A non-profit mainland website that provided free translations of open courses on philosophy, history and 10 other subjects from prestigious US universities including Harvard and Yale has been shut down by mainland censors, apparently because of political concerns.
The YYeTs website, also known as 'Everyone's movie and television', published a statement yesterday saying its servers had been confiscated by the government on Thursday and it was co-operating with an investigation by the authorities.
'We're sorry to announce that the website was shut down by regional authorities from the culture, radio, TV, film, press and publication administration on Thursday afternoon for some reasons,' the statement said.
'Our servers have been confiscated ... and we'll clean out all content published on the website.'
The shutting down of the website comes only eight days after it appeared in a story on the website of the government mouthpiece People's Daily headlined 'Chinese netizens keen on foreign university course videos'.
'These open classes taught by famous professors are so popular that more than 70,000 search results can be found on the Baidu search engine,' the report said.