UPDATE: At least two of these blogs appear to be back up. See comments section, or this round-up post.
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Three renowned Chinese bloggers are blocked by their BSPs, including one of the most popular bloggers in the country and DW Best of Blog winner, Milk Massage.
The three blogs are Milk Massage, Milkpig and Pro State in Flames. The first two are hosted on Yculblog and the last is hosted on Sohoxiaobao. Now trying to access to those blogs, you will get message like “Due to some unavoidalbe reasons that all of us know, this blog is temoprarily closed” or “For nontechnical reasons, this blog is closed from today”. Here is a screenshot.
Apparently, this blockage is not done by the government but by the personnels in the Blog Service Providers who consider the three blogs offending and dangerous. Danwei has a story. He aslo compares this with another blogger, who is a member of CPPCC that is having the yearly joint session in Beijing.
The news quickly spread in Chinese blogosphere. Lianyue, a columnist said on his blog with his usually ironical style(in translation):
Yesterday, the officals at “Administration of Blog” has receieved an email, demanding the shutdown of “Lianyue's Blog”. It's wonderful that the sender of the mail is Lianyue himself. His reason is “All are blocked except for me. So I am faceless”
Hellomedia, a blog dedicated to tracing the development of new media, analyzes the reasons leading to the blocking. Showing a screenshot, he thinks that it is the mention of FaLungong that close the blog Milk Massage. For Milkpig, it seems quite unreasonable since she only talk about celebrities stories and gossip. And the “Pro State in Flames” has long been politically aggressive and it's blocked because the two major political conferences are undergoing in Beijing:CPPCC and CPC.
2 comments
Update: it now appears that 2 of the 3 blogs, Massage Milk and Flypig, have been unblocked.
The whole thing has been a hoax, engineered by Massage Milk himself. Not everybody is pleased:
http://www.chinaherald.net/2006/03/internet-massage-milk-apologizes-for_09.html