Cenci Journalism Project

» see icenci.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 23 July 2011 a high-speed train crashed near Wenzhou and Kang Xia, then twenty-two and studying Albanian at Beijing Foreign Studies University, read Xinhua's account of what the foreign press was saying about it. The gap between a summary of an article and the article bothered him enough that two weeks later he started a Sina blog to close it. 参差计划, the Cenci Journalism Project, went up on 6 August 2011. The name is taken from a Bertrand Russell line he liked about diversity being essential to happiness and in short supply in utopia.

The model was crowd-sourced translation of foreign reporting into Chinese, in full and for free. It ran five standing channels, the first of which was 边缘议题, marginalized topics, and the sources ran from The New Yorker to Der Spiegel. There was a site on DedeCMS with a Discuz forum bolted to the side, a Sina Weibo account, a WeChat public account called cencistory, a Douban page and eventually an iOS app. Coordination happened in QQ groups, which is where a volunteer organization in China of that era actually lived.

The numbers worth quoting are the ones somebody else counted. Foreign Policy, writing three days after the end, put it at about four hundred volunteer translators and roughly 140,000 registered users as of March 2014. The China Times had counted more than 150 translators and about 5,000 visitors a day back in March 2012. Both Wikipedia articles about the project were written by the founder's own account and the Chinese one carries a neutrality tag, so the self-reported figures circulating in Chinese coverage should be read with that in mind.

~ the record ~

~ what a block looks like from outside ~

Turkey has run its own version of this. Wikipedia was unreachable from here between April 2017 and January 2020, and YouTube and Twitter have each had their turns off. So the reader's half is familiar enough: an address you have used for years stops resolving, and no page comes up to explain it. The half I have never been anywhere near is the editor's, where the thing that stops answering is something you built and five years of other people's unpaid evenings.

~ eight in the evening ~

At 20:00 on 14 July 2014, with Kang's phone off charging, the project's Weibo and WeChat accounts went down at the same moment as its Douban page and more than a dozen of the internal QQ groups. He had spent the first half of that year deliberately running soft material, mostly film and culture pieces, in the hope that a quieter site would be left alone. It made no difference.

The next day the firewall took icenci.com itself. Kang's personal Weibo went with its two thousand-odd posts, every volunteer who had put 参差计划 in their display name found the suffix swapped for random digits, and the iOS listing and the Baidu results for his interviews were cleared. No notice was issued at any point. Yang Chu, the twenty-eight-year-old editor-in-chief who had come from Caijing, told Foreign Policy: 我们没有收到任何官方通知. We did not receive any official notification.

The server itself never went down. Hosted overseas and therefore outside the reach of the thing that had just erased its audience, icenci.com went on serving its 15 July content to anyone outside China for about another year before decaying into stubs. The last article it ever published sits in the archive under a path ending 2014-07-11. The domain answers 200 today and is an Indonesian gambling site.

~ a thousand obituaries ~

On the evening of 16 July, Kang posted a piece called 我所有的朋友都死了, "All my friends have died." It was deleted, and China Digital Times had already copied it. "From now on, there is no Cenci Journalism Project," it says, and then: "It felt like all my friends had died. I wanted to write 1000 obituaries, but I knew that obituaries wouldn't bring them back." It closes, "The Cenci Project will not return. There won't be another Cenci Project either."

There was not. Yang Chu told Foreign Policy they had no plans to rebuild, and both she and Kang left for graduate study abroad, Kang later reporting for Bloomberg. No mirror went up, no successor launched, and the only copy of the work is the one the Internet Archive happened to take. Thirty or so volunteers had met in Beijing at the start of that July for the project's first offline party. It was also its last.

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