Communist Party People Net

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

~ the obituary ~

The last thing this site published was a polite notice. In accordance with the requirements of the notice from the Network Propaganda Management Office of the Beijing Municipal Information Office, it said, Communist Party People Net and the worker-peasant-soldier BBS will be temporarily closed before nine in the morning on 22 February 2006. Then it asked readers to save the site's QQ number and email address, so that everyone could be told when it opened again. It was signed by the whole editorial staff, eight people using handles rather than names, and dated the same day.

The site itself was called 共产党人, communists, which is where gcdr.com.cn comes from. Its front page ran party-building material and historical archives, alongside a column of pieces arguing that the reform era had abandoned the ideology the party still printed on its own letterhead. The link list pointed at the rest of the small mainland leftist web, China Worker Net among them. One of the contact addresses was gcdr1921 at a free mail provider, 1921 being the year the party was founded. The footer carried a Beijing ICP filing number beginning with 05, which is the only clue anywhere to when the thing was registered.

The reason given was money. Voice of America reported on 26 February that three civilian leftist sites had been ordered shut ahead of the annual parliamentary sessions, and the rule being applied was the September 2005 provisions on internet news information services, which required an operator to hold no less than ten million yuan in registered capital. China Worker Net was closed the same day under the same requirement. Boxun, reporting on the 25th, noted that a search engine could still find exactly one page from the site: an article criticizing Zheng Bijian, the theorist behind the peaceful-rise line and an adviser close to Hu Jintao.

The notice asks readers to keep the QQ number. I have never had QQ installed on anything. In Turkey between 2002 and 2010 the messenger everyone had was MSN, so a Chinese site's forwarding address would have been useless to me in the most ordinary way possible, not blocked, just on a network nobody I knew was on. What I keep returning to is that the continuity plan for a website was an instant messenger contact, because the domain was the part that could be taken away and the contact list was not.

~ the case file ~

~ the notice ~

Boxun read the notice as a promise that the site would come back after nine on the 22nd, and then noted that it had not. The eight signatures are worth listing, because they are all this site left behind in the way of authorship: sand jujube tree, worker bee, sentry, wine bottle, vanguard, strong wind, mud, and Guevara. Nobody used a legal name. For a site arguing that it spoke for workers and peasants, the roster reads like a factory shift board.

The archive keeps the shape of the closure without needing any of the reporting. There is a full front page captured on 9 February 2006, dated articles running up to that morning. The next three captures, spread from March to May, are all 403. The address answers, and refuses.

~ the letter ~

On 14 March 2006 an open letter appeared on Boxun, addressed to the same Beijing office that had issued the order. It was written by Zhang Yinqian, who described himself as an old worker who had started work in 1956, a party member past sixty living on a pension. He said he had gone looking for somewhere to write and had picked the two sites that seemed closest to ordinary workers, China Worker Net and Communist Party People Net, and that both had been ordered closed not long after.

His objection to the ten million yuan is the plainest statement of the mechanism anyone made at the time: a capital requirement is a policy aimed at people without capital, and if you had that much money you would not be a worker anymore. He quoted Article 35 of the constitution on freedom of speech, and Article 1 on the working class as the leading class, and then asked the question the whole letter is built around. For a communist party government to seal the site of communists who believe in it is to seal itself. If you still insist on closing it, he wrote, there is only one explanation left, which is that one of the two must be fake.

~ where the address went ~

Nobody answered the letter, and the site did not reopen. By June 2007 gcdr.com.cn was serving a frameset with no content of its own, pointed at a domain-parking search portal, with a line telling visitors that their browser did not support frames and inviting them to click here to enter. A site closed for holding less than ten million yuan in capital spent its afterlife as an advertising frame, which is the one business model on the whole page that met the requirement.

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