Tuesday, August 18, 2009

"Chinese Tweets: “Send Your Feelings” to Xu Zhiyong Today!" by Xiao Qiang, China Digital Times

Link
August 12, 2009

Since legal scholar and founder of Gongmeng (Open Constitution Initiative) Xu Zhiyong was detained, his virtual existence has also been cleaned up in Chinese cyberspace. His blog on sina.cn.com was completely deleted around 11 am on August 12 and searching his name in Baidu and Google will produce the following error pages:

Netizens have pointed out that similar search results will appear at the following links as well: Douban group Search, Douban Topic search, Sina Community Search, Sougou, Netease Search, Tom, Qihu Search … (豆瓣小组搜索,豆瓣话题搜索,新浪社区搜索,搜狗,网易有道,TOM,奇虎搜索……)
Hecaitou, a long time and hugely popular blogger tweeted about his experience in searching “Xu Zhiyong” “许志永” on Baidu today: in addition to the standard error message (”Your search results may relate to contents which is not consistent with relevant law, regulations and policies, and therefore cannot be displayed”), the upper-right corner banner ad on the same page will automatically enter the search term “Xu Zhiyong” into a popular Baidu online service, “Baidu Send Your Feelings (百度传情).” So the banner reads:

Other tech savvy netizens provided links to download the compressed version of Xu Zhiyong’ blog content.

Even before Xu Zhiyong’s blog was taken off-line, Beijing blogger Wang Lihong (王荔蕻) anticipated this possibility and set up a blog on a Yam.com, a hosting service in Taiwan. She then spent several days hand copying and pasting each of Xu’s articles into this new mirror site here.

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