China Worker Net

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

~ the obit ~

The price of continuing to publish was 10 million yuan, about 1.2 million dollars at the time. That figure was not a fine or a bribe. It was the registered capital a body had to hold before it could lawfully run an internet news information service in China, set out in provisions issued on 25 September 2005 by the State Council Information Office and the Ministry of Information Industry. The people running China Worker Net were workers and farmers and some of them were unemployed. The statement they put out afterward makes the arithmetic plain: you have to buy your voice with 10 million yuan.

The site went up on 1 May 2005, May Day, which was not an accident. It was founded in Beijing by a group who described themselves as socialists, edited by Yan Yuanzhang, and it was filed with the state as Beijing ICP No. 05004935. Its subject was the Chinese working class in the reform era, mostly labor relations inside state-owned enterprises and what had happened to the people in them as those enterprises were restructured. Yan later described it as the first Chinese leftist website, and whether or not that is exactly true, nothing quite like it had been maintained inside the mainland before.

What it was not was oppositional in the sense the outside world understands. This site argued from Mao Zedong Thought. It claimed to represent workers and peasants and the ideology the party still printed on its own letterhead, and it criticized the government for having abandoned that ideology rather than for holding it. On 22 February 2006 the department that manages internet propaganda for Beijing's information office ordered it shut. Voice of America reported it on the 26th, as one of three civilian leftist sites closed just before the annual parliamentary sessions.

I published on the web from 1998 onward and it never cost me anything but the phone bill. Free hosts and forum accounts, and a signature block on frmtr with my hardware listed in it. That is the whole reason this grave landed strangely for me: the internet I learned on had a floor of zero, and a capital requirement is a way of putting a floor under speech without ever having to say what speech you object to. I did not read this site, could not have read it, and would have disagreed with a fair amount of it. The mechanism is the part worth writing down.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who wrote it ~

Yan Yuanzhang gave an interview in April 2006 describing how the thing had actually run. The forum was mostly maintained by intellectuals, but the discussions in the sections about management and enterprise issues were where workers themselves turned up. The site collected and posted information about strikes, which is the detail everything else hangs on.

The official complaint, as Yan reported it, was that the site was controversial and political, and that right-wing and overseas websites were lifting its strike reports and using them to make the party look bad abroad. Yan's answer to that was to ask whether you blame the man who sold the knife when somebody steals it and commits a murder. He also said the team refused to move the site overseas, on the grounds that the workers it was for did not have the skills or the tools to reach an offshore server. So they stayed where they could be reached, and they were.

~ the price of a license ~

The 2005 provisions are worth reading once. Applicants had to be enterprise legal persons holding no less than 10 million yuan in registered capital. They also had to have been legally established for at least two years with a clean administrative record across them. Every clause of that is neutral on its face and none of it can be met by a website run by people earning a few hundred yuan a month. The rule did not have to name a single opinion it wanted removed.

The site had done the compliant thing before that. It had filed for a real ICP number, and it operated in the open at zggr.org rather than from somewhere the state could not reach. None of that survived the new requirement, and no amount of good behavior could have. What is left in the archive is a plain text-driven site in GB2312 with no logo of its own, which is why this page has no mark at the top. The last thing the address served, a year and a half after the shutdown, was a stranger's banner image.

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