YouTube has been blocked, and back up, and blocked again in Beijing more times than I remember. Now the Great Firewall turns it’s wrath on smaller video sites, as well.
It’s well known that China goes to tremendous lengths to censor and block certain types of content online through a combination of tens of thousands of “internet police” combined with vague rules that are left up to various ISPs to enforce or face sanctions (meaning they tend to be even more quick to block than they may need to be). It appears that even that wasn’t enough to deal with the rise of user-generated video sites in the country. The Chinese government has a new policy demanding that all video upload sites must get a license from the government, must be state-owned or state-controlled and (of course) must not allow any video that “involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography.”
From this TechDirt article.