Great Firewall blocks Danwei.org
- Source: Global Times
- [20:53 July 07 2009]
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By Wang Weilan
Talk about tempting fate. One of the last things Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder of the Danwei.org website, told the Global Times before heading off on his three-week vacation to Italy was: “Finally, everything is on track.”
He was celebrating the fact his site had finally registered with the Beijing Administration for Industry and Commerce in December to become a work unit. That’s right, Danwei.org was now a danwei.
On the sixth day of his vacation, the site was blocked. It came just two days after the abortive launch of the Chinese government’s Green Dam project, a hot-button issue among Danwei’s savvy and dedicated readership.
As Danwei staff had received no official notification about the blocking, the Global Times called the the Ministry of Public Security, ultimately the highest agency responsible for Internet security, but the ministry did not respond by presstime. It would seem that Danwei had fallen victim to China’s “Great Firewall”, an issue close to the heart of its readership.
The Global Times next called the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), who, despite their apparent role as an Internet information center, had absolutely no idea who blocks websites or how to find out who had blocked Danwei.
“I don’t know why it happened, so there is no way to proceed,” Danwei’s Joel Martinsen told the Global Times. However, the site remains accessible outside the Chinese mainland and available through proxies within the country.
The pinyin for the Chinese word “work unit”, Danwei is an English language blog featuring selections of Chinese media, blogs and Western media reports on China.
Popular with foreign correspondents, Chinese intellectuals and people interested in the Chinese mainland in general, Danwei has been monitoring reports on China and Chinese blogs since 2003. Goldkorn registered the website in 1999. As a member of TypePad, Danwei was blocked in 2004 when the whole service was blocked.
But since then, the website has persisted where others have been blocked. This was the first time Danwei was blocked on its own, said Martinsen, a colleague of Goldkorn.
Before it was blocked, Goldkorn seemed unusually upset over the suspension of Google service and wrote “Nothing could break the friendship between netizens and Google.”
The post before that featured Goldkorn selling Danwei T-shirts with Mao Zedong’s portrait to celebrate the founding anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party.
Jin yumi or “gold corn” is the familiar nickname for Chinese when talking about this energetic founder, publisher and editor of Danwei.org. Aged 37, Goldkorn identified himself as a half-Jewish white African who has spent almost his entire adult life in China.
Group of four
Goldkorn started recruiting his multinational group in 2005. The American Martinsen, a graduate of Chinese literature from Beijing Normal University, joined Danwei after working as an English teacher in Jilin of Northeast China.
Chinese Alice Liu Xin had worked as researcher for the Guardian newspaper and resided in England for 15 years. Eric Mu is a graduate from Shandong Province in East China. Their daily task involves translating articles and blog posts by Chinese writers. Everybody selects and writes the story on his or her own, and they discuss among themselves.
Their office, a two-room unit located in a down-to-earth building in Dongdan, Beijing, which used to be Goldkorn’s home, was a sight to behold in the hot summer.
The door of the office was wide open to get fresh air. A noisy electric fan was blowing while the three full-time workers tapped on computers in the living room. Newspapers they had bought at their own expense were piled on desks.
A graduate of English literature from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, Goldkorn has lived in China since 1995. For the first eight years, he did odd jobs like teaching English, freelancing and running magazines, both legal and underground. In between jobs, he started companies and experienced interesting ups and downs.
Goldkorn was inspired to register the domain name danwei, but did not know what to do with it until in 2003 he caught the blogging bug during the SARS breakout.
“I read blogs on SARS and noticed that they were in fact more comprehensive sources of disease information than the WHO release or news reports,” he said.