China: Blogging On
7 minutes, 2006
Ref: 475

The Growing Giant: China's blogging community will soon be bigger than America's, and not even the world's most sophisticated system of web censorship can silence the chatter.

Bloggers like Wang Xiao Feng are armed with a keyboard and a lot of attitude. Wang models his blog on the satirical magazine Private Eye, which a friend once brought him from England. He pokes fun at entertainers, as well as double-talking officials, in a way that wasn't possible when he wrote for a Beijing magazine. Wang doesn't regard himself as overly political, but he also knows there are many ways of making a statement and dodging the censors. Wang has now started to make irreverent videos, which he posts on his blog site. One depicts a night in a police station for man - a blogger - wrongly accused of robbery. The words read, if you confess, you'll be severely punished, if you don't you'll be severely beaten - which is a play on a common police notice urging suspects to confess in order to receive more leniency. Eventually the unfortunate blogger is released. Beijing's semi-underground night clubs have become the latest haunt of China's most famous blogger. Muzi Mai's fame resulted from her online sex diaries, which attracted ten million readers. She was sacked from her job at a newspaper in the southern city of Guangzhou, where the Propaganda ministry withdrew her permit to do journalism - at least, of the conventional sort. So she's moved to the capital, and gone into podcasts, recording the wild lives of the City's underground rock stars.