Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
chinamediaproject.org
chinamediaproject.org
Unfortunately alot of it from the article seems typical: blogs going off line as bloggers move to new technolgoies, social media companies going defunct or just not keeping old content.
Alot of these things can happen in the west. Remember these books you could read? "The Feynman Letters", etc. I'm paraphrasing-- but its impossible now.
Think of this: emails? A person dies and their laptop dies or is disposed of -- they're all gone. In the past the physicality of the letters would persist. Not so now. All this correspondence vanishes.
Facebook, are you kidding me? If someone famous thought to export their data -- and it can be found on a laptop still working (and you have the login password), then maybe. See above. This repeats and repeats for each system we interact with for communication.
Aside from the laptop scenario-- all this is lost. We live now in a blackhole of historical details of information, and soon to be replaced by a fabricated history hallucinated by LLMs perhaps.
Those that love historical understanding should be very worried.
This is a purge, not a failure to maintain archives. This is like when during the Cultural Revolution, they literally burned archives and letters by intellectuals.
Rule of thumb, if the Constitution says it stinks, it does. If we don't like something in it, work for a change. In China and Russia they don't have that right.
You don't get your comments censored by commenting about natural entropy on the internet. You do get your comments censored by drawing attention to the censors.
I get very tired of people drawing false equivalences between organic human behaviors in the West and intentional abuse by central authorities in China. We can and should do more to preserve our history in the West, but we are already preserving orders of magnitude more data per person than any of our ancestors could have dreamed of. There's no comparison between emails getting lost when someone dies and centralized censors actively purging old content to make it easier to change the party's narrative.
They also talked about how Wonder Bread (the original sliced bread and origin of the phrase "best thing since sliced bread") came into town and the eldest son went to work for them to support the family after the local baker he had worked for folded, lost a finger to the machinery. At some point, he had some kind of heated dispute at work due to this, was beaten by security, and as I'm told, died from injuries sustained during that beating some time afterwards.
It was a weird little window into bits of family history that would have otherwise been erased.
For us Russians, collective memory for almost all people starts with post-WWII era, usually 1950s. Old generation rarely told me about what was before - although i am old enough to vaguely remember some of my ancestors born around 1895 and spent a lot of time talking to those born around 1910.
One might think that it was about memories being overly heavy - indeed there was Commie and for some, also Nazi terror, hunger, and the stuff - before ~1956 an average Soviet starved at least for several weeks a year, and before ~1951, once in a few years, some relative always died of starvation - that was the norm, but real reason as i understand it, wasn't that. The reason is that there was almost nothing to tell. These people were illiterate peasants living very local-minded lives, without formal jobs (kolkhoz serfdom), without electricity or money, and with very little worldview apart from primitive propaganda pushed once in a while by visiting agitators.
Before WWII, there was almost nothing any of them could tell: only thing that could happen, was repressions, but those to who they happened, couldn't tell anything - they never returned - and their relatives usually forgot of them because it was too scary to remember. Apart from that, it was all the same - endless toil on a small plot of infertile land to produce as much food as possible to avoid kids dying next spring, and keep as much of it from kolkhoz eyes, and slacking off at kolkhoz forced work as much as possible to keep more energy to work on your own plot. Never leaving the village, unless forced out of it by Nazis or Commies (actually happened to my relatives - one day they were forced out of the village and it was razed, moved ~20km away, and left in the field, being issued some formal "compensation" in worthless money - had to dig a new earthhouse). That's the kind of stories i heard.
I can understand why they were not keen on telling them.
Stories of later generations had a lot more of "story" in them and i can understand they lived an actual life.
You may think that it's impossible for an innocuous post to get censored unless it has inadvertently unmasked a conspiracy to bury the past, but censorship decisions also get made to prevent unwanted reactions. If a post about disappearing content inspires people to complain about censorship, that's enough to suppress it.
If the disappearance of old websites were entirely deliberate, you'd also need to explain why the West is in on it.
The post by He Jiayan was, but that post was taken down for violating regulations. TFA is largely about the censorship angle which He Jiayan specifically avoided talking about (not that it helped him).
