Shuimu.com is just one of China's thousands of Internet chat rooms. But when non-students were barred this month from using the site at Tsinghua University in Beijing, it triggered a rare burst of outrage.
A brief protest erupted at the school. Users posted appeals on other sites for Web surfers to speak up. Some compared the crackdown to persecution in Nazi Germany.
Until a few days ago, Shuimu was the biggest university forum in China. For 10 years, students, alumni and others used it for lively debates on everything from physics to politics.
Now, in a crackdown aimed at preventing critics from posting anti-government comments online, communist authorities have closed the site to users outside the university campus.
Several other top universities also posted notices on their bulletin boards this month saying users had to register. Outsiders and anonymous postings were banned.
China has the world's second-largest online population -- 87 million -- after the US. The government encourages Web use for business and education, but tries to bar access to material deemed subversive or pornographic.
Tsinghua officials told Shuimu users on March 16 that only people within the university would be allowed access to the site.
"We will never ever forget the broad community of outside users," said the notice, which has been widely circulated on the Internet.
The edict was said to come from the Ministry of Education, which did not respond to a faxed query from reporters seeking confirmation.
On March 18, students held a rare protest on Tsinghua's campus.
They laid out flowers and origami cranes and wrote "peace" and "free" on the ground with scraps of paper, according to pictures posted on San Francisco-based Web site Webshots.com.
One photo showed a banner that read "Bless and protect Shuimu."
"This country is closing itself, it's suiciding," said a caption on one of the photos.
Complaints popped up on other chat rooms and personal Web log sites, or blogs.
"I feel our channels of communication are already controlled by an invisible hand and our free breathing space is becoming smaller and smaller," said a posting signed Zola.
Others compared the crackdown to Nazi Germany, invoking a quote from a pastor who famously said that after he failed to speak up when the Nazis persecuted communists and Jews, there was no one left to speak up when the Nazis came for him.
But some criticized the outcry, saying it might jeopardize Internet access for ordinary Chinese.
"It's thanks to you people out there who are clamoring for freedom all day that we small potatoes worry that we won't even be able to use the Internet at all in the future," said a note on a bulletin board of the Web site Donews.com. It was signed "oo."
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS