This is an excerpt from a longer text Hu Yong has written for the catalog of Ars Electronica 2011. Hu Yong is one of the speakers at the conference “public square squared – how social fabric is weaving a new era” (September 4, 2011), curated by Isaac Mao and David Sasaki (Brucknerhaus Linz).

In China, there exists in actual practice no mechanism in the political decision-making process to take the opinions of private citizens into consideration and to enable these opinions to make an impact. Moreover, the reform of the judicial system is moving ahead at a sluggish pace and the media are subject to state censorship. The upshot of all these factors is that citizen journalists and the opinions they articulate in the public sphere in China have assumed a special and very prominent role. I differentiate among four types of influence citizen journalism is having on Chinese politics and society.

1 Accountability Politics

Since the internet is constrained to a lesser extent by social norms and institutionalized political authority than other media are, the opinion of the citizenry—something that used to keep a low profile—has attained a very high degree of visibility there. And even if most Chinese people can generally be regarded as members of the silent majority, the internet now affords them the opportunity to speak out loud and clear and has brought forth a means of doing so that they regard as appropriate for this medium. An essential point in this regard is that netizens are attempting, within the framework of the constitution and other legal provisions, to make the powers that be answerable for what they do, and, in a society in which government officials have been accorded a highly privileged status, to slowly sow the seeds of political accountability.

When netizens strive to call politicians to account for their misdeeds, they utilize a method that has come to be known as a “human flesh search,” 1 whereby users join together in an online community to conduct research about the event’s background or a person’s biographical details and to post these findings online. In recent years, there have been numerous instances in which government officials have been forced to resign after netizens used this method to expose a scandal.

In October 2008 when Lin Jiaxiang, the party secretary of the Maritime Safety Administration of the City of Shenzhen, was suspected of having sexually molested a little girl, netizens put a video online that showed him arguing with the child’s parents. In the video’s subtitles (the video itself did not originally feature audio), Lin Jiaxiang spoke to the parents in an extremely arrogant way—to the great displeasure of netizens who immediately launched a human flesh search with him as their prey. On November 3, Lin was forced out of all his offices by the Party Secretariat of the Ministry of Transportation and expelled from the party because the statements he made (while inebriated) in public conveyed a horrendously bad image.

In December 2008 in Nanjing, the head of the Jiangning District Housing Construction Authority, Zhou Jiugeng, was dismissed after netizens had published photos showing him at a meeting smoking extremely expensive cigarettes and wearing a Vacheron Constantin watch. On October 10, 2009, a Nanjing court sentenced Zhou to an 11-year prison sentence. The case of Zhou Jiugeng is a textbook example of the role netizens play in the battle against corruption.

In November 2009, reports were posted online indicating that Attorney General Liu Lijie from Arun Banner(qi, meaning county) of Hulunbuir Prefecture in Inner Mongolia (one of the poorest counties in that autonomous region) drove a luxury SUV. She too was later relieved of duty.

In February 2010, the diary of Han Feng, director of the Tobacco Monopoly Administration of the City of Laibin (Guangxi) was put online, and the upshot was a storm of indignation. The diary entries from January 2007 to January 2008 led readers to conclude that his professional and private life consisted primarily of getting drunk, getting laid and collecting bribes. He was dismissed from office immediately. On March 14, the Party Committee of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region decided to strip Han Feng of his party membership and oust him from all government posts he held. On December 14, a court in the city of Nanning (capital of Guangxi) convicted him of accepting bribes and sentenced him to 13 years in prison and a fine of 100,000 renminbi (RMB), about €11,000.

The rapid development of the internet and the new channels for free speech that this has opened up have already instilled fear and loathing in bureaucrats’ hearts and minds. This was tersely stated by a representative of the Ministry of Propaganda of the Province of Shaanxi: “Back then, before the internet, all was still right with the world. They said what we wanted them to say.” 2 In April 2010, the People’s Tribune magazine (Renmin luntan) under the People’s Daily conducted an opinion poll on the subject of government officials’ fear of the internet. In connection with it, the secretary of a county party committee said: “On the internet as it now exists, government officials run the danger of becoming a ‘weak group.’” 3 The results of this survey indicated that 70% of respondents held the opinion that Chinese bureaucrats suffered from “fear of the internet.” When the polling center at the People’s Tribune magazine surveyed 300 party and government officials and asked which category of bureaucrats feared supervision via the internet the most, 47% of respondents put “officials on the county level” at the top of their list. Interviews conducted by journalists have revealed that top-echelon officers in the propaganda Ddepartments and secretaries of county party committees fear the internet the most. 4

In another opinion poll conducted online, 71.5% of respondents stated that they would personally take part in the “battle against corruption” and 77.5% said that, if they were confronted by “unwholesome manifestations” in society, they would denounce them on the internet. The Procuratorial Daily (Jiancha ribao), a newspaper under the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, had this to say about the survey results: “In a comparison of all the various news media, the internet is the open forum for the expression of opinions that does the best job at living up to its social responsibility to represent the public interest by acting as a watchdog agency dedicated to uncovering corruption (…) the internet already constitutes a powerful weapon when it comes to cutting through red tape, simplifying formalism, and stemming signs of corruption like exploiting positions of power for personal gain.” 5

On the internet, the general public has finally found a public site in which it can move about relatively freely (and fearlessly) and where emotions and critique can assert themselves. This also explains why things proceed less “peacefully” and “reasonably” in the new media as compared to other media in China. And it’s also an indication that, in light of the special political facts and circumstances prevailing in China, the internet has assumed much greater political significance.

