The following post by Wang Wei (王巍), an executive at Mergers China, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 3:54pm today, July 20, 2012. The post deals with the upcoming first anniversary of the July 23, 2011, high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou. A government report on the tragedy, promised within several months, has still not been released to this day. Wang Wei currently has just over 1.56 million followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

The anniversary of the July 23 [high-speed rail crash] approaches. My piece “Wang Si Tiao” (王四条) [about this issue] was shared around 50,000 times before dying. I demanded that the high-speed rail system be suspended pending an investigation, that legal proceedings replace administrative proceedings, assisting outside intermediary organizations in thoroughly investigating and auditing all high-speed rail tofu engineering projects, etcetera. This is a basic demand of civil society and the information age, but the result has been that it this [issue] has been dropped into a dark and bottomless pit. Can such a huge price in human lives be forgotten and harmonized? Can this be borne by a handful of people like [former railway minister] Liu Zhijun?


The original Chinese post follows:

723事件马上也周年了。我写的"王四条"瞬间转发了近五万次后阵亡。要求高铁立即停驶调查、用法律起诉代替行政处理、借助外部中介机构审计和清查所有高铁动车的豆腐渣工程等。这是公民社会和信息时代的起码要求,结果都掉进无底黑洞。这么大的生命代价会被遗忘被历史和谐吗?刘志军几个人就承担了?

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.


David Bandurski

CMP Director

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