Censored Sina Weibo posts translated into English by HKU project

Some posts deleted by censors from mainland microblogging site Sina Weibo have been recovered and are now available in English.

WeiboScope, a program that can recover deleted posts - including those removed by government censors - has collected 200 million posts since its launch at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in 2011.

And now a team of data journalism students from the university's journalism school have developed a search engine that makes some of those posts accessible to English-language users.

"The Chinese internet is a closed book for most English-language speakers," said Henry Williams, a student from Britain. "By creating WeiboSuite, we want to make a very important part of it much more accessible to journalists across the world."

More than 300 million mainlanders use Sina Weibo to communicate with each other. Some have used the platform to expose corrupt officials and spread information that would otherwise be censored or played down.