Canonical P1 joint case profile • Digital preservation / censorship archive
Chen Mei (陈玫) and Cai Wei (蔡伟) were founders of Terminus 2049 / 端点星, a crowd-sourced project created to preserve Chinese-language web pages after they were deleted or censored.
Terminus 2049
Human Rights Watch reports that the project began in April 2018 and used GitHub to archive material removed from Chinese media and social platforms. By 2020 it had preserved hundreds of articles, including roughly 100 related to COVID-19, as well as material on other social and labor issues.
Detention
HRW reported that Beijing police took Chen Mei and Cai Wei from their homes on April 19, 2020. After 54 days in an undisclosed location, authorities formally arrested them on June 12 on the charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
Information-control significance
The Terminus 2049 case is notable because the activity at issue was not only publishing new reporting but preserving material that had already appeared and was later removed. It therefore links censorship with digital preservation, redundancy and historical memory.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch — Silenced in China: The Archivists
- Human Rights Watch — China: Free Journalists, Activists