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

By Li Yuan | Published by The New York Times

Summary

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.

Chinese internet users are also becoming increasingly aware that, despite the country’s vibrant online environment populated with short videos, livestreaming, and e-commerce, their internet and collective online memory are being erased in significant portions.

A widely shared post via WeChat on May 22 reported that almost all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, and social media sites between 1995 and 2005 had become inaccessible. The post headlined, “The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” was itself quickly censored.

Author of the viral WeChat post, blogger He Jiayan, said he was deeply pessimistic China’s erasure of history can be reversed: “If you can still see some early information on the Chinese internet now, it is just the last ray of the setting sun.” He found his capacity to participate in public discussions had been restricted more than he had anticipated, resulting in a substantial loss to his personal life. “My life has been negated,” he told New York Times contributor, Li Yuan.

Li conducted her own online experiment of China’s top search engine to ascertain the vanishing impact on content related to high-profile Chinese public figures (ranging from Jack Ma to Xi Jinping); content she would expect to find results for in proportion to their status and did not.

In his book “Sparks” about courageous underground historians in China, longtime China correspondent and author Ian Johnson cited the Internet Archive for Chinese online sources in the endnotes because he knew they would eventually disappear,.

“History matters in every country,” said Johnson. “But it really matters to the CCP. It’s history that justifies the party’s continued rule.”

Johnson founded the China Unofficial Archives website, aiming to preserve blogs, films and documents beyond the reach of China’s internet censorship.

Projects that focus on providing access to censored content include Greatfire.org and China Digital Times. The latter is archiving blocked or at-risk work in an attempt to preserve Chinese memories and history from being lost.

Beyond vanishing content, a more extensive issue exists: China’s internet is contracting. According to the country’s internet regulator, the number of websites in China decreased to 3.9 million in 2023, reflecting over a one-third drop from 5.3 million in 2017.

While China has one billion internet users, constituting nearly one-fifth of the global online population, the number of websites using Chinese language account for a mere 1.3 percent of the worldwide total. This percentage has plummeted from 4.3 percent in 2013, representing a 70 percent decline over a decade, as reported by Web Technology Surveys, which monitors the online usage of top content languages.

The number of Chinese language websites is now only slightly higher than those using Indonesian and Vietnamese, and smaller than the number of websites in Polish and Persian languages. It represents only half the number of Italian language sites and just over a quarter of those in Japanese.

One reason behind this decline is the technical difficulty and cost associated with archiving older content, an issue not unique to China. However, in China, the other contributing factor is political.

Internet publishers, especially news portals and social media platforms, have faced intensified pressure to censor content under Mr. Xi’s leadership. Maintaining China’s cyberspace as politically and culturally pure is a top priority for the Communist Party. Internet companies have greater incentives to over-censor and allow older content to disappear by not archiving it.

Consequently, many individuals have experienced an online erasure.

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