A 'blog' revolution sweeps across China

This posting is taken from: The 'blog' revolution sweeps across China by Xiao Qiang, New Scientist, 24 November 2004.

Isaac Mao and Zheng Yunsheng created China’s first online discussion forum about blogging technology and culture in late 2002. They soon gathered a small but devoted group of participants, many of whom went on to develop the technology that makes blogging possible for China’s half-a-million bloggers. When they started CNBlog.org, China had 67 million Internet users; now it has more than 90 million.

Since 2000 China’s police force has established internet departments in more than 700 cities and provinces. “Net police” monitor websites and email. Since 2002, all internet service providers have had to sign a self-censorship pledge. The “Great Firewall” protects the nine gateways connecting China to the global internet, preventing surfers in China from accessing “undesirable” web content.

By January 2003, when the Chinese government blocked all access to blogspot.com, China had about 2000 bloggers. Three websites offered them a refuge: Blogcn.com, Blogdriver.com and Blogbus.com. All were blog-hosting services started by people who had first gathered on Mao’s website. All were based inside China, and inside the Great Firewall.

In early 2003, most Chinese commenting online were using not blogs, but bulletin boards and chat rooms. In China, the moderators censor these sites’ content. More than 1000 words, including “dictatorship”, “truth”, and “riot police” are automatically banned in China’s online forums. Yitahutu, China’s most influential bulletin board, was closed down by the net police in September 2004. Unlike other online forums, Yitahutu was moderated by its users, who voted to decide which post should appear on the front page. The censors reacted to content they didn’t like by closing down the entire site. By that time the site had more than 300,000 registered users and 700 discussion forums.

This type of censorship is part of the wider internet crackdown that intensified in 2003, shutting down almost half of the country’s 200,000 internet cafes, and installed surveillance software in the rest.

A woman’s explicitly sexual web log inadvertantly helped change the situation. By mid-November 2003, more than 160,000 people had logged on to her site and the number was growing by 6000 a day. While her explicit writing and lifestyle challenged traditional morals, causing heated debate in the Chinese media, Mu Zimei also made the Chinese for blog, bo ke, a familiar word for hundreds of millions of people.

By the end of October 2004, China had more than 45 large blog-hosting services. A Google search for bo ke will return more than two million results, from blogs for football fans to blogs for Christians. While the larger hosting companies have become subject to censorship regulations, any tech-savvy user can download and install blogging software themselves, bypassing the controls.

Material that would once have been banned by censors now spreads through the blogsphere, evading the efforts of those censors by circulating within the network of blogs.

Meanwhile blogging seems set to grow as a national hobby for the younger generation. Providers of China’s 300 million mobile phones are beginning to provide “moblogging” services, with which users can send text and photos directly from their phones to their blogs. Most of this is personal, but who knows where Chinese young people will go with moblogging.