Blackout has some desperate for Web

Every weekend, dozens of people pile off the train in Liuyuan, a sand-swept town on the ancient Silk Road that’s the first train stop outside Xinjiang, 400 miles east of Urumqi, the regional capital.

“We must get online! We must!’’ said Zhao Yan, a businesswoman from Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. She has rented the same private booth in the Internet cafe every weekend since August in an uphill battle to keep her small trading business going.

“If this goes on another couple of months, I’ll have to give up,’’ Zhao said. “I can’t keep up with the outside world, and I’m losing money.’’

Xinjiang residents are without Internet links unless they flee to far-flung places like Liuyuan. One customer had traveled 750 miles just to get online.

Authorities unplugged Xinjiang, a sprawling area three times the size of Texas, in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the ethnic rioting between the Han Chinese majority and the mainly Muslim Uighur minority that the government says left almost 200 dead. China’s government blamed overseas activists for the riots, saying they stirred up resentment in the Uighur community through websites and e-mails.

For many, it feels like being thrown back in time 30 years.

Xinjiang now has no e-mail. No blogs. No instant messaging. The government this month promised Internet access would resume “gradually,’’ but it also said the same thing in July and not much has changed. So far, only four restricted websites, half of them state-run media, have returned.

No country has shut down an information infrastructure so widely for so long, said the Open Net Initiative, a Harvard-linked partnership that monitors Internet restrictions around the world. Some former Soviet Union countries have done it during sensitive elections, but “the blackout only lasted for hours or days at most,’’ said Rafal Rohozinski, the group’s principal investigator.

The normal Internet in China is already among the world’s most restricted.

“The fact that the Chinese authorities had to resort to shutting down and cutting off the entire infrastructure . . . is indicative of the difficulty they are having in controlling cyberspace,’’ Rohozinski said.