Consensus Net (共识网)

» see 21ccom.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 1 October 2016 the front page of 21ccom.net stopped carrying articles and started carrying one sentence: updates are suspended because the site software is being upgraded, we ask for your understanding. Anybody who had been reading Chinese websites for a decade already knew what that sentence meant.

共识网, Consensus Net, had opened on 20 February 2009. It was the web arm of 领导者, a magazine published out of Hong Kong, and it ran long pieces on politics and on recent Chinese history. The stated purpose was to look for consensus in an era of great change, and the method was to put liberal scholars and leftist scholars on the same page and let a reader see the argument whole.

The man behind it was Zhou Zhixing, and his record is the reason the site lasted as long as it did. From 1980 to 1987 he was an assistant researcher in the Liu Shaoqi group at the Communist Party's Central Party Literature Research Office. From 1987 to 1996 he was deputy head of the Central Party Literature Press. After that he founded Phoenix Weekly, then a business digest, then 领导者 itself. Somebody with that history has standing an ordinary editor does not.

I never read a word of this while it was up, and would not have been able to. What is legible from here is the closing sequence, which took three days and was documented by the people it happened to.

~ the case file ~

~ three days ~

The upgrade notice went up on 1 October. On 3 October Zhou posted to WeChat: the authorities want us to close Consensus Net, they consider it a platform for transmitting wrong ideas, we have no choice and are preparing to close. Hereby reported. That last phrase is the register of a man who spent sixteen years working for the organization he was now filing a report to.

It did not happen in isolation. 炎黄春秋, Yanhuang Chunqiu, the reform-era history magazine, had been taken over by its state-affiliated publisher in July 2016 and its editorial staff pushed out. Commentators placed Consensus Net directly behind it, as the same operation applied to the same readership in a different medium.

There was a negotiation of a sort. Reports the following day said Zhou was still talking to the authorities about it. The outcome did not change.

~ the range ~

What made the site useful was its spread. A liberal economist and a New Left academic could both turn up there inside the same week, which by the middle of the 2010s was no longer true of much that was hosted inside China. For a reader it was one of the few places where an argument got reproduced rather than won.

Not everything it printed aged well and not everything it printed was liberal, which was the design. The magazine behind it was aimed at exactly the audience its name says, and the website's reach went past that audience by a wide margin. 21ccom.net has not resolved since 2016. The logo is on Wikimedia Commons and sits at the top of this page: two red arrows pointing in opposite directions around the name.

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