Though cutting off access to sites can often be traced to a specific trigger - such as the June 4 Tiananmen anniversary - specialists say the fact the sites are not coming back online shows the harsh measures are part of a long-term strategy to pare back the power of the Internet and silence some voices finding expression.
“I am especially pessimistic about this fall and next spring,’’ said Wen Yunchao, a well-known Chinese blogger based in Guangzhou in southern China. “I expect they will be more and more restrictive because they have yet to come up with a good way to manage the Internet. They are aware that it has this great power and they are afraid of it.’’
Digu and Zuosa, two Chinese websites that offer microblogging services similar to Twitter, were both shut down for maintenance yesterday, according to notices posted on their home pages. A Digu spokeswoman who would give only her surname, Zhang, said the site was offline so that it could be moved to a new server. She said it would be down for at least a week.
“It’s a sensitive period, so we are not in a rush to reopen it,’’ Zhang said, adding that some Digu users had recently tried to post politically sensitive material to the site and that the company was having to censor such content.
Wen, the blogger from Guangzhou, said having two sites close on the same day indicates pressure from authorities for them to shut down.
He said the timing of the closures was probably related to the 10-year anniversary today of the banning of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
China has the world’s largest population of Internet users, more than 298 million, and the world’s most extensive system of Web monitoring and censorship.
