Directly confronting the online censorship mechanism, the following public statement from four prominent Chinese lawyer bloggers is translated by ESWN:
Joint Statement about Sina.com’s Censorship of Blogs.
We are registered users of the Sina.com blog service. For a long time, we were grateful to Sina.com for providing a free space for speech. But we do not owe Sina.com anything. When we register to have blogs with Sina.com, we are also satisfying Sina.com’s business objectives. Therefore, there exists an equal obligation for Sina.com as well as us to respect each other. Unfortunately, while Sina.com’s business has been growing, it lacks business ethics. While providing the space for our blogs, it has also seriously violated our freedom of speech. Ever since we registered, our blogs have seen large numbers of posts being willfully deleted by the Sina.com administrators. Since we were understanding, we forgave Sina.com for its violation of our rights over and over again. But we cannot tolerate this anymore, because Sina.com’s censorious activities have become more and more unreasonable. Recently, the posts related to the names of Zhang Yihe (Á´†ËØíÂíå) and Cui Yingjie (Â¥îËã±Êù∞) were barbarously deleted. Many netizens spent a long time to write comments, but they were deleted in a flash without even enough time to retain a copy. [Full Text]