‘Father’ of China’s Great Firewall Shouted Off Own Microblog

Users said Mr. Fang’s earliest posts dated back to a few days ago, but that few people noticed his microblog until he wrote a message to famous CCTV anchor Jing Yidan (“Hi, I’m on Weibo now, although I don’t dare be as outspoken as you all, haha”) on Monday morning. After that, the comments, most reflecting the displeasure of many over the limitations on their use of the Internet, began piling up.

The Chinese government regulates Internet use in a number of ways. Internet companies in China, including Sina, need licenses to operate, and are required to police themselves, filtering out any illegal content, which ranges from pornographic to politically sensitive material. Websites based elsewhere may be blocked in their entirety or users can be periodically locked out if they continuously surf onto Web sites that contain certain key words.

The technology used to accomplish this—said by official media to have been built with substantial input from Mr. Fang–is often referred to as the Great Firewall, or GFW. In recent years an increasing number of Chinese Internet users are learning about its existence and–to a lesser extent–about how to circumvent it. Meanwhile, services like microblogging are speeding up the flow of information, making it more difficult to control.

Some commenters appeared to hope that their harsh reactions would limit Mr. Fang’s ability to use Sina Weibo the way the GFW limits Internet access within China. “Fang Binxing, GFW has deprived people’s rights to freely access the Internet, and now people want to deprive you of the right to use micro-blogging,” one user wrote. “But if you are not happy with it, go ahead and list t.sina.com.cn on your blacklist.”

Translations of comments appearing on China Digital Times, a China-focused news blog run by the Berkeley China Internet Project out of the University of California, Berkeley, included insults like “Brother Fang, when are you going to die?’’ and “F— you 404 times,” a reference to the “404 error” message that browsers sometimes display when search results are blocked inside China.

One Sina Weibo user in Beijing who saw some of the comments said they were “incredibly harsh” and “brazen.” “I was actually pretty shocked by the aggressiveness and disrespect of some of the comments I saw,” said the user. This “cannot be good for Sina” or microblogging, the user added. It’s a “big loss of face for Fang and Sina.”

Sina and other websites that contain user-generated content already go to great lengths not to offend Chinese authorities, employing dozens or hundreds of people just to police their own websites. As of Monday evening, Mr. Fang had more than 4,000 followers but his microblog posts, and the comments on them, had been deleted.

It’s unclear whether the posts were deleted by Sina or by Mr. Fang himself, but users who watched said that every refresh of his webpage looked like a race to see how fast new comments could be posted by users and deleted by administrators. “As I could remember, the remarks left by web users were more than 600″ at one point and went down to 200 at other points, said Zhao Gang, an IT technician in Beijing. “The number’s like the fluctuation index of stock market—it’s different every single time you refresh the page!”

A Sina representative confirmed that Mr. Fang had opened an account on Sina Weibo but would not say when he opened it and insisted Sina was not involved in deleting any comments. “We have no right to delete any messages or microblogs,” the spokesman, Mao Taotao, said, “if they didn’t violate relevant regulations.”

–Loretta Chao, with contributions from Juliet Ye. Follow Loretta on Twitter @lorettac. Follow Juliet on Twitter @wsj_jul