Microsoft's new Chinese blog censorship policy cranks into gear

Roland Soong at ESWN reports that Chinese blogger Wang Ning is one of the first targets of Microsoft’s new and improved Chinese blog censorship policy.  If you visit Wang Ning’s MSN Spaces blog from the U.S. or anywhere else outside the People’s Republic of China, you can access it just fine. But if you access it from inside China you get the following error page:

“Space not available. Sorry, we are required by order of the Chinese government to block access to this Space due to its content.”

Wang’s final blog post was about Yahoo!’s role in the jailing of Chinese dissident Li Zhi. MSN has also blocked the blog of an anonymous Chinese journalist who posted this week about new internet news restrictions. As Asiapundit points out, China Digital Times had recently linked to both blogs.

Wang Ning confirms that nobody from Microsoft contacted him before censoring his blog. Since his primary audience – inside China – can no longer read any of it, he has set up a new one. He writes (in Chinese):

“Of course I hate msn, but not strongly, because I know that the real roots of evil lie with the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party and domestic BSP’s [blog service providers], which are no different, if even worse. But they are simply blocking the whole blog, in order to save the hassle of having to censor each post, thus driving me away. Who is the most vile?”

What will Microsoft do now? Do nothing and hope that angry Chinese bloggers who now hate msn will be outnumbered by happy Chinese cat-bloggers? Get into the game of censoring individual blog posts? Ask each blogger to choose whether they want to take down an individual offending post or have their whole blog blocked?  It doesn’t seem like they have thought any of these scenarios through before starting up their Chinese language blog service.

UPDATE: Roland points out some more details from Wang Ning’s blog post that I did not focus on. Wang mentions that he had been keeping paralell blogs at Bokee and MSN spaces, but had stopped using Bokee because it was censoring individual posts, which MSN spaces was not doing. But now MSN has shut down his blog. While Wang Ning thinks both are bad, Roland has a different perspective:

That is what Wang Ning thinks.  Actually, I think that there is a difference. MSN Spaces is taking the passive approach.  They will comply with any direct specific orders from the Chinese government and they won't lift a finger otherwise.  So it is up to the government to read the blogs and compile the hit list.  And the faster MSN Spaces can grow, the harder it is to cover all the blogs.

By contrast, the Chinese BSPs are taking the active approach to filter and delete themselves in order to avoid the phone call from the government.  As such, they may be more aggressive than necessary.

Roland also points out Wang Ning's description and screenshot of how another Chinese blog - which translated material from the western media into English (see Roland's description of it from December) - has been taken down by it's Chinese blog host, Tianya Club.

Comments

[a reader]

Which blogging service should I use in China?

[TM Lutas]

I think that it would be a useful exercise to identify the censors. In the US, such orders (very rare, usually to keep troop movements in war secret) are individually signed and you know what organization is doing the censoring, what's the individual who made the call, and the law under which you are being censored. Would it be too much trouble to put the equivalent information on the PRC takedown orders?

In the US Kelo decision, which confirmed the right to take property (eminent domain) under relatively expansive definitions of public use, there is great outrage against the decision. One of the ways that the outrage is being expressed is by applying the exact same doctrine against one of the majority judges' personal residence. Resistence to seizing the SC justice's house by local officials seems mainly based on the principle that even someone who erodes private property doesn't deserve to have his private property taken away from him. They have too high a regard for private property to favor such measures.

Identifying, shaming, and engaging in legal watchdogging would seem to be a legitimate way to strike back, even in the PRC. But Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, et al would first have to lift the veil of secrecy that these decisions currently benefit from.

Want to freak a censor? Publish his name, position, the name of his superior, and instructions on how to file an appeal of the decision.

Drown them in paper, threaten their careers by filing appeal after appeal, become a perfectly legal annoyance. The censorship system always depends on training the subjects of the system to conform. Destroying the system can be done in the same way.

[eswn]

I have updated
http://www.zonaeuropa.com/200602.brief.htm#028
that the Our World blogger is moving along again. He always had a Wordpress blog (not accessible from China) but he is now adding a bloglines blog.

No time to feel miserable. There are several hundred more blog service providers to choose from.

[freedom]

lots of msn blogs were block,and
my blog was blocked too.i think it was because cited the public letter of protest that written by Li Datong, the editors of China Youth Daily newspaper.