Orchis Tower

China’s Internet community is ablaze these days with the Social Networking phenomenon. Whereas the Facebook hype seems to finally deflate (at least according my own subjective observations), the Chinese have just discovered the joys of six degrees social graphs and buddy functionality.  Big portal providers and bloghosters like Blogbus are adding SNS features to their blogs, and some bloggers even go so far as to proclaim the end of blogging.

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• China tangled up in red, white and blue (Shen Dingli, Asia Times, 2008-10-03) - Overview of China’s ‘official’ attitude towards the US elections by a scholar from Fudan University (a little too ‘balanced’ to be really interesting)
• The Great Crash of China (Brian Klein, FEER, 2008-10-01) - Misleadingly titled article giving a rather bleak outlook on China’s current economic situation. (Additionally, some current numbers about the Chinese real estate market, from Caijing, via The Age)
• Trading Strains (John Thornhill, FT, 2008-10-01) - About the growing ‘China-angst’ in the EU. China Financial Markets blogger Michael Pettis concludes: “China is going to be forced somehow to adjust its monetary policies just when everything on the external front has gone wrong. This won’t be easy. We should all hope the recession associated with the US financial crisis is very, very mild.”
• What Has My Country Done For Me? (Southern Weekend 2008-09-28, via ESWN) - Most respondents cite education, peace and prosperity
• Skype messes up, badly. (Rebecca McKinnon, RConversation, 2008-10-03) - So Skype has been compromised too, through its Chinese partner Tom. No big surprise, actually. Rebecca McKinnon has the story and an evaluation of it.

• China watches U.S. elections with bemusement (Los Angeles Times, 2008-09-06) - To the Chinese the US elections seem to be a strange, overdone spectacle
• The Three Closenesses 三贴近 (CMP Media Dictionary) - Li Changchun’s January 2003 elaboration on Jiang Zemin’s notion of “guiding of public opinion” with the three-tiered “Closeness to reality, closeness to the masses and closeness to real life” (贴近实际，贴近群众， 贴近生活). Also relevant: Li’s concept of “enlarging and strengthening” (做强做大): making chinese cultural and media organizations competitive against international brands.
• Sanlu’s public relations pawns: a relay of lies in China’s media (David Bandurski, CMP 2008-09-28) - A thorough analysis about how PR persons from Sanlu were presented as “correspondents” by major chinese media from July till early September.
• Chinese fear online mobs (Owen Fletcher, Asia Times 2008-09-25) - Report on “renrou sousuo” (人肉搜索) and the beginning chinese sensitivity to privacy.
• Coal Miner’s Daughter (The China Beat, 2008-09-28) - Another article on 人肉搜索。 This one focussing on the blurring between fact and fiction. (With a response here, relating the “human flesh search engines” to the ancient european ritual of “rough music”.)
• The Censor in the Mirror (Ha Jin, The American Scholar, August 2008) - Censorship and Self-Censorship as seen from a writer’s perspective
• Chinese Youth on Western Media: A Diversity of Opinion (CNReviews, 2008-09-14) - Discussion of a Tianya posting originally translated by Roland Soong of ESWN.
• 9 Terms to Learn China History in the Past 30 Years (CNReviews, 2008-09-23) - 9 important terms to summarize the 30 years of chinese opening.
• Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success (Avinash Kaushik, Occam’s Razor) - Helpful thoughts about Blog Metrics

Nearly half a year has passed since the last entry. Those months have mostly been defined by teaching and other research, but also by preparations for finally making Orchis Tower a proper research project - on chinese online media, especially on portals and the blogosphere.

Now I’ve arrived and settled down in Beijing for a half-year sabbatical, equipped not only with a new computer, camcorder and sound recorder, but also with an official invitation as a visiting scholar at the Central China University for Science and Technology in Wuhan. Will go there regularly, for academic cooperation and some teaching. Wuhan University is huge, with a beautiful campus hosting more than 50,000 students, and, I’m told, the biggest program for educating new media journalists in China. Greatly looking forward to being there.

I won’t have to change the subtitle of the blog, though. This space is still going to be for the occasional observation, finding and small report. But quite certainly with higher frequency than before, I promise.

