SHANGHAI—Organizers were forced to cancel an annual blogging conference in Shanghai this weekend under pressure from authorities, the latest sign of tightening limits in China on free expression.
The Chinese Blogger Conference has attracted dozens of prominent online commentators, entrepreneurs, digital artists and others each year since it was started in Shanghai in 2005. Many of the attendees are critical of government censorship, so the event is considered potentially sensitive.
This year, organizers waited until four days ahead of the two-day conference's planned start on Saturday to announce the venue, an office building in Shanghai's Xuhui District, near Shanghai Jiaotong University. But the planned hosts reneged late last week owing to pressure from authorities not to let their venue be used for the conference, according to one of the organizers.
It couldn't be determined which arm of the government was responsible. A person who answered the phone Sunday at Shanghai's cultural affairs bureau, which oversees events being held in the city, declined to comment.
China's government has steadily stepped up efforts in recent years to curb free expression on the Internet, which has more than 420 million users in China—the most of any nation.
Earlier this month, a Chinese court handed down a prison sentence of two-and-a-half years to Zhao Lianhai for using the Internet to organize support for parents of children sickened in a tainted-milk scandal. The court found him guilty of inciting social disorder. The winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced last Christmas to 11 years in prison for helping write a manifesto calling for political reforms that was circulated over the Internet.
Blogging is enormously popular in China. As of the end of last year, 145 million Internet users there had blogs or other such personal pages that they had updated within the previous six months, according to the government-backed China Internet Network Information Center.
While the vast majority of content on such pages is apolitical, blogs have also been used for sometimes hard-hitting social commentary. And although Twitter is blocked to Internet users in China, similar Chinese microblogging services have become popular ways to spread sensitive information.
Microblogging was to be one of the key subjects of discussion at this year's blogging conference. The annual conference had come to be a symbol of the clever ways many Internet users evade Chinese censors. Organizers moved it to a different city each year to make it harder for authorities to quash. Last year, bloggers met by a cave near a remote city in southern Guangdong province to avoid possible problems.
After learning that their venue had been canceled this year, organizers posted a notice on their website blaming "well-known reasons" and said they were looking for an alternative. Then on Saturday, the conference's home page was stripped of content, with a message saying "Website Suspended." As of late Sunday, no new venue had materialized.
Isaac Mao, a venture capitalist and software architect who co-founded the conference, said that while pressure from authorities had "upset the original scheme of this year's conference," bloggers who came to Shanghai for it could "still find ways to gather in smaller groups."
Meanwhile, organizers found a way to poke fun at censors: when visitors to the conference's censored home page pressed Ctrl-A—the common computer command for "select all"—it highlighted previously hidden text that read, in Chinese, "The grass mud horse has been harmonized." Grass mud horse is a famous anticensorship pun in China's Internet world—its characters form a homophone for an obscene phrase—and "harmonize" is a euphemism for censorship, playing off President Hu Jintao's longstanding campaign to create a "harmonious society."
