Page 98 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

New York Times and Newsweek have blogs, blogging networks have sprung
up, and bloggers such as the politico Arianna Huffington have become
celebrities. Bloggers have clout and press credentials to cover presidential
elections. From the appliance salesman to the next-door neighbor, blogging
has moved from cult status to the mainstream. How do I know this? My
mother in rural Ohio even got me a book on how to start a blog.
Blogging is a natural in a democratic country, such as the United States,
founded on the principles of liberty and freedom of the press. After all,
blogging is the freest form of expression on the Web today. Chinese youngsters
have discovered blogging and love it, but the proliferation of blogs in China is
a challenge for the government to police and also a threat. Pornography has
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been allowed to flourish online, but politics or religion have not. Authorities
have blocked controversial bloggers and shut down blogging sites.
Dozens of cyberdissidents have gone to jail for posting articles critical of
authorities, according to Reporters without Borders. Rebecca MacKinnon, an
advocate of free speech in new media and a journalism professor at the Uni-
versity of Hong Kong, says she knows of several bloggers who have been
threatened. Those bloggers self-censored their comments, started a new blog
with a different Web address, or stopped blogging for a while, she adds.
“Chinese bloggers and blog-hosting businesses have viewed censorship as part
of the necessary trade-off required for online speech,” MacKinnon says.
But the blogosphere door is creaking open. One indication: A recent post
criticized the mascot figure designs for the 2008 Beijing Olympics as silly and
ugly. The designs were praised in government-owned Chinese media outlets.
Today, some 30 million Chinese are bloggers, accounting for more than a
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third of the world total. Blogging first became popular on university
campuses in China in early 2003, soon after it took off in the United States.
I decided to investigate this phenomenon and set up an interview with a
Chinese entrepreneur who played a key historical role in getting the com-
mercial blogging business going: Fang Xingdong, the founder and creative
spirit of Bokee.
Fang discovered blogging as a new media outlet in mid-2002, when his
rants about Microsoft’s dominance as a threat to the adoption of new media
in China disappeared from online chat rooms on the Mainland. A friend
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clued him in to the rise of blogs in the United States. He lay awake nights,
pondering the possibility of starting a blog in China. By the end of the

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