The Irish Times reports that Fang Binxing, the lead architect behind China’s “Great Firewall” who has been widely deplored by netizens, has resigned his position as the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications:
“A serious illness has made me unable to stay up working late into nights any longer. I couldn’t shoulder the dual responsibilities of doing research and administration like I did before,” he told an audience of graduates in June, and his retirement came into effect last week.
Local reports say Mr Fang (53) has cancer.
He had become a detested figure in China. When he opened a Weibo microblog on Sina. com a couple of years back, nearly 10,000 webizens had left messages within three hours, most of them lambasting him for messing up web access for them.
In 2011, a disgruntled student threw a shoe at him during a lecture at Wuhan University.
In an interview with the Global Times, Fang confessed to having signed up to six virtual private networks that he uses to access some of the websites he had originally helped block. [Source]
See prior CDT coverage for more on Fang Binxing.
