The “Cat’s Eye View” forum on China’s leading cultural and political commentary website Kedi.com, once the home base for the exchange of views among China’s liberal intellectuals, has suddenly closed.
The editorial board recently issued a statement, declaring that it had cut its ties with public intellectuals and was faithful to Xi Jinping’s thinking. Many media and political analysts bemoaned the resurgence of the Cultural Revolution on the Internet and the fact that China is entering an anti-intellectual and bigoted era of universal Boxer Rebellion.
On April 15, the editorial board of the Kedi community issued an open letter to the general public, stating that after March 30, the pages where “publicists” used to gather, such as “Cat’s Eye View”, “Cultural Essay”, “City Life”, “Original Literature” and “Film and Television Review”, were closed one after another to thoroughly clean up the illegal and undesirable comments, and to fight against “The community of Kedi said that it should bear in mind that Xi Jinhua is the only person who has ever spoken to the public.
The Kedi community said it should bear in mind the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s series of speeches at the Symposium on Network Security and Informatization, take Xi Jinping’s socialist thought of the new era with Chinese characteristics as guidance, and constantly improve its political standing.
The article wrote, “However, there are also a few so-called ‘publicists’ with ulterior motives and fear of the world, mixed in with them. Under the banner of ‘patriotism’, they practice demonic words and confuse the public, collude and conspire with overseas hostile forces, and attempt to shake the core socialist values.”
On April 22, Yan Yangtian commented on the Rights Defense Network that this incident marked the death of the soul of the Kedi community. Over the years, the Caidi community has stood firm in defending the scale of speech, and has long been a thorn in the side of officials, including those concerned with the case of Yan Xiaoling in Fujian, the strike by take-away riders, and the incidents of Sun Dawu and Ren Zhiqiang, among others.
“Cat’s Eye View” often focuses on social hotspots and sensitive events, fermenting from online discussions to offline actions. Guangzhou independent writer Naidu recalls that from 2003 to 2006, with the flourishing of the human rights movement, forums such as the Kaidi community served as a booster of social change and played an important role in mass gathering, but since the 2008 Beijing Olympics strengthened public opinion constraints and the BBS pushed the real-name system, the Kaidi community is no longer in good shape and languishing.
Nodu: “Since 2009, BBS discussions have begun to decline. For more than a decade, the cat’s eye has been languishing, in China’s social trend of decline. In China’s liberalized camp, there can be no medium for free communication to the people. In the late 1990s, Mr. Li Shenzhi published “Fifty Years of Wind, Rain and Yellow” as a nod to China’s liberalism, which produced a shift in the entire social thinking.”
The Kedi community did not collapse overnight, but died a slow death. The article on RightsInfo.com mentions that Tianya and Kaidi communities were purged more than a decade ago, and a large number of writers, such as Liu Yiming, moved to Phoenix. But after 2016, many forums and blogs on Sina, Phoenix, NetEase and Sohu began to close.
In 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered his landmark 4-19 speech, emphasizing the use of core socialist values to create a clean and upright cyberspace. He said, “The ancients said, ‘Those who know the leak of the house are under the yu, and those who know the failure of the government are in the grass.’ Many Internet users call themselves “grassroots”, that the network is now a ‘grass field’.”
Mr. Wang, the head of the Twitter account of “China’s Word Jail Incident Inventory,” who declined to give his full name, witnessed the sharp turn in public opinion after 2016, “Xi Jinping issued a speech at the time, saying that news should be guided. The next day, the entire network of various platforms blocked a large number of self media accounts, including many entertainment accounts such as the poisonous tongue movie, not related to politics. This is just one of the many tightening policies we have experienced, and he has been tightening all the time.”
The surviving Baidu bars, the NetEase news comment section and Tianya forum still have active users, but Mr. Wang observed that most of these platforms are about eating, drinking and having fun, with little high level political writing. The most heavily censored areas by Chinese authorities are Weibo and WeChat, especially WeChat groups and friend circles, which are the “hardest hit” areas for text jails.
According to cases collected by the “China Text Jail Incident Inventory,” several users of the Kedi community have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to four years over the past three years for complaining about social injustice and government malfeasance.
