A Web site running an information service and online forums for carriers of the Hepatitis B virus in China was closed by the authorities at the end of November.
An official on duty at the Beijing municipal telecommunications bureau said they had received many phone calls about the closure of the site.
“It is probably because they neglected to file a required application,” the official said.
“This Web site has been running for six years now without running into any problems. If there were any additional formalities required, they should have notified us ahead of time. But we haven’t been allowed any leeway at all. They just shut it down immediately. This is an illegal act,” said Lu Jun, a forum moderator.
China now has 120 million known carriers of Hepatitis B. This Web site has been a strong force in the past three years in fighting social discrimination against them.
“We have already been in contact with the Telecoms bureau, and they told us we should be registering as a healthcare service provider. We didn’t in fact think we were providing such services. But we are still being closed down under that category. The feedback from the Health Ministry was that our forums were inappropriate. After all, what can people who have the same illness say to each other? They don’t need to talk to each other. If they are sick they can go to the hospital to seek treatment. They criticised this and that. The only forum they allowed was the science one. This is totally unacceptable.”
Sources told RFA that this Web site had provided the only hope in the existences of some Hep. B carriers. Guo Dong, forum moderator: “Many people come to this forum when they are on the brink of psychological breakdown, to get a little emotional support. These closures are going to affect a lot of people. In the past we have had a lot of people on the forums talking about committing suicide. Whenever we saw someone talking like that, we immediately found out their location and found a volunteer to go and support them. There was a young lad in Shenzhen recently who was going to jump off a building … and we sent someone round there to talk him down. So, this Web site has really helped a lot of people.”
Original reporting in Chinese: RFA Mandarin service reporter, Fang Yuan.
Filed under: China, East Asia, GFW, Newsdesk, china_civil_rights, china_civilrights, china_health, china_internet, china_mentalhealth, citizenjournalism, east_asia, freespeech, governance, technology | Tagged: china_health, china_mentalhealth, GFW, hepatitisB, HepB
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