After the Moranbong Band's abrupt cancelation of their performances in Beijing over the weekend, it appears Chinese censors went to work deleting speculation and chatter about the North Korean girl band on mainland sites.
The Moranbong Band, whose members were said to be handpicked by North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, were on a goodwill mission to Beijing and were set to perform three concerts starting Saturday night. But just hours before the first, they abruptly canceled the gig and headed home on a North Korean jet.
The band was supposed to perform songs such as "Long Live the Workers' Party of Korea" and "I wanted to see you (Comrade Kim Jong-un)" at the invite-only goodwill concert, said Sina.
North Korea did not offer an explanation, and the Chinese state-run press cited "communication issues at the working level" for the cancelation.
The failure of the concerts, which the Chinese foreign ministry earlier said was meant to improve ties between China and North Korea, sparked speculation that North Korea had taken offense at some of the chatter online leading up to the performances.
Posters on Weibo noticed that the day after the band's departure, searches for "Moranbong Band" were blocked on the Twitter-like site, instead showing an error message.
Pages of videos on the Moranbong Band on streaming site Youku were also deleted.
Freeweibo.com, a site that captures deleted Weibo posts, shows several posts that official censors could have deemed offensive to North Korean eyes. In this post, a user condemned North Korea's abrupt decision and lack of explanation, calling the country "childish" and "unpredictable".
And even seemingly-innocuous posts weren't spared, either. An announcement of the cancelation from the National Theatre, where the band was to perform, was also deleted. The notice had been reposted several times on Weibo, and some of the retweets that were accompanied by speculation were also deleted.
It seems that chatter on the Chinese web was possibly part of the reasons North Korea pulled the performances in the first place. Leading up to the gigs, Chinese netizens had been circulating rumors about a past relationship between Kim and one of the members of the band, a North Korea expert told the Associated Press.
A story posted a week prior to the Moranbong Band's arrival, titled "Kim Jong-un's dark secret", was read over 100,000 times and detailed some of Kim's previous relationships and mysteries around ex-girlfriends' disappearances.
In October, the Chinese censors started blocking posts on Weibo ridiculing the infamously thin-skinned North Korean leader. Searches for one of his derogatory nicknames on the Chinese web, "Fat Kim the third", were blocked on Weibo and China's most popular search engine, Baidu.
China and North Korea have traditionally been allies, although relations have seemingly cooled since Kim's ascent to power in 2011. Kim has so far refused to visit China, and China has been upset with North Korea's nuclear tests in recent years.
But the two appear to be trying to mend those ties, and China certainly doesn't want errant Weibo posts to rock the boat. In October, high-ranking Chinese official Liu Yunshan visited Pyongyang, and this visit by the Moranbong Band was widely publicized in the Chinese press.
