden change in policy, or was a temporary measure linked possibly to a meeting in Shanghai of the 21-member Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, the biggest international gathering on Chinese soil in modern history.
U.S. President George W. Bush was due in Shanghai on Thursday for an APEC leaders' meeting over the weekend.
Several weeks ago, the Web site of the New York Times was unblocked, with no public explanation.
It has not been clear which Chinese bureaucracies are responsible for blocking, although it is widely thought that security agencies, including the State Security Bureau, are influential in making the decisions.
The State Council Information Office has a mandate to regulate the Internet.
Western news organisations have long been puzzled by what appeared to be random censorship. Reuters news, for instance, has been widely available on sites such as Yahoo.com and the Web site of the International Herald Tribune, which have not been blocked.
But authorities have blocked the news section of the Yahoo! Asia site, which carries news from Agence France Presse. That site was also unblocked on Tuesday.
MESSAGE OF OPENNESS
More than 3,000 foreign journalists are due at the APEC meeting in Shanghai. China has laid on first-class facilities at a media centre and is clearly anxious to convey a message of openness to the world.
The easing of censorship appeared to be limited to news organisations. Other sites remained blocked, including those promoting the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, including Clearwisdom.net.
China regards the Falun Gong as a political threat to Communist Party rule and has labelled the movement an "evil cult".
Although China is eager to embrace the Internet as part of its efforts to develop an information-based economy and promote e-commerce, it is wary about the capacity of the Internet to undermine the state-controlled media.
Chinese authorities have insisted that state newspapers limit their coverage of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington to dispatches from the state news agency, Xinhua.
By strictly limiting the number of gateways to the World Wide Web, Beijing has found it relatively easy to apply blocks.
China boasts more than 20 million Internet users and the number is expected to mushroom in coming years in line with booming sales of personal computers.