The explosion was caused when workers continued to inject desulfurizer into the pipeline after a tanker had finished unloading oil, according to a statement posted Friday on the website of the State Administration of Work Safety.

The statement said the explosion remains under investigation. The pipeline is owned by China National Petroleum Corp., Asia’s biggest oil and gas producer by volume. State media have said oil operations at the Xingang port have resumed.

China’s transport ministry ordered ports across the country to have emergency response plans and hold regular safety drills, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.

The ministry will also establish a database of all ports that handle dangerous goods, the People’s Daily newspaper reported.

Officials have warned of a “severe threat” to sea life and water quality as China’s latest environmental crisis spread off the shores of Dalian, once named China’s most livable city. One cleanup worker drowned this week, his body coated in crude.

Cleanup workers have reported using chopsticks and their bare hands to remove the gooey oil from the sea, while state media said 2,000 soldiers, 40 oil-skimming boats and hundreds of fishing boats were helping with the cleanup.

Environmental group Greenpeace, which has a team at the scene, urged the government to warn residents on nearby coastlines of the dangers.

“Greenpeace was … surprised to see that the beaches have not been closed to visitors and lack any warning signs,” Greenpeace China said in a statement Friday evening. “As a result, locals and visitors unaware of the extent of the oil spill were playing in the water with their kids, risking exposure to petroleum.”

It said fishermen without equipment were doing most of the cleanup work at one of Dalian’s most popular beaches, Jinshitan.

“They don’t even have face masks, the most basic and necessary of precautions. They don’t even know that they need to protect their skin from crude oil,” said Zhong Yu, one of the Greenpeace workers.

“We strongly urge the government to send professional staff and safety equipment to work on the cleanup process,” Zhong said in the group’s statement.

The foreign affairs office for the city of Dalian did not immediately respond to questions Friday about the cleanup or warning signs on beaches.

State media has said no more oil is leaking into the sea, but the total amount of oil spilled is not yet clear.

China Central Television earlier reported an estimate of 1,500 tons of oil has spilled. That would amount roughly to 400,000 gallons (1,500,000 liters) — as compared with 94 million to 184 million gallons in the BP oil spill off the U.S. coast.

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Associated Press researcher Yu Bing contributed to this report.

“The oil is half-solid and half liquid and is as sticky as asphalt,” she told The Associated Press.

The oil was spread over 165 square miles (430 square kilometers) of water five days since a pipeline at a busy northeastern port exploded. State media says no more oil is leaking into the sea, but the amount of oil spilled was not clear Wednesday. Based on the known figures, the spill is significantly dwarfed by the BP oil spill off the U.S. coast.

Greenpeace China released photos Wednesday of straw mats of about 2 square meters (21 square feet) in size scattered on the inky sea, meant to absorb the oil.

Zhong said it was still difficult for Greenpeace China to estimate the spill’s real size and the damage it is causing.

But one maritime official with the city of Dalian, where the port is located, was already warning of environmental dangers.

“The oil spill will pose a severe threat to marine animals, and water quality, and the sea birds,” Huang Yong, deputy bureau chief for the China Maritime Safety Administration in Dalian, told Dragon TV.

At least one person died in cleanup efforts. A 25-year-old firefighter, Zhang Liang, drowned Tuesday when a wave threw him from a vessel and pushed him out to sea, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. Another man who fell in was rescued.

Beaches near Dalian, once named China’s most livable city, were closing as oil started reaching their shores, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Officials at all levels were turning out on the beaches for cleanup, using sometimes makeshift equipment.

“We don’t have proper oil cleanup materials, so our workers are wearing rubber gloves and using chopsticks,” an official with the Jinshitan Golden Beach Administration Committee told the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper in apparent exasperation. “This kind of inefficiency means the oil will keep coming to shore. … This stretch of oil is really difficult to clean up in the short term.”

China Central Television earlier reported an estimate of 1,500 tons of oil has spilled. That would amount roughly to 400,000 gallons (1,500,000 liters) — as compared with 94 million to 184 million gallons in the BP oil spill off the U.S. coast.

State Oceanic Administration released the latest size of the contaminated area in a statement Tuesday.

Though the slick has continued to expand — it covered a 70-square-mile (180-square-kilometer) stretch earlier this week — state media has said no more oil was leaking into the Yellow Sea.

The cause of the explosion that started the spill was still not clear. The pipeline is owned by China National Petroleum Corp., Asia’s biggest oil and gas producer by volume.

Images of 100-foot-high (30-meter-high) flames shooting up near part of China’s strategic oil reserves late Friday drew the immediate attention of President Hu Jintao and other top leaders. Now the challenge is cleaning up the greasy brown plume.

