Bloggers and reporters are today accusing the Chinese government with blocking access to US based search services such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft by redirecting Chinese web traffic to domains containing the word “search” to Chinese search engine Baidu.

The issue was first reported from China Wednesday around 1AM Beijing time and persists at the time of this post.

According to a piece by Barry Schwartz in today’s Search Engine Land, this is not the first time traffic destined for Google has been redirected by Chinese officials. In September 2002, the Chinese government redirected traffic to Peking University’s search engine Tianwang, a smaller search tool ch888.com and to Baidu.

All DNS servers in China fall under government control so it is easy for the Chinese government to use routing as a means of punishment if it perceives a company or the nation-state they are located in has somehow run afoul of its wishes. Speculation is that the Chinese are feeling politically pissed-off after the US honoured the Dali Lama in Washington yesterday.

Reports from China say the issue might be growing as YouTube is now blocked in mainland China (but not in Hong Kong).