2 Information Politics

Anyone who posts objective, factual information online assumes the role of a “witness” to a certain extent. Frequently, such a witness not only documents the “truth” about an event for posterity; he/she can also crystallize what the general public is thinking and advance the process of solving social problems. Liu Wenjin wrote: “In modern-day society, the ‘primal sin’ of people is not so much not knowing but rather ‘looking without seeing.’” 6

Naturally, in contemporary Chinese society, the hope that people will really “see” what’s going on also evokes fear on the part of some. The reason for this is that inherent in this “seeing” is power that ought not to be underestimated. It is the power of the “eyewitness,” of memory, of looking out for one another. During a sensational case of Ppolice “fishhooks” entrapment in Shanghai in which Judge Huang Jiang had threatened the party who had been provoked to commit a misdemeanor with the words “You must obey!” Attorney Hao Jinsong responded with the now-famous words “I’ll tell you this: Thanks to the internet, everything you say here can be known throughout the world within 24 hours!” 7 Cases like this one show that the internet is a natural ally of Chinese netizens because, as they go about seeking the truth behind events and struggling to attain social justice, it enables them to deploy their testimonials in such a way that they can achieve maximum impact.

Very often, a news item is first published by netizens and subsequently picked up by print media outlets and TV stations. Citizen journalism can function as a barometer in that reactions by netizens serve as a basis upon which it can be estimated whether a news story will—or should—be pursued by the mainstream media. Hot topics often come to the fore as follows: People who want to promote certain information log onto a few influential websites and aggressively comment on articles that are getting lots of views/likes; these comments are then shared, and as soon as they’ve achieved a certain momentum, conventional media that are receptive to content in this area jump on the bandwagon and publish interviews and background stories. In doing so, they orient their coverage on user comments, and this quickly gives rise to synergies among net-based and conventional media.

At the same time, the citizen media also constitute a feedback mechanism for the conventional media and assume the role of an amplifier and “mixer.” For example, conventional media in the Province of Guangdong were the first to report on the case of Sun Zhigang 8 but the in-depth reporting and analysis were concentrated on websites like Sina.com, sohu.com, people.com.cn and Xinhuanet.com. Here, net-based and conventional media worked hand-in-hand and thereby built a consensus that shaped public opinion. There have also been other cases in which print media were the first to play up their doubts about the government version of a situation, but this was subsequently concentrated and disseminated online. Close interaction among print and online media make it possible for a participative public opinion to crystallize.

These information politics have already permanently changed the Chinese media landscape. Before 2003, the conventional media and the so-called new media were two completely separate worlds because the conventional media paid no attention to reportage in the new media. But this separation broke down over the following years and there now exists an often very fruitful interactivity among new media and mainstream media. Together, they have changed the way news is reported. The relative transparency of the new media also led to old, established news institutions becoming more open and more interactive.

3 Resistance Politics

Modern-day China generally lacks effective channels for political participation and the representation of people’s interests. Under such circumstances, people and institutions that are unable to defend their own interests are forced to apply highly risky resistance methods to articulate their needs and to seek redress. At present, China is going through an unprecedented transformation process during the course of which methods of resistance are assuming ever more complex forms.

China now stands at the threshold of an era of popular struggle to obtain rights. Farmers, workers and the middle class that has only recently emerged are all fighting for their “civil rights.” Regardless of which group we’re talking about: people’s struggles for their rights are unimaginable without taking full advantage of the internet. The internet plays a key role above all in expressing opinions and organizing initiatives. The relatively unrestricted freedom to state ones views has the effect of changing collective perception and sets up a framework for collective action. If people lack this perception and/or this frame of reference, it is exceedingly difficult for collective action to occur. At the same time, a resonant reaction in public opinion can be triggered via the internet and support can be gained for a social movement. But another aspect is perhaps even more important. A fully developed civil society does not currently exist in China and the formal social institutions are incapable of motivating people, but the internet is capable of surmounting precisely these obstacles and, by means of an “unorganized organized force,” helping citizens take meaningful, effective action.

