Google Is Blocked in China as Party Congress Begins

All Google services, including its search engine, Gmail and Maps, were inaccessible in China.The block comes as the 18th Communist Party Congress, the once-in-a-decade meeting to appoint new government leadership, gets under way.

According to Google thier is no issue with the technical site but it was blocked by the Government .
Despite great fanfare, China’s Party Congress takes place under wraps. Reporters are not allowed in, and in the days preceding the event, the government has imposed restrictions ranging from replacing books in bookstores to banning balloons because they could carry messages of protest.

The block on Google sites appears to be the latest in a long pattern of increasingly sophisticated Internet censorship by the Chinese government.

Google has had a particularly strained relationship with China. In 2010, the company said it had been the victim of serious hacking attacks coming from China. In response, it removed its Chinese language search engine from China and began redirecting traffic to the Hong Kong version of the search engine.

YouTube, Google’s video site, has been blocked in China since 2009. And Gmail has been partially blocked at various times, beginning around the time of the Arab Spring.