According to a
news story winding its way around the Web, China now has more than 34 million
blogs, with 17.5 million
people considering themselves bloggers. Apparently the Chinese blogosphere has
increased 30-fold in size in the past four years.
The content of
most Chinese blogs skews heavily toward pop culture and daily life, as political
dissidents are known to suddenly "disappear" with a little help from the Chinese
government.
I
wonder if bloggers there have the same annoying things as Western bloggers. Does
the exploding Chinese blogosphere write about its cats or lunch (rice, again) in
a pink, blinking Comic Sans font?
Lockstep patriotism is mandatory in China -- although it's
spreading here, it's still optional. Do Chinese bloggers embed
animated .gifs of waving Maoist flags in their blogs, I
wonder?
It
drives me nuts that I can't speak Chinese and figure this out for myself.
There's a whole culture evolving and exploding over there, and we've got no easy
way to access it - infuriating to guy whose curiosity rivals that of a thousand
cats.
Virtual China
offers up a really fascinating digest of what's going on online in China -- it's
a window to the online East that I'll be looking through regularly. One recent
link from the page goes to Linese.com, an
expansive resource for people to learn about Chinese culture. Don't
think you're going to learn much about the political climate there,
though.
China's media policy is vaguely defined and harshly enforced to prevent a free
flow of information among its people -- despite China's desire to keep up with
technological innovation and communication on a global scale. Whether or not the
Chinese government likes it, the people are talking among themselves really,
really fast. The government may be able to prevent the spread of "harmful"
information now, but it won't be able to do it forever.
Like the
Chinese proverb says :"Enough shovels of earth -- a mountain. Enough pails of
water -- a river."
