The 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China was convened on November 8, 2012. This screenshot shows that Baidu stopped censoring searches for relevant terms such as "18 Big" (十八大) some time between July and September 2012.
The change in censorship may have been
timed to coincide with the September 28 announcement by China's official news agency Xinhua that "The 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is proposed to convene on Nov. 8 in Beijing."
These screenshots show that, while Baidu continued to provide seemingly uncensored search results for "18 Big" on November 8, it had banned Tieba forums with that term, and returned no search results for that term on its user-generated question & answer product, Zhidao.
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| Baidu apologizes that it is illegal to open Tieba forums for "18 Big" |
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| Baidu says it can find no questions or answers containing the phrase "18 Big." |
In addition, these screenshots show that, at some point in the first week of November, Baidu began censoring "Zhang Dejiang" (张德江), one of the men widely speculated to become a member of the Party's Politburo Standing Committee.
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Baidu began restricting web searches for "Zhang Dejiang" to a strict whitelist
of about a dozen websites operated by the government and the Party. |
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As a result, searches for websites that were not on the white list
(in this case, Hudong) began returning no results, just a censorship notice. |
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Baidu went from finding thousands of results for "Zhang Dejiang" on its
Wenku document sharing product to saying it could find no results. |
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Baidu went from finding thousands of results for "Zhang Dejiang" on its
Zhidao Q&A product to saying it could find no results. |
Baidu imposed similar censorship at the same time for Li Yuanchao (李源潮), Yu Zhengsheng (俞正声), Liu Yunshan (刘云山), Zhang Gaoli (张高丽), and Wang Qishan (王岐山).
It did not impose this censorship for Wang Yang (汪洋).
