Little red blogs | 1, 2, 3, 4

Li Li did for blogs in China what Janet Jackson did for nipple shields in the United States. And like Jackson, she outraged and titillated an entire nation. Sina.com, the largest Chinese Internet portal, posted her stories online, and a full third of China's then-Internet population -- some 20 million users -- logged on to read them. By November, Chinese censors moved to ban both her site and her book. But by that point, the whole country was talking about blogs, and scores of young, tech-savvy Internet users began to set up sites of their own.

Blogging's growth in China is also directly, and somewhat paradoxically, related to the efforts of government censors. In January 2003, the government walled off access to the Blogspot.com domain, leaving Chinese with the ability to post, but unable to share that content with their compatriots, or even view it themselves. At the time, China Internet watchers speculated the entire domain might have been blocked merely to cut off one particular Blogspot site, Dynaweb, which posted lists of proxy servers that allowed Chinese citizens to circumvent the government's Great Firewall.

Not everyone, however, thinks the blocks were purely politically motivated. Pennsylvania native Adam Morris, an ESL teacher working at a British international school in Tianjen Tianjin, China, keeps a blog at brainysmurf.org, and frequently writes about political issues. Morris speculates that the government blocked access to American blogging services in order to drive traffic to Chinese-owned ones.

"I'm fairly convinced it was a business decision to limit the field of competition for online services," said Morris via e-mail. "The government does this fairly often. For example, when a mainland director comes out with a movie, China bans foreign movies for a month in hopes of driving up sales."

Either way, this silencing had a secondary consequence, according to Xiao.

"My speculation was that I wondered if they really hated Blogger.com, or if it was because of [just] one of those blogs, and in their usual blunt way they blocked the whole IP and didn't care. Those few bloggers had to go somewhere else and they helped start blogging in China."

Nonetheless, the IP censoring remains a tremendous barrier between Chinese Internet users and free and open speech. Roughly 30,000 Chinese are employed maintaining China's Internet monitoring and blocking services, according to Reporters Without Borders. Numerous Chinese Internet users I spoke with complained of the unpredictable ways in which those censors operate. A single comment on a bulletin board system (BBS) might cause censors to pull down the whole board. Thus even those who play by the rules can still find their site blocked by the Chinese government, based on comments someone else might make on the same domain.

To use an analogy, imagine the Bush administration blocking every site hosted on Blogspot.com, due to comments made by a single user such as Atrios. In addition to just walling off Atrios' political site, thousands of other politically neutral, or even supportive, sites hosted on the Blogspot.com domain would be taken out as well.

"[There is] no good blogging service", in China, says Wang. "Blogcn.com and other blogger service providers [are] not stable -- mainly because it has to shut down the server when the government finds any sensitive information on any of the 100,000 blogging users' pages."

And even if you don't have to worry about your site going down, the Great Firewall -- China's attempt to control Internet access -- still has a stifling effect.

 Next page | No negotiating, no bargaining: Just pull down the Web page, now
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