From John Kennedy at Global Voices Advocacy:
Beijing’s Olympic Plan for the mainland China-based portion of the blogging and BBSing netosphere is starting to take shape. While on one hand it’s coming coated in talk of self-restraint and uses words like “professional” and “responsibility”, the wording in an official notice [zh] which appeared online this week and is being spread by webmasters of sites that stand to be affected suggests that the coming month will see a similar massive shutdown similar to the one we saw leading up to the seventeenth National People’s Congress last year.
This comes at a time when even major commercial web 2.0 sites with tens of dollars of foreign venture capitalist funding can drop dead on the spot with no explanation.
The post goes on to quote a message on the Feeling BBS aimed at clarifying the new rules that warned users not to make fun of national leaders and only post news items from Xinhua and “other mainstream websites.”
