Supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its associated global protests in cities across the world have not been shy about their use of social media, especially Twitter, to spread awareness and news about their causes. But good luck even mentioning the phenomena in China, where the country’s second-most popular microblog, Sina Weibo, has gone ahead and blocked basically all “Occupy”-related keywords in uers’ searches.
The Orwellian discovery was made on Friday by the China Digital Times, a bilingual China news website run by the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information’s Counter-Power lab. (H/t: GOOD)
As the China Digital Time reported: “”All the listed phrases stick to one simple rule: a combination of “occupy” (å é¢) and a place name-provincial capitals, economically developed regions, and few symbolic local areas.” The ban reportedly applies to search queries on Sina Weibo’s new realtime search feature, which was just implemented on Friday.
The full list of banned keywords includes:
Occupy China
Occupy Beijing
Occupy Shanghai
Occupy Guangzhou,
Occupy Xi’an,
Occupy Chongqin,
Occupy Tianjin,
Occupy Urumqi,
Occupy Lhasa,
Occupy Changsha,
Occupy Wuhan,
Occupy Nanchang,
Occupy Fuzhou,
Occupy Nanjing,
Occupy Dalian,
Occupy Hangzhou,
Occupy Harbin,
Occupy Chengdu,
Occupy Kunming,
Occupy Hohhot,
Occupy Haikou,
Occupy Zhengzhou,
Occupy Changchun,
Occupy Shenyang,
Occupy Xining,
Occupy Lanzhou,
Occupy Taiyuan,
Occupy Yinchuan,
Occupy Shijiazhuang,
Occupy Jinan,
Occupy Nanning
Occupy Jiling
Occupy Shenzhen
Occupy Wenzhou
Occupy Qingdao
Occupy Wangfujing
Occupy Zhongnanhai
Occupy Financial Street
Of course, the development is hardly unexpected, given China’s notoriously hard line when it comes to Internet censorship. Sina Weibo is just one of several exceedingly popular microblogs (weibos) within the country, all of which were called to task by the Chinese government and Chinese state media in late August for allowing users to spread “toxic rumors.” The weibos dutifully complied with increased calls for censorship, with Sina Weibo suspending several users for a month for posts the company said contained false information and posting about the matter on its official blog, a de-facto warning to other users to play by the new rules.
And yet, even that didn’t stop Sina Weibo users from criticizing the move, especially since earlier in the year, the weibos had been a primary conduit for spreading information and dissent about a horrific, fatal high-speed rail accident and the (unrelated) health status of a Chinese official shrouded in mystery.
But the latest list of banned terms is interesting for several other reasons.
Firstly, It doesn’t contain the most “westernized” Chinese city, the one generally encumbered by the mainland’s Web censorship and other sociopolitical and cultural controls: Hong Kong.
Indeed, Hong Kong became the site of China’s first “Occupy” protest on Saturday, October 15, with reportedly about 500 protesters coming out in force in front of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, although the number of attendees has since dwindled to about 20 or 30 occupants, mostly students, who have refused to budge from their encampment beneath the HSBC headquarters.
And as in the case with Occupy movements elsewhere, Occupy Hong Kong protesters have aired their grievances, including against forced relocation, on videos posted to YouTube:
Also, the Chinese government and state media have been only too happy to celebrate the Occupy movements occurring on U.S. soil, criticizing U.S. authorities and media for failing to understand and properly address the protests.
As Chinese state news agency Xinhua wrote in an editorial on Oct. 14 (reported by TIME magazine):
What strikes us as odd is that the muckraking-crazy US media seem to have lost their sensitive news nose amid the spreading protests descending on their own soil. Mainstream American media of [sic] either turn a completely blind eye or try to play down the mass unrest storming their own streets.
This is just in a violent contrast with their eagerness to hype up the mass events of such kind, of course, if they all occurred in other countries. The rarely mute and subdued practice of the US mainstream media is also in departure with tenets of their oft-sung “free media.” They even show some reluctance to go figure in covering the Wall Street protests which a new poll shows that most Americans sympathize with. Some have even gone so far as to insult people taking to the streets as “idiots.”
And current and former Chinese government officials have suggested the protests should inspire self-reflection on the part of the U.S. As Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin told U.K. newspaper the Telegraph on October 17: “We have noticed that in the media there has been comment, discussion and reflection about these activities. But all these reflections ought to be conducive towards maintaining the stable and healthy development of the global economy.”
Indeed, as the Telegraph points out, the Chinese Communist Party outlet that has reported perhaps most on the Occupy movement in the U.S. is tabloid The Global Times, a sister publication of the People’s Daily, which has published dozens of articles and editorials on the protests.
In one editorial, published October 17, the paper’s board opines that the Occupy Wall Street protest “reveals one of the core reasons why the western world lacks determination for real change. Political parties have been taking advantage of dissatisfaction in their societies, manipulating them to serve their own short-term political interests, rather than eliminating the causes.”
In an article published the same day, the paper quotes a former Chinese official explicitly tying the movement to President Obama’s re-election bid: “Some analysts believe that the first priority for Obama is to solve the problem of high unemployment if he wants to be re-elected successfully, according to Ma Bin, one of the older generation of proletarian revolutionaries in China’s Communist Party.”
And in a bizarre, mildly racist editorial by one Barry Cunningham published on Sunday, the Occupy movement is declared to be more evidence of the U.S. government’s failed response to inequality compared to the Chinese response: “The Chinese government is acutely aware of the wealth gap and its ministers are trying to adjust the inequality between urban and rural workers…If nothing else, the tent city protest in New York shows it doesn’t take much of a spark to ignite economic vandalism.”
