MCLC: cyberpolitics in China (2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <anne at chinadigitaltimes.net>
Subject: cyberpolitics in China (2)
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More on the closing of the Cenci site.

Anne

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Source: Foreign Policy (7/17/14):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/07/17/china_censorship_cenci_tra
nslation

Another Chinese Website Bites the Dust
Crowdsourced translation site Cenci gets 'erased from the planet.'
BY ALEXA OLESEN 

When then-22-year-old Kang Xia founded the Cenci Journalism Project in
2011, he called it "cenci" -- meaning "diversity" in Chinese -- because he
liked this quote by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell: "Diversity
is essential to happiness and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a
defect in all planned social systems."

Over the next four years, Kang built his non-profit monument to diversity
into a respected niche web site, delivering Chinese translations of
articles in more than 14 languages sourced from around the web. Pieces
came from Pro Publica, The New Yorker, Asahi Shimbun, Oil of Russia
magazine and Le Figaro. The slogan: "Reporting another dimension of the
world." Cenci is part of wave of independent citizen journalism that has
sprung up in China in recent years with help from the Internet and social
media platforms such as WeChat and Sina Weibo. The Chinese government,
which heavily censors all official news media and doesn't tolerate
independent reporting, regularly cracks down on these mushrooming news
outlets. 

But many flourish before they fall. By March 2014, Cenci had about 400
volunteer translators who provided content, free of charge, and had
attracted some 140,000 subscribers.

Then on July 14, down came the hammer. Cenci's accounts were deleted
across Chinese social media platforms, including Sina Weibo, Tencent's
WeChat, and film and literature criticism site Douban. On July 15, the
icenci.com <http://icenci.com/> website, which is hosted overseas, was
blocked in China. Cenci, for all intents and purposes, was dead. For Kang,
25, a former Bloomberg Businessweek reporter now studying for his GREs, it
was a devastating blow. He posted a grieving essay online that was widely
shared and doggedly deleted by censors. (A copy of the essay, saved as an
image to make it harder for censors to find it with a key word search, can
still be found online.)

In the piece, Kang described how Chinese search engine Baidu no longer
even delivered links to various media interviews he'd done. "All of this
was cleanly erased from the planet, it was as if I never existed," he
wrote. Sitting at home in his apartment in Beijing, Kang said he was
stunned. "I don't want to eat, don't want to cry, don't want to speak."

Cenci's 28-year-old executive editor Yang Chu told Foreign Policy via
email that she cried after reading Kang's obituary and messages from
friends and volunteers. She wrote in her email: "I feel pretty calm now.
Profoundly powerless, however. I feel guilty that that there is nothing I
can do to protect Cenci." Yang said it wasn't yet clear why authorities
targeted the project or if there was any specific content that triggered
the action. "We haven't officially heard anything," said Yang, a former
reporter for Caijing, one of China's leading financial news magazines. She
said sheand Kang heard only that China's Internet surveillance department
requested that Sina Weibo, Wechat, Douban and others shut the Cenci
service down. "But we don't know who gave them the order." Yang said she
suspected that the government wasn't happy with how the site was generated
by hundreds of people spread out across China and in some cases, the
globe. That was potentially unmanageable for authorities, who have shown
themselves to be very jumpy at the Internet's power to unite netizens
across provincial boundaries.

Cenci's content was sometimes lightly provocative, but not overtly daring.
In May, it published a Chinese version of an article from The Atlantic
about Associated Press reporter Edward Kennedy's decision to break a
military-mandated embargo on news that Germany had surrendered in 1945.
His action infuriated U.S. wartime censors and his fellow journalists, but
the crux of the story, which probably rang bells in the minds of many
Chinese readers, was this line: "What, exactly, does the public have a
right to know? And who gets to decide?"

Kang founded Cenci along with several classmates from the Beijing Foreign
Language University. It retained an undergraduate-type enthusiasm but had
high digital polish and appears to have been particularly popular among
young people. 

For many Cenci readers and contributors, the site's shuttering was their
first personal experience with censorship.

For many Cenci readers and contributors, the site's shuttering was their
first personal experience with censorship. One young woman in Xi'an, the
capital of the central province of Shaanxi, wrote on her Sina Weibo page
in response to news of the site's demise: "Many people say that doing
media in China is hard, I didn't feel it before but this time I am
sincerely convinced."

A 24-year-old Cenci fan named Selina who works for Baidu in Beijing told
Foreign Policy via a WeChat interview that she found the news deeply
upsetting. She described herself as "angry and hurt" that her country
"doesn't allow its young people to think freely, doesn't allow young
people to spontaneously do something they find meaningful, and responds
instead with threats, fear, and coercion." (She asked to be identified
only by her chosen English name for fear that speaking out might impact
her job.)

For Kang and Yang, the next step is still uncertain. They won't revive
Cenci, Yang said. Both are currently planning to get graduate degrees
outside China. As for media, they will wait and see whether to re-engage.
"In a country where only entertainment and light news could survive, we
really don't know what we could do," Yang wrote. "We want to write what we
like, but it is so hard."