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Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
In a post to China’s popular WeChat platform last week, one writer bemoaned the shocking loss of nearly a full decade of information from the early days of the country’s domestic internet. Within hours the writer's reflections had vanished too.
This means that if we set out to understand Jack Ma’s experience over this particular time period — i ncluding news reports, public discussions, his speeches, company developments, and so on — the sum total of the material we derive from this search is zero. If we search for [Tencent founder] Pony Ma (马化腾), [Xiaomi CEO] Lei Jun (雷军), [Huawei CEO] Ren Zhengfei (任正非), and so on, or even for figures like [Chinese entrepreneur and internet celebrity] Luo Yonghao (罗永浩) and Sister Fu Rong (芙蓉姐姐) who were hot topics at that time, and even if we search for internet stars like [Taiwanese singer and musician] Jay Chou (周杰伦) or [Super Girl contest winner] Li Yuchun (李宇春), we still get the same results. Perhaps there was a monster devouring webpages, and it was following the historical timeline — swallowing pages starting in the past and moving on toward the present, first in nibbles and then in great bites, chomping away the Chinese internet in five and ten-year chunks.
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