Chinese people know that their internet is different. There is no Google, no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter. They use euphemisms online to say things they shouldn’t, and they resignedly accept that their posts and accounts are censored.
They live in a parallel universe online, they know it, and they even joke about it.
Now they are finding that beneath the bustling facade of short-form video, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and their collective online memory — is disappearing in pieces.
According to a widely shared post on WeChat on May 22, nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums and social media sites between 1995 and 2005 is no longer available.
“China’s Internet is Collapsing at an Accelerating Rate,” the headline read. Predictably, the post itself was quickly censored.
“We believed the internet had a memory,” He Jiayan, a blogger who writes about successful businessmen, wrote in a post, “but we didn’t realize that this memory was similar to that of a goldfish.”
It’s impossible to determine exactly how much content was lost, and what kind of content it was, but I did some testing, using Baidu, China’s top search engine, to look at some of the examples cited in He’s post, focusing on roughly the same period from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s.
I started with Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Tencent’s Pony Ma, two of China’s most successful internet entrepreneurs, and He searched for them. I also searched for Liu Chuanzhi, known as the godfather of Chinese entrepreneurship, who made headlines when Lenovo acquired IBM’s PC business in 2005.
I also searched for China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, who was then head of two major provinces. Search results for high-ranking Chinese officials are always tightly controlled, and I wanted to see what people who wanted to know who Xi was before he became the country’s leader would find.
Your search returned no results Jack MaJack Ma’s Chinese name. Ma HuatengPony Ma’s name. Liu Chuanzhi 7 entries found.
There were zero search results for Xi Jinping.
I then looked into one of China’s most significant tragedies in recent decades: the May 12, 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed more than 69,000 people. The earthquake occurred during a brief period when Chinese journalists enjoyed more freedom than the Communist Party typically allows and produced a lot of high-quality journalism.
Narrowing the time period to May 12, 2008 to May 12, 2009, Baidu returned nine pages of results, most of which were articles from the websites of the central government or state broadcaster China CCTV, though many more articles could be found by identifying the journalists’ names or organisations.
Each results page contained about 10 headlines. My search turned up only a small sampling of coverage from the time, many of which were published on the websites of newspapers and magazines that had sent journalists to the epicenter of the quake. I didn’t find the striking news reports or online cries of grief that I remembered.
In addition to content disappearing, there’s a broader problem: China’s internet is shrinking. According to China’s internet regulator, there will be 3.9 million websites in China in 2023, down by more than a third from 5.3 million in 2017.
China is home to 1 billion internet users, nearly a fifth of the world’s online population, but just 1.3% of websites worldwide use Chinese, down from 4.3% in 2013 and a steep 70% drop in a decade, according to Web Technology Surveys, which tracks online usage of major content languages.
The number of Chinese language websites is currently slightly higher than those in Indonesian and Vietnamese, lower than those in Polish and Persian, half the number of Italian websites, and just over a quarter of the number of Japanese websites.
One reason for the decline is that it is technically difficult and costly for websites to archive old content – this is not unique to China – but another reason in China is political.
As China moves in a more authoritarian and nationalistic direction under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, internet publishers, especially news portals and social media platforms, are under increasing pressure to censor. Keeping China’s cyberspace politically and culturally pure is a top priority for the Communist Party. Internet companies have a strong incentive to over-censor and to kill old content by not archiving it.
Many people’s online presence has been wiped.
Two weeks ago, Wang Nanfeng noticed that articles about him on Wikipedia-like sites had disappeared. When Wang, a documentary filmmaker, searched for his name on film review website Douban, nothing came up. The same was true on WeChat.
“Some of the films I’ve directed have been removed and banned on the Internet in China,” she said, “but this time, I feel like I’ve been erased as part of history.” She’s not sure what triggered it.
Zhang Ping, better known by his pen name Zhang Ping, was one of China’s most famous journalists in the 2000s. His articles were published everywhere. And in 2011, his articles drew the wrath of censors.
“My public statements have been suppressed more severely than I expected, which has meant a great loss of my private life,” he told me. “My life has been denied.”
I was saddened and angry when my Weibo account was deleted in March 2021. I had over 3 million followers and thousands of posts documenting my life and thoughts over more than a decade. Many of the posts were about current events, history, and politics, but some were more personal reflections. I felt like a piece of my life had been taken away.
Many people deliberately hide their online postings out of fear that they could be used against them by the Party or its proxies. In a trend known as “grave digging”, nationalistic “Little Pinks” pore over the past online posts of intellectuals, entertainers and influencers.
For Chinese people, online memories, however trivial, can become a burden that must be unloaded.
“We tend to think of the internet as a bit superficial, but without many of these sites and things we would lose part of our collective memory,” said Ian Johnson, a long-time China correspondent and author.
In his book “Sparks,” about China’s intrepid underground historians, Johnson cited the Internet Archive in an endnote as a source of online Chinese information because he knew they would eventually disappear, he said.
“History is important in any country, but it is especially important to the Chinese Communist Party,” he said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “It is history that legitimizes the party’s continued rule.”
Johnson founded the China Unofficial Archives, a website that aims to preserve blogs, films and documents off the Chinese internet.
Other projects are trying to prevent China’s memory and history from fading. Greatfire.org has several websites that provide access to censored content. China Digital Times, a nonprofit that fights censorship, archives works that have been blocked or are at risk of being blocked. Journalist Zhang is its editor-in-chief.
He, the author of the viral WeChat post, is deeply pessimistic about the chances of China’s erasure of history being reversed.
“If you can still find early information on the Chinese internet, it is the last ray of light of the setting sun,” he wrote.
