In a shocking revelation, an essay by internet influencer He Jiayan highlighted the vast disappearance of Chinese internet content from the early 2000s. Major internet portals and private websites from the first decade of China’s internet have almost entirely vanished, raising questions about the Chinese government’s control of history and public opinion. Even searches on non-Chinese search engines like Google and Bing yielded minimal results. He Jiayan’s post, deleted from WeChat, pointed out the alarming trend of disappearing content, creating a void in the historical record. The loss of content signifies the rapid collapse of the Chinese-language internet, leaving a significant gap in collective memory.
https://chinamediaproject.org/2024/05/27/goldfish-memories/