Two years ago Sina Weibo – China’s equivalent of Twitter – was crawling with tales of political scandal. Today those stories are harder to find, and government figures suggest the online community in the country has become more docile. What happened?

It started with a smile. In the summer of 2012 a Chinese government official was pictured grinning at the scene of a bus crash in Shaanxi Province. Web users, annoyed by his cheerful demeanour at the scene of a tragedy, began trawling through other images of the official and found something that many found unsettling. In picture after picture, people noticed that the civil servant was wearing a string of luxury watches, and people demanded to know how he could afford them on his modest salary. The outcry led to a jail sentence for the official, and kick-started a wave of similar scandals, many of which came to light on the Sina Weibo social network.

Allegations of corruption on the network increased following the incident, according to an independent assessment by an Australian journalist. In the six months following the scandal, 104 allegations were posted, and in 2013 there were a further 229. But then something changed. In 2014 the number of allegations plummeted, to just 51.

Read the Full Article: Source – BBC News
Browsing Privacy: (BBC News) – Has China silenced its bloggers?

source not found