Tiexue

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

~ the goodbye ~

Tiexue ran on the standard furniture of its generation. Threads down the page, reply counts alongside them, a signature block under every post carrying whatever the poster wanted you to know about them. What made it specific was the subject. It opened in 2001 as the home of the junmi, China's military enthusiasts, and for twenty years it was where people went to argue about aircraft carriers and the strength of a navy none of them had seen.

It got big. More than ten million registered users by the end, which put it near the top of the Chinese forum web alongside Tianya and Mop, and it carried a particular reputation outside its own membership. Junmi commentary was blunt, nationalist by default, and quotable enough that foreign correspondents writing about Chinese public opinion on the American relationship or on Taiwan would go and find a Tiexue thread to quote from. The forum was read by people who were never going to register.

Behind it was Beijing Tiexue Technology, which was a listed company. Not on the main boards, but on the NEEQ system, the third-tier exchange where small Chinese firms go to be traded thinly. That detail matters later, because a listed operator has to file, and filing is how the numbers behind a beloved forum become public.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the stake and the contract ~

In August 2017 People.cn, the listed arm of People's Daily Online, bought about a million dollars of Tiexue Technology stock: 913,300 unrestricted tradable shares at 7.89 yuan each, for roughly 1.5 percent of the company. Attached to the share purchase was a second agreement. People.cn would provide Tiexue with content censorship services, and Tiexue would pay for them.

That is worth stating in plain words, because it is easy to skim past. A forum for military enthusiasts hired the Communist Party's newspaper to check what its members were posting, and paid an invoice for it. This was not an enforcement action against Tiexue. It was a business arrangement that suited both sides, and for a site whose entire appeal was patriotic argument, having the party paper's stamp on the moderation was closer to an asset than a burden.

~ the last post ~

Posting and replying were switched off on 20 December 2021, and the site announced it would cease operating on 1 March 2022. The farewell thread opened with an apology and the words for saying goodbye to family. The company's public explanation was that the community was unable to keep up with the times, with a second line about a transformation in business strategy, and the filings underneath said what that meant: losses in 2018, losses in 2019, losses in 2020. The announcement drew a regulatory inquiry letter, which is what happens when a NEEQ-listed firm shuts its main asset.

Mobile apps took the audience. Whatever Tiexue was for, by 2021 there were faster ways to do it on a phone, with video, with an algorithm choosing the argument for you instead of a moderator and a thread title.

~ the forum shape ~

I never read a word of it, because I do not read Chinese, and that is the whole of the reason. But the forums I lived in during those same years were Turkish and mostly about hardware, and they had identical furniture: the post counter next to your name, the signature block where you listed every part in your machine so that strangers could judge it. A forum's shape travels much better than its content does, and the thing that killed Tiexue in 2022 had already come for the Turkish boards, and for every other board, from the same direction.

~ what 403 means here ~

tiexue.net still answers. It returns a 403 rather than failing to resolve, which is the signature of a site that is being served by something and refused by it, not a domain that lapsed and got parked. The address is held, the machines are reachable, and the door is shut from the inside. Twenty-one years of threads sit behind it in whatever state the company left them.

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