Bullog.cn

» see bullog.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In January 2009 I was in Ankara on a TTNet line that could not reach YouTube. Turkey had blocked it the previous spring and would keep it blocked until late 2010, so the general mechanism was not exotic to me: a legal pretext gets found, an order goes to the carriers, and a site you used yesterday returns nothing today. What was different about Bullog was the pretext, and the fact that everybody involved understood it was a pretext.

Luo Yonghao started it in 2006, and the reason was straightforward. He had been blogging on the large Chinese portals, Sina and Sohu, and had watched his posts disappear often enough to want a host that would not do that. The name was 牛博网, roughly Bull Blog Net, which is a pun that also functions as a boast. It was invitation-based rather than open, so the writer list was curated from the start.

That list is why the site matters. Ai Weiwei wrote there. So did the novelist Han Han, the science writer Fang Zhouzi, the sociologist Li Yinhe and the economist Steven Cheung. Several contributors had signed Charter 08, the pro-democracy manifesto circulated in December 2008. For about three years Bullog was the closest thing the Chinese web had to a place where those people could publish without an editor removing paragraphs overnight.

~ the case file ~

~ the two shutdowns ~

The first closure came on 19 October 2007, timed to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party, when a great many things on the Chinese internet went quiet for the duration. Bullog came back in April 2008, and Luo used the interval to set up bullogger.com on servers outside the country as an insurance policy.

The second closure was permanent. On 9 January 2009 the domestic servers went down as part of a national campaign against pornographic and vulgar content that had been announced days earlier and that eventually took 91 sites offline. Luo posted the actual reason: a notice relayed from the Beijing Press Office through the Beijing Communication Administration and delivered by the ISP, stating that the site had carried a large volume of harmful commentary on current affairs. The pornography campaign was the vehicle. The commentary was the cargo.

~ where everyone went ~

The writers did not stop writing, they just scattered, and the scattering is the lasting effect. Some moved to bullogger.com and accepted that mainland readers would need a workaround to reach them. Others went back to the large portals and back to being edited. Within a couple of years the center of gravity for Chinese online argument had moved to Sina Weibo, where the format was 140 characters and every post passed through a filter before anyone saw it.

Luo Yonghao's own path is the odd footnote. The man who built China's most censored blog platform went on to found Smartisan, a phone company, and later became one of the country's best-known livestream shopping hosts, selling merchandise to tens of millions of viewers on platforms that answer to the same regulators. It is not a betrayal so much as an accurate reading of which doors stayed open.

~ the afterlife ~

Bullog.cn never reopened. The 2009 shutdown holds, and the wave it arrived in set the pattern that has run ever since: the announced target is always obscenity or fraud or something else nobody will defend in public, and the sites that vanish are the ones carrying arguments.

The lesson for anyone reading from outside is about hosting. Luo built his own platform specifically so that no editor could delete his work, and that worked exactly as designed right up until the layer beneath him, the ISP, received a phone call. Owning the site was never the level at which the decision got made.

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