Advertisement
Blockchain
TechPolicy

China’s bitcoin crackdown pushes miners out of Xinjiang, Qinghai as Baidu and Weibo censor related internet searches

  • Qinghai province and the western Xinjiang region have ordered cryptocurrency mines to shut down amid an ongoing bitcoin crackdown from Beijing
  • China’s dominant internet search engine Baidu and microblogging platform Weibo also censored searches for three major cryptocurrency exchanges

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
7
A bitcoin miner inspects a malfunctioning mining machine during his night shift at a facility in Sichuan province on September 26, 2016. While China is home to most of the bitcoin network’s computational power, Beijing has been cracking down mining recently over concerns related to financial stability and energy use. Photo: EPA
Yujie XueandCoco Feng
China’s crackdown on bitcoin mining continues to gather steam, both on the ground and online, as northwestern Qinghai province and the Xinjiang region begin pushing out miners while search engine Baidu and social network Weibo censor search results for major cryptocurrency exchanges.

The provincial industry and information technology authorities in Qinghai ordered bitcoin mines to shut down on Wednesday and banned companies from providing related projects with land and power, according to a notice cited by state-owned Xinhua News Agency. The notice was issued after Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the province, where he emphasised the importance of environmental protection.

The same day, the local branch of the National Development and Reform Commission in Changji, a prefecture in the far western Xinjiang region, told subordinates running a local industrial park to shut down cryptocurrency mining activities, according to The Block, a blockchain and cryptocurrency news site. Xinjiang is the world’s largest bitcoin mining region by hash rate, a measure of a blockchain’s total computational power.

Meanwhile, searches for Huobi, Binance and OKEx – three major cryptocurrency exchanges – appeared to be blocked on Baidu and the microblogging platform Weibo on Thursday, in a sign that Beijing’s crackdown is also expanding online.

Infographic: SCMP Graphics
Infographic: SCMP Graphics

While the names of the exchanges alone returned no search results on the platforms, searching for other terms and topics that included their names still pulled up results on Baidu. The searches “official site of Huobi”, “Huobi download” and “is Huobi legal” were all still showing results on the search engine as of Thursday afternoon.

It is not clear when the platforms started blocking the search terms, but some Chinese media reports about the censorship had been published by Wednesday evening.

Advertisement