Newsweek has published a brief article – including an interview with CDT’s Xiao Qiang – about reactions to the recent crackdown on university BBS sites:
The clampdown, however, is only forcing China’s Netizens to become more innovative. Within hours of the Tsinghua protest, students had posted photographs on the Internet and bloggers had pasted them into their Web sites. Many of the bloggers used codes “tagged” to their postings to link them together on technorati.com, a search engine that collects blog postings by subject.
Other Chinese shifted their discussions to alternative technologies such as voice over Internet protocol, which allows groups of people to talk together using cheap or free Internet connections, and instant messaging… “By cracking down on BBS sites the government just pushes people into new technologies,” Xiao says. “They’ll come back in a more effective way.” And, no doubt, angrier than before.