China has largely blocked the use of the WhatsApp messaging app during a preemptive crackdown on internet communications before the Communist Party gathering next month, according to The New York Times.

The Facebook-owned app is a setback as the chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been aiming to re-enter the Chinese market and studying the Chinese language intensively to retain one of the last Facebook products to be available in mainland China.

The main Facebook site has been banned in China since 2009, while its Instagram app is also unavailable.

Chinese censors started blocking photographs and video chats along with other files on WhatsApp in mid-July, but most text messages were able to continue normally.

But now WhatsApp appears to have been largely disrupted in China, even for just texting, according to an applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, Nadim Kobeissi.

Kobeissi said that China blocking text messages on WhatsApp hints that the censors could have developed specialized software to interfere with such messages, that rely on encryption technology that is used by few services aside from WhatsApp.

“This is not the typical technical method in which the Chinese government censors something,” Mr. Kobeissi said whose company's automated monitors began detecting disruptions of WhatsApp in China on Wednesday but by Monday the blocking was almost the total app.

Facebook declined to comment on the issue.

The Chinese authorities usually block internet services that are a threat or simply slow them down to the point of rendering them unusable, which has prompted many Chinese citizens to take to using communication methods that function smoothly but are easily monitored by the authorities like the WeChat app from Chinese internet company Tencent.

Beijing is also making preparations for the Communist Party's congress which begins on Oct. 18 and is held once every five years for the congress to decide the party's leadership, which in turn runs the country.

Next month is anticipated to reconfirm President Xi Jinping's rule, but there's still uncertainties about who could join the leader on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the party's highest-ranking group.

China has not only been increasing online censorship but has also closed a number of churches and jailed several human rights activists, lawyers, and advocates for ethnic minorities.

Many took to social media to complain about the WhatsApp interruption.

“Losing contact with my clients, forced back to the age of telephone and email for work now,” one user complained on Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging site.

“Even WhatsApp is blocked now? I’m going to be out of business soon,” another Chinese social media user said on Weibo.

Email has been falling out of favor in China as many embrace the WeChat app, which has 963 million active users, and retains similar features to WhatsApp, but also maintains close ties to the government.

Earlier this month, WeChat sent out a notice to remind users that it complied with official requests for information.

WhatsApp is notorious among cryptographers for security, which may have piqued the interest of Chinese censors since the app provides so-called end-to-end encryption, which means that even Facebook will have no clue about the contents of any kind of your messages that go through their servers.





The latest disruption of the WhatsApp messaging system suggests that China’s censorship apparatus may have figured out how to target the more uncommon and heavily encrypted data transport protocol as well, Mr. Kobeissi said.

After China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the country promised to have open online data services and other enhanced telecommunications services to international competition but also got permission to keep restrictions on certain media.

Many of the large technology companies are highly dependent on the Chinese market and have been reluctant to accuse Beijing of failing to meet the WTO demands.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative began a formal investigation into whether China is violating the intellectual property of American companies, but has not said whether the inquiry will cover the blocking of products that rely on American intellectual property, or if it will focus on cases in which China has purloined or otherwise copied it.

-WN.com, Maureen Foody