Cases of resistance are daily events in China. When they occur, online and offline situations often add fuel to each other’s fire. This is also a warning addressed to the government: A healthy social order demands normal, institutionalized governance. To voice their grievances about the all-pervasive, virulent social contradictions and conflicts, citizens should not be forced to excessively rely on the internet, where their needs are turned into “news,” or to have to go online to establish contact with higher-echelon officials in order to solve their problems.

A few wise local officials have already gained insights from their personal experiences with the internet and come up with a way that is suitable in the context of Chinese circumstances to react to unexpected events. For example, Shanghai pParty sSecretary Yu Zhengsheng advises “reporting about facts quickly, but reporting about background factors cautiously.” He stated: “How is one to deal with public incidents? First off, one must react rapidly. One must provide an explanation. In the case of major events that affect public security, one must quickly lay out the facts. In the case of harsh criticism of the government, one must act fast regardless of whether the critique is justified or not. By all means, an answer must be forthcoming when the government is called into question. And even if one has no response, one must admit that we have not yet analyzed these questions and we are not yet able to provide an answer. Second, one must be guided by the facts. Third, the emphasis must be placed on the institutions.” 9

And the former party secretary of Anhui Province, Wang Jinshan, checked in with this advice: “In the case of internet incidents, under no circumstance is ‘hiding’ the right course to take, ‘blocking’ doesn’t work either, and ‘delaying tactics’ are an even less attractive option. If one assumes a negative stance, one is forced to remain on the defensive; only when one takes an active approach can one assume leadership. Two things are particularly important. First of all, a quick reaction is absolutely essential. As soon as the news item appears, one must address the issue and take a position. One must read what is being written online and one must post a response there. One may neither remain silent nor attempt to deceive. One must act both promptly and prudently. Secondly, solving the problem must always be the aim. On one hand, one must take advantage of the internet in the effort to understand the situation and to gather valuable information; on the other hand, one must analyze this information to separate truth from falsehood and to give netizens a responsible answer so that the problem can be solved effectively.” 10

4 Symbolic Politics

The term “symbolic politics” means using symbols and narratives to impart a frame to an event and thereby influence public opinion. The internet provides highly effective support for the production and dissemination of graphic symbols. Accordingly, activists mobilizing online deploy above all images and digital videos in order to make a powerful symbolic impact. For example, the previously mentioned resistance politics, due to its radicalism and dramatic nature, can be propagated online very easily and activate the opinions of netizens. If, for instance, shocking images or videos surface in conjunction with some acts of resistance, the events will be reported in a very simplistic and provocative way, and construed values will be disseminated along with them. A very close relationship exists between current social movements and the media, and to a certain extent such social movements essentially constitute a media war. But this also means that “visual mobilization” plays an essential role.

For example, a Hong Kong University scholar Qian Gang, before he investigated the self-immolation of Yihuang 11, looked into the chain of information dissemination following a previous very prominent case of self-immolation. In the city of Chengdu in Sichuan Province, Tang Fuzhen, resisting the forced demolition of her home set for November 13, 2010, burned herself to death on the roof of the house. Qian’s investigation revealed that the torrent of reportage peaked after Chinese national TV broadcast the story of “the death of someone about to be evicted” on December 2^nd at 9:30 PM and ran a cell phone video showing Tang’s fiery suicide. This “video effect” immediately triggered an online explosion of commentary about the woman’s self-immolation. 12 In the case of Yihuang, videos and images of victims’ burning themselves were also uploaded onto the internet. Above all in the wake of the appearance on microblog sites of photos of Zhong Rujiu, a member of the victim’s family, showing the woman being pulled away by government officials, the news item went viral and became a widely discussed event.

Chinese netizens also conduct “imaginary revenge” campaigns involving a special form of satire in which the powerless are empowered and clout is wrested away from the mighty. When, for example, in 2009 netizens protested the mandatory installation of Green Dam 13 filtering software on every PC, satirical images, videos and songs began to make the rounds. Some very imaginative netizens even invented a cartoon character named Maid of the Green Dam who was decked out in an armband emblazoned with the word “Discipline” and a hat adorned with a symbolic river crab [Internet slang created by Chinese netizens in reference to internet censorship]. In one hand, she holds two lucky hares (a mascot representative of Green Dam); in the other, she has a bucket of paint to whitewash the ugly spots on the internet. Stories and songs sprouted up about this girl, and they were soon accompanied by various spinoff products like T-shirts and games. Next up was a complete assortment of cartoon characters. Indeed, some netizens even “proudly” claimed that these were probably the first Chinese cartoon characters whose origins were not an act of copyright infringement!

Despite the fact that citizen journalism plays such a diversified and essential role amidst China’s special political and social situation, it’s important to keep in mind that the development of internet-based citizen journalism in China is by no means proceeding smoothly. Such efforts have run into three types of obstacles: Journalists are strictly controlled by the Chinese government, as a result of which “citizen journalists” have no legal status; Journalists working for conventional media ostracize citizen journalists in an effort to safeguard their own privileged professional position; and citizens invest too much hope in citizen journalism when it comes to solving problems, which can end up leading to a loss of credibility for citizen journalists.

