The Communist Chinese Regime dismantled the Uyghur internet in a massive digital book burning

[mota bhai 2,675]

By Henryk Szadziewski & Greg Fay
July 22, 2014

In the early 2000s, Dilshat Perhat, a media studies student in China’s northwestern Uyghur region, launched a new kind of website called Diyarim. Describing Perhat as an innate entrepreneur, a friend said he was propelled by a keen interest in offering Uyghurs online services common on websites elsewhere in the world.

Perhat built novel technologies into Diyarim’s code as he developed MP3, video, and BBS (bulletin board system) forums. Featuring content including songs and music videos, forum debates about cultural and social issues and even re-posted clips from CNN, Diyarim attracted Uyghur students and intellectuals. The website was innovative in other ways, too; before 2004, only a handful of Uyghur websites used the Uyghur Arabic script and Diyarim was among the first. “For our generation, it felt like a new land, a new way to express yourself,” said Perhat’s friend.

Diyarim promoted Uyghur businesses and hired often underemployed, educated Uyghurs in the tech sector. Diyarim had offices in the regional capital, Urumchi, with 20 people in its cubicles, including video specialists and other skilled website technicians. The success of the site led it to be ranked as one of the top 100,000 sites globally in terms of numbers of users.

Perhat meticulously monitored Diyarim for discussion of sensitive topics, especially forbidding calls for incitement or independence. After several Uyghurs were killed in the Pearl River Delta region in June 2009, Uyghurs flooded Diyarim with calls for justice. On July 5, 2009, Uyghurs assembled in Urumchi to peacefully protest the killings. The invitation to demonstrate was made across forums run by Diyarim and similar websites. Although Perhat tried to moderate the posts, and even alerted police to them, when the dust settled, he was arrested and sentenced to five years for “endangering state security.”

Perhat’s fate is not uncommon, according to a new report on the Uyghur Internet from the Uyghur Human Rights Project. Webmasters and bloggers from Diyarim, Salkin, Orkhun, Xabnam and Uighurbiz all ended up in prison. As the researchers and writers of the report, we were able to speak to a number of people familiar with the Uyghur Internet. From interviews with experts and regular users, a pattern of systemic denial of freedom of expression and association emerged—all of it underpinned by a labyrinth of national and local regulations.

The unprecedented 10-month shutdown experienced after the 2009 protests was catastrophic for original writing in the Uyghur language. When the Internet was restored in May 2010, at least 80% of Uyghur-run websites, including Diyarim, were wiped from the web in what added up to a digital book burning of Uyghur content. On the forums of Diyarim and the other two most popular sites, Xabnam and Salkin alone, over 200,000 users had contributed over 2 million posts in 145,000 threads. Not a single website that was deleted by authorities after July 5 was devoted to religion. Instead, the sites were mainly devoted to literature, entertainment, culture and computers, based on a 2009 survey.

http://thediplomat.com/2014/07/how-china-dismantled-the-uyghur-internet/

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

That's atrocious.