Publish and be deleted

• Source: Global Times
• [22:12 February 25 2010]
• Comments

A protester holds the banner "Anti high-speed railway in an ascetic-style (kowtow-every-26- step) walk" during a march against the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong high-speed railway outside the Legislative Office of Hong Kong on January 15. Douban deleted this photo two days later. Photo: courtesy of Liao Weitang

Commercial survival

Self-censorship is the rule of survival that prevents popular websites from being shut down, Zoe Wang, a veteran website developer told the Global Times.

"I can understand an author being outraged when his post gets deleted, but it's even harder to operate a website as I have to suffer the humiliation of supervisory organs and handle all the criticisms coming from users," she said.

"How can you hope to pay your staff or maintain your users' statistics if the website is shut down all because of one sensitive post?"

"You can never relax," said the small website operator.

"You're always keeping your phone switched on and waiting for that emergency call from the authorities requiring deletion of a post."

What's worse, she said, was the complete absence of clear-cut rules for deciding whether or not to delete an online post.

"The criterion of sensitivity depends on many aspects such as the political environment, the website's background, size and location, as well as the different understandings of Web masters."

Douban was extraordinarily cautious about its content as it had no background or ties to government, according to a source close to an editor at the site.

"Once you're shut down, nobody can save you," the source said.

No editor from Douban would go on the record when the Global Times contacted them.

"Douban recalls clearly the fate of Fanfou, Yeeyan and Blogbus," Fang said.

They were three of the most well-known mainland websites closed down last year, according to the Southern Metropolis Weekly. The latter two were recovered in January.

Fanfou founder Wang Xing was pondering how much to up censorship during the July 5 Xinjiang riot last year when he got his answer.

The Twitter-style microblogging service for 100,000 registered users was closed down almost immediately for "violating related rules", according to the China Business News Weekly.

Wang hasn't given up hope of bringing Fanfou back some day. Seven months on, Wang still refused to comment.

A site that published collaborative user-submitted translations of English and Chinese articles, Yeeyan was shut down in November last year for violating the regulation on "running a news information service".