BEIJING, Nov. 5 (Xinhua) -- A petition calling for rational views on China has been censored and deleted by U.S. website Change.org, French journalist and writer Maxime Vivas, main author of the petition, said Thursday.
"The petition for the right to speak differently about China was censored by Change Org which warns me: This petition is not available," Vivas wrote on his Twitter account.
Change.org is an American petition site based in San Francisco. With hundreds of million users across the world, the website claims that it offers the public the opportunity to promote petitions they care about.
In the petition "Stop the demonization of China," he recalled that "a real beating" against him was taking place in France, saying that "what our media cannot stand is simply the publication of works that are not Sinophobic, not racist, not fomenting imperialist wars."
"We claim the right to speak differently about China," the petition says. "Let us respect China as it respects us."
Vivas has visited China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region twice, and recounted what he saw in a book entitled "Uygurs, to put an end to fake news," which has dismantled the lie of genocide in Xinjiang.
"This petition is not about urging people to say good things about China, but about having a discussion about what really happened in the country, allowing all sides to express their views of China, to debate and to do researches based on the truth," said Zheng Ruolin, a researcher at China Institute of Fudan University and one of the premier signatories of the petition.
"We never thought that even this could not be allowed," he told Xinhua.
Some Westerners, including Vivas, have discovered that the truth about China is contrary to what have been reported in the Western media, and that is why these people have launched the petition, he added. Enditem