In August 1998 the China Democracy Party (CDP) — founded weeks earlier in Zhejiang, in the first open attempt to register an opposition party in the People’s Republic — opened a website on Tripod (members.tripod.com/~chinadp). The site carried the party’s founding declaration, a day-by-day chronicle of the July 1998 crackdown and the protests that followed, essays, press releases, Chinese and English wire reports, and a document archive. This section reconstructs the site from its archived captures, in Chinese as published, with the gaps stated plainly.
The record (Chinese originals)
- CDP website homepage (1998) — table of contents, link directory, and the full text of the Founding Public Declaration of the CDP Zhejiang Preparatory Committee (Wang Youcai, Wang Donghai, Lin Hui). The declaration also stands on this site as page WP12395.
- Chronicle of the “CDP Incident” (10 July – 10 August 1998) — the arrests, the legal-aid society, the hunger strikes and the worldwide protests, day by day.
- Xu Shuiliang, “On the Significance of Founding the CDP” (1998) — the founding essay the homepage carried.
- News directories (Chinese and English, 1998) — what the site’s wire-report sections held and what survives.
- Document archive catalogue (1998, not recovered) — the /file/ directory listing: 21 documents known by name and date only.
What does not survive
None of the 21 documents in the site’s file archive was ever captured by any web archive; the forum and guestbook were hosted off-site and are recorded as links only; and 63 of the 81 English wire files were never captured. The catalogue page above puts the largest of these gaps on the record, with the file list a future recovery can work from.
A note on the link directory
The homepage’s directory is itself a small map of the 1998 movement web: it links the Free China Movement and the Free China Forum, the “VIP Reference” weekly magazine, and the Chinese Democracy & Justice Party (come.to/cdjp) — a separate party, founded February 1998, whose own archived site this archive has inventoried at the Free China Movement’s request.
Provenance
- Source: http://members.tripod.com/~chinadp/ and sections; 196 archived captures inventoried (1998–2008), 69 unique items recovered verbatim.
- Reconstructed 2026-10-23 under the FCM-ARCHIVE-UX-20261022 programme. English editions of the records follow under the programme’s translation sequence.