Chief at Freedom Dogs pointed me to this Washington Post article reporting a crackdown on student bulletin boards at Chinese universities which has led to limited demonstrations.
The incident followed a rare demonstration Friday at
neighboring Tsinghua University, where about 100 students gathered
around a stone monument engraved with the motto, "Actions are greater
than words," and covered it with paper cranes and other origami figures
to urge the school to rescind the new policies, witnesses said. Another demonstration took place on Tuesday at Nanjing
University west of Shanghai, where more than 200 students participated
in an evening vigil around a campus fountain, students said.
The Internet bulletin boards at Tsinghua and Nanjing
universities were the largest student-run discussion sites in the
country. Authorities began blocking outsiders from reading or leaving
messages on the Tsinghua site last week and have shut down the Nanjing
site. Students confirmed that similar restrictions were put in place at
universities in Shanghai, Tianjin, Xian, Hangzhou, Jilin, Wuhan and
Guangzhou.
Tsinghua University officials responded to the
demonstration by holding an emergency meeting and promising to appeal
to the Education Ministry to loosen the restrictions. But students said
they did not expect the party to back down, in part because most
students were too frightened of being expelled to participate in
protests.
"There's no hope at all. The bulletin board era is
over," said one student who resigned as a Web site manager and spoke on
condition of anonymity. "Student leaders opposed the policy, but
college officials said they were following orders from above and asked,
'Would you be happier if the site was shut down completely?' "
The EastSouthWestNorth blog has a number of translations of how various universities are dealing with the crackdown. Some have suspended new registrations and outside users, some are requiring registration verified in person with student ID's. They also include reports of students resorting to extensive quoting of Mao, using his words as a form of protest. (St. Kate? Are you behind this Mao resurrection?)
In an update, titled, Does China Need an Internet Nanny, he includes feedback from different users, one who says the BBS was of limited use and another user, BorlandKylix. who is obviously upset with the change:
I have been holding back for so long.
Since the people above want to defeat on us today, I am going to speak these
words no matter what the consequences are for me.
Listen, brother, this is the information
age. Understand? The information age! The most important
thing in the information age is information, and that means the civil right to
obtain useful information through widely available, equitable, legal and rapid
public channels of information.
I was willing to tolerate the problem about
the exchange of information between China and the outside world in the case of
Google. Do you know the importance of the search engine which is the
soul of the Internet? I work on building robots, and I have to spend
hundreds of dollars a month on getting chips. It is so hard to find a
good datasheet on the specifications of DSP chips. If I cannot search effectively, what kind of research can I be expected to do?
What are you saying? You tell me to use
that Baidu search engine built inside China? That f*****g thing might be
good for finding song lyrics, but it is not good for any serious work.
Read the whole rant. It's worth it. In the same post, an article points to Department of Education leader Zhou Jie as the source of the crackdown, based on a December 2004 speech that discussed the problem of students getting all their news from the internet and the idea that:
Foreign organizations are powerful enough to publish all sorts of information on the Internet. Our students not only ready them, they actually believe them.
There's no evidence that these bulletin boards were being used for any political dissent, it's the mere possibility that this freedom of speech could be misused that the government is reacting to. The party will probably succeed in enforcing this change of rules, but they will not succeed long term in keeping the internet information genie in the bottle.
