An official news blackout in China surrounding Premier Wen Jiabao’s interview over the weekend with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria hasn’t kept it from becoming one of the hottest topics on the Chinese Internet. If anything, censorship has only made it hotter—possibly giving Wen additional political clout in the process.
“The longer the newspapers refuse to report it, the more need there is for us to discuss it vigorously,” one user on Sina Weibo, Sina.com’s popular Twitter-like micro-blogging service, wrote about the interview.
“Sunlight at last!” wrote another on the website of Phoenix TV, one of the few online sites that published a Chinese summary of the interview.
The exclusive interview, Wen’s first with a Western journalist since he spoke with Zakaria in 2008 on CNN, began spreading through the Chinese Internet almost as soon as it was posted online.
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