While the Occupy Wall Street protesters have struggled to gain acceptance in mainstream American media, one group is apparently taking them quite seriously: China’s ruling party.
The Chinese government is censoring a suite of terms related to the Occupy Wall Street protests on the country’s largest social media platform, Sina Weibo, the China Digital Times has discovered. These include Chinese versions of the terms “occupy Beijing,” “occupy Shanghai,” and “occupy Lhasa” (the Tibetan capital).
The government has a delicate relationship with microblogging services such as Sina Weibo, which boasts over 175 million users. Thousands of public officials and government departments have profiles on the site, with millions of followers and thousands of posts.
But microblogging sites are boisterous and hard to control. In China, they increasingly are becoming a place where people can find news that doesn’t pass through an official government filter. A recent pseudonymous editorial in a Beijing newspaper proposed using real names on microblogs in order to prevent people from “hiding in dark corners in disguise and creating rumours.”
And Sina Weibo has already switched from listing stories ranked by popularity to listing “suggested” stories, meaning stories can’t float to the top all on their own. It’s a simple way to exclude popular topics that might make government censors uncomfortable.
The full list of censored terms is below.
“Occupy Beijing”(占领北京), “Occupy Shanghai”(占领上海), “Occupy Guangzhou”(占领广州), “Occupy Xi’an”(占领西安), “Occupy Chongqin”(占领重庆), “Occupy Tianjin”(占领天津), “Occupy Urumqi”(占领乌鲁木齐), “Occupy Lhasa”(占领拉萨), “Occupy Changsha”(占领长沙), “Occupy Wuhan”(占领武汉), “Occupy Nanchang”(占领南昌), “Occupy Fuzhou”(占领福州), “Occupy Nanjing”(占领南京), “Occupy Dalian”(占领大连), “Occupy Hangzhou”(占领杭州), “Occupy Harbin”(占领哈尔滨), “Occupy Chengdu”(占领成都), “Occupy Kunming”(占领昆明), “Occupy Hohhot”(占领呼和浩特), “Occupy Haikou”(占领海口), “Occupy Zhengzhou”(占领郑州), “Occupy Changchun”(占领长春), “Occupy Shenyang”(占领沈阳), “Occupy Xining”(占领西宁), “Occupy Lanzhou”(占领兰州), “Occupy Taiyuan”(占领太原), “Occupy Yinchuan”(占领银川), “Occupy Shijiazhuang”(占领石家庄), “Occupy Jinan”(占领济南), “Occupy Nanning”(占领南宁).
Photo by danielfoster437
