In a crisis, might China flip the "kill switch" on its internet and disconnect its 564m users? It may sound unthinkable, but theidea is not altogether outlandish. The Communist Party has already given it a trial run in an entire province. In July 2009, after ethnically charged riots left hundreds dead in Xinjiang, a remote north-western region with a sizeable Muslim Uighur minority, the authorities put the province on electronic lock-down. More than 6m internet users were cut off from the rest of China and from the world, and long-distance calls and text messages on mobile phones were disabled. Xinjiang residents could not use these telecoms services for many months and were unable to use any of the outside internet, even most of the scrubbed Chinese version, untilthefollowing May, leaving a gap of more than ten months.
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