Nearly four months after deadly ethnic riots in China's Muslim region led authorities to shut off the Internet there, local residents are still barred from sending text messages and getting online.

The clampdown on telecommunication in China's western Xinjiang province, where rioting claimed nearly 200 lives in early July, has hurt local businesses and cut residents off from many nongovernment sources of news and other information.

The rioting between Uighurs, a mostly Muslim minority group native to Xinjiang, and Chinese Han, the country's ethnic majority, also led China to block various social networking Web sites nationwide. Twitter, similar Chinese services and Facebook all remain inaccessible in the country. China has blamed communication on such Web sites for helping lead to the riots, which were sparked by an ethnic brawl in far-away southern China.