In 2019, Tian Yinghua of Changyang, Hubei Province, was sentenced to two and a half years for petitioning and posting “the court does not work for the people, to whom do the people complain” in Kaidi; Yang Defu of Fufu County, Heilongjiang Province, was sentenced to three and a half years for mailing materials to several government departments and posting accusations in Kaidi and Tianya communities that case officers were harboring his son’s murderer; Li of Texas, Shandong Province, posted in Cat Eye Media that “In 2018, Liu Zhenhua of Xiangcheng, Henan Province, was charged with “insulting and abusing the people’s government of Yongfeng Town of Xiangcheng City, the public prosecutor’s office of Xiangcheng City, and the relevant state officials when he posted “This is a time of pitfalls. ” and sentenced to four years and two months in prison.
Mr. Wang, a collector of Chinese texts, fears that once the online Cultural Revolution to annihilate intellectuals continues for ten to twenty years, the level of Chinese thinking will degenerate into extreme radical and violent nationalism, and the trend of universal Boxer Rebellion will be difficult to contain.
“The public intellectuals being criticized is an era of universal anti-intellectualism, where bad money expels good money. The good money is knowledge and enterprise, the bad money is anti-intellectualism and ignorance, all position and no facts. The previous Cultural Revolution was to beat down intellectuals and stinky old men in reality. From the network dimension, the Cultural Revolution is already happening. Everyone is afraid to expose their different positions from the official ones, just like the ‘thought crimes’ during the Cultural Revolution. If all the hundred flowers are chopped off and there are no publicists on the Internet for a decade or two, all the scientific and technological innovations will also be in ruins because the people have lost their ability to seek knowledge.”
After its launch in 2000, the Kedi community quickly became one of the famous current affairs platforms. Currently managed by the Central Internet Information Office, it is also one of the only three private integrated self-media network platforms in the country in the form of electronic bulletin boards (BBS), with civil servants, corporate executives, intellectuals and other mid- to high-end Internet users between the ages of 25 and 55 as its main users, and has become an important outreach platform with 1.64 percent of overseas visits.
After 2000, during the Hu-Wen era, Hainan’s Mu Mo and Yin Ming started the Kaidi and Tianya communities respectively, and the writings of public intellectuals like Yu Jie, Liu Junning, Fan Xuede, He Weifang, Zizhongkun and Qian Mansu brought the rule of law and democracy to netizens. Mr. Liu recalled that Kaidi’s articles later brought the rule of law and democracy to the netizens.
Mr. Liu recalled that Kaidi was later acquired by Southern Newspapers, but was still subject to political repression and difficult to disagree with, and was later returned to Mu Mu. Kaidi had retired judge Chen Guangping, whose pseudonym is Yizhen, as its content director, publishing posts focusing on human rights lawyers and social justice. Chen Guangping, 63, was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison last year for questioning the black police in Leping, and was admitted on the spot.
“Intellectuals have made Kedi a major community portal in China. Just like the Great Emancipation of Thought in the 1980s, many people found a platform in Kedi for the Chinese community to speak freely, and many of the depth of thought far exceeded the current academic articles, gathering a group of liberal celebrities at home and abroad like a thunderbolt, without asking for anything in return. Tianya has a lot of articles without ideological depth, while Kaidi favors ideological theory and the legal system.”
In recent years the liberal discursive scene has been extinguished one by one, and the figure of liberal scholars has faded out of public view. The nearly seventy-year-old Mu Mu returned to his hometown in Pingxiang to retire, and Zhang Lifan, Yuan Weishi, and Xin Lijian, who had once spoken out and exchanged ideas with Mr. Liu, either fell silent or went to the country.
“Mu Mu himself is an ideal, sentimental cultural people, want to do what they can for the progress of democracy. Now he is just trying to live a quiet, horse-riding life, like Tao Yuanming. The liberals don’t exist anymore, and to have a liberal voice is to bring death upon oneself. The Cultural Revolution is already happening. After the closing of the 18th National Congress I said that in the next ten years, China is moving step by step towards the Mao era, the pace is getting faster and faster, and there will be amazing changes that you don’t expect.”
The current management announced on the Kedi website includes President Li Xi, Assistant Vice President and Chief Content Editor Tang Jinwu, with friendly links to websites such as China Communist Party News, NetNews, Xinhua, and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
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