It’s time to get Orchis Tower going again, after an involuntary break induced by an overflow of other, teaching-related work. Followed up on my China feeds today. Read and tried to digest a few hundred blog posts. Mostly about the Tibet crisis, mostly depressing, with a lot of noise. Some signal - like most entries on the very good China Beat. I especially liked this posting, which is pre-T, but highly applicable to the issue. Another interesting item was this article on The Guardian’s Comment is Free website. Its author, Pankaj Mishra, also contributed a portrait of the Dalai Lama in a book review at The New Yorker, a little too favorable to my liking, e.g. sparing the reader the tibetan leader’s known involvement with several bloody CIA plots in times of the Cold War.

Many German media really did a poor job (follow the link and scroll down for some examples) during the Tibet crisis. Even experienced China correspondents like Kai Strittmatter (Süddeutsche Zeitung) contributed biased and clichéd reporting. And, especially with the Germans’ infatuation with the Dalai Lama, the willingness to come to uninformed and quick conclusions seems to have been overwhelming.

No fun being a Chinese in Germany these days. Read this sad protocol of a young Chinese’ conversations with his german co-worker in some german office, ripe with arrogance and misunderstanding. (Of course he’s wrong in assuming that it is the Germans who block the Internet connection to his favorite China-based BBS, but this just shows how much mistrust has already been caused.)

There have been exceptions, of course, like an early interview with Georg Blume, a ZEIT and TAZ correspondent who was at Lhasa during the first days of the riots, or this thoughtful article at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about the communication breakdown between chinese and western media. But even the Blume interview was tainted by the editorial staff of SPIEGEL ONLINE with a misleading headline.

“China’s New Intelligentsia”, this month’s Prospect title story by Mark Leonard, provides for some highly fascinating reading. Even though Leonard does not cash in its headline’s ambitious promise, he quite efficiently places the thought of some Chinese intellectuals into the context of The Middle Empire’s recent internal and external actions and development.

In my eyes the foremost value of informed articles like this one consists in the fact that they serve as an invitation not to talk about, but enter into a discussion with people representing widely differing world views, presenting them not as naive or even as authoritarian brutes, but as people quite able of giving reasons for their positions.

Let’s face it: Liberal western democracies may have had their high time during the 90s, but more and more they are experiencing a legitimacy crisis, due to many factors: the US’ rapid descent into unilateral authoritarianism, a declining trust into the traditional party systems, the diminishing credibility of the media as a safeguard of public knowledge and awareness, among others.

Of course we’ll still hold that free media, free and secret elections, the division of power, a system of checks and balances etc. are all necessary ingredients of any really good form of societal organization. But this might not be as self-evident as it seemed to us after years of liberal complacency. And it is not only for the sake of human rights in some places we haven’t even begun to understand that we have to re-enter the market-place of ideas and test or defend our positions. It might turn out that the pragmatic discourse of some Chinese thinkers could help us come to grip with some of our domestic problems as well.

Saturday evening I’ve met Héng Gē (横戈), CEO and founder of Blogbus, the oldest independent blog service in China, in a small café opposite of the Shanghai Public Library. Heng Ge, whose regular name is Dòu Yì (窦毅), founded the service in late 2002. With more than 4 million accounts they are not the biggest, but probably the best-reputed blog service in China, sporting a lot of users from the oh-so-important “creative class”. They don’t do advertisement for the service, just word-of-mouth campaigning.

While the major competitors are all working with teams of several hundred employees, Blogbus is still a small bunch of people. And they are profitable. After having drawn a major outside investment in 2006, Blogbus reached the break-even in time for their 5-year anniversary in 2007. Blogbus’ source of revenue are context-sensitive advertisement and user-fees for premium services like customized URLs, designs, and extended upload space.

