China’s Anti-Smut Crackdown A Total Smokescreen

herdspeople.jpg

Chinese propaganda poster, “Herdspeople love to read books by Marx and Lenin” (1976) from chineseposters.net.

Rebecca MacKinnon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where she teaches online journalism and conducts research on free expression and the Chinese Internet. As many of us know, starting this year China announced it would be saving “young minds” by silencing adult and “vulgar” websites — but it’s now becoming obvious that they’re simultaneously performing a social “cleansing” on adults. (Read China online porn crackdown: 91 sites down, thousands to go at Ars Technica for more information.) But MacKinnon has what looks like firm evidence in her blog post, Bullog.cn goes down.. unlikely due to smut. Feel “unpublished” much, punk? Snip:

China’s edgiest blogging platform, Bullog.cn, was shut down this afternoon.
Authorities launched an anti-Internet smut crackdown on Monday. Bullog was not among the websites cited for failure to control “low and vulgar” content.
A line about today’s shutdown has already been posted on the Chinese Wikipedia entry for Bullog:
2009?1?9?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Translation: “On the afternoon of January 9th, the domestic server for the Bullog network was shut down, and Bullog international was also inaccessible. Some people believe this shut down of Bullog may have to do with the recent major Internet rectification, signaling that China’s political climate has turned to the left.” (Here’s the correct edit history page in case it gets removed.)
On a Bullog fan page in the social networking site Douban, people have been buzzing with outrage and annoyance.
Bullog has been the favorite home for China’s edgiest public intellectuals and counter-culture types – as you can see from the links on Bullog’s still-visible Google cache page. (…read more, rconversation.blogs.com)

I think there is a lot to be learned — Americans, Australians — from MacKinnon’s posts about ‘net filtering, such as Circumventing censorship: issues of trust.
“To Read Too Many Books is Harmful” (Mao Zedong)
Update 01.19: China shut down 244 websites last week alone, bringing the total since January 5th to 726(news.xinhuanet.com). The claim, of course, is pr0n — and cryptically, “violating the top legislature’s regulations” but Chinese officials are not releasing the names of sites shut down.

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