Conclusion

Can an eyewitness with no Press ID disseminate news online? The exceptional world of Chinese media is populated by many individuals who aren’t professional journalists. They’re just private citizens equipped with a camera and a blog/microblog who participate in events of great import in these times in which many conventional media outlets have been forced to wear a muzzle and a leash when doing their reporting.

Wherever we are and whenever we observe whatever goes on around us in society, when we feel the need to contribute our views, our critiques and our concerns to the public discourse, the internet and our cell phone enable us do so. The various domains of the network-linked public sphere provide every individual with access to a channel in which they can express their opinions, pose questions or conduct investigations without being at the mercy of media organizations. New forms of decentralization and division of power are emerging, which is making possible new forms of control, new political discussions and organizations, and influencing topics and discourses. The bottom line: people who have merely been passive recipients up to now are becoming potential participants in the political dialog and potential protagonists in the political arena.

This mobilization, this activism on the part of netizens now occurring on a small scale, could proliferate into a systematic, widespread demand for respect and justice. What will develop out of this won’t be a revolutionary movement but rather a transformative one committed to slowly changing the nation and the society and contributing to the wellbeing of all members of society.

Footnotes

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine

2 Zheng Tingxin: “When the school principal meets the county head,” in: Southern People’s Weekly, January 25, 2008，http://www.infzm.com/content/4859

3 “Expressing exactly what bureaucrats feel: Online, government officials are a ‘weak group,’” in: People’s Tribune, May 6, 2010, http://politics.people.com.cn/GB/1026/11535839.html

4 “Opinion poll: The head of the Propaganda Department and secretaries of the county party committees are the ones who fear supervision via the internet the most,” in: People’s Tribune, May 6, 2010，http://politics.people.com.cn/GB/1026/11535806.html

5 “For three-quarters of all citizens, the internet is for airing grievances. The citizens’ battle against corruption still awaits recognition by the system,” in: Procuratorial Daily, November 11, 2010, http://leaders.people.com.cn/GB/13185774.html

6 Liu Wenjin: “We’ll meet again: Impressions after the Simone de Beauvoir Prize was awarded to Ai Xiaomin and Guo Jianmei,” in: 21^st Century Review, April 2010, p. 121

7 Quoted from He Bing’s blog: “Judge Huang Jiang: What damage have you done to the Supreme Court?” October 28, 2009, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_486bea1a0100fam9.html

8 On his way to an Internet café, Sun Zhigang, a new immigrant to Guangzhou, was stopped by police and asked for his ID. When Sun said he had left it at home, the police took him to a nearby station. By the next day when his boss and friends showed up with the necessary papers, Sun had been transferred to a detention center for vagrants. Two days later, on March 20, he was dead, the victim of a brutal beating in the center’s infirmary. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,458835,00.html#ixzz1Q5zPOpUo

9 “Yu Zhengsheng on the party building activities in Shanghai: Revamp the institutions as energetically as possible and go forward with concrete efforts,” in: Liberation Daily, November 17, 2009, http://sh.sina.com.cn/news/2009-11-17/0836122886.html

10 “Wang Jinshan: When leading government officials go online, then it’s a sort of unofficial visit,” in: People’s Daily, November 23, 2009, http://leaders.people.com.cn/GB/10424980.html

1**1 The most famous case of individual resistance in 2010 took place at the Zhong family home in Yihuang of Jiangxi Province. Three people set themselves on fire during a conflict in the morning of 10 September 10, 2010, when the Zhong family home at Fenggang Village, Yihuang County, Fuzhou, Jiangxi was forciblye fully demolished. Photographs taken at the scene were circulated at lightning speed on major websites, including popular microblogs, in China. At the time when the incident was “live cast” via the microblogs, someone attempted to warn the leaders of Yihuang County by phone and via text messaging, but they had failed to arouse the attention of the leaders. The county leaders had failed to foresee how the microblogs could transform this incident into a public event. They were finally held accountable. The Jiangxi Provincial Government announced on 10 October 10that the Yihuang County Party Secretary, County Chief and other major leaders were to be removed from office. This is the first time in recent years that local chiefs have been held accountable for forced demolition. The Fuzhou City Government also ordered demolition work at the Zhong family house to be halted.

12 Qian Gang: “The chain of information dissemination following Tang Fuzhen’s self-immolation,” in: Media Digest, January 14, 2010，http://www.rthk.org.hk/mediadigest/20100114_76_122514.html

13 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam

Translated from German by Mel Greenwald

I met An Xiao some  months ago in Shanghai at Xindanwei where she presented her project to dig into the Chinese social media sphere. She has done a great job summarizing the essentials about this Chinese communication spheres.

