Digital Journalism Review | Former Google China boss complains of censorship on Twitter

After a “departure” of nearly 150 days, Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google China and one of most influential celebrities among Chinese netizens, resumed posting original tweets on Twitter, complaining against censorship in China.

Lee, who runs his own venture capital firm in Beijing, said that in the past six months, 78 of his posts on Sina Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like social media site, had been deleted.

“Judge for yourself, do you think these 78 posts really needed to be axed?” Lee asked, pasting a link to his personal page on Sina Weibo where he shows the screenshots of the original 78 posts.

Most of Lee’s posts got deleted were just reposts from the others, many of which were related to cases of corruption among officials, censorship and other political issues.

In an original post, Lee pasted a quote by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in Chinese, and the quote was later translated into English and retweeted by the official account of the United States consulate to Hong Kong.

The quote, according to the translation by the consulate (see screenshot below), reads, “When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it, always.”