Century China

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

~ the last words ~

The order that closed Century China is dated 19 July 2006, and the site had opened on 19 July 2000. Nobody planned that and it is on the paperwork anyway: six years to the day, from the first essay to the letter telling the operator to take the whole thing down.

It was organized out of Beijing by a research institute with an unwieldy name, the Zhongqing Future Community Culture Development Research Institute, working with the Institute of Chinese Culture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. That second half matters, because a Hong Kong academic partner in 2000 was a way of putting one foot outside the mainland regulatory frame without leaving it. The stated purpose was building a rational and open public space for speech, which is exactly the sort of phrase that sounds like boilerplate until you notice what it cost.

What it published was humanities and social science: essays, and long arguments between named academics writing under their own names about subjects that were not settled. The site lived at cc.org.cn and the forum lived next door at ccforum.org.cn under the name 世纪沙龙, Century Salon. By the middle of the decade it was the most influential intellectual website in mainland China, which is a description that comes from people who disagreed with each other on it. Liu Xiaobo posted there, two years before Charter 08 and four before the Nobel he could not collect.

The distance on this grave is not that i could not have read it. Turkey knows this shape from the receiving end. YouTube was unreachable from here between May 2008 and October 2010, and Wikipedia between April 2017 and January 2020. What arrives at the browser in either country is identical, a page that will not load. The difference is the paperwork, and in this case the paperwork survives.

~ the record ~

~ what it was for ~

The thing to understand about Century China is that it was not underground. It carried an ICP permit, number 041040, which is the state licensing number every Chinese website has to display, and it had a university partner and an institutional address. Its writers were professors publishing under their own names, not pseudonyms on a bulletin board.

That was the whole design. A space for open argument that operated entirely inside the permitting system was a bet that the system had room in it for one, and for six years the bet paid. The forum ran the parts that a journal cannot: someone published an essay, and two hundred people took it apart in public underneath, at length, in a register that mainland print had no venue for.

~ the order ~

The document is short and it is worth knowing what it actually says, because the reason given is not the reason anybody assumes. It is addressed to the Beijing Zhongqing Future International Cultural Exchange Center and it names both domains. The finding is that the operator did not hold the qualification to provide internet news information services and had opened news information columns anyway, in serious violation of the Internet News Information Service Management Regulations and Article 19 of the Internet Information Service Management Measures. Both sites are ordered closed.

So the charge is licensing. Not sedition, and not any of the vocabulary Hong Kong would reach for fifteen years later against Stand News. A site full of academic essays was closed for lacking a news permit, and there is no route to argue with that, because the permit either exists or it does not.

English-language sources date the actual disconnection to 25 July. Chinese accounts put it at around 7:20 in the evening of the 26th, which is the kind of detail people record when they were watching it happen. The archive splits the difference and confirms nothing: the last capture of cc.org.cn holding real content is 20 July 2006, and after that the crawler comes back repeatedly and gets nothing but a robots file. Over a hundred intellectuals signed a protest against the closure within weeks. It changed nothing.

~ still under review ~

Both domains are still registered and both are still answering. The bare cc.org.cn redirects to an https address that never completes. Next door, ccforum.org.cn returns a page reading 非常抱歉，当前内容审核中, which is to say: very sorry, the current content is under review. Underneath, a line explains that in order to operate the website more lawfully and in compliance, they are speeding up the review of the current content.

Honesty about that page: it is a stock template that Chinese hosting providers put up over any domain in an unresolved state, and it was not written by anybody who had anything to do with Century Salon. It is not a message. It is a default. Twenty years after the forum was closed for operating without the right license, its address is serving an automated notice promising that the review is being expedited, and nothing whatsoever is under review.

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