Part I

Cruising In: Weibo’s Ashton Moment

A few months ago, Tom Cruise made waves in both Chinese and Western media by announcing that he had joined Sina Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging tool used by Chinese and, now, Western celebrities. “We’re having fun talking to you and our new friend at http://t.sina.com.cn/” his Chief Information Officer announced.

Cruise is a special case, of course. But his popularity reflects something of an “Ashton Kutchor moment” in terms of the attention Chinese social media have been received lately from the West. Sina’s strategy, which was to bring prominent public figures in both entertainment and politics to the service, has paid off.

In little over two years, Sina Weibo, or Weibo for short (Sina is the company; Weibo, written 微博, means “microblog”), has attracted some 160 million users and bought weibo.com, edging out other microblog competitors like Tencent Weibo and Sohu Weibo for the coveted domain. Cruise himself attracted over 1.8 million followers (though for some reason the account isn’t active at the moment), making him perhaps the first Western movie star to break the magic million number, a fact all the more remarkable because his account is almost entirely in English.

The art world, with its growing interest in Chinese art, is also joining Chinese social media. LEAP Magazine, the bilingual Chinese-English art magazine, has an online presence, as does the Beijing staple Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. But sites you might not initially expect, like Artforum and Artinfo are also present, garnering over 1,500 and 2,400 followers, respectively. Hyperallergic has even joined, and they plan to post in English.

Artful Discussion

“Arts organizations would find a welcome home [on Weibo],” Phil Tinari explained to me over email. Tinari heads up LEAP Magazine, and he serves as the China representative for Art Basel. “We’ve just launched a feed for Art Basel, and it has found a nice following [of 450].”

Weibo offers a number of advantages over Western social media, especially when discussing art. The service ostensibly limits messages to 140 characters, but it’s a fuzzy number; English posts frequently go over that limit (spaces and punctuation don’t always add to the count). And of course, the compact Chinese language has more than enough room to breathe with 140 characters.

The use of threaded comments, which don’t face the same 140 restriction, and @replies encourages conversation and community building. And perhaps most key for arts organizations is the regular use of embedded media. Unlike Twitpics and Twitvids, Weibo media are automatically embedded in the messages. As in Tumblr, a simple click automatically displays the larger media.  All of this encourages interaction.

“Crowdsourcing is a very popular concept right now,” explained “Will”, a Shanghai-based social media consultant who asked that I use a pseudonym. “I have an experiment where I ask one question on my Ren Ren [a Facebook-like service whose humble name means 'everyone'] and ask the same question on my Weibo. Now I get more solutions on Weibo than Ren Ren.”

And not all of it is in Chinese. Within China, even tech-savvy expats with existing Twitter accounts often prefer to use Chinese social media, as leaping the Great Firewall can be too much of a hassle. Shanghaiist, which caters to Shanghai’s expat community, posts messages entirely in English. Its 800-plus followers are both English speakers and native Chinese either fluent in English or eager to learn.

Regardless, almost everyone I spoke with who’s used both Weibo and Twitter say they much prefer the Weibo interface. From group chats to user tags, Weibo just offers more to work with, particularly for artists and arts organizations.

“Big Bang Theory talks a lot about Twitter, and there are a lot of Chinese people who watch this American show,” Will continued. “Maybe they see how Twitter is popular in the US, so maybe Weibo can be our Twitter.”

But not all are fans. The service, loaded with features to appeal to different audiences and needs, can be overwhelming. Animated smileys light up the pag, and advertisements appear in full color, moving banners. During a recent performance in Shanghai, I found that even native Chinese speakers had trouble navigating the system for the first time.

“Despite what a couple of the tech analysts believe, Weibo is really technically uninteresting, and makes for a rather poor user experience,” noted Robin Peckham, a Hong Kong-based writer and curator. He no longer actively updates his Weibo account, noting that “the level of discourse isn’t really something I’m interested in there — on Twitter I have a lot of critic and academic contacts and we exchange links and plan projects, but other than following announcements, Weibo is a lot of jokes, malicious gossip, and
 soft porn.”

Is it worth logging on?  What if you can’t speak Chinese? In the next installment of this three-part series, I look at these questions and the role of censorship in Chinese social media.

Part II

Time to Log On?

Is it time for the Western art world to join Chinese social media? That depends on your goals. “I don’t see any reason for anyone not directly involved in the Beijing/Shanghai art world to be on Weibo,” argued Robin Peckham. “It’s more about back-and-forth in-scene and doesn’t have much application in terms of PR and such, at least on the small scale of galleries and organizations.”

Indeed, Chinese sites like Weibo and Douban, even as they gain more attention from the West, remain predominantly Chinese in both language and user base. If you or your organization have no plans to reach a Chinese audience, then joining these sites won’t help much. But if you’re keen on developing an international base, and to establish yourself in China, you’ll need a site like Weibo to help you reach the hundreds of millions of Chinese using the internet each day.