> If the disappearance of old websites were entirely deliberate, you'd also need to explain why the West is in on it.
Name one figure who was prominent in between 1995-2005 who you can't find any content about from that era when using Google's date filters. A single figure.
Some sites go down organically. It happens. Every site that references a figure who was once favored and is now out of favor? That doesn't happen in the Western internet.
The original post listed multiple people famous in China at that time (including Taiwanese celebrities) where even Bing and Google didn't get them old enough results. Sure, they return results that supposedly match the date filter, but if you actually read them, it becomes clear that Google got the publication date wrong, because much later events are mentioned in the text. Or e.g. a YouTube video from 2004, before YouTube even existed. (Actually uploaded in 2013.)
Also, even Jay Chou, who I assume is the Taiwanese celebrity you're referring to, has a bunch of sources that are clearly from those dates:
http://www.china.org.cn/english/culture/81463.htm
https://westeastmag.wordpress.com/2002/09/08/made-in-taiwan-...
It really does illustrate the difference between information being forgotten and being deliberately censored. In the West the harder someone tries to censor information on the internet, the more amplified it is likely to get
I'm willing to bet that these physical letters have historically fared about as well as our digital letters are; otherwise, our world would be absolutely filled with the written detritus of the past.
> Those that love historical understanding should be very worried.
As humans we've always disposed of more than we've kept. It's just not worth the energy cost to operate any other way. Thankfully history is recorded as several overlapping collections and not as a series of single data points.
After I read them, keeping them doesn't serve much of a purpose... in short-term. That's why I keep them.
What you describe as single data points is exactly what we want, but somehow we don't know that until it's too late. We cherish tablets about copper orders from times far past because somehow it's now more valuable. Who's to say yesterday's letters aren't going to be?
There were three discovered tablets and that was one of them. They were discovered in 1920 but only widely known about 100 years later. They're notable because they're described as the oldest found written complaint. They're mildly useful because they describe specific details of the commerce being conducted at the time, which comports well with other contemporary sources of the same information.
This particular artifact was written in 1750 BC. Our oldest writings extend back to 3400 BC. They're not particularly "cherished" but they are a widely known "meme" thanks to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Yes.
China's current leadership is terrified of dissent. Even mild dissent. Even discussions within the party. There's no good reason to clamp down that hard. The current leadership is doing a reasonably good job. But they now have an Xi personality cult, which never ends well.
Yes, China botched their housing bubble, but so did Japan and the US.
You can't scrape what is no longer there, or was never written to begin with...
Pretty sure megacorps still have their near-infinite databases around, in walled garden as always, but that's another topic. Censored contents are almost certainly soft-deleted.
The problem is more about independent-ish sites, for example Tianya [1]. Think ancient BBS. Or newsgroups. If nearly all archive of these are lost it would indeed be very sad.
Not necessarily. It's quite possible that, if no one accesses them, they got moved to backups with only one copy, and the backups may not actually be restorable in the case of disaster (it happens somewhat frequently even for backups of data you might actually care about, so imagine the effects of neglect on that).
(This I think is part of why Chinese human genomics has been such a disappointment: yes, there's collectively a lot of data, but there ain't nothing like UKBB pulling it all together. Just thousands of fiefdoms.)
The loss of the early web due to web hosters not maintaining their own hosting and moving to walled gardens is painful and tragic, but it is not in any way similar (or functionally equivalent) to this blatant censorship.
Many of the government archives are not public for copyright reasons.
You know how it is with the Great Fire Wall: you can't visit some outside websites from inside. Wikipedia was blocked completely in 2019.
There's actually another direction: you can't visit some inside websites from outside:
Most Chinese apps/websites are required by law to be tied to person identities. That means they have to be registered by phone number. In China, one person = one phone number. Without Chinese phone numbers, most Chinese apps/websites simply refuse to even let you use it.
There is no way to get a phone number without physically going to a Chinese phone-card bureau and present your ID card.
Indeed, it is getting difficult for foreigners nowadays to visit China. Without a phone number they can't do anything with Chinese apps, but they need that. Getting a phone number requires presenting a passport and a valid visa.
