Boxun.com is an overseas Chinese

Overseas Chinese

Overseas Chinese are people of Chinese birth or descent who live outside the Greater China Area . People of partial Chinese ancestry living outside the Greater China Area may also consider themselves Overseas Chinese....

 community website created by Meicun "Watson" Meng, who studied in the United States after working for two multinational companies in China. Boxun covers international political news and human rights

Human rights

Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

 abuses in the People's Republic of China

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

, among other topics. Boxun allows anyone to submit news to the website, which results in a large number of articles remaining anonymous. Editors attempt to confirm and verify the articles, with pictures and videos published for evidence.

Boxun is an alternative source of news from China. Readers include NGOs

Non-governmental organization

A non-governmental organization is a legally constituted organization created by natural or legal persons that operates independently from any government. The term originated from the United Nations , and is normally used to refer to organizations that do not form part of the government and are...

 and government organizations seeking information about China. The website has a literature section as well, devoted to short stories, essays, and political commentaries written by people in China and overseas.

Boxun is the first known Chinese website in the model of citizen journalism

Citizen journalism

Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information...

. It may also be the first Chinese blog, having started in 2001.

In February and March 2011, the site is blocked in mainland China

Censorship in the People's Republic of China

Censorship in the People's Republic of China is implemented or mandated by the PRC's ruling party, the Communist Party of China . The special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal systems and are largely self-governing, so these censorship policies do not apply...

 following calls for a Jasmine Revolution in China.

The Boxun servers are run from an office in North Carolina since 2000.

Meng's tax-exempt organization, China Free Press, is registered to the same North Carolina address as the Boxun website. From 2005 to 2009, the organization received grants totaling $513,366 from the National Endowment for Democracy

National Endowment for Democracy

The National Endowment for Democracy, or NED, is a U.S. non-profit organization that was founded in 1983 to promote US-friendly democracy by providing cash grants funded primarily through an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress...

, a U.S. non-profit organization founded in 1983 to promote U.S.-friendly democracy and funded primarily through an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress. While the organization says it is independently run and audited, critics, including German leftist magazine konkret

Konkret

konkret has been the name of two German magazines.konkret was originally the name of a magazine established by Klaus Rainer Röhl in 1957, that was an influential magazine on the German political left in the 1960s...

, have suggested that it is simply a tool of U.S. foreign policy.