Just after the G7 summit ended, Naver’s portal was blocked in China today (Feb. 22). This is the first time in more than four years that all South Korean sites have been blocked in China since 2019, when the country retaliated against the U.S스포츠토토. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. China has not given a reason for the block, leading some analysts to speculate that the country may be embarking on full-scale retaliatory measures.
Park Sung-hoon is our correspondent in Beijing.
[Reporter]
When I search for Naver on the Internet, it doesn’t open.
A white window says, “Shortcut,” but it doesn’t connect.
In China, access to Naver, the country’s largest portal site, has been blocked since this morning.
Previously, Naver’s cafe and blog services, which allow users to write personal opinions, have been blocked, but this is the first time that simple news searches have been blocked.
[Jang Hye-young, Vice President of the Korean American Association of China: I was shocked when I suddenly couldn’t access Naver, and some people asked me about it, but we are also frustrated].
This is the first time in four years and four months that all South Korean sites have been blocked since the THAAD retaliation in January 2019, when the portal Daum Kakao was blocked.
In China, major overseas portals such as Google and Yahoo have already been blocked by the Great Firewall.
The Chinese authorities have not taken a position on the blocking of Naver.
However, there are observations that it is not unrelated to a series of recent events, such as South Korea aligning itself with the United States and Japan in the security and economic fields and speaking out on the Taiwan issue.