Foreign map apps are usually broken in China.
Foreigners who are not physically located within China are just trouble, from the Chinese point of view. Not only do they not want Chinese people to use foreign apps, they also don't want foreign people to use Chinese apps.
A few months ago I tried registering a QQ account. The "International" version is no longer maintained. When I tried nevertheless the last known good version, it just threw an error. The "domestic" version does not work when the phone is not physically located within China, and requires a Chinese phone number anyway.
About 2 weeks ago I noticed that Zhihu also stopped allowing you to expand long answers without an account. And of course, to register an account, you need a damned phone number. At least it allows American phone numbers.
Philosophically, I think it is the resurgence of the Chinese security mindset: Forbid all inside-outside contact by default. We have everything we need at home anyway.
Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures. --- Emperor Qian Long's Letter to King George III, 1793
In North Korea it is illegal to mention famine or hunger.
In Florida it is illegal to mention climate change in any state document.
citation needed. Oh, found one: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article129837... ( https://archive.is/P9k4m )
> DEP officials have been ordered not to use the term “climate change” or “global warming” in any official communications, emails, or reports
I'm not sure that amounts to illegal, but they did at least make it career impairing. Would be interesting to see someone sue for wrongful termination on that basis...
US Google: About 2,580,000 results
A pretty remarkable scrubbing of history.
First result for me is https://www.scb.co.th/en/personal-banking/stories/business-m... which Google thinks is from 2003-03-15, except it mentions COVID-19 so it obviously isn't.
Second result is https://www.instagram.com/jack_overpower/feed/ which Google thinks is from 2001-01-02, except Instagram didn't exist at that time. It might have pictures from 2001 though.
Third result is http://pacificpower.foreignpolicy.com/15-jack-ma/ which Google thinks is from 1999-02-15, except it mentions Alibaba's 2014 IPO so it obviously isn't.
Fourth result is https://www.facebook.com/story.php/?story_fbid=5041357966634... which Google doesn't show a date for, but it's a Facebook post from 2018.
...
I don't doubt that some of those results are from 1998 to 2005, but the millions of results number specifically is meaningless.
What are you doing when you use their services? Searching.
But they are still there. Do a specific enough search and they'll be at the top of the search results.
I don't want to see Google remove the search-by-date-range feature, it has tons of 100% serious legitimate uses (quote attribution, journalistic, historical, also debunking internet rumors and fresh reposts of old fake virals), but Google could estimate the errorbars on date-ranges and hitcounts, provide a disclaimer and feedback box to encourage users to flag/retag gross errors like this.
If anyone dug deeper into why the date inferencing is now getting broken, I'd speculate they find Google is nowadays getting reciprocally confused by site publishers and advertising networks changing or removing items which contain date; but that's in turn presumably for Google changes which downrank or uprank legit older content.
(I can't find the recent HN article here by an SEO expert with a bullet-point list advising website maintainers to remove all date information, among other things)
Perhaps it was just updated?
I generally ignore/ get annoyed by articles that don't have a date/ updated on, on the byline.
Interesting catch, seems Google grossly mistagged its date. IA confirms it was actually published 2021-09-06 [0], but that isn't tagged or referenced anywhere in the article text or HTML. I'm assuming Google misinferred the date as "2003-03-15" because the first two paragraphs talk about the SARS crisis, which was declared by the WHO around 2003-03.
> I don't doubt that some of those results are from 1998 to 2005, but the millions of results number specifically is meaningless.
Yes, seems there's not much QC on Google's date-inferencing of "old" articles. Hence the date-range is hit-and-miss, and search hit counts (which Google is eliminating anyway). I mean if anyone wanted to QC it, just search "old" internet for telltale terms like "COVID", "Nicki Minaj", "President Zelenskyy" etc. that should hardly generate any hits.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210601000000*/https://www.scb....
But without the time filter, theres millions of search results.
China as we (the world) knows it is only about 60 years old. This is more true as they go about systematically destroying their own history and forcing village traditions to be stamped out and guided towards the city life.
Losing a blip of internet history during the regime of mass censorship is probably a blessing in disguise.