The Economist and Time have joined the ranks of foreign news websites blocked in mainland China.
The censorship was most likely triggered by the magazines' recent cover articles critical of China's president, Xi Jinping, The New York Times reported Friday.
China has blocked numerous international news websites, including VOA, the Times, The Independent and Bloomberg.
According to GreatFire.org, a website that tracks internet and social media censorship in China, The Economist’s website and mobile app have been censored since April 2.
Meanwhile, in an ironic display of the communist state's iron grip on information, the very creator of China’s Great Firewall, the filtering mechanism by which the government dictates what Chinese can and cannot see online, was himself blocked from viewing a website during a recent talk at the Harbin Institute of Technology.
Fang Binxing was trying to access a South Korean website when he was denied access, which meant he had to circumvent his own creation and use a virtual private network (VPN) — which many Chinese use to access Western sites such as Facebook and Twitter — in full view of his audience.
The "father" of the Great Firewall of China was later resoundingly mocked online for having run up against his own creation.
