Just the other week I’d been reading that the Chinese government was turning to microblogging in a big way. This week not so much.

Apparently people are using it to ferment revolution or protests in Egypt? Which if you’re the Chinese Communist Party this is bad so China has responded to this week’s upheaval by blocking searches for the word “Egypt” on the country’s various microblogging services in the hope that its population won’t notice.

According to reports the blocking activity began over the weekend on Sina.com’s Twitter clone Weibo and other microblogging services offered by Tencent and Sohu.

Its like digital magic. Users running searches for the Chinese word for “Egypt” get no results. Egypt has simply gone — as far as microbloggers are concerned at least. The only news on Egypt comes from state news agencies.

PC World quotes a Sina spokesman saying “in accordance with the relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search result did not display”.

Like President Hosni Mubarak’s efforts to shut down the internet in Egypt to stifle protest China is an old hand at such digital crackdowns as it showed two years ago when it shut down internet access as unrest spread in China’s western Xinjiang region.

The Washington Post reports that elsewhere in China newspapers can only publish accounts of the protests from the official Xinhua News Service. And with the BBC and CNN not widely available it is the government view that many are getting.

Those accounts have focused on the chaos and ignored protester complaints about autocracy and corruption, both sensitive topics in China. The reports have also highlighted the government’s dispatching several chartered planes to rescue hundreds of stranded Chinese.

“China’s attempts to restrict debate and sanitize reports echo its handling of earlier mass protests, said Jeremy Goldkorn, who runs Danwei.org, a website that tracks the media and Internet in China.

“It’s almost the same reaction as when there were the color revolutions in Eastern Europe,” he told the Washington Post. “The aim of it is to discourage people from making parallels with China and … from seeing this as part of a global people power movement.”