Blogging Burma in China

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Last week I reported that Chinese cyber-police were keeping a watchful eye on bloggers who were cutting and pasting foreign press reports on developments in Burma to fill the information gap left by the official media. The cat-and-mouse game continues. Using the keywords “miandian minzhu” (Burma democracy), my search on the popular Web portal sina.com’s blog site over the weekend generated more than 45,000 results. Each displayed a caption, the first two lines of the text, the author’s name, the time of the last update, and the blog address. An October 5 entry carried the title “Burmese military digs mass graves, massacre imminent.” The first line of the text was displayed, and it cited a report from the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma that security forces that same day had detained at least 300 monks from two temples in Rangoon. When I clicked on the link to the full story, I received the following message: “Sorry. The blog address you visited does not exist.” That same message appeared when I tried to download a number of other stories, including “actual pictures of the Burmese upheaval,” “Burmese monks will be sent to prisons in the north,” and an entry whose first line contained a quote from Aung San Suu Kyi, “In Burma, the pursuit of democracy…” One blogger, “Peking Man,” was so miffed by sina.com’s removal of his entry “condemn the Burmese military junta’s criminal act of slaughtering the people” that he posted the following message on his blog on sohu.com:

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