Little Trouble in Big China

By Steve McCain

I know this topic might be getting old, but I cannot help reading every bit of information that pops up on the issue. Regardless if Chinese officials blame a "paperwork error" for conflicting records of gold medalist He Kexin's age...the coincidence with her appearance is too compelling to ignore. The article below describes the actions of 32 year old computer specialist, Mike Walker, who decided to test his computer hacking skills after hearing stories of missing records regarding the ages of Chinese gymnasts.

After about three days of on-and-off cyber-sleuthing last week, Walker found copies of a spreadsheet that had previously been posted on a Chinese government website. It listed the age of the Chinese gold-medal gymnast He Kexin as 14, not 16 as it says on her passport.

Walker and others owe their discoveries in large part to internet search engines like Google and Baidu. Search engines visit, or crawl, sites across the internet periodically to build an index that users can search. Most search engines also keep a copy, or cache, of the pages they index. Because some websites are crawled infrequently, say every few weeks, a file may remain in cached form long after it has been removed from the website where it originally appeared.

That is what happened with the documents that Walker and others found. But it took some digging. After much trial and error, Walker conducted a search on Google for spreadsheets on Chinese websites that contained He's name and the year 1994. Walker got one result, a registry of athletes from the General Administration of Sport of China. When he clicked on the link, the file was no longer on the site. Walker was able to view the cached version, but He's name was not listed.
That raised suspicions for Walker and other bloggers that Google could have modified the cached file, perhaps at the request of Chinese authorities. Google denied it. The company said that it caches only the first few hundred kilobytes of a spreadsheet. The file in question was large, and He's name did not appear in the portion that Google had cached. Walker said he was satisfied with that explanation.

Walker had better luck with Baidu, a Chinese search engine, whose cached copy of the athletes registry included the entire spreadsheet. It listed He's birthday as Jan. 1, 1994, which would make her 14. The cached page has since vanished from Baidu, probably because Baidu has crawled the site again and updated its cache accordingly.

By Walker's account, bloggers have uncovered at least four other official documents that show He's age as 14.
Not everyone believes the evidence. Comments on Walker's blog point to other information suggesting the Chinese Olympic gymnasts are all 16 or older.

Parts of this article where extracted from the Brisbane Times. Click here to read the entire article.