Shuimu Tsinghua (; abbreviated SMTH) BBS is the first and most prestigious bulletin board system among Chinese universities. Hosted by Tsinghua University, it is recognized for its diversity and depth of topics.

Access to the BBS was limited to campus-only since March 16, 2005, effectively blocking away a substantial portion of its contributors, ranging from graduates living overseas to students from other universities in China. A small protest was held at the elite university against tightening Internet censorship in mainland China on the Internet.

=1995: How it All Began=

In early August of 1995, ace set up a BBS program on a 386/Linux machine in the lab. Later, ming and lucky joined the endeavor and transferred the system onto a SUN Sparc 20 with 64M memory. On August 8, the BBS formally declared open, and was named Shui Mu Tsing Hua , often abbreviated to be SMTH. The IP address then was 166.111.1.11.

In October, SMTH started to provide MUD. Since November 27, SMTH became accessible through World Wide Web (WWW). At the end of 1995, the number of registered users at SMTH reached about several dozens.

=1996=

Between March and April, SMTH community organized a kite-flying party and received large publicity nation-wide as CCTV (China Central Television) recorded and aired the event in its Our Generation program. SMTH became accessible to the entire campus community around the end of April and saw its traffic peaked. Number of online visitors often reached three digits.

September 18, 1996, radical opinions regarding Diaoyu Islands (as known in China, Senkaku Islands as known in Japan) issue appeared in many BBS s across China. The government reacted by closely monitoring these BBS s. Two sites in Peking University were temporarily shut down. SMTH was closed for one day. The following month, SMTH closed its Military, History, Salon and Time-Space Report sections.

At the end of October, Firebird BBS replaced the former system. Before that, administrators did a massive overhaul on the original Firebird system. In November, the second version of the WWW-BBS architecture was realized. In December, SMTH experienced a severe hard drive breakdown, resulting in the loss of two-month worth of information.

=1997=

In January, recovered from its hard drive failure, SMTH reopened without WWW access. At the same time, Tsinghua University BBS Regulation came into effect. At the end of February, due to the death of Deng Xiaoping, SMTH was temporarily closed. It reopened on third of April. Its IP address was changed to 202.112.58.200.

Late June, the SMTH community launched a fund-raising compaign for a student who fell seriously ill.

Late September, the BBS administrative committee was established and began its first term. SMTH s management and maintenance became regularized.

=1998=

On March 4, SMTH was again closed during a period when the National People s Congress and the Chinese People s Political Consulative Conference both convened. It reopened on April 1. In June, the site had another scheduled shut-down. When it was online again on June 15, users organized an offline get-together, a party they called happy98. On December 9, in the atmosphere of The Asian Olympics Games, SMTH created a temporary section devoted to the news and analysis of the event, setting a precedent for all major sports events to follow.

=1999=

On the eighth of May, American missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Yogoslavia. Many users simultaneously expressed their anger on SMTH, causing a surge in its site traffic.

On December 18, SMTH acquired the domains smth.org and smth.edu.cn.

=2005: From Public to Restricted=

The Ministry of Education of the People s Republic of China issued a mandate in 2005, demanding all university BBS systems to be reformed into campus-wide communication platforms requiring users to register under their legal names. SMTH BBS is made to be the pioneering example for other universities to follow. In responese, Tsinghua University decided to turn SMTH from a public BBS into a campus-restricted BBS with effective from March 16, 2005.

In the afternoon of the same day, the BBS Administrative Committee issued An Open Letter to All Users of SMTH , stating their stance on users outside the university. The history of SMTH in the past decade has shown that, with a friendly community atmosphere, good academic discussion, development of informational sections and effective, strict internal site management, users outside the campus are not the cause of mismanagement, nor the source of various destablizing elements. On the contrary, a fully open, strictly managed off-campus user community has proven to be instrumental to SMTH s vigor and quality, and hence contributes in a tremendous way to the upholding of the academic reputation of the University. The Committee went on stating that, Users outside the campus are an extremely important source to the vibrant culture of SMTH. Come what may, SMTH will never forget its many users outside the campus, past, present or future. At the same time, many public users found they were unable to connect to SMTH normally. Instead, they were greeted with the welcome message: Effective from today, BBS SMTH is restricted to only on-campus access. All outside IP s are blocked.

March 16, after a brief recovery of service, Lily, the BBS of Nanjing University,, became read only , depriving all users of their posting privileges.

March 17, many university BBS s (including Unnamed of Peking University, Terra Cotta of Xi an Jiaotong University, etc.) closed their public access one after another.

Meanwhile, searching keyword Tsinghua University in the popular Baidu Search Engine no longer returns the entry Tsinghua University BBS which used to rank the second. Similar screening has been done to other university BBS s as well.

Shortly after the blocking, students of Tsinghua University found various means to express their discontent. They produced large amount of screenshots of previous greeting messages of SMTH to express their condolences, hope or criticism.

On March 18, students of the University voluntarily organized a gathering. Many people expressed their sadness by folding numerous paper cranes.

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