With the approach of the 17th Party Congress that begins on October 15, it seems that China’s Net Nanny is in overdrive. Chinese bloggers are not pleased. Here are excerpts from three English-language blogs written by Chinese men who work in the IT and Internet industries.
Old school Shanghainese blogger Wang Jianshuo — who is usually very reluctant to discuss sensitive topics — wrote:
To prepare a “good environment” for the meeting, massive websites in China were shutdown. This time, much different from the previous actions, it is the whole data center instead of websites or servers that were shutdown.
Let me take few famous IDCs (Internet Data Center) as examples. Zitian, an IDC in Luoyang was shutdown completely, and all the 500 servers were unplugged from Internet, and tens of thousands of websites hosted there were inaccessible on Aug 24. Among them is the largest traffic tracking site 51.la, and this infected a very big portion of Internet websites in China.
Soon, on Aug 28, Lanmang, the other IDC in Shantou faced the same situation. Again, tens of thousands of websites were complete inaccessible. An unconfirmed news said the data center closed in Shantou has 3000 servers, and they are all closed. Lanmang has to hire lots of trunks to put all these servers and distribute the servers into many other data centers across China. I doubt this can work, since the fate of other data centers may not be better after few days. However, what else can they do? I understand how painful people feel when a site is shutdown.
After that, news about whole IDC was shutdown came one after one, and each time, at least hundreds of servers were complete unplugged from Internet. Since these IDC host about 100 to 200 websites per server, I cannot imagine how many sites were shutdown. If this continues, I guess the total number of shutdown sites may quickly be one million. In Shanghai, many data centers were very simply completely unplugged, and each time, hundreds of servers or tens of thousands of websites were disconnected from Internet. The Waigaoqiao Data Center, the largest and one of the most advanced data centers in Shanghai were completely closed these days.
That is just the beginning…
The Moonlight blog has a post titled China Internet censorship goes crazy:
Are they going crazy? Before they would warn and order the webmasters to delete “harmful” information from their websites, sometimes they just blocked the website. But now thousand of websites would be blocked if they are so unlucky to be hosted by the same IDC company with a “harmful” website.
China Web 2.0 Review also has news:
China IDC to Shut Down BBSs and Blogs
The situation is getting worse. IDCs in China are required to take self-discipline actions to close all BBSs, forums, Blogs, message boards or any kinds of interactive features in their hosted servers or virtual spaces, otherwise the whole IDCs may be closed completely. So if you want to start blogging, you may have to switch to a blogging service provider who has signed self-discipline pact, or to use a hosting service from abroad…
Click on the image above to go to a website previously set up by Chinese bloggers to stick a virtual voodoo pin into the Net Nanny doll.