Weibo Censored Former Chief of Google China Kai-Fu Lee

The outspoken entrepreneur had his posts removed in the recent weeks because he was discussing about 13,000 dead pigs that were found in Shanghai River, and Chinese parliament to appoint the country’s new leadership. “Lowest week was my ‘3-day silence’, and the highest weeks were the recent 2 weeks”, said Lee in his tweet.

My weibo deletions (click link).Lowest week was my "3-day silence", and the highest weeks were the recent 2 weeks twitter.com/kaifulee/statu…

— Kai-Fu Lee (@kaifulee) March 18, 2013

This isn’t Lee’s first time Lee being censored by the Chinese authorities. Kai-Fu Lee has always been vocal about Chinese social media censorship. “Social media has more power in China than it does in any other country. While the controls are tight, one must realize that social media is revolutionizing the way people communicate with each other and can change China for the better”, said Lee to Forbes.

In January, he shouted an angry message to the authorities on Weibo regarding the blocking of the Chinese social programming site Github. “GitHub has three million members and China ranks fourth in terms of member base. Github is the place for developers to learn, share, and connect with others developers in the world. It doesn’t have any sensitive content so blocking Github is unjustifiable. Blocking Github will only hurt domestic programmers and cause them to be less competitive and competent.”

Kai-Fu Lee was even banned from Chinese Twitter-like-services for three whole days in February 2013 for posting a summary of a Wall Street Journal report that describes how slow internet speeds and instability are discouraging overseas businesses from relocating to China. In his tweet, the founding president of Google China from 2005 to 2009 invited his 33.4 million followers from the two social networks to follow his Twitter instead. “I’ve been blocked from Sina and Tencent Weibo for three days; you can find me here [on Twitter].”

我在新浪腾讯都被禁言三天，大家可以来这里找我。

— Kai-Fu Lee (@kaifulee) February 17, 2013

Kai-Fu Lee is currently the CEO of China-based Innovation Works, a venture capital firm for Chinese technology start-ups. Lee was ranked by Sina as the most influential microblogger on its Weibo service last year.

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