Chinese websites are disappearing

 

Yifan Wu

Chinese websites are disappearing

China’s internet is vanishing in chunks. Posts are being removed and censored.

As of 2023, there were 3.9 million sites, down from 5.3 million in 2017, the country’s internet regulator found. A recent post on WeChat reported that nearly all information shared on China’s internet — news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites — between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.

While archiving a website anywhere is costly and difficult, internet publishers in China are under intense pressure to censor under Xi Jinping’s leadership, Li Yuan writes in the column The New New World.

Internet companies have more incentive to overcensor and to let older content disappear by not archiving.

Two weeks ago, Nanfu Wang, a documentary filmmaker, searched her name on the film review site Douban and found nothing. “Some of the films I directed had been deleted and banned on the Chinese internet,” she said. “But this time, I feel that I, as a part of history, have been erased.”