Huge new wave of blogging in China - Technology - International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French The New York Times - Technology - International Herald Tribune: "On her fourth day of keeping a Web log, she introduced herself to the world of blogging with these striking words, "I am a dance girl, and I am a Party member."

"I don't know if I can be counted as a successful Web cam dance girl," that early posting continued. "But I'm sure that looking around the world, if I am not the one with the highest diploma, I am definitely the dance babe who reads the most and thinks the deepest, and I'm most likely the only Party member among them."

Thus was born, early in July, what many regard as China's most popular blog.

Sometimes timing is everything, and such was the case with the anonymous blogger, a self-described Communist Party member from Shanghai who goes by the pseudonym Mu Mu. A 25-year-old woman, Mu Mu appears online most evenings around midnight, shielding her face while striking poses that are sexually provocative but never sexually explicit. She parries questions from some of her tens of thousands of avid followers with learned witticisms and cool charm.

Chinese blogs have existed since early in the decade, but the form has exploded in recent months in a strong new wave of online activity that is challenging China's ever-vigilant online censors and giving flesh to the kind of free-spoken civil society whose emergence the government has long been determined to prevent, or at least tightly control.

Web experts have said that the upsurge in blogging is the result of strong growth in broadband Internet usage, coupled with a huge commercial push by the country's Internet providers to attract users. Common estimates of the number of blogs in China range from a million to two million, and the population is growing fast.

Under President Hu Jintao, the government has waged an energetic campaign against freedom of expression - prohibiting the promotion of public intellectuals by the news media and imposing restrictions on Web sites, like requirements to register domain names.

The government has also pressured search engine companies to bar sensitive topics, particularly those dealing with democracy and human rights, and has heavily censored online bulletin board discussions at universities and elsewhere.

So far, the Chinese authorities have mostly relied on Internet service providers to police the Web logs. Commentary that is too provocative or too directly critical of the government is often blocked by the provider, and sometimes the sites are swamped by opposing comments - believed by many to be from official censors - that are more favorable to the government.

Blogs are sometimes shut down altogether, temporarily or permanently. But the authorities do not yet seem to have an answer to the proliferation of public opinion in this form.

The new wave of blogging took off earlier this year. Unlike in the past, when a few pioneers of the form stood out, huge communities of bloggers are springing up around the country, with many of them promoting one other's online offerings: books, music, or, as in the case of Mu Mu, a highly ironic commentary about sexuality, intellect and political identity.

"The new bloggers are talking back to authority, but in a humorous way," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley. "People have often said you can say anything you want in China around the dinner table, but not in public. Now the blogs have become the dinner table, and that is new."

"The content is often political, but not directly political, in the sense that you are not advocating anything, but at the same time you are undermining the ideological basis of power."

A fresh example was served up this week with the announcement by China of five cartoonlike mascot figures for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. They were lavishly praised in the media and widely ridiculed in blogs, in what seemed to be a more accurate expression of public sentiment.

"It's not difficult to create a mascot that's silly and ugly," wrote one blogger. "The difficulty is in creating five mascots, each sillier and uglier than the one before it."

Wang Xiaofeng, a 38-year-old Beijing entertainment journalist, is a leading practitioner of the sly, satirical style that is fast emerging in China as an influential form of political and social commentary. Wang, who runs a site called Massage Milk, is better known to bloggers by his nickname, Dai San Ge Biao, meaning "wears three watches."

His blog mixes cleverness with increasingly forthright commentary on current events, starting with his very name, which is a patent mockery of the political theory of the last Chinese Communist Party chief, Jiang Zemin, a theory labeled San Ge Dai Biao, meaning the Three Represents.

In a recent commentary, as the government stoked patriotic sentiment during the commemoration of the defeat of the Japanese in World War II, Wang asked who really fought the enemy, making the risqué observation that only two Communist generals had died fighting Japan, while more than 100 of their rival Nationalist counterparts did.

"In blogging I don't need to be concerned about taboos," Wang said. "I don't need to borrow a euphemism to express myself. I can do it more directly, using the exact word I want to, so it feels a lot freer."

Another emerging school of blogging, potentially as subversive as any political allegory, involves bringing Chinese Web surfers more closely in touch with things happening outside their country. Typically, this is done by avid readers of English who scour foreign Web sites and report on their findings, adding their own commentary, in Chinese blogs.

One of the leading sites of this kind was run by Isaac Mao, a Shanghai investment manager who started out writing about education and shifted to technology before having his site, isaacmao.com, blocked by the authorities when he posted a graphic purporting to illustrate the workings of the firewall operated by the country's censors.

Mao, an organizer of the blogger conference, has gone back online recently under the name notisaacmao.com.

By far the biggest category of blogs remains the personal diary, and in this crowded realm, getting attention places a premium on uniqueness. For the past few months, Mu Mu has held pride of place, revealing glimpses of her body while maintaining an intimate banter with her many followers, who are carefully kept in the dark about her real identity.

"In China, the concepts of private life and public life have emerged only in the past 10 to 20 years," she wrote online.

"I'm fortunate to live in a transitional society, from a highly political one to a commercial one," she wrote, "and this allows me to enjoy private pleasures, like blogging.""