Archived link

A partial English translation of He Jiayan’s post (and a link to the archived Chinese version) is available at the bottom of the linked article.

“The Chinese internet is collapsing”

In a fitting illustration last week of the Chinese leadership’s unrelenting efforts to manipulate collective memory, an online essay with a shocking revelation about the wholesale disappearance of Chinese internet content spanning the 2000s was deleted by content monitors. But the post, quickly archived and shared, reverberated in platforms beyond PRC-managed cyberspace.

Written by He Jiayan (何加盐), an internet influencer active since 2018, the essay concluded, based on a wide range of searches of various entertainment and cultural figures from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, that nearly 100 percent of content from major internet portals and private websites from the first decade of China’s internet has now been obliterated. “No one has recognized a serious problem,” wrote He. “The Chinese-language internet is rapidly collapsing, and Chinese-language internet content predating the emergence of the mobile internet has almost entirely disappeared.”

Simple searches through the Baidu search engine for public figures such as Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun (雷军), who would have yielded perhaps millions of unique posts during the period of the “traditional internet” from the late 1990s through the end of the 2000s, turned up few if any results, He Jiayan revealed. These wholesale absences in Chinese-language content from inside China were repeated when He used non-Chinese search engines, including Google and Bing.

The post cited several reasons for this mass vanishing, including the phasing out of private websites and blog platforms as technologies developed, the shuttering of old and unprofitable platforms by commercial providers who have no commercial incentive to maintain archives, and a lack of social resources in China that might handle archiving as a preservation initiative (like Internet Archive in the United States). But as others commented outside the Great Firewall, the most decisive factor in the loss of content and the failure to archive has been the Chinese Communist Party and its mandate for political and ideological control of history and public opinion.

Posted on Wednesday, May 22, He’s post had been removed from WeChat by the following day, yielding a 404 message that read: “This content violates regulations and cannot be viewed.”

Acknowledging the various reasons for the widespread outage of content from the period of China’s traditional internet, the fact of this mass vanishing raises huge questions about the role of the internet in the formation of collective identity — and what it will mean for entire landscapes of history to be simply gone. “In the internet era to come, as people look back on the first two decades of the 21st century, it will be a 20-year period absent from the historical record,” He wrote. “If you still glimpse old information right now on the Chinese internet, these are just the last rays of the setting sun.”