“Our priority is to collect the spilled oil within five days to reduce the possibility of contaminating international waters,” Dalian’s vice mayor, Dai Yulin, told Xinhua on Tuesday.

But an official with the State Oceanic Administration has warned the spill will be difficult to clean up even in twice that amount of time.

The Dalian port is China’s second largest for crude oil imports, and last week’s spill appears to be the country’s largest in recent memory.

Some locals said the area’s economy was already hurting from the spill.

“Let’s wait and see how well they deal with the oil until Sept. 1, if the oil can’t be cleaned up by then, the seafood products will all be ruined,” an unnamed fisherman told Dragon TV. “No one will buy them in the market because of the smell of the oil.”

“I was writing a new post and suddenly my blog couldn’t open,” lawyer Pu Zhiqiang told The Associated Press. Legal expert Xu Zhiyong said his blog on the popular Sohu Inc. portal was also shut down Wednesday, a day after his Sohu microblog was closed. Both men are well-known for taking on sensitive issues.

Chinese officials fear that public opinion might spiral out of control as social networking — and social unrest — boom among its 420 million Internet users. China maintains the world’s most extensive Internet monitoring and filtering system, and it unplugged Twitter and Facebook last year.

Blogger Yao Yuan listed at least 61 closed Sohu blogs, including his own, on a separate, unblocked blog Thursday. He called the closings mass murder.

“If Internet users don’t speak out, all sites will be cracked down on in the future,” said Yao, who owns an Internet-promotion company in Shanghai. “Ordinary people will forever lose their freedom to speak online, and the government can rest without worrying anymore.”

Microblogs can quickly aggregate critical voices, which is why authorities have been increasing controls, said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley.

“However, given the speed and volume of microblogging content produced in Chinese cyberspace, censors are still several steps behind at this stage,” he said in an e-mail.

China’s government actually embraced microblogs earlier this year, with the Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, launching a microblog of its own.

The People’s Daily microblog showed no sign Thursday of new restrictions. Meanwhile, Beijing’s public security bureau announced it would set up a microblog for the city’s police, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Wednesday.

But in April, a leading Internet regulator called for requirements that people use their real names when going online.

“As long as our country’s Internet is linked to the global Internet, there will be channels and means for all sorts of harmful foreign information to appear on our domestic Internet,” Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, said in comments released this week by the New York-based group Human Rights in China. “Many weak links still exist in our work. These problems have weakened our ability to manage the Internet scientifically and effectively.”

Privately run microblogs are showing signs of feeling pinched. The Netease.com Inc. microblog is down for maintenance, while the Sina Corp., Sohu and Tencent microblogs display a beta tag.

Sina president Chen Tong responded Wednesday night to speculation that the site could be shut down. “Of course not,” he said on the site’s microblog. “I’ve said that sentence more than any other one today.”

Government officials could not be reached for comment.

Despite Beijing’s extensive restrictions, technologically savvy users can still jump China’s “Great Firewall” with proxy servers or other alternatives. And they can just keep publishing. Pu, the lawyer, said he has already set up a new Sohu blog — his 13th so far.

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Associated Press researcher Xi Yue in Beijing contributed to this report.

Tainted dairy has recently been found in China’s largest city, Shanghai, and in the provinces of Shaanxi, Shandong, Liaoning, Guizhou, Jilin and Hebei. At least five companies are suspected of reselling tainted products that should have been destroyed, the Health Ministry said last week. The problem products uncovered in the 10-day emergency crackdown have so far been limited to the domestic market.

The campaign is set to end Wednesday, and it’s not clear whether it will be extended. The country’s biggest holiday, the Lunar New Year, starts this weekend, and already some offices are closing and millions of people are going on vacation.

The Health Ministry has not commented since the crackdown began, and the China Dairy Association has remained quiet as well.

“The problem is, this is a product with a shelf life of several years. It’s very important that the product is not left unattended,” said Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO senior scientist on food safety based in Beijing. “There’s always a risk it will find a way back into the system.”

The latest discovery underscores the difficulties of policing China’s smaller food producers, despite a sweeping new food safety law that took effect last summer and promised stricter quality controls after the 2008 scandal, which was China’s worst food safety crisis in years.

In the wake of that crisis, China punished dozens of officials, dairy executives and farmers, even executing a dairy farmer and a milk salesman. But the government didn’t destroy seized products itself. Instead, it issued guidelines on how to destroy them, suggesting they be burned in large-capacity incinerators or that small amounts be buried in landfills.

In the southern city of Guangzhou, however, the local government did take over disposal after one garbage company poured tainted milk into a city river.

