A pseudonymous Twitter user who posts as @hanunyi claims to have attended a talk by Fang Binxing (characterized as the “father of China’s Great Firewall” and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications) at Wuhan University in Hubei province and to have pelted Fang with eggs and shoes. Fang’s office denies the attack took place, but the Luojiashan public security bureau alerted the Associated Press that police came to the university to “investigate a shoe-throwing incident.”
“The egg missed the target. The first shoe hit the target. The second shoe was blocked by a man and a woman.
“I didn’t think this little thing would get such a big response,” he added several hours later, following the online outpouring of glee.
@hanunyi, who said he was not a student at the university, was still tweeting on Friday. Responding to one comment warning he might be detained, he noted: “So far, not yet. Just woke up. Thank you…”
Earlier this year Fang closed a microblog within days of opening it after thousands of Chinese internet users left comments, almost all of them deriding him. They attacked him as “a running dog for the government” and “the enemy of netizens”.
He later told the Global Times newspaper: “I regard the dirty abuse as a sacrifice for my country.”
Fang told the state-run newspaper that internet controls were not tough enough, a comment that presaged increasingly tight controls.
China’s ‘great firewall’ creator pelted with shoes
(Image: Humpty was pushed, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from aussiegall’s photostream)