And they are proud of experimenting with innovative forms of advertisement, making use of the community for providing an emotional background of awareness for offline campaigns. E.g., Blogbus invited their bloggers to an event at Shanghai’s Ice Bar sponsored by Absolut Vodka, inviting them to write about it without explicitly mentioning the brand. Or Blogbus bloggers participated in a series of theatre events that were part of a campaign for the new Buick Lacrosse (motto: “My Gentleman Boyfriend”). A new idea involves linking certain keywords in bloggers’ contributions to discussions about beauty and ugliness, thereby setting the stage for an offline campaign of a cosmetics brand. Don’t they expect protest of the users? No, because it’s just a temporary, playful thing.

Right now the Blogbus blogs are organized into 8 channels, each maintained by 2-3 editors. Every other week 10 new interesting “passengers” are featured on the homepage. The users are encouraged to form groups along interesting topics. Something like the topical structure of About.com is the model for this strategy.

There is no financial incentive for the bloggers. I ask about revenue sharing (like Sina.com, one of the big portal and blog service providers, is offering it to its power bloggers). After some slightly evasive answers, Mr. Heng says, No, we normally don’t pay any bloggers for their contributions. Only if they participate in outrightly commercial campaigns. But there is a honour system, outstanding bloggers get credit for their work and they are invited to special events organized by the company.

The talk is a little difficult, due in part to the language barrier and the tedious procedure of having questions as well as answers translated by a helpful friend. But also, both of us are a little uneasy with the situation. I’d prefer to talk about blog culture and content, he prefers to talk about his successful business. I have yet to find the right tone between journalistic interview and scientific inquiry, encompassing both.

Through some winded path of reference I found a recent study comparing the online behaviour of Chinese and American youth. Henry Jenkins gives a useful summary of some its findings:

• Almost five times as many Chinese as American respondents said they have a parallel life online (61 percent vs. 13 percent).
• More than twice as many Chinese respondents agreed that “I have experimented with how I present myself online” (69 percent vs. 28 percent of Americans).
• More than half the Chinese sample (51 percent) said they have adopted a completely different persona in some of their online interactions, compared with only 17 percent of Americans.
• Fewer than a third of Americans (30 percent) said the Internet helps their social life, but more than three-quarters of Chinese respondents (77 percent) agreed that “The Internet helps me make friends.”
• Chinese respondents were also more likely than Americans to say they have expressed personal opinions or written about themselves online (72 percent vs. 56 percent). And they have expressed themselves more strongly online than they generally do in person (52 percent vs. 43 percent of Americans).

Compare further with this highly interesting and helpful CC-licensed 100-page summary of a $3,000 report on Tencent’s QQ, one of the staggering success stories in Chinese Internet business. (Page 23 is an echo of this line of thought.)

(Via ChinaVortex, among others)

As was to be expected, James Fallows’ article on China’s Internet control system, “The Connection Has Been Reset”, is an excellent one, well-informed and balanced.

Funny enough, when I followed Fallows’ recommendation yesterday and downloaded the software for a “virtual private network” (VPN), I experienced exactly one of the measures described in his article. Sitting in a café, I was able to read the homepage of the VPN company, but when I wanted to order the product, the connection was blocked for some minutes.

But after a while, I was allowed to complete my purchase, and now I am able to access the blocked sites whenever I want (Wikipedia and the Blogspot blogs having been especially annoying blind spots on my Beijing Internet map). It’s like the watchdogs just wanted to tell me: “Don’t you think we don’t know what you’re up to - but look, we are a friendly bunch of people!”

Update Feb 28, 2008: There is an additional interview with James Fallows online at the Atlantic’s website: Penetrating the Great Firewall. 

From the “Survey Report on Blogs in China 2007″ press release, published on December 26, 2007, by the “China Internet Network Information Center”:

[B]y the end of Nov. 2007, the number of blog spaces has reached 72.82 million in China, and with 47 million blog writers, it is reaching one fourth of the total netizens. This indicates the rapid growth of the blog market in China.

The survey statistics show that by the end of Nov. 2007, the number of blog spaces has reached 72.82 million in China, while that of blog writers has totaled 47 million, which means that one out of every 30 Chinese, or one out of four netizens writes blogs. Also, the active blog writers have taken up 36% of the total blog writers, approximately 17 million, and the number of valid blog spaces of the active blog users is 28.75 million.

(Via Kaiser Kuo: Digital Watch)