Blocks to Wikipedia and free blog sites like Wordpress.com and Blogger.com have been removed recently in China. Most of the content is accessible, but pages that are politically sensitive to China like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet cannot be viewed.

The IOC recently announced that athletes were allowed to write blogs during the Olympic Games. The Chinese government assured the IOC that internet restrictions would be removed during the Beijing Olympics.

It remains to be seen whether this a only a temporary measure for the Olympics. Internet censorship in China is done on many different levels and often appears quite arbitrary. Sometimes sites are blocked by IP address, so a site that is blocked on a shared server will have all of the sites hosted on the same server, legitimate or otherwise blocked in China.

It is not the first time such bans have been lifted. During the APEC summit in Shanghai during 2001 for example, several international news sites that were previously blocked suddenly became accessible.