William Farris

There's a critical mass of China expertise on Bluesky, so I'm done with this site until things improve. I'll continue posting on PRC censorship on Bluesky: wafarris.bsky.social, where I'll post about my new project: "An Encyclopedia of Censorship in the PRC."

Is Rui Chenggang beginning a rehabilitation tour? In 2016 PRC state media said he was taken away by prosecutors in 2014. These screenshots show just after that report, PRC Internet companies began censoring results for his name: blog.feichangdao.com/2016/04/baidu-…. scmp.com/news/china/pol…

Had a nice visit to Taichung. Spent a couple evenings at the annual jazz festival, got a photo of another bucket-list bird, and visited a largest-ball-of-twine-esque tourist trap.

Dinner and music at a cafe in Taipei.

But at least on the way up Yushan I was able to get some pics of a couple of my bucket-list Taiwan fauna.

What's it like climbing Taiwan's highest mountain during a tropical depression? Damp. Very, very damp.

For more on how the PRC government censors information about what's going on in Xinjiang, see the posts on how PRC Internet companies censored info about: Xinjiang Concentration Camps blog.feichangdao.com/2021/04/xinjia… The UN's 2022 Assessment on Xinjiang blog.feichangdao.com/2022/09/Censor…

The UN recently noted it has "limited access to information," and these screenshots show Baidu censors results about Xinjiang from the UNHCR's website. Baidu says its unable to find results for "新疆 site:ohchr.org." Google and Bing find hundreds of results.

These screenshots taken today show PRC internet companies censor search results "Xinjiang Concentration Camps" (新疆集中营): Baidu and Sogou restict results to state sponsored media outlets. Qihoo shows no results at all.

First, the most obvious example: A screenshot showing Sina Weibo has banned the topic "Xinjiang Concentration Camps." While it does show results for a query for that phrase, I challenge anyone to post a screenshot of any Weibo post that is inconsistent with PRC propaganda.

What makes this sophomoric post especially ironic is any such reality show would have to be approved and censored by the PRC govt: jsgd.jiangsu.gov.cn/art/2020/2/24/…. And while I'm at it, here's a thread of examples of PRC censorship of Xinjiang concentration camps #新疆集中营 @niccijsmith

You can see for yourself that its not just Baidu censoring the phrase "Cambodia Canal" (柬埔寨运河): Sogou censoring it: archive.li/lggwC Qihoo censoring: archive.li/nlAx0 Baidu censorsing: archive.li/G76dS

H/t to @whyyoutouzhele for spotting that all major PRC search engines are censoring the phrase "Cambodia Canal" (柬埔寨运河). How do you know its censorship and not just Baidu not finding any search results? Because a Baidu search for "Canal Cambodia" returns hundreds of results.

All of these cases (except for Hu Xin's) can be found in translation and in the original Chinese in "State Prosecutions of Speech in the People's Republic of China," available for free download here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…. 13/13

A PRC court imprisoned a man surnamed "Li" for one year for his 120 posts on Twitter that it claimed "harmed the image of the State and severely endangered the interests of the State." 12/13

A thread with a (very partial) list of examples of people the PRC government jailed for using this site for political speech that the owner of this site could raise if he cared as much about free speech in the PRC as he claims to care about it in Brazil. 1/13