In late February, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) silenced a critic of President Xi Jinping by ordering Sina and Tencent to close the Weibo accounts of blogger Ren Zhiqiang.
In early June, Cyber Security Association of China (CSAC) – a new institution under CAC - wrote GitHub to request help in defending the Chinese president again, reported Quartz. The CSAC asked GitHub to remove a March 9 post on its website that suggested Xi killed his half-brother.
The article was an essay which alleged Xi ordered the death of Xi Zhengning, through the military, to seal his rise to power. It claimed Zhengning’s murderers entered his house, subdued the half-brother, and injected his body with poison that caused his heart to stop beating.
CSAC pointed out that there is no evidence of the accusation and the essay was not credible. Quartz took note of the polite way the CSAC used to ask GitHub to remove the essay. This new approach contrasted with the way Beijing launched before a distributed denial of service attack on GitHub which slowed down the site’s webpage on where millions of engineers rely on.
Fan Bingxing, the man behind China’s Great Firewall, heads CSAC. Meanwhile, CAC Director Lu Wei left the agency which he joined in 2015. He would be replaced by Xu Lin, his deputy and the former Shanghai Minister of Propaganda from 2013 through 2015, reported Financial Times. CAC blocked all Google services in China in 2014.