08 May 12 | China
The twists and turns in the fate of “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng have held all in its thrall. Despite the vigilance of web censors, China’s netizens — particularly its social media users — have found inventive new ways of discussing the case.
China’s web nannies have been on high alert ever since Chen fled his home in his native Shandong province. To bypass the censors, netizens concocted nicknames for Chen, including “Shawshank” (a reference to the film, The Shawshank Redemption) and “Sunglasses” (denoting Chen’s trademark black sunglasses). But within days, these search terms were also blocked .
Tea Leaf Nation, a blog that “makes sense of China through social meda”, rounded up the memes and graphics that people used to express their support for Chen, including photos of girls on Weibo with “Free CGC” tacked onto their bare legs. The pictures are now likely to be deleted.
Blocking on Sina Weibo (China’s hugely popular version of Twitter) has been systematic in the Chen case. “Chaoyang Hospital” the facility where Chen received treatment, is now an illegal term. When you search for it, Weibo tells you that “according to the relevant regulations, search results cannot be shown.”
The authorities are also using soft blocking – Beijing-based film-maker and writer Charles Custer explored how Weibo hides content from users. For Tech in Asia Custer wrote:
What we found is that while Sina did not block “left of his own volition” as a search term … the company clearly took steps to smother discussion of the term by disabling the indexing of new posts containing the term. … While you can still search for posts with “left of his own volition,” you will only see results from before 16:50 this afternoon, which is approximately when Sina blocked the indexing.
Hong Kong University’s China Media Project, has been, as always, the most reliable source of information on what’s been censored. A post by Xiong Peiyun, a journalist and fellow of the centre, is on the Weibo ban list. Links to Xiong’s piece which criticised China for asking for an apology from the US for sheltering Chen in its embassy have been deleted.
Although overtaken by Chen case, China’s crackdown on “rumour-mongering” in the sensitive Bo Xilai affair continues. On 24 April it was reported that the Chinese government shut down at least four Sina Weibo accounts — “Li Delin,” “Guangzhou Wu Guanchong,” “Yangguang de yuanshi” and “Longyitian—945″ — and several reports claim people running these Weibo handles have disappeared.
The Financial Times report that Wu Guanchong was an entrepreneur and avid internet user based in Guangzhou who allegedly used Weibo to circulate rumors about a coup in Beijing. He has been missing for about a month, it is being claimed he was taken away at the end of March by officials from the capital.
Meanwhile, when one searches on Weibo in Chinese for Li Delin, a financial journalist who also blogged extensively on the case, the following notice appears:
Recently, some lawless individuals have used Sina microblog to make up and spread rumors for no reason, which has had a bad effect. They are now being dealt with by Public Security according to the law.
There were a few comments on Weibo about these notices. A student called Zhang Shaoyan wrote:
This [notice] made me think of how our textbooks had described the Kuomintang [Chinese Nationalist Party]. It’s been eighty years, but now the mountains are on our own heads.
Zhang’s comparison of the tactics of the ruling party with the Kuomintang (defeated by the Communist Party during the Chinese civil war) is hardly original. There was a reason he felt so strongly: one of his microblogs had just been deleted.
10 Apr 12 | China, Digital Freedom
It has emerged that the Chinese government has closed 16 websites and detained six people for “fabricating or disseminating online rumours” in recent weeks.
On 19 March, rumours began spreading on Chinese microblogs that claimed “military vehicles” had entered Beijing, and that the Chinese capital was the centre of a coup attempt.
The rumours focus on internal political upheaval: the sacking of Bo Xilai, the popular former Chongqing Communist Party chief. Rumours began to spread after his deputy and police head Wang Lijun sought political asylum at the American Embassy.
Xinhua reports that the closed websites included meizhou.net, xn528.com and cndy.com.cn. These small websites do not affect everyday life in China, but then on the morning of 31 March, users of the country’s most popular microblog, Sina Weibo, woke up to find that they could not comment on any posts. Users of another large microblog, Tencent’s t.qq.com faced the same issues.
And on Friday 7 April, a well-known Maoist website, Utopia, was closed down along several other less well-known leftist websites.
China’s latest censorship tactics underscore Beijing’s nervousness ahead of the leadership transition later this year, with Bo’s ousting also giving rise to speculation about top-level infighting. Combined, these two factors are making China’s leaders all the more anxious about online discussion.
Having microblog comments shut off riled netizens. Sina put up the following notice:
Weibo users:
Lately there have been a lot of unlawful and harmful content appearing in the comments section of microblogs, so from 8AM on March 31 to 8AM on April 3 our comment function will be suspended temporarily. After we have finished this round of regulation, we will re-open it again.
Han Han, China’s foremost blogger and a recent Index on Censorship award nominee, chose the second day of this three-day shutdown period to speak up. He wrote:
Flowers lose their petals in the winter, and then bloom again in spring. Some people go, some people come.
The oblique post attracted hundreds of thousands of reposts.
After commenting had been restored, users such media worker Vic speculated rote on Sina that the microblogs censors were working overtime:
Ever since microblog commenting had been restored, the moderating at Sina is obviously stronger than it had been. They have over the last couple of days set a string of posts by me under the category “only seen by me.” Little Secretary [the nickname for web censors on the microblog], you’ve worked hard!
One of the replies to Vic’s post was by Linglingfa, the head of technology at internet web forum giant Maopu. He said:
I know everyone needs at least two accounts: one for normal use, and the other to monitor whether we can use the other one normally [i.e. what gets taken down and what doesn’t]… I now understand what a great way this is for Sina to expand the number of registered users!
On the morning of 7 April, commenting on the microblogs had already returned for a couple of days, and most people were buzzing about the loss of Utopia. The Guardian reported that the leftist website was shut down because of its support of “Red” messages such as those espoused by Bo Xilai, who had initiated new classes studying the works of Mao. After reportedly being told to close for a month, the website put up a notice that said:
Our staff asked for a list of articles that they thought violated the constitution and said we would certainly co-operate and deal with these problems. They did not have any specific articles or evidence. In the end, the conversation was cut short and rudely ended.
On the Sina microblog, a link to a Tianya post that had the following statement written by a fan of the website was re-posted over 60 times. The fan had in part written:
I heard that when it started, Utopia was a last effort to restore the glory days of the Cultural Revolution, but I never saw this myself. Naturally, they posted stuff, sang Red Songs, gave speeches, went travelling, and deleted those with a different view to them, burnt some magazines that have different views, destroyed lecture venues. Though some believed in it, no-one thought it would come to this.
