As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory’
www.nytimes.com
The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.

The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.

Chinese people know their country’s internet is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation.

They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it.

Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and collective online memory — is disappearing in chunks.

A post on WeChat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.

“The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored.

Non-paywall link

  • zephyreksEnglish
    73·
    5 months ago

    This is just… A poorly researched article. China’s GDP per capita in 1995 was $609. The shittiest computer of that era would’ve been around $1000, and most of the parts would’ve been imported from the US (which, at the time, was obscenely far ahead in the semiconductor game). On a somewhat related note, China joined the WTO in 2001.

    The NYT assumes that everywhere around the world had a computing renaissance in the late 90s… But not everywhere is as wealthy as the US. By the start of 1995, there were only 3000 Internet users in China. So… No shit, there’s not much available from 1995?

    Of course, by the end of 2005, China has 111 million users, but most of them were still consolidated on the main platforms (NetEase, Tencent’s QQ, Alibaba, Baidu, etc.). I did a cursory check of them, and there’s a ton of content from the 1995-2005 era up on them. Check for yourself.

    One important note: Baidu is a really terrible search engine. It doesn’t index everything, and even when it has something indexed sometimes it just won’t serve it because (presumably) it looks up in a cache of popular sites rather than doing a comprehensive lookup. In fact, Baidu’s shiftiness is a well-known joke in the Chinese internet community.