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"It gives readers a window into my life, thoughts, feelings and experiences," said Dora via e-mail. "Visitors exchange ideas. It increases an understanding between people from different cultures across the world."

Of the English-language blogs Salon surveyed -- and there are quite a few -- most avoided politics. A lot of these, like Dora, are students practicing their English. Others have a chatty LiveJournal meets Hello Kitty feel. Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley and recipient of a MacArthur fellowship for his human rights work, attributes some of this reticence to an interest the Chinese digital class has, consciously or not, in preserving the status quo.

"You also have to watch who are the people using the Internet," says Xiao, "the demography. It's not just average Chinese people. It's still a very particular kind, usually young, anywhere from teenagers to early 20s. Hardly anyone over 35. They are usually probably being wild in China, whether working at a good job or in college, and have a lot of opportunities. They are not the ones who suffer. They are not the poor workers, they are not the overtaxed peasants. They are not revolutionary. They are not the ones advocating the overthrow of the government. The government is counting on that; the Internet users are their power base. And I think they are basically right."

Higher up the food chain from the lifestyle blogs is Mao Xianghui, or Isaac Mao, a software architect currently involved in bringing the Creative Commons licensing scheme to the People's Republic. Mao is like a Chinese Dave Winer or Jason Kottke in terms of the influence he has had on other bloggers. He was an early adopter and his personal site, which covered a variety of topics, gained a steady following. In 2002, Mao founded a community blog at CNblog.org, inviting others from all over the country and world to join him. The site was called "Blog on Blog," a place for bloggers to get together and post about, you guessed it, blogging.

The bloggers at CNBlog tended to be a highly tech-savvy 20- and 30-something set who promoted blogging as a business tool. Meanwhile, homegrown blogging services began to take off, allowing users to post in Chinese. All of this took place under the radar of the Chinese government's censors.

China had long kept a censorious eye on personal Web sites -- Geocities, for example, was hemmed in years ago. Yet when blogs began to appear, the government did not recognize them for what they were, due largely, says Xiao, to the discretion of those early adopters who played down blogging's potential as a free speech engine.

"They come from an angle where they are negotiating space," says Xiao. "'Let's not promote this thing as an independent media. Let's promote it as a new tool for information management.' Not that they don't know. They did that not because they didn't see it; it was precisely because of the political angle."

"Bloggers have to pay attention to their content," stressed Mao via e-mail. "Try to avoid confliction with government's intangible regulations." Mao says that although he does not shy away from any subjects, "however, I will try to avoid sensitive words."

Still, at the end of 2002, there were only a relative handful of bloggers, perhaps a few thousand. Today, estimates put the number of bloggers in the PRC at anywhere from 100,000 to half a million. Mao thinks there are about 350,000, based on research a team of his is doing on the Chinese blogosphere.

What happened? Sex.

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