Newsnet, Commentary, Blog, and Twitter (also called Weibo in China) are the major channels for more than 500 million Chinese to access news, voice opinions, and exchange ideas on current important domestic and international issues; although the exchanges are ephemeral and in flux, they play a vital role in people's daily life. The CDL's Web Archiving Service provides a perfect platform to capture and preserve ephemeral contents to fill the gaps of collections and services. The "Current Events in China: popular websites, blogs and twitters" is an attempt to do just that. The sites are identified by Professor
James Tong of the
Department of Political Science at
UCLA and Professor Yong Hu of The Journalism Department at Peking University. The capture started in September 2012.