The Chinese know that the Internet in their country is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to express things they shouldn’t mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they just accept it.

They live in a parallel online world. They know about it and even joke about it.

Now they are finding that beneath the bustle of short videos, live streaming and e-commerce, their internet — and their collective online memory — is collapsing.

On May 22, a widely forwarded article on WeChatPostsIt said that almost all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums and social media sites between 1995 and 2005 is no longer accessible.

“China’s Internet is collapsing at an accelerated pace,” the headline read. Unsurprisingly, the post was quickly censored.

“We thought the Internet had memory,” He Jiayan, a blogger who writes about successful businessmen, wrote in a post. “But we didn’t expect that this memory was like that of a goldfish.”

We can’t be sure exactly how much content disappeared, or what it was. But I did a test. I used Baidu, China’s largest search engine, to look up some of the examples cited in He Jiayan’s post, focusing on the same time period between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s.

I started with Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Tencent’s Pony Ma, China’s most successful Internet entrepreneurs, whom He also searched for. I also searched for Liu Chuanzhi, known as the godfather of Chinese entrepreneurship: He made headlines in 2005 when his company Lenovo acquired IBM’s personal computer business.

I also looked at search results for Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, who served as governor of two major provinces during this period. Search results for China’s top leaders are always tightly controlled. I wanted to see what people would find if they were curious about Xi Jinping before he became the country’s leader.

When I searched for Jack Ma, I got no results. I found three entries for Ma Huateng. When I searched for Liu Chuanzhi, seven entries appeared.

I didn’t get any results about Xi Jinping.

Then I searched for one of China’s worst tragedies of the past few decades: the Wenchuan earthquake on May 12, 2008, which killed more than 69,000 people. This occurred during a brief period when Chinese journalists had more freedom than the Communist Party normally allows, and they produced a lot of high-quality journalism.

When I narrowed the time range to May 12, 2008 to May 12, 2009, Baidu gave me nine pages of results, mostly articles from central government websites or the state broadcaster CCTV. Hint: If you know the names of the journalists and their organizations, you can find more.

There were about 10 headlines per search results page. My search turned up only a fraction of all the coverage at the time, much of it published on the websites of newspapers and magazines that had sent reporters to the epicenter. I didn’t find any of the great journalism or online condolences that I remembered.

Beyond disappearing content, there is a broader problem: China’s internet is shrinking. In 2023, there were 3.9 million websites in the country, down by more than a third from 5.3 million in 2017, according to China’s internet regulator.

China has 1 billion internet users, nearly one-fifth of the world’s total. However, the number of websites written in Chinese accounts for only 1.3% of the global total, down from 4.3% in 2013, according to the 2015 China Internet Network Information Center, which tracks the languages ​​of the top content online.Network Technology Survey“Institutions, down 70% in ten years.

Currently, the number of Chinese websites is only slightly higher than that of Indonesian and Vietnamese websites, less than that of Polish and Persian websites, half of the number of Italian websites, and slightly higher than a quarter of the number of Japanese websites.

One of the reasons for the decline in websites is that archiving old content is technically difficult and costly.Not just in ChinaBut in China, another reason is political.

After Xi Jinping came to power, China began to move toward authoritarianism and nationalism, and Internet publishers, especially news portals and social media platforms, faced greater pressure to censor. Keeping China’s cyberspace politically and culturally pure is a top priority for the Communist Party. Internet companies have more incentives to over-censor and make old content disappear by not archiving it.

Many people’s online lives have been wiped out.

Two weeks ago, documentary filmmaker Wang Nanfu discovered that her entry on a Wikipedia-like website had disappeared. She searched for her name on Douban, a film review site, but found nothing. The same was true on WeChat.

“Some of the films I directed were also deleted and banned on the Chinese Internet,” she said. “But this time it feels like I, as a person, as part of history, was erased.” She doesn’t know what triggered it.

Zhang Ping, known by his pen name Chang Ping, was one of China’s most famous journalists in the first decade of this century. His articles, once ubiquitous, drew the ire of censors in 2011.

“My public presence was stifled much more than I expected, and that was a huge loss of my personal life,” he told me. “I felt it was a denial of my own life.”

When my Weibo account was deleted in March 2021, I felt sad and angry. It had more than 3 million followers and thousands of posts documenting my life and thoughts over the past decade. Many of the posts were about current events, history, or politics, but some were personal reflections. I felt like a part of my life had been taken away.

Many deliberately hide their online posts because they could be used against them by the party or its agents. In a trend known as “digging up graves,” nationalist “little pinks” look up what intellectuals, entertainers and influencers once posted online.

For Chinese people, our online memories, even if trivial, may become a burden that we need to unload.

“Even though we tend to think of the Internet as somewhat superficial,” said Ian Johnson, a longtime China-based journalist and author. “But without these sites and things, we’d lose part of our collective memory.”

Zhang Yan’ssparkIn his endnote to his book, Sparks, which tells the story of the brave historians who went undercover in China, he citesInternet ArchiveHe prefers to avoid Chinese online resources from the Internet Archive, he said, because he knows the material will eventually disappear.

“History is important in every country, but it is really important to the Communist Party,” he said. “History is what justifies the party’s continued rule.”

Zhang Yan created theChina Civil Archives” website, which aims to preserve blogs, movies and documents outside the Chinese internet.

There are other projects to save China’s memory and history and prevent them from falling into a void.Greatfire.orgThere are several websites that offer content that has been censored. Nonprofits fighting censorshipChina Digital TimesArchives works that have been blocked or are in danger of being blocked. Journalist Zhang Ping is the executive editor of the website.

Can China’s practice of erasing history be reversed? He Jiayan, the author of the viral WeChat article, is deeply pessimistic.

“If you can still see some old information on the Chinese Internet now, it is just the last rays of the setting sun,” he wrote.