Democracy and Freedom Web

~ the obituary ~

In early October 2005 the man who ran this site went and registered it with the government. That was the correct thing to do. A rule issued that March required non-commercial sites to file, and the Ministry of Information Industry had announced that unregistered ones were entering a period of severe sanctions. He filed. On 18 October the authorities shut the site down anyway and canceled the registration he had just obtained.

The site was founded on 12 June 2001 as the Democracy and Freedom Forum, and later ran under the name Perspectives. It was a mainland Chinese discussion and publishing site about political reform and human rights, and it was properly filed with the authorities in Beijing and Chengdu among other places, rather than hidden offshore. The operator was Wu Wei, a Guangzhou writer who publishes as Ye Du and who later coordinated the network committee of the Independent Chinese PEN Center.

Over five years it was taken offline or otherwise disabled forty eight times. Forty seven of those times it came back. One of the disablings followed a set of articles mourning Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary removed after 1989 who died in January 2005 and whose death the state preferred not to have discussed. The Washington Post wrote him up in May 2004 as a webmaster who had found the gaps in China's net, which was accurate and probably did not help.

I have been on the wrong end of a national block, so I know one half of this from the inside. Turkey kept YouTube off for two and a half years from 2008 and Wikipedia off for nearly three from 2017, and I spent both stretches doing what everybody here did, which was route around it and complain. What I have never been is the person on the other side of the block, the one who owns the thing being taken down and puts it back up again on Tuesday. Reading somebody do that forty seven times is a different order of stubbornness than mine.

~ the case file ~

~ the forty eight ~

The count is not a metaphor, it is a tally that Hong Kong and overseas Chinese-language press kept. Apple Daily's report on the last closure is headlined around the forty eighth time. By late 2005 the Congressional-Executive Commission on China was already recording the site as having been forced offline more than forty times in a little over three years, which averages out to roughly one shutdown a month across its entire existence.

The mechanism behind that number was not one big censor but a lot of small ones with different tools. Part of it was administrative, an order to a host or a canceled filing, and part of it was network-level blocking that no host could have argued with. Reports at the time also describe plain intrusion into the server. What stayed constant was that none of it came with a written reason anybody could appeal.

~ the pressure off the network ~

The part that does not show up in a domain history is what happened to the man's housing. Liu Xiaobo, writing in January 2006, reported that police in Guangdong had been leaning on Wu's landlords, and that he had been evicted at least five times over the previous year. That is a form of site administration too. You do not need to break a server if you can keep moving the person who maintains it.

It is also why the registration attempt reads the way it does. He tried to satisfy the rule, got the filing, lost the filing and lost the site, reopened it, and lost it again on 25 November. Compliance was available as a procedure and unavailable as an outcome.

~ the last order ~

On 16 July 2006 the site was closed completely, and the order this time came from the Communist Party's propaganda department rather than an internet-services regulator. Voice of America reported it the following day. Radio Free Asia and Apple Daily carried it on the 17th as well, both framing it as the forty eighth.

Nothing came back after that. There is no archived front page to point at from here, no farewell post, no parked domain with a notice on it, and the site had never been the sort of thing that mirrors itself abroad, because filing in Beijing and Chengdu had been the entire point. Five years of argument about political reform inside China exists now as a number in other people's reporting.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »