Internet users in China can read English language news stories on the BBC website for the first time following years of control by authorities in Beijing.

The BBC news site is one of several to have been blocked as part of the so-called 'Great Firewall of China', which is used by the Chinese Government to prevent people accessing Western news sources.

Reports from China suggest, however, that the Government has now relaxed its controls, although the block remains in place for any Chinese language services on the site, as well as for any links written in Chinese.

Beijing has never admitted to blocking access to the BBC, but Chinese users trying to access pages on the site have invariably been re-directed to pages displaying the error message: 'The connection was reset.'

There has been no official confirmation that China has restored access to the site, though authorities have promised foreign journalists greater freedom in the lead up to the Olympic Games, which take place in August.

Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website, welcomed the development, saying: "We want BBC News to be as accessible in China as anywhere else in the world.

"We will endeavour to continue working with the Chinese authorities to improve our access in other areas."

China's censorship of foreign news organisations has been in the spotlight in recent weeks after Western journalists were refused access to Tibet to cover the recent unrest, and articles about the violence were blocked on several sites.

Last Monday, the entire Guardian website was inaccessible, and on Times Online, all articles by Jane Macartney, the Times Beijing correspondent, were blocked.

Popular sites which assimilate news from different sources - such as Google News - have been subjected to what is known as 'keyword filtering', where a Chinese internet user attempting to load a page which contains words such as 'Tibet' or 'Dalai Lama' will see the site stall.

Chinese authorities have also blocked access to several other widely used websites, including YouTube, the video-sharing site which has become a home to amateur footage of news events, Flickr, the photo-sharing site, and Wikipedia.

China is notoriously strict about the sites that its 210 million internet users - now the largest internet population of any country - are able to access.

Censorship is made easier by the fact that there are relatively few internet service providers (ISPs), meaning that software which runs 'keyword' checks on sites before they can be visited can readily be deployed.

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