The friend tried to forward one of the jokes about Chairman Mao and President Hu Jintao - still stored in his phone's memory - to deerfang's mobile. One evening last week, a Chinese blogger who writes under the name of "deerfang" was sharing a good laugh with a friend who knows some great political jokes - learned through mobile-phone text messages sent in May from other friends.
Instead the Web portals ran extensive coverage of events in Weng'an reported by China's professional media. Many large Chinese Web portals deleted or prevented publication of any blog and chat room posts mentioning Weng'an. A similar thing happened in July after large riots took place in Weng'an, a town in Guizhou province, after a young girl died under suspicious circumstances. At the same time, clamp down on blogs, chat rooms and video-sharing sites that might allow too much unfettered discussion of the news. The strategy seems clear: Give China's professional journalists a longer leash to cover breaking news even if it's not positive - since the news will come out anyway and unlike bloggers, the journalists are still on a leash. Yet a Baidu news search on "drum tower" turned up several Chinese media reports about the incident. A blog-hosting service run by Baidu, one of China's biggest Internet companies, wouldn't even let me publish the post. But Sina's news portal ran Chinese news agency reports about the attack. One of China's most popular blogging platforms,, deleted my post after a few hours. On Monday, I logged into a number of Chinese blog-hosting services and posted the first paragraph of a Chinese-language story, based on state media reports, about last week's knife attack on American tourists atop Beijing's Drum Tower. Chinese Web users now experience a more targeted and subtle approach to censorship than before.Įxamples abound. There is indeed a vastly larger space for public discourse on matters of public concern than existed even a few years ago. This context is key to understanding the wide-ranging conversations, many of them political, that are now happening on Chinese blogs and chat rooms. All of China's blog-hosting services, YouTube-style video sharing sites and the like hire entire departments of people to flag and delete things that may get them in trouble with the government authorities who could revoke their business license. Inside China, companies that host Web sites, blogs and chat rooms are held responsible for objectionable content posted on their services.
The "Great Firewall," the common moniker for China's filtering system that blocks various Internet addresses and keywords, really only pertains to Internet sites and services hosted on computer servers outside China.