The Sydney Morning Herald’s John Garnaut reports on the recent hacking of nationalist Chinese website Utopia:
The flagship website of China’s resurgent New Left movement was brought down by hackers yesterday, interrupting its ferocious campaign against critics of Chairman Mao Zedong.
“Our website has been attacked by the forces of darkness,” Fan Jinggang, the co-founder of Utopia (www.wyzxsx.com), told the Herald. “I believe it is related to our recent campaign against Mao Yushi and Xin Ziling. This is a struggle between patriots and traitors, not leftists and rightists.”
China’s “leftists” tend to want to limit the market, glorify the country’s socialist past and protect it from foreign influence, while liberals typically call for constraints on the state in the economy, democratic political reforms and “universal values” ….
Mr Fan claimed the Chinese government was on its side and had even pledged to send technicians to restore its website.
Others, however, speculated it was the government that had brought down the site down yesterday morning (and then partially restored it) out of fear that its cultural revolution-style campaign could spill onto the streets.
The site appeared in a recent Economist article on the furious response to Mao Yushi’s essay:
“The whole nation is waiting for the dawn, the dawn of a day when Mao Yu-Shit (sic) and other anti-Mao reactionaries who vilify Mao are annihilated,” one person commented on Utopia, a website which is leading the campaign to get Mr Mao indicted. Utopia accuses Mr Mao of subversion and libel. It says funding given to Unirule by the Ford Foundation, based in New York, is evidence of “collusion” with foreigners in his alleged crimes.
Mao’s essay itself is available with translation and explanation on China Media Project. See also CMP’s explanation of why the Left is up in arms, and a New York Times article on Mao’s still divisive legacy, via CDT.
Another far-left website, that of the “Progress Society”, gained some notoriety last year by appearing to advocate the hanging of Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and other “slaves of the West”.
