http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/chinadn/en/archives/003087.html September 18, 2004 China's Slashdot-like political forum closed by authorities Posted by Xiao Qiang at 03:05 PM Yitahutu (一塌糊涂), a familiar domain name for hundreds of thousands of studen ts, teachers and alumni in Chinese universities, has disappeared from Chinese c yberspace. On September 13, The Beijing Communications Administration issued a notification that Yitahutu (YTHT) BBS is permanently closed. In the meantime, m any Chinese BBS sites announced that it is forbidden to discuss YTHT on their s ystems. And the YTHT domain name itself has been entered into the filtered keyw ords list, including on the Chinese search engine, baidu. Founded by a graduate student from the physics department of Peking University five years ago, Yitahutu has grown into one of the largest online communities i n Chinese universities. According to Chinese Wikipedia, it currently has over 7 00 discussion forums and over 300,000 registered users. The discussion forum to pics include Taiwan , international relations, anti-corruption, legal reform, r ural China, human rights, etc. It is certainly the most politically provocative online community in Chinese cyberspace. Its influence has grown beyond its own Peking University campus to become a national information network. Notably, YTHT's attraction is its unique management structure. Usually a BBS ha s a group of monitors/editors (ban zhu), who are held accountable for the site' s contents. They have editorial rights to control and delete the posts and kick participants out of the forum. But YTHT has a particular "democratic structure ", which allows every participant to freely open a discussion forum on any topi c they want to, and also to "vote" to decide which post should come up on the f ront page. It is a self-organizing, bottom-up editorial control structure, simi lar to Slashdot. Because of this technological feature, the editors cannot be h eld responsible for what appears on the front page. Therefore, the Internet pol ice found their only solution was to close the whole site down. On September 16, a prominent law professor at Peking University, He Weifang, wr ote an open letter to the president of the university, urging him to defend the YTHT on the basis of freedom of expression. You can read Professor He's letter (in Chinese) on the New Century Net website here or read his article collectio n at TYFW.Net. -- 燕子 ﹀ ﹀ ﹀ ﹀ ︿ 疾飞林间 清风拂面 ﹀ ﹀ ﹀ ╱ \ 在片落枫红的缤纷中 大陆BBS的Taiwan版 ﹀ / 台 / 　 　 灵动轻舞 ﹀ http://kyxk.net / 湾 / ____▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█▇▆▅▄▃▂▁____ http://ytht.net \ ╱ ︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽︽\/︽︽︽ --

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