" Since the WSJ didn't do this for its English language pages, my best guess is that they weren't trying to hide content from search engines, but rather trying to work around some old browser bug that incorrectly rendered (or made ugly) Chinese text, but somehow rendering text via JavaScript avoided the bug."
Or maybe they were trying to get past the great firewall of China?
> Or maybe they were trying to get past the great firewall of China?
Possible, but at that time the only affected pages were for a certain date range in their archives, not the most recent pages. I alse think the Great Firewall of China did simple context-free regex searches that would have caught the text in the JavaScript literals.
Or maybe they were trying to get past the great firewall of China?