China visibility triggers suicide attempt

Che Guevara

John Purvis-Bagworth has been a blogger since before the activity had a name. To his family and friends, he has always been known not as “John” or “Johnny” but as the “Che of the Web”. It was his pride to be spending endless hours at his desk, writing about everything he felt should be written about, in an often controversial and un-politically correct tone. Terrorism, the lack of human rights in many regions of the world, the Tibetan fight, women’s rights to abort…no subject was too small or too sensitive for “the Che”.

And then his dream was shattered. As a present for his 50th birthday, his children offered him a full inclusive trip to China, a country he had criticised for many years on his blog, but that still fascinated him by its size and mystery.

He had planned everything: a trip to the Google offices to pay his respects to the company that (finally) said no, the Great Wall, hiring a bicycle to discover Beijing like the natives. But then, he made a mistake that was almost fatal: he went to a cyber-cafe to check his emails. And there, the shock that hit him was unforeseeable: in a moment of curiosity, he typed the URL to his blog and discovered to his great horror that his site was fully accessible. Not a page censored, not even a comment. Every painfully written line of dissent was fully visible for all to see in China. His entire life dedicated at building a rebel self-image was shattered within seconds.

According to witnesses of the scene, the man started shouting “I should be blocked too!” and waving his armes, before violently kicking a nearby bubblegum dispenser and gulping down 382 Chewy Lewies (a Chinese brand of colourful chewing gums said to “make the biggest bubbles”) in what seemed to be a desperate attempt to put an end to his life.

Luckily, though the man is likely to suffer for the rest of his life from a serious aversion to Chewy Lewies, his days are no longer in danger. The BJ reporters contacted an official at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China and queried why John’s website had not been blocked. The official confirmed that the lack of blocking was voluntary (he even conveyed that he really liked John’s post on his dog’s eating disorder) as blocking John’s content was not considered worthwhile by the Chinese authorities. The man said: “we only bug commercial companies that compete with local companies. In John’s case, there is no local that even wants to compete with the lame content of a capitalistic WASP that has too much time on his hands”.

But the story does have a happy ending: European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Malmström, called John personnally in his hotel to reassure him by saying that the blocking system of Internet websites her services are trying to put in place (and dubbed “Censilia” by NGOs) would probably block his site entirely.