These are weird days for China’s netizens. According to Bloomberg reports on March 15, the Chinese Communist Party relieved Bo Xilai, the Chongqing Party Secretary, of his duties after his police chief allegedly attempted to seek asylum in the United States. It was arguably the biggest political story to hit China in two decades, and Chinese microbloggers embraced it with gusto. In the hours following the concise, two-sentence official statement the state media carried about the firing, citizens posted millions of tweets to Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblog, speculating about the causes and circumstances of Bo’s abrupt fall.
The Weibo frenzy lasted for roughly a day, but then, with ruthless efficiency, the censors that troll Chinese microblogs -- whether they represent the party or the controversy-averse microblog owners -- quickly vacuumed up most of those tweets, abolishing them from the site. Searches, too, for “Bo Xilai” on Weibo produced no results. The Chinese public knows nothing about what is happening between the factions who supported Bo, and those who opposed him.
Amidst all this opacity, politically-interested netizens have fallen into a seemingly paranoid mood. This is especially the case for those who have something to gain or lose from the rise and fall of political leaders, such as businessmen whose success is highly dependent upon good relations with local governments. One of China’s best-known real-estate developers, Pan Shiyi, tweeted this on Monday night for his 9.2 million followers:
This evening Weibo was strange indeed, there were some words that could not be sent out on Weibo. I saw a line of commentary dropped several times from Weibo, but what I saw made my scalp tingle; was it gremlins? Better to turn off the computer and go to sleep.
Pan has a habit of posting cryptic tweets that regularly generate hundreds of responses. But this post landed in the midst of political scandal at the highest levels -- and it spurred rumors at the lowest levels…
Read more at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-21/chinese-coup-rumors-run-wild-online-then-disappear-adam-minter.html
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