And getting started is simple. “One can’t go wrong by first using the medium as a static place to announce and distribute relevant information,” advised Tinari. After getting the hang of things, it’s easy to start building up from there.

It’s All Greek to Me

Inevitably, you might ask if it makes sense to join Weibo if you can’t post in Mandarin. A new iPhone app in English makes it easier to navigate, but virtually everyone I interviewed, including Tinari and Peckham, argued that the medium is best expressed in Mandarin. The same character limit (140) in Mandarin makes for a richer conversation, and the medium is generally set up for the language.

But before you rush to find a Chinese-speaking staff member or brush up on your Chinese, I’ve found that many Chinese users are eager to follow English language accounts to practice English. (One follower from central China offered to share her phone number with me so she could practice English with a native speaker!) Some even translate posts made in English and repost them for their followers.

And the number of English speakers is steadily growing. A growing expat population in China combined with strictures on accessing Twitter means there’s a thriving English speaking community on Weibo.  Many expats I know use only Chinese social media, and they interact with expat friends and English-speaking Chinese friends.  This group will only grow larger. In other words, Mandarin is key but not absolutely essential.

Sensitive Vocabulary: A Sensitive Issue?

Censorship is a reality on the Chinese Internet. Entire sites like Fanfou, an earlier microblogging service, was completely taken down for over a year. Reports of so-called “sensitive vocabulary” like “Egypt” and “Mubarak” being blocked coupled with the recent disappeareance and mistreatment of artists like Ai Weiwei and Wu Yuren can make the art world understandably wary. Ai’s Twitter and Weibo accounts remain eerily silent over a month since his disappearance, but any messages related to his disappearance have been deleted from his Weibo account.

And yet there are many ways that users circumvent censorship. Charles Custer at China Geeks outlined some of the nuances of censorship about Egypt, a topic that wasn’t fully blocked, as many Western media reported:

Simply saying “China censors news about Egypt!” is easy, but things are not that simple. In fact, China has created a much more elaborate system to deal with the unrest in Egypt, which seems to be focused more on misdirection than direct censorship. Sina and other web portals are scrubbing Egypt-related content from their front pages, search functions, etc., which makes it less likely to become a big story. At the same time, though, people are still allowed to tweet about it, and even read news coverage about it (both foreign and domestic), which decreases frustration.

The art world has more recently heard about the use of the homophonic Ai Weilai (爱未来: Love the Future) to refer to Ai Weiwei, though it was soon considered “sensitive vocabulary” and blocked. Today, Ai’s supporters use a combination of images, subtle references, wordplay and double entendre to evade censors. Indeed, “Ai Weilai” is no longer prevented from being posted, and a message in English with the phrase “Ai Weiwei” is still possible. A cursory search reveals continued posts from supporters.

“If you are going to criticize the [Chinese Communist] Party, you may be affected,” said “Jun,” a source who asked to remain anonymous. “But Weibo also is used to challenge local authorities and discuss politics and reform. We’re more free on Weibo than we have ever been on the ‘net. That includes Ren Ren and QQ [another popular social media site].”

Indeed, Western media engages in forms of censorship as well, though political censorship is difficult to find. Facebook famously fell under fire recently for deleting accounts that posted images of Gustave Corbet’s painting “The Origin of the World.” Many in the art world know someone whose page was either deleted or disabled after posting artistic nudes. Second Life hides nudity and swear words unless you pay a special fee.

And if you pay close attention, you actually start to notice holes in what initially seems like an impenetrable wall. “Weibo’s viral nature means that things circulate in an instant before anyone can intervene,” noted Tinari, “and somehow it takes longer to delete the forwards (retweets) of a given post than the original.”

Censorship is an unfortunate and complex reality on either side of the Great Firewall. It runs contrary to the free expression inherent in art, and it’s worth much more attention than I’m able to give here. However, issues around censorship need not discourage the average user looking to explore Chinese social media. (For more on this topic, I recommend reading the work of Ethan Zuckerman, who writes regularly on internet freedom).

Ready to hop on board? With 140 million users (Twitter has 200 million), Weibo’s growing influence is undeniable. In the upcoming final part of this series, I suggest how to make the best of Sina Weibo, whether or not you speak Chinese, and I also take a look at another popular Chinese social media service.

Part 3

What Next? Taking Advantage of Weibo

Just how do you tap into this interface? Like Twitter, it takes a little while to get used to, regardless of what language you’re speaking. But once you get the hang of it, it soars.

English speakers should first download Weibo’s iPhone app, which now features an English language option. Though the translations are awkward, they get the point across, and they’ll hopefully improve over time.  You can also install a client like FaWave, which lets you update Weibo and Twitter at the same time.  If you don’t have an iPhone, you can use a combination of Chrome, which offers automatic translation, and this useful guide for English speakers by Digicha.

