The founder of an anti-corruption website quit Wednesday, handing his site over to the relevant authorities just a few weeks after receiving official legal approval to run the unofficial site.
“It’s hard for an individual to run such a website in China,” the founder with the online name of Xiaoxiaosheng told the Global Times Wednesday.
The website license had been canceled and it would be shut down forever, he announced at woxinghuile.info on Tuesday.
The website was inspired by ipaidabribe.com, a popular Indian website founded in August last year.
The idea quickly caught fire on the Chinese mainland as a grass-roots anonymous tipster service to root out corruption.
After an official pause where Xiaoxiaosheng and other similar site founders were made to officially register their websites, Web users who tried to log onto woxinghuile.info in late June found they couldn’t access it. Other sites including ibribery.com, woxinghuile.com and 552phone.com also experienced problems.
Since the website suffered low speeds and server security problems, he would donate it to the government, according to the statement posted on the site by Xiaoxiaosheng on Monday.
“My website is not shut down by the government,” he said, “since I closed it down on my own, keeping in mind national regulations.”
His website must abide by laws and regulations, he said, hence the closure didn’t involve any personal feeling but was simply a matter of principle.
“I made this decision after serious consideration, with the hope of securing long-term survival for the site,” he said.
Donating the site meant transferring domain name ownership, site management and operating rights to the relevant departments, he said.
Xiaoxiaosheng said he had contacted jcrb.com, the official website of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, but received no reply.
The Supreme People’s Procurator launched its own online reporting system for corruption cases in 2003.
Global Times