A day after winning Taiwan's presidential election, President-elect Tsai Ing-wen was virtually "erased" by Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter. Searches for her name and "Taiwan elections" yielded zero results.
Instead, searchers were given this message: "According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the results for this search cannot be shown." China's censors were clearly working overtime after Tsai made history on Saturday by being the first female president of the country when she beat the candidate of the ruling Kuomintang Party, reported IBN.
But what alarmed mainland China authorities is that Tsai did not hide her dislike for Beijing when she warned China that suppressive policies would damage "cross-strait ties" as she insisted that Taiwan's democratic system, national identity and international space be respected right after her win.
Before any news about the results of Taiwan's election were blocked, many Chinese news websites reported the event but only used the term "leader of the Taiwan region" to describe Tsai. The websites did not use "president" because it would give legitimacy to Taipei's claim that it is sovereign, while China insists Taiwan is just a province of the mainland.
Fresh from Tsai's electoral victory, China's state-run media warned her against insisting on an independence path. Zhou Zhihai, head of the Institute of Taiwan Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in an article in the Chinese-language edition of Global Times, warned her that if she would move to part ways with the mainland, "she would go down a dead end."
It is not just Tsai who was censored by the "Great Firewall of China," but also Chou TzuYu, the 16-year-old member of a Taiwanese girl band who had to apologize for waving the Taiwanese flag during a recent Internet broadcast.