A post on WeChat from May 22 headlined "The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace" detailed how virtually all information posted on news portals, blogs, forums, and social media sites from 1995 to 2005 is not available anymore. The blog post was censored soon after it was posted, but not before it was archived.
NYT journalist Li Yuan tested this allegation by searching for some of China's most successful internet entrepreneurs in the mid-90s and mid-2000s as well as for Chinese President Xi Jinping during the same time period. There were no or very limited results for the entrepreneurs and zero results for Xi. She also found that her search for the Great Sichuan earthquake of 2008, one of China's most devastating tragedies in the past 30 years, produced very limited results compared to the flood of online information and posts at the time of the earthquake.
The report stated that "in addition to the disappearing content," China's internet is "shrinking" in general as well. According to its internet regulator, there were 5.3 million websites in China in 2017, compared to 3.9 million to date. Additionally, while one-fifth of the world's internet users come from China (roughly 1 billion), only 1.3 percent of global total number of websites use the Chinese language. This is a 70 percent plunge from 4.3 percent in 2013, according to Web Technology Surveys.
The New York Times report attributes these dwindling numbers to the high cost of archiving old content—and politics.
It showcased a documentary filmmaker named Nanfu Wang who experienced the unexplained erasure of some of her accomplishments. “Some of the films I directed had been deleted and banned on the Chinese internet,” she said. “But this time, I feel that I, as a part of history, have been erased."
Zhang Ping, or better known as Chang Ping, was cited as "one of China’s most famous journalists in the 2000s" before his works were censored in 2011. “My presence in public discourse has been stifled much more severely than I anticipated, and that represents a significant loss of my personal life,” he told the outlet. “My life has been negated.”
