Fool’s Mountain: Blogging for China

It’s not my intention to be critical here. But I find this blog has evolved into a polite debating society. Comments to one post can run up to several tens or even well surpassing 100. However, they are more of opinions and criticisms rather than analysis and suggestions. Continue reading »

This post was submitted by Netizen K.

Uighur-Online, a gathering place for many minority voices in Xinjiang that has often pushed the limits of political speech in China, is again available online (连接).

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While looking into the Pew Global Attitudes Survey (which deserves a blog post of its own), I came across these interesting results highlighted by Pew, with the title ‘Few in China Complain About Internet Controls‘.  This survey was conducted in 2007:

• Over four years of tracking user reaction, trust in the reliability of online content has fallen by one-half, from 52% in 2003 to 26% now.
• Only about one-third of internet users (30%) said they considered online content reliable.⁵
• An overwhelming number of Chinese, almost 84%, agreed that the internet should be controlled or managed.
• Since 2005, the percentage of users who say that online content about “politics” should be controlled or managed jumped from 8% to 41%, by far the biggest increase of any items tested.

It’s fair to wonder whether the survey is fully representative. After looking at the methodology in detail (pdf) (which polled 2000 urban residents in 5 cities), I think these numbers do give us at least a fuzzy picture of common trends.

This all tells me that perhaps we shouldn’t expect much liberalization online in the near future. There’s just too little popular demand for it.

And the newest expression sweeping the Chinese internet: “I don’t give a $@*&; I’m just here to buy soy sauce.” (关我鸟事，我出来打酱油的)

It comes to us from Guangzhou TV last December, when an average man on the street was asked his opinion about a pressing social issue (the Edison Chen photo scandal if you must know). He gave a very, uh, candid and straight response.

This works very well with the Chinese sense of humor, and has just exploded in usage over the past few months. It’s taken on other meanings now without a clear definition… but I’d summarize it as: “I’m cynical as hell.” As rumors of official corruption after the earthquake were swirling, the emotional young Internet crowd often turned to this phrase when they felt frustration, but had little else to add… at least without having their post deleted by censors. (”More corruption? Whatever, who gives a $@*%, I’m just here to buy soy sauce.”)

This follows the “very pornographic, very violent” (很黄很暴力) expression which started sweeping the Internet a few months ago.

Many people probably know that the number of people going on line in China has just recently, officially, passed the number of people going online in the United States . (Many believe China passed the United States long ago, since hundreds of millions login through anonymous internet-cafes where they aren’t “counted”.) But many people might not understand what this really means from a practical impact point of view.

Perhaps due to cultural reasons, or perhaps due to political reasons, or perhaps just due to demographics… just as in the real world, life on the internet is substantially different in China from what it is in the United States. I want to introduce a few of these differences to the English-speaking world.

Tianya remains one of China’s most popular and famous message forum sites (and partly owned by Google). At any given time during the day, Tianya will have anywhere from 50,000 to 250,000 viewers. Interesting threads will stay active for years at a time, accumulating tens of thousands of replies. Active threads (like those following recent Olympics torch rallies) will build up thousands of replies within the matter of one or two days. Numerous, significant, nation-changing “movements” have come out of Tianya.

Details after the jump.

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