Censors in China have excised the word Ferrari from the country’s biggest social networking sites in an attempt to suppress all public discussion of a sensitive mystery car crash.
The ban followed a burst of speculation that the young driver killed in the high-speed accident on Sunday may have been the son of a senior Communist Party official, thus raising awkward questions about how a civil servant could afford to buy his offspring one of the world’s most desirable and expensive cars.
China’s internet censors have a number of ways of banning particular words or phrases from Sina Weibo and other microblogging sites. The simplest and most regularly used method is to remove the offending term from the site’s internal search engine. A more extreme tactic — and the one used in the case of Ferrari — automatically removes any post containing that word.
Hints at the extreme political sensitivities surrounding the crash emerged throughout Monday as other words and names joined the list of banned words while newspaper reporters revealed that they had been forbidden from investigating or writing about the crash. A brief local newspaper report on the crash, which occurred shortly after 4am on Sunday in Beijing and apparently involved a Ferrari F430, was swiftly removed from the website.
An ancient word for a high-ranking official, often used to refer to a minister today, was barred on Twitter-style microblog sites, along with the names Shang Fulin and Jia Qinglin — respectively the chief banking regulator and the chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
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The ban was imposed with the ruling Communist Party in the throes of its most public political turmoil for more than 20 years after the downfall of a prominent star in a scandal that threatens to taint others in the highest echelons of leadership.
Internet censors have been busy. Since the sacking of Bo Xilai as party boss of the sprawling city of Chongqing last week, his name and those of other family members have been blocked as search items. The Government appears especially keen to snuff out speculation about Mr Bo amid reports that he may be under house arrest pending a fuller investigation of his conduct.
Mr Bo has his own Ferrari link: he recently dismissed as nonsense that his Harrow and Oxford-educated son, Bo Guagua, drove a red Ferrari.
The exact circumstances of Sunday’s crash, beyond the fact that pictures of the twisted wreckage clearly showed it was a black Ferrari, are unclear. The driver, thought to have been in his 20s, was travelling with two young women sharing the single passenger seat. They reportedly survived the crash but with severe injuries.
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Words banned — some temporarily — by China’s internet censors:
• 64 — month and day of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4, 1989
• Jasmine — disappeared after the term “jasmine revolution” appeared in reference to a possible Chinese attempt at an Arab Spring
• Iodised salt — banned to end rumours this could prevent radiation poisoning after Japan’s nuclear disaster
• Warlord — reminiscent of power struggles in the 1930s
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• Love potions — regarded as too permissive by prudish censors