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:
Postings that have survived censorship include a report by Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao on rallies around the world condemning the crackdown, the Chinese translation (cut and pasted from the website of the U.S. State Department) of President Bush’s September 25 speech to the United Nations vowing to tighten sanctions against the junta, and a translation of a Japanese press report on the life and death of Kenji Nagai, the Japanese journalist killed in Rangoon. In addition, a video link to C-SPAN showing the October 3 U.S. Senate hearing on Burma’s Saffron Revolution could be accessed via the site of a blogger going by the name “cavahui.” The majority of China’s bloggers continue to stand firmly behind the demonstrators in Burma. Some see in the Saffron Revolution strong parallels to the Tiananmen crackdown. For example, a Chinese translation of the October 1 speech to the United Nations by Myanmar foreign minister Nyan Win, together with photos of the Burmese security forces and the bloodied corpses of their victims, was posted with the words “utmost restraint,” “mob,” “ignored warning,” and “turmoil” enlarged. The heading: déjà vu. Another blogger urged Burma’s “haughty and conceited” military junta to engage in “self-reflection,” while one going by the name “Grassroots” editorialized by adding an exclamation mark in the heading of the entry “China and Russia oppose condemnation; the UN can only express regrets!” The blog from “Jeff” declares liberty to be “an inalienable right of man” and prays for the overthrow of the junta in Burma. “Sophia” mocks the Burmese military as an army that never saw a real battle but was nonetheless “incomparably valiant and commanding” when it came to suppressing defenseless civilians. My personal favorite is a posting entitled “reporting to work after drinking should be prohibited”:
