Chinese blogger ‘fired’ after John Kerry meeting

A Chinese blogger who called on US Secretary of State John Kerry to push for Internet freedom in China has been fired by his employer, he told AFP on Sunday.

Journalist Zhang Jialong was one of four bloggers who met with Kerry in February, where he urged the United States to help “tear down the great Internet firewall”.

Beijing tightly censors the Internet, banning websites including Facebook and Twitter with a system labelled the “Great Firewall of China”, and ordering domestic Internet firms to delete content that government officials deem “sensitive”.

Zhang’s employer Tencent dismissed him on Friday for “leaking business secrets and other confidential and sensitive information”, he said, calling it a reprisal for his meeting with Kerry.

Zhang said that authorities at Tencent, one of China’s best known Internet firms, told him his dismissal was prompted by the meeting, and his posting online of censorship orders issued by China’s government.

Directives published by Zhang included an instruction for websites to delete a video by a Taiwanese singer because it briefly showed “a man on an ambulance wearing a Free Tibet scarf”.