David Bandurski is the Executive Director of the China Media Project, an independent research project studying the Chinese media landscape both within the People’s Republic of China and globally. He is also a co-founder of Decoding China, an online guide to understanding the official Chinese meaning of key terms in international relations and development cooperation. In addition to his regular writing and analysis at the China Media Project, Bandurski has been a contributor to Brookings, The New York Times, The Guardian, Index on Censorship, ChinaFile, The Diplomat, and other publications. He is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village: And Other Tales from the Back Alleys of Urbanising China, a book of reportage about urbanization in China, and co-author of Investigative Journalism in China, a book of eight cases on Chinese watchdog journalism.
When Lu Wei — the man who reportedly led the crackdown on the “Big V” Weibo account holders last year — was asked at a press conference why sites like Facebook (which is blocked in China) had been “shut down,” he responded with a homespun metaphor.