China’s new food safety law places even more responsibility on food producers to ensure their products are safe, including introducing tough new penalties for makers of unsafe products.

On Monday, with the announcement that more products contaminated by the industrial chemical melmine had been found, it appeared the new regulations had failed again. Officials issued a recall for more than 170 tons of milk powder tainted by the industrial chemical melamine and closed two dairy companies in the northern region of Ningxia, the China Daily newspaper reported.

The report said officials have already seized 72 tons of the powder but were still looking for the rest, which had been sold by the Ningxia Tiantian Dairy Co. Ltd. to five factories in the neighboring region of Inner Mongolia and the bustling southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian.

The report said the tainted powder should have been destroyed in the 2008 scandal, but that an unnamed company gave it to Ningxia Tiantian as a debt payment.

Zhao Shuming, secretary-general of the Ningxia Dairy Industry Association, told the China Daily that said Ningxia Tiantian appears to have been unaware the product contained melamine but should have known that the repackaging itself, which usually involves changing production and sell-by dates, was illegal.

Zhao told the paper that many small dairies, including Ningxia Tiantian, don’t have the technology to even test for melamine. When watered-down milk is laced with the chemical, it appears to still be rich in protein in quality tests that measure nitrogen, found in both the melamine and protein.

“Flaws in the previous system led to the current chaos. What if companies with tainted milk also hold back their stocks for this round of checkups and reuse them later, just like what’s happening now?” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Zhao spoke more carefully Monday, telling the AP, “We have strict checks, and our client companies have strict checks, too.”

Ningxia Tiantian has been shut down, and a second company, Ningxia Panda Dairy Co. Ltd., was also ordered closed because of ties to a Shanghai dairy found with tainted goods last year, the report said.

Online Chinese chat rooms were buzzing Monday over the latest tainted milk finding, with many asking “Why are these things happening again?”

But a large-scale drop in consumer confidence that happened in the 2008 scandal isn’t likely this time, said Cindy Yang, a dairy analyst for the Netherlands-based Rabobank Group in Shanghai.

“These companies are quite small ones,” she said Monday, adding that China’s largest dairies put stricter safety measures in place after feeling the bite of bad publicity — and raised prices 20 to 30 percent to pay for the better quality.

“You can’t say that because of these cases, there’s no trust in the whole market,” she said.

“This should be an issue with Google’s intellectual property, also with China censorship,” said Xiao Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley. “I cannot see how these sites can survive very long without facing these two issues.”

Both sites were still working Thursday. It wasn’t clear what Chinese authorities would do with them, if anything.

China’s National Copyright Administration has been cracking down on illegally run Web sites and this month issued a code of ethics, but no statement was posted on its Web site Thursday about the Google and YouTube imitations.

Google had little comment. “The only comment I can give you right now is just to confirm that we’re not affiliated,” spokeswoman Jessica Powell said in an e-mail.

China is famous for its fake products, but this is the first time such prominent sites have been copied in this way, Xiao said.

The creators of the two sites could not be reached Thursday.

“I did this as a public service,” the founder of the YouTube knockoff, Li Senhe, told The Christian Science Monitor in an instant message conversation. Videos on social unrest in China can be found on the site, which is in English.

The real YouTube was blocked in China in 2008 after videos related to Tibetan unrest were posted there.

Some Chinese quickly welcomed the knockoff YouTube site. “I don’t know if it will last long,” wrote blogger Jia Zhengjing, who has written posts against censorship.

The other site, Goojje, is a working search engine that looks like a combination of Google and its top China competitor, Baidu.

“Exactly speaking, Goojje is not a search engine but a platform for finding friends,” one of the founders, Xiao Xuan, told the Henan Business Daily on Wednesday.

Xiao said the site didn’t have the level of sensitive material of the copycat YouTube site and that it probably was based on the Google China site instead of the version used in the United States.

“It’s quite clean by Chinese censorship standards,” he said.

He guessed that based on the amount of time and work needed to build such a site on top of Google’s data, Goojje had already been ready before the Google-China showdown started — and that the founder or founders chose the name “Goojje” to get attention.

The names are a play on words. The second syllable of “Google” sounds like “older brother,” and the second syllable of “Goojje” sounds like “older sister” in Mandarin.

Copycat companies are nothing new in China. “Baidu included,” Xiao said of China’s most popular search engine. “The whole idea is following Google.”

Xiao said if another copycat site like these emerges, it probably would be of Facebook — which is also blocked in China.

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Associated Press researcher Zhao Liang contributed to this report.

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On the ‘Net:

http://www.goojje.com/

http://youtubecn.com/