Kaifu Lee: Check Out My Chart of How Often I Get Censored by Sina Weibo

Despite insisting that he’s no activist and is just keen on debating with his 33.4 million followers on Sina Weibo, entrepreneur and former Google China country manager, Kaifu Lee, finds his Weibo posts get censored and deleted quite a lot. In fact, authorities got Lee banned from Sina Weibo for three whole days last month. Now Lee has revealed the extent of the censorship he faces on Weibo and just posted a graph (to Twitter, not Weibo) of how many of his microblog posts have been removed in the past eight months.

Kaifu Lee explains:

My weibo deletions (click link).Lowest week was my “3-day silence”, and the highest weeks were the recent 2 weeks twitter.com/kaifulee/statu…

— Kai-Fu Lee (@kaifulee) March 18, 2013

Here’s the graph he made:

You’ll see that he’s had more Weibo posts than ever deleted in March, right after his forced hiatus. An accompanying table explains that he was discussing two topical and hot-button events in recent weeks that caused the spike in censorious deletions: the 13,000-plus dead pigs that keep appearing in a Shanghai river, and the just-finished session of Chinese parliament that appointed the country’s new political leadership. Just the kind of things that are being discussed in stores, taxis, and restaurants all over the country – but when posted online, these topics are often ordered to be eradicated from Weibo and other social media.