By Riaad van der Merwe
BEIJING – Former U.S. president Bill Clinton arrived in Beijing yesterday on a humanitarian mission aimed at securing the unblocking of social networking sites Facebook and Youtube.
The video sharing website Youtube has been blocked in mainland China since March this year, while the social networking site Facebook suffered a similar fate in July.
The more than usually stringent censorship policy is said to be the result of several “sensitive” events, including the anniversary of the uprisings in Tibet last March, the Xinjiang riots, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident and, finally, the 60th anniversary of the PRC.
Industry insiders expected that the websites would return to normal service following the National Day holidays, which came to an end on the 8th of October. However, both sites remain trapped behind the Great Chinese firewall.
Since the blockage, Facebook has experienced a drop in visitors to its site from more than one million to less than 14,000; Youtube users have fallen at a similar rate.
Hoping to salvage their respective businesses, the CEO’s of both websites sought help from the former American president to unblock their respective websites.
As with his mission to North Korea in August to secure the release of two American journalists, Clinton’s trip is “privately funded and independent of the American government”, according to a spokesperson for both Facebook and Youtube.
At a press conference in Beijing today, Clinton announced that he had shown Chinese president Hu Jintao his own Facebook page, and then assisted the Chinese president in setting up his own page. After completing several quizzes, such as ‘What does your name say about you?’, ‘Your personality according to your IQ’ and ‘What kind of a leader are you?’, Clinton said “Hu then added me as a ‘friend’”.
Clinton went on to say that he plans to share photos with president Hu, and will soon challenge him to a game of Facebook Scrabble.
The Facebook session was filmed. Tomorrow, Clinton will show Hu how to post the videos on Youtube, and add a link to their respective Facebook pages.
“It’s all about sharing,” said Clinton. “Sites like Facebook and Youtube allow users to communicate. People everywhere should be free to spend their time viewing and exchanging mind-numbing trivia. I’m sure President Hu agrees with me.”
It is unsure if the micro-blogging website, Twitter, which has also been blocked in China for a number of months, will reap any benefit Clinton’s efforts.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made no official comment on her husband’s latest diplomatic coup, however her latest twitter update reads: “Gr8 2b married 2 most pwrfull man in wrld! LOLZ!!”
