Global Times: Spanish Judge "Ignorant" for Arrest Order for Jiang Zemin, Weibos Censor "Spanish Court Jiang Zemin"

Screenshots showing Sina Weibo, Tencent
Weibo, and Baidu Tieba censor searches
for "Tibet Independence"

On February 12, 2014, the state-sponsored Global Times published an English language editorial entitled “Ignorance Leads to Spanish Judge’s Ruling.” Some excerpts:

A Spanish judge on Monday issued a ridiculous "arrest warrant" against former Chinese heads of state. In response to the charge filed by Spanish pro-Tibet independence human rights groups, the judge accused former top Chinese officials of committing crimes against humanity under the principle of universal jurisdiction.

The judge might have never been to Tibet because he is totally ignorant of the enormous social progress made in recent decades. He still views China with an old, biased and arrogant attitude by attempting to interfere into Beijing's internal affairs.

It is fair to say that he is a blunderer who lacks the fundamental concepts of international politics. He is more ludicrous than but not as innocent as Don Quixote, a figure created by Miguel de Cervantes during the Renaissance.

These screenshots, taken on February 16, show that both Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo were censoring searches for “Spanish Court Jiang Zemin,” but not for “Spain Jiang Zemin.”

 

These screenshots, taken on the same day, show that a search on Baidu for the title of a BBC article on this issue returns no results, just a censorship notice.

These screenshots, also taken the same day, show that a search on Baidu news for “Spanish Judge Jiang Zemin Li Peng Arrest Order” (西班牙法官 江泽民 李鹏 逮捕令). The same search on Microsoft’s Bing news  returns over 4,000 results.