As I mentioned earlier, I found that even native Chinese speakers had some trouble navigating the system for the first time. But for the most part, the layout is familiar, and once your account is set up, you mainly need to focus on posts. One hint is to hover your mouse over links and see the URL they point to. Most of the URLs are in English, even if the overall interface is in Chinese.

Once you’re set up, be sure to get together useful tags. Tags can be in any language; choose English if you want to reach the expat community, and Chinese if you want to reach Chinese nationals. And be sure to check out the trending topics translated and contextualized on The World of Chinese; you might even join a meme or two (Weibo hashtags use the # sign at both the front and back of the link, like #上海#).

Those intent on truly connecting with a broad Chinese audience should hire a native Chinese speaker to manage messaging; barring that, someone adept at basic Chinese can suffice. Machine translation between Chinese and English is as yet unreliable. Unless you’re a global brand, don’t expect too many followers at the outset. English-language or bilingual Weibo users like myself hover generally under the 100-follower range, while Chinese-language arts organizations shoot to the 1,000 range and above.

I’m Online. Now Who Should I Follow?

Start following a few English-language accounts. Tom Cruise and Bill Gates are obvious ones. Loretta Chao at the Wall St. Journal has grown a sizable following. Hrag Vartanian, editor of this publication, just signed up, and he brought Hyperallergic with him. I post in both English and Chinese, as does sinologist and technologist William Bishop. The Shanghaiist account, Beijinger and Time Out Beijing offer useful models for English-language posts that successfully reach the expat community. And tell your friends; the more English-language accounts that emerge, the more interactive it will be for English speakers.

The Chinese-language accounts are obviously more diverse. Popular Chinese-language accounts by Westerners include China researcher Jeremy Goldkorn; ars technica curator Ingrid Fischer; and frog design creative director Jan Chipchase. I also recommend coworking space Xindanwei, headed up by Liu Yan and Aaajiao, at the forefront of the new media scene in Shanghai, as well as Tricia Wang, an American who researches technology in China. The Creator’s Project and VICE China’s Madi Ju are online. The arts organizations I mentioned in this article should also be followed, including Artforum, Artinfo, Art Basel, the Ullens Center, LEAP Magazine and Tang Contemporary Art, amongst others. Phil Tinari can be found at @philiptinari, and Robin Peckham at @rpeckham.

Where the art world most stands to shine, however, is through image, video and audio integration. Weibo is a multimedia-heavy medium, and in that regard it resembles Tumblr more than Twitter. Popular design feeds like Design360 and angsschool show compelling designs that can be appreciated even without Chinese. Jewelry site A Moveable Feast is almost entirely in English but has 2,000 followers. And feeds like Chinese street photography site Zaijietou (在街头: on the street) and supermen (全球时尚街拍: global street fashion photos) show that you don’t even need words to gather a strong following. (Even Beijing’s special police force feed has a habit of posting photos.)

Don’t Forget Douban

The more adventurous amongst you, armed with either basic Mandarin skills or an automated translator like Chrome, should also be sure to visit douban.com. Douban doesn’t quite have an equivalent in the West; it’s something of a mix between MySpace, Amazon books, last.fm and Flickr. It’s popular amongst hip, techno-savvy, urban Chinese and serves up music, books, movies, photos and long form blogging, along with events promotion.

In terms of niche popularity, it’s closest, I think, to Tumblr. Numbering around 10 million, users of Douban are often seen as influencers amongst urban Chinese, and reaching this audience means reaching the tastemakers. Welcome to ENTER, which I participated in, managed its presence through Douban and got the attention it sought amongst the expat and English-speaking Chinese community in Shanghai.

Organizations can create dedicated pages, and individuals can sign up as well. China staples like Xindanwei, Beijing music production group Pangbianr and performance artist Xiao He have highly customizable xiaozhan (小站: minisites) to promote their work. My personal page is still forming, but I focus on Chinese media and music. Robin Peckham, whom I mentioned earlier, is online. Other art world folk include Shanghai-based curator Samantha Culp, the JUE Festival and even Ai Weiwei (well, his book at least).

A useful overview to Douban can be found here, though instructions for English-speaking users are still lacking. As with Weibo, Google translate can help immensely, and hovering your mouse over links will generally reveal an English-language URL. And  be sure to visit douban.fm, which functions similarly to last.fm, for an amazing selection of contemporary Chinese music, from poppity pop to hipster rock.

Time for the Western Art World to Join Weibo? Survey Says …

“[Weibo] is a much more dialogic form than Twitter,” said Tinari, whose LEAP Magazine Weibo account has attracted some 10,000 followers. “The economies of interaction are different. It’s overall more generous than Twitter, which wants to keep you focused on people you already know. We should also note that you can say so much more in 140 Chinese characters than English letters, so the whole nature of the conversations that happen is different.”

