CHINA: Leading Chinese writers and dissidents have reacted angrily to the closure of the Century China website, one of the last remaining channels for independent thinking in heavily censored cyberspace and 100 intellectuals have signed a petition in protest.
China's net nannies are closing in on free-thinking websites and on July 25th shut down the liberal site, arguably the most important outlet still running for Chinese intellectuals. The petitioners described Century China as "the only spiritual home we had in the cyber world".
The strongly worded petition said the site's users and other netizens had been living in misery since the order by the Communication Administration of Beijing to shut Century China was carried out.
"By destroying this platform that connects the government and the people, and intellectuals at home and abroad, Chinese scholars are further ostracised from their homeland," the petitioners said in the letter. The letter was broadly circulated and publishing it marks a significant act of resistance.
Since it was launched in 2000, the site has been a popular forum for critics of the ruling Communist Party, posting discussions about civil issues and calls for greater political freedoms. Its central doctrine was to be "free, independent, democratic, tolerant and rational".
The petitioners blamed the shutdown on ever-tightening control of the media and opinion and said it was another "instance of the Chinese government suppressing the freedom of its people".
Among the names on the petition were those of Liu Xiaobo, a veteran journalist and campaigner, and Ding Zilin, a retired academic who has campaigned for compensation for those whose relatives were killed during the Beijing massacre in June 1989.
Also this week, Tibetan poet Woeser's blog was banned after she posted a picture of Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. The blog bans are the latest sign of the great firewall of China's increased impregnability.
There are over 120 million internet users in China and the government sees cyberspace as a potential hotbed of dissent. Chinese search engines have updated their word filters to include more banned terms.