Censorship in China: How ReadWriteWeb China Was Closed Down For a Month

Mera Blog

• 15 Posts
• 20 Comments

In the West, the concept of the ‘read/write Web’ is a relatively easy one to get behind. Everybody can contribute content to the Web (‘write’), as well as read it – it’s a very democratic notion.

However in countries where democracy doesn’t prevail, the read/write Web is often subject to censorship rules.

Indeed in December, ReadWriteWeb China was off the air due to the temporary closure of our syndication partners Yeeyan. In this post we look at how and why that happened.

The Global Times recently published a special report about censorship in China. It is an illuminating analysis of a number of publishers who have been censored or who self-censor themselves in order to survive.

According to Wikipedia, Internet censorship in China is “conducted under a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations.” In particular China looks to censor political or social content. In mid-2009 a number of prominent Western social networking sites were blocked in China, including Facebook and Twitter. Western media speculated that the bans were put in place to prevent activists from using social networks to organize themselves – which happened in Iran in June of 2009, when Iranian election protesters used Twitter to call attention to their cause.

Self-censorship

Inside China, self-censorship is practiced by many web publishers in order to prevent trouble. “Self-censorship is the rule of survival that prevents popular websites from being shut down,” said veteran web developer Zoe Wang in The Global Times.

However, self-censorship is difficult to do in practice – because it’s not regulated by a single authority and so there are a lack of clear rules on what to censor. Web publishers in China are never sure what could get their site shut down.

On sites driven by user-generated content, publishers routinely censor political content. But while this may appease the government, it risks upsetting the core users. This has been the case on Douban, a popular social network in China with 33 million registered users. Censorship has recently tightened on Douban, leading to “veteran members” protesting about the censorship of certain photos, poetry and book reviews.

Site Closures, Including RWW China

The Golbal Times points to three recent examples of sites closed down by authorities: Fanfou, Yeeyan and Blogbus. The latter two were recovered in January.

These site closures directly affected our own company, as Yeeyan is our syndication partner for ReadWriteWeb China.

Yeeyan is a community translation website (our initial review 3 years ago), which publishes some well-known Western news sites such as The Guardian, Time Magazine, the New York Times and of course ReadWriteWeb. In early December, Yeeyan was forced to shut down its site – including ReadWriteWeb China.