Orchis Tower

• Behind the Chinese blogging boom (Danwei.org, January 19, 2009) - Column by Kato Yoshikazu, originally from Oriental Outlook (瞭望东方周刊), about the significance of blogs in contemporary chinese media culture. Very good
• Li Changchun on the media and China’s “global influence” (CMP, January 19, 2009) - Background by David Bandurski about chinese government’s plans to put 6.6 billion dollars into the expansion of international news TV under the guidance of CCTV, with the translation of a talk by China’s media control czar Li Changchun
• China: Blogging for Change (Global Voices, Jan 14, 2009) - Translation of part of the discussion on Sohu’s Annual Bloggers’ Meeting (Jan 12?). Very interesting contributions on the topics of commentary, criticism and the role of the public intellectual

After the christmas break, the second half of my six-months inquiries into chinese online media is taking shape. First there will be the social drought of Spring Festival beginning after next week, when all Chinese head home to meet their families. I expect to see only expats during those two weeks, and am prudently planning to use the period for further preparation of my summer term seminars in Germany.

But there has been a lot of social interaction during the last months. Nearly no week passed without meeting new, interesting people, getting new information and new angles on my topic. Everything is still quite exploratory at this stage. No definite results to be celebrated, just an ongoing attempt to keep up with the oh-too-quickly-developing obvious.

In February I will go to Hongkong, to visit that fascinating place for the first time, and hopefully meet some experts for further exchange. And in March I want to go to Wuhan for a third time, to see my friends and colleagues there and maybe lay the groundworks for future collaboration. So the schedule is pretty dense, and I’m afraid time will pass far too quickly.

In the Chinese public sphere, cyber manhunts have got a lot of attention recently, with western media eagerly following up. This is partly due to the catchy name the chinese are using for the phenomenon. The term Renrou Sousuo (人肉搜索) literally means “Human Flesh Search Engine”, opening up a range of possible misinterpretations. Actually, Renrou Sousuo simply refers to a human-powered ’smart mob’ research for the factual background of some Internet content, not necessarily of a scandalous nature.

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If you want to learn about online media in a certain market, one of the first steps is to get the correct numbers. Starting from the general demographics, going on with overall usage patterns and more detailed data about specific market segments, down to the hardcore access data of single websites.

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There is a question coming up from time to time when I introduce my research project to chinese friends and students or western expats living in China, especially when I talk about my interest in the portal websites: Why is it that chinese media websites, especially the portals, look so completely different from western ones? Chinese pages usually are packed to the brim with hundreds of headlines and links, whereas western news sites, even the portals, consistently present much less content, usually with shorter pages and a much spacier layout.

An ad hoc count at the Sohu homepage, done in the evening hours of December 1, found, under a navigation leading to 67 different channels, a total number of nearly 1000 links (forgive me for being not utterly scientific here), most of them headlines, some of them links leading to channels or subchannels. For comparison, Germany’s biggest portal T-Online offers 24 channels, and a number of around 200 links, 50 of which belong to a special subnavigation at the page footer.

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Trying to understand Zuola’s old and new roles as citizen reporter or network engineer, we should consult another important contributor to CNBloggerCon, the Hongkong-based Sino-American Roland Soong. Unfortunately, Soong had to cancel his trip to the conference for private reasons, so he published his announced talk on his blog, the legendary EastSouthWestNorth.

Soong is one of the most important ‘bridge bloggers’, crossing the all-important language boundary between the Chinese Internet community and western readers with carefully selected translations of chinese language blog and forum entries. In his talk he reflects on his work and what has changed over the last five years. There are too many valuable and fascinating insights in Soong’s talk to summarize it fairly. I can only recommend to read it thoroughly. Instead I want to focus on one aspect I find particularly intriguing.
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Blogger Zhou Shuguang (周曙光) a.k.a. Zuola or Zola, who some days ago was barred from going to Germany by the chinese authorities, has also been one of the more conspicuous participants at this year’s chinese blogger conference CNBloggerCon, two weeks ago in Guangzhou. In front of the entrance to the conference venue, Zuola sold t-shirts showing his picture, most of the time you could see him networking eagerly, distributing his name cards, advertising his talk.

