In a bid to improve its economy, China will reportedly loosen its grip on Internet censorship in a small portion of Shanghai.

According to the South Morning China Post, which cited anonymous government sources, a 28.78 square kilometer section of Shanghai's Pudong New Area will allow Internet users to access previously blocked sites like Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times.

The area includes the Waigaoqiao duty-free zone, Yangshan deepwater port, and the international airport area, the Post said. The area would operate in a way similar to Hong Kong, which as a "special administrative region" of China, is not faced with the same type of Internet censorship as mainland China.

According to the Post's source, the move to unblock Twitter or Facebook in the region is intended to attract foreign companies and workers to the region. The idea is that they might feel more at home if they can sign in to the well-known services.

Apparently, if the effort is successful, it might extend to the entire Pudong district, which covers 1,210.4 square kilometers.

The move is part of a Shanghai free trade zone that will also loosen controls on the region's financial industry, the Wall Street Journal reported. It's tentatively set to launch on Oct. 1.

The U.S. tech community has had a complicated relationship with China. It's a gold mine of potential users, but some firms are hesitant to adhere to the government's censorship requests. In its 2012 initial public offering paperwork, for example, Facebook estimated it has zero percent penetration in China.

"We continue to evaluate entering China," Facebook said at the time. "However, this market has substantial legal and regulatory complexities that have prevented our entry into China to date."

Google has tangled publicly with China in recent years. In 2010, Google said it would stop censoring search results in China, but in a bid to retain its Chinese ISP license, the company eventually took a hybrid approach. All users in China are directed to a Google.cn landing page. The search component is an unfiltered option going through Google.com/hk, while other Google.cn services that can be provided unfiltered, like music and text translate, are available via Google.cn.

In January, meanwhile, the New York Times revealed that, for the previous four months, it was the target of Chinese hackers. The attackers were reportedly in search of details about sources to whom Times' reporters spoke to for an October story about the wealth of China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao. Specifically, they targeted the email accounts of David Barboza, the Times' Shanghai bureau chief, and Jim Yardley, the paper's South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously held the Shanghai post.