YouTube confirmed on Tuesday its Web site was being blocked in China, although the California firm offered no explanation for why Chinese authorities were barring access to the popular video-sharing service.
“YouTube has been blocked in China since yesterday,” company spokesman Scott Rubin said. “We do not know the reason for the blockage and we’re working as quickly as possible to restore access to our users in China.”
Chinese authorities have a history of blocking Web sites they deem politically unacceptable or offensive.
A spokesman for the Chinese consulate in San Francisco said he didn’t have any information about YouTube being blocked in China.
The YouTube blockage came as government officials there publicly challenged the authenticity of a video that purports to show police beating a pro-Tibet demonstrator to death last year.
China’s Xinhua news agency quoted an unidentified government source as saying that supporters of the Dalai Lama were “fabricating lies” by doctoring video to “deceive the international community.”
In March of last year, YouTube access was barred temporarily in China after video clips appeared showing violent unrest in Lhasa that triggered a virtual lock down of the city by security forces.
Footage of Chinese troops apparently beating Tibetans last year in and near Lhasa following the deadly riots has appeared on YouTube in recent days. The source, date and location of the footage, posted by a Tibetan exile group, could not be independently confirmed.
The video shows hundreds of uniformed Chinese soldiers running through a Tibetan monastery, some of them beating a man with batons.
In another scene, uniformed soldiers kick, drag and beat several men and women who are lying on the ground, some of them with their hands bound behind their backs.
The narrator of the video said the violence was part of China’s crackdown following anti-Chinese unrest in the Tibetan capital on March 14 last year, which Beijing says led to the deaths of 21 people by rioters.
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