Nutuge.com

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

~ the obituary ~

Nutag is the Mongolian word for homeland. That is the whole name of the site and it is also the whole argument the state ended up having with it. The Chinese-language description in the page header read as an online homeland for the Mongol people, and the keyword list underneath it named Inner Mongolia, the Mongol districts of Xinjiang and the country of Mongolia in one breath. In March 2004 the authorities closed it for posting separatist content and discussing ethnic problems.

Type the address today and you get a keyword-farm page whose meta tags read Nuts, Nut Free, Nut Gift. A squatter looked at the string nutuge and heard nut. The site's own history is legible in the archive going back to a capture in November 2002, a frameset in GB2312 that loaded everything into one main pane, holding sections on Mongol history alongside photographs from Hohhot and further west.

It was run by Govruud Huuchinhuu, who was not a webmaster by trade. She had been active in the Mongolian student movement of 1981 and belonged to the Southern Mongolian Democratic Alliance. She also wrote books, and China banned them. She administered several Mongolian-language forums and every one of them was eventually closed on the same finding. This one was the first to go.

Turkish is written in a Latin alphabet and even that broke constantly on the dial-up web I grew up on. Every second page in 1999 turned ş and ğ and ı into question marks or into Greek letters, and you learned to read your own language through the damage. So I recognize the problem this site had, at a scale I never faced. Traditional Mongolian script runs vertically and nothing in a 2002 browser was going to render it, so the site solved it by hand, which is where this grave stops being about censorship for a paragraph.

~ the case file ~

~ what was on it ~

It was a reference site with a forum bolted to it. The archive holds directories of photographs next to regional material covering Inner Mongolia and the Mongol areas of Xinjiang. There was a Hohhot section with its own mark, a black horse-head ornament above the words HUH HER, which is the Mongolian name of the city.

None of this was underground. The site sat at a plain.com and was indexed like anything else. What made it a target was not any single post that anybody has ever quoted, and no source names one. It was the subject matter itself, held together in one place, in a language the state does not administer in.

~ the script problem ~

Two directories in the archive are the interesting artifact. One is called font and it holds single-character GIF images named after hexadecimal character codes, one of which measures 46 by 20 pixels. The other is called minputstr and holds pages of a table of small clickable cells wired to a JavaScript handler, which is an on-screen keyboard rendered in HTML.

Put together, that is a site building its own typography and its own input method because the platform gave it neither. Unicode had Mongolian code points by then and no browser on a 2002 machine in Hohhot could do anything useful with them. So each character became a picture and each picture got a filename. It worked, and it is also why almost nothing of the actual text is recoverable now: the writing was images, and the images have no words in them.

~ the charge ~

Separatist content and discussing ethnic problems is the standard finding for this class of closure, and the pattern repeated after nutuge went. In September 2005 the authorities took down two more Mongolian-language sites, Ehoron.com, a forum with more than 1,300 Mongolian intellectuals on it, and the site of a law firm in Tongliao. Members of the forum believed the trigger was criticism of a Chinese cartoon that had portrayed Chinggis Khan badly. The law firm had been collecting evidence for a lawsuit about it. That one was allowed back on 2 October on condition that it not post separatist content again.

Nutuge got no such condition and did not come back. The domain was already being parked by late 2004, and by February 2005 the file the front page had loaded its splash image from was serving a yellow button reading Click Here Now.

~ what happened to her ~

The forums were the smaller part of what was done to Govruud Huuchinhuu. She was detained on 11 November 2010 and put under house arrest. At the end of December she was admitted to a hospital in Tongliao, and after her release on 27 January 2011 she disappeared. Two years of enforced disappearance followed. A closed-door trial in November 2012 found her guilty of leaking state secrets. Human Rights Watch gave her a Hellman/Hammett grant that year.

She died of cancer on 25 October 2016, still under round-the-clock watch. Her books stayed banned. Every forum she had run was gone, and the address of the first one was selling nut gifts to nobody.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »