BEIJING – Dozens of Chinese writers and dissidents have decried the closing of an Internet Web site they said was one of the few refuges for relatively unfettered views in their censorship-bound country.
In recent days, the Century China Web site has disappeared from computer screens. Over the past six years, the site was a popular forum for liberal critics of the ruling Communist Party, often relaying discussions of social and political ills and calls for political relaxation.
On Wednesday, more than a hundred intellectuals and critics of the Chinese government issued a petition that blamed the closure on the state’s tightening control of the media and opinion.
“The shutdown of Century China is just another instance of the Chinese government suppressing the freedom of its people,” stated the petition, which called the Web site “the one spiritual home we had in the cyber world.”
The signatories included veteran dissident Liu Xiaobo and Ding Zilin, a retired academic who has campaigned for redress to families whose kin were killed or maimed in Beijing’s bloody crackdown on protesters in 1989.
Dozens of Chinese intellectuals now living abroad also signed. Several local signatories confirmed to Reuters they had signed. The petition was distributed to foreign media by email.
The Chinese government routinely monitors online chat forums and bulletin boards for controversial political comment, censoring words such as “freedom” and “democracy.” In the past couple of years, several other Internet sites that were forums for candid opinion have also been closed.
A Beijing-based Tibetan writer who writes in Chinese, Woeser, said on Tuesday that her blogs were closed after she displayed a picture of Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, on one of them, Radio Free Asia (www.rfa.org) reported.
