This post is a day ahead of what might have been an on-and-off, full year of Twitter becoming “invisible” or being “harmonized” in mainland China. By that, of course, we mean Twitter being blocked in China. The twentieth anniversary of what’s known as “some sensitive anniversary” got the authorities more than a bit upset — thereby granting it a license to basically shut down all major SNS sites outside China. For those of us still on SNS sites inside China, numerous limits were also placed. Censorship increased and appeared to go on and on.

That was June 2, 2009. @mranti (Michael Anti) warned tweeps that everyone’s favourite tweeting machine will “go under” — “soon” or “one of these days”. A year ago, that date finally “became true”. Along with Twitter, Facebook and flickr also died, and the then-new Bing also “went under”.

The funny thing is that although Twitter was supposed to be completely “dead” (the API block coming an hour or so after the initial twitter.com block), it wasn’t the case. We switched to other tools, such as iTweet, which were blocked months after the “sensitive anniversary”. We set up our own Twitter sites, such as Twitese, which also got blocked. For those of us with the tools, we did VPNs. There was always a way for us to tweet. When @thomascrampton came to town in August 2009, he was positively amazed that everyone heard of the tweetup — via Twitter, of all things. Before Twitter got blocked, we had only a couple hundred tweeps around early 2008. The 2010 stats now speak of over 150,000 tweeps, 100,000+ of these China-based.

The censors had wanted to stop Twitter. Instead, they did what’s known as a bang dao mang (帮倒忙); instead of nixing Twitter, they helped it spread like wildfire. It’s a fact of life that active Twitter users are tracked by the cyberpolice, who are also present on Twitter and have been known to follow “sensitive people” and harmonize, or censor, any third-party Twitter site being promoted like wildfire. There have been cases of people tweeting much-too-sensitive content and being called into the police office for interrogation, and to be ordered to stop blogging “all this negativity”.

Yet despite official disapproval, Twitter is not gone from China. Radio broadcasts make reference to Twitter and nobody gets fired. The printed media also makes the rare reference to Twitter at times — apparently without serious consequences. While much of the Chinese Web (”official” Web rather) may have gone onto Sina Microblogs, Twitter has managed to thrive. People know that because Twitter does not censor (once you can get into the service), Twitter comes closer “to the truth” than “eunuch-ized” local microblogs.

It’s that old adage at work, once again: when there’s a will, there’s a way.