Monday, January 17, 2005

Don’t be led astray�

By Joey Liu

MAINLAND BLOGGER Aggressive Little Snake was upset when he lost his mobile phone on a recent trip to his home town of Xuanhan in Sichuan province, but he’ll soon be compensated with a new Apple laptop valued at 50,000 yuan. It’s an award for his weblog Dog Newspaper, which was voted Best of the Blogs in the world’s first international competition, run by German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Launched in 2002 by Yan Wenbo (his real name), the newspaper at www.18mo.�com is devoted to dogs. Put together in a collage style, the blog shows the unfair conditions that dogs suffer on the mainland and in other parts of Asia, compared with the treatment of animals in the western world. The blog also tracks the stranger and more curious aspects of a dog’s life, such as a match-making service, which Yan jokingly refers to as “dog prostitution”, dog begging and those lucky few that live as luxuriously as their owners.

“The jury members saw the winning blog as a successful metaphor for the situation of people living in China and other nations,” said Guido Baumhauer, online editor-in-chief at Deutsche Welle, organiser of the International Weblog Award 2004. “The blog is a good example of weblogs bringing up an issue that isn’t tackled by the traditional media.”

Blogging, a relatively recent tool for ordinary people to publish their views online, has been a hit on the mainland. First introduced in 2002, it has reportedly drawn more than half a million users, with the figure expected to reach three million this year. However, although blogging is seen as a promising new medium because of the freedom of speech it allows, bloggers on the mainland are cautious, by and large, about broaching one topic: politics.

Even Yan, the creator of what the jury decided was the best blog in the world, declined to explore the political meaning of the metaphor he created in the Dog Newspaper. “I admit that I intentionally made the contrast to show the inequality of dogs in the eastern and western worlds,” says the 33-year-old dressed in a pink shirt, jeans and sneakers. “But I would rather not elevate the meaning to the political level. If you interpret it as a parable on human rights, it’s your own interpretation. And I encourage different interpretations of my blog.”

The political parallels seem clear. As a dog lover and “father” of a Labrador and a schnauzer, Yan says he’s inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which tells of how a group of animals fall under the dictatorship of their revolutionary leaders, who have expelled the farm’s human owners. The ironic style of the blog can be seen from its Chinese title, gou ri bao, which can be understood either as “the dog newspaper” or “f*** the newspaper”.

But if Yan’s blog is a parable, why does he shun spelling it out? “I’m unwilling to get involved in politics,” he says. “If one day I mess up and it’s all over, where would the fun be in that?”

Eloquent and witty, Yan is liable to judge things by how much fun he has. Politics is something he classifies as “having no fun”.

As one of the earliest bloggers on the mainland, Yan knows what will happen if he’s not passive enough. In January 2003, the government blocked all access to blogspot.com, the server that hosts all blogs registered on the US-based portal blogger.com. It suspected a user on the site was publishing proxy server addresses that allowed others to circumvent the so-called Great Firewall of China, a system of policing the internet to filter out politically critical content.

In a country where the internet police are always alert (with 30,000 of them reportedly manning the Great Firewall), blogging spread slowly at first. Then, in November 2003, along came Mu Zimei. With explicit details and real names, the Guangzhou-based woman’s sex diary was such a huge hit that user registrations at blogcn.com, the host site, rose to 160,000 from 20,000 by late 2003. There was a similar influx of registrations and visitors to other blog-hosting sites.

Mu’s highly personal style was enormously influential on blog designs, and broke down many taboos. Another blogger, Zhu Ying Qing Tong, posted photos of her naked body. Weng Fan, a 28-year-old graduate student who recently married an 82-year-old conservative physician, Yang Chenning, is also an avid blogger, who posts love poems between her and her elderly lover.

“Now, blogs have become women’s powder rooms,” says Yan. “But it seems to be inevitable. There are two groups of people online: exhibitionists and voyeurs. Their existence is the product of our environment, which doesn’t allow people to talk about serious issues, and encourages them to talk about personal or trivial things.”

Two main groups of people have been crucial in the development of blogging on the mainland: CNblog.org and BlogChina.com. Shanghai-based information technology specialist Isaac Mao Xianghui and his Fujian schoolteacher partner Zheng Yunsheng set up CNblog.org and an online forum about blogging technology and culture. Beijing-based Fang Xingdong set up BlogChina.com in August 2002, roughly at the same time as Mao started his blog-hosting business.

Made famous by Mu, the Chinese term for blog – boke (pronounced boh-ke) – was coined by Fang’s company. But Mao and Zheng don’t like the word, saying it stains the meaning of blogging because boke has since been understood as an online diary purely in Mu’s style.

They say they also fear the democratic and open nature of blogging will be ruined by the commercialisation advocated by the word’s inventor, Fang, who has been criticised for publishing users’ articles without permission, and for not paying a copyright fee while providing a blog-hosting service. Fang declined a request for an interview.

While the Great Firewall of China is blamed for having extinguished mainland bloggers’ enthusiasm for politics, Yan says that other factors are also at play. A key issue is China’s decades-old ideological education, which instils a sense of self-censorship in everyone. That’s exacerbated by new rules requiring all internet service providers to pledge self-censorship before they can operate.

“Chinese are politically different from foreigners,” he says. “We study politics from childhood. We all have a strong sense of what can be said and what cannot. Reality teaches you to protect yourself. There’s a Russian blogger who writes his daily life in the tone of [Vladimir] Putin. But in China, can you imagine someone daring to do the same?”

However, a few brave souls have begun to take up the blog as a communications and publicity tool, showing its potential. On December 17, strikers in a Japanese factory in Shenzhen set up a weblog to document how the local police were helping the investor stop the strike. The blog was spotted by The New York Times, which reported the story.

In another case, Tinyfool, a Chinese blogger, reported that a group of villagers in Lanzhou set up a blog in October to protest against the eviction and confiscation of their farmland by local authorities. In response, local officials set up their own blog to “clarify some facts”. It was a blog war.

Seeing how the government was prepared to use blogs to fight back made some users fearful. As a blogger under the internet name of Sorrowrain writes: “While technology enriches the means of mass communication, it also enriches the government’s means of control. The cost of control is lowered and the control can be more powerful.”

However, Yan hasn’t lost his faith. Two months ago, he quit his job as a sub-editor with China Business Post to join Fang’s BlogChina.com. He’s responsible for editing the website’s weekly online magazine, made up of the best articles published on the site within a week.

“For now, the internet still provides the freest environment in China,” says Yan. “As long as you don’t take the joke too far, no one will stop you. It’s the place where I can have most fun.”

“I’ve finished editing two issues [of the BlogChina.com’s online magazine] so far. I’m now thinking of doing an issue with a red cover featuring a worker, a soldier and a farmer, like this …” Yan draws an elbow across his chest in a martial pose often seen on posters during the Cultural Revolution.

“It’s real socialism, isn’t it? I like jokes like that,” he says, winking.

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