From The New York Times
China Mounts Vigorous Crackdown on Popular Online Opinion Makers
By Chris Buckley
HONG KONG — These are bad times to be a Big V in China.
Big V, for verified account, is the widely used moniker for the most influential commentators on China’s growing microblog sites — online celebrities whose millions of fans read, discuss and spread their outpouring of news and opinions, plenty of which chastise or ridicule officials. And the Communist Party has turned against them in the most zealous crackdown on the Internet in years....
“We’re only seeing the beginning of this campaign,” said Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the Chinese Internet. “And this round they’ll be much harsher, and the targets will be the more influential people in the Chinese public sphere.”...