Little red blogs | 1, 2, 3, 4

This censorship chiefly affects news portals and blog service providers, who are held responsible for the content posted to their sites and are often ordered to remove material that runs counter to the government line.

"We do have many pressures from the government," said Liang Lu, CEO of Blogdriver.com, at a Berkeley conference on China's digital future. "If your blogger is [posting messages] against the government, the government will call you and tell you to delete it."

Haibo Lu, news editor with Chinese portal Sohu.com, put the process bluntly: "No negotiating, no bargaining, simply remove this news from the front page where you cannot see and the common people cannot see."

"But," points out Liang, "so many bloggers post their own opinion, that within a few days information becomes distributed everywhere. Everyone will know it."

This distribution, however, more often takes place on cellphones via SMS, in chat rooms, and on bulletin boards -- places that offer greater levels of anonymity or impermanence. Dissent more often shows its face in these forums that are harder for the government to monitor and control.

"On the blog more or less your personality shows," says Xiao "You put yourself out there and for both social and political reasons people don't want to be that out there and be in trouble. You're asking for it."

Yet many Chinese bloggers are putting themselves out there, to varying degrees. Among them is Wang Jianshao, who shies away from overt criticism of the government but treads the line rather closely. Wang wrote extensively about the SARS outbreak last year, and has repeatedly reported on site blockages, as well as some of the red tape site operators face in publishing their work. Earlier this year, Wang even went so far as to proclaim, in reaction to the Blogbus block, "I am not a good citizen and didn't follow the current law well enough."

Typically some of the most pointed criticism comes from Westerners like Morris, or the tabloidy Shanghai Eye, a site published out of China, via a U.K. domain, that openly mocks such topics as "Chinese Democracy in Action."

"Practically speaking, we aren't monitored the same way natives are," says Morris. "For Chinese-language bloggers, on the other hand -- although I don't think it's mostly 'killing a few flies to scare the monkey' -- they really have to worry about calling unwanted attention to themselves and their families. Once a Chinese national writing in English was stunned that she heard about the shooting of President Chen Shuibian through my blog and not through official channels (there was a few-day news blackout). She said she wanted to write her feelings but didn't because she was worried about the repercussions. The most Western bloggers in the PRC have to worry about is whether or not their blog community gets blocked."

Although blogging is growing, it remains limited in terms of both scope and influence. As Mao points out, 300,000 (or for that matter even a million) bloggers in a country of 1.4 billion is not much in the way of a trend. And Xiao notes that it still takes a backseat to SMS and other means of peer-to-peer communications.

"It's certainly changing the current dynamic," he says, "but I would not say at this point that it's destabilizing the current dynamic." Yet this, he notes, may change.

"It's starting to, and will play a bigger and bigger role to influence the free flow of information and expression. You will see some crackdowns, you will see some services being shut off, you may even see some bloggers being arrested. But overall, the genie is out of the bottle."

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