12 low points in China’s tech news in 2014

China’s web and tech industry got slightly larger, richer, more innovative, and more global during 2014, but there were still plenty of low points, calamities, and facepalm moments (Update: You might also like to see our complementary list of 17 highlights and milestones in China tech in 2014).

Here are 12 of the worst, starting in sorta chronological order:

1. Bitcoin clampdown continues

China’s clampdown on Bitcoin started in late 2013 and continued well into the start of this year. By March, the People’s Bank of China had ordered banks and all third-party payment services to stop dealing with anyone in the bitcoin business. That effectively de-funded all bitcoin trading websites as they would no longer have bank accounts.

Shortly after, China’s bitcoin exchanges were issued with formal notices stating that their bank accounts must be closed by April 15. One exchange in the country announced on April 10 that it had been contacted by its bank and told to remove all funds prior to the deadline or else the assets would be frozen.

2. China silences bloggers on WeChat

In March, Tencent followed orders from authorities to purge several prominent bloggers from their WeChat official accounts.

This followed on from a broad clampdown on rumors and bloggers on Weibo in 2013, showing that WeChat was now the main focus for censors as it became China’s main social app, used for sharing news as much as private messages between friends.

3. China totally blocks Google

China’s Great Firewall has been silently strangling Google’s search engine since 2010, when the search engine giant shuttered its censor-compliant Google.cn and redirected mainland Chinese users to the uncensored Google Hong Kong site.

During that time, Google’s market share collapsed in the country as the Google search engine took a minute or more to load due to this surreptitious slowdown. By June of this year, the strangulation stopped as the nation’s system of web censorship flat-out blocked Google – and pretty much every other Google service, right down to Google Translate.

They all remain blocked.

4. Net Nanny goes mental in July