People knowing his reputation as one of China’s most famous citizen journalists could easily see that there was a subtle re-branding going on. Zuola.com (his Skype handle) is still promoting himself as an advocate of those common people who are neglected by the mainstream media. But he doesn’t want to be seen any more as ‘blogger on demand’, who can be called to help and publish the suppressed truth. He is now a “Network Engineer”, says his namecard, and many participants misunderstood the announcement of his talk, thinking he would talk about technical topics like GFW evasion. In fact Zuola was giving a lecture on how to become a citizen journalist. His newly declared aim is the empowerment of the chinese people to self-publish their concerns.
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Rebecca McKinnon has a highly interesting posting on her blog about recent research she has done at the University of Hongkong. (Unfortunately her blog cannot be easily accessed in mainland China. Even the RSS Feed in Google Reader is blocked.)

Following up on a conversation McKinnon had last year with BOB 2008 award winning Beijing lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan, she did some empirical study on how much chinese blog service providers (BSP) interfere with their hosted blogs on sensitive topics. It turns out that what Liu had observed with his own blogs is true: There is a high degree of variation. Of the 108 entries with sensitive content that McKinnon and her teams consistently posted on 15 different blogging platforms the most rigorous BSP deleted 60, the most lenient only 1!

CIC has published the first two parts of their white paper “The Internet IS the Community”. Over the last years, Sam Flemming and his team in Shanghai have done a lot to bring the importance of the chinese Internet community to the attention of their target group, which consists, of course, mostly of business people interested in learning new ways of marketing their products. But the range of CIC’s inquiry is so broad that most of their publications are interesting also to a much wider audience.

The white paper parts, published on Slideshare, provide a wealth of neatly presented current data and numbers and some carefully picked examples to illustrate the enormous potential of the chinese online community (part 1) as well as some interesting insights into new ways to measure and analyze its dynamics (part 2).

And I think they should provide a bigger version of their beautiful chinese conversation prism for download.

Yesterday Deutsche Welle announced the winners of the Best of Blogs Award 2008. Winner in the chinese language section is the Beijing-based lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan (刘晓原). Liu, who blogs about all kinds of legal matters, has recently received some international press coverage when representing the mother of Yang Jia, the man who had killed six police officers in Shanghai on July 1st and had subsequently become some kind of popular hero with the chinese public, especially after some irregularities during his trial. Yang Jia has been executed on November 26.

Another Liu-related story is his lawsuit against the big webportal provider Sohu.com because Sohu had censored his blogposts. Like many chinese bloggers, Liu works with several blog providers. He uses a dozen platforms and distributes his content on as many as six blogs per day. Every provider has deleted or edited some his postings, but often content that is censored on one blog appears without a problem on another. Rebecca McKinnon has a detailed posting on Liu and his blogging experience.

In an ironic twist of the story, Liu has recently given legal advice to blogger and citizen journalist Zhou Shuguang a.k.a. Zola, after Zola had been denied to leave China for Germany following his invitation as a jury member of the Best of Blogs Award. As far as I know, Zola gave up on joining the Jury meeting and went back to his hometown after several failed attempts to get the necessary documents. It was planned to have him participate online instead, but I haven’t heard yet whether this was successful. (More on Zola later.)

Zola is the latest in a series of renowned chinese bloggers serving as BOB jury members, starting in 2004 with notorious sex blogger Muzi Mei (which led to the bizarre decision of giving the award to a blog about dogs in that year), including Michael Anti and CNBloggerCon organizer Isaac Mao.

This years events might have additionally been strained by Deutsche Welle Chinese Service’s suspending their assistant department head Zhang Danhong in August 2008 for allegedly taking a too friendly stance toward the chinese government, following rising pressure from civic groups and other media.

It will not help that the special BOB award of Reporters Without Frontiers 2008 goes to another chinese blog. Winner is Zeng Jinyan, wife of the imprisoned activist Hu Jia, who blogs about her difficult life under house arrest and constant observation.