Indeed, even though I post largely in English and just joined, I’ve already been drawn into a number of interesting conversations about art, technology and China. Both by design and usage, Weibo is a substantially more social medium, one that encourages discussion and regularly suggests people I should considering following.

Today, rather than a continental East-West divide, we have a digital one. The divide is driven not just by firewalls but by language and cultural barriers; what trends on Weibo is often a world away from what’s trending in the US and on global Twitter. But there is overlap, and it’s this possibility of bridging that makes the medium so interesting. Artists and arts organizations that make the leap into Chinese microblogs stand to benefit from a new audience, making new exchanges and creative collaborations possible.

China Digital Times has launched a participatory Web 2.0 initiative: the “Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon,” (“GMH Lexicon”), an online glossary of translations of terms created by Chinese netizens and frequently encountered in online political discussions. The Lexicon has been posted on China Digital Space, CDT’s new, collaborative wiki site.

The “Grass Mud Horse” phenomenon has been awarded a Special Mention at Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities category in 2009.

Source: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/12/introducing-the-grass-mud-horse-lexicon/

This project is part of our effort to contribute to a deeper understanding of the Internet’s cultural, social, and political impact by moving beyond anecdotal evidence and systematically documenting and interpreting political discourse created by Chinese netizens. By creating this lexicon, we hope to map out the dynamics of “domination and resistance” in Chinese communication and information networks. The aim is to vividly illustrate the increasingly dynamic and sometimes surprising presence of an alternative political discourse: images, frames, metaphors and narratives that have been generated from Internet memes. This “resistance discourse” steadily undermines the values and ideology that reproduce compliance with the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian regime, and, as such, force an opening for free expression and civil society in China.

Ultimately, we hope this project will contribute to the ongoing debate: Is the Internet acting as a “safety valve” to prolong the life of the Chinese authoritarian regime; or are new forms of networked communication enhancing opportunities for social change and helping to move China toward the “threshold” for political transformation?

Origins of the Grass-Mud Horse

In early 2009, a creature named the “Grass-Mud Horse” appeared in an  online video which became animmediate viral hit. The term grass-mud horse, which sounds nearly the same in Chinese as “f*** your mother” (cáo nǐ mā), was originally created as a way to get around, and also poke fun at, government censorship of vulgar content. After netizens created an online video depicting the grass-mud horse at war with and eventually defeating the river crab, a homonym for “harmony,” a propaganda catchword, the idea caught fire instantly and the symbolic meaning of this term has been completely transformed. Within weeks, the “grass-mud horse” became the de facto mascot of netizens in China fighting for free expression, inspiring poetry, photos and videos, artwork, lines of clothing, and more. As one Chinese blogger explained, “The grass-mud horse (草泥马) represents information and opinions that cannot be accepted by the mainstream discourse, and “ the Song of the Grass-Mud Horse” has become a metaphor of the power struggle over Internet expression”

The grass-mud horse was particularly suited to the contested space of the Chinese Internet. The government’s pervasive and intrusive censorship system has generated equally massive resentmentamong Chinese netizens. As a result, new forms of social resistance and demands for greater freedom of information and expression are often expressed in coded language and implicit metaphors, which allow them to avoid outright censorship. The Internet has became a quasi-public space where the CCP’s dominance is being constantly exposed, ridiculed, and criticized, often in the form of political satire,jokes, videos, songs, popular poetry, jingles, fiction, Sci-Fi, code words, mockery, andeuphemisms.

In recent years, Chinese netizens have shown they possess boundless creativity and ingenuity in finding such ways to express themselves despite stifling government restrictions on online speech. To the uninitiated, even those who can read Chinese, their coded language can be confounding. But to Chinese Internet users, the terms often resonate deeply by expressing feelings about shared experiences that millions of people can immediately relate to. Despite their subversive beginnings, many of the terms have already become mainstream in Chinese society; a few were even added to the Oxford Chinese dictionary this year.

How have these Terms Been Submitted and Selected?

The terms in our lexicon are all created by netizens and circulated on websites inside China, not just byprominent bloggers or opinion leaders. For many of the terms, one cannot identify the original author or how exactly it originated. China Digital Times selected these terms from a variety of sources. We discovered many from a self-initiated online project of Chinese bloggers to select for the “words of the year in Chinese blogosphere.” Others come from countless online articles, blog posts, articles from mainstream publications such as Southern Metropolis Daily or even Xinhua, and from Chinese BBS. The direct participation of Chinese netizens also yielded many terms after China Digital Times’s Chinese version made the call for submissions public in June 2010.

The selected terms are not a complete recording of pop culture online terminology. Rather, China Digital Times editors have focused exclusively on politically-charged terms which represent the netizens’ “resistance discourse.” These are not “censored” keywords, which have been documented elsewhere by CDT and other projects, nor are they part of the “legitimizing discourse,” used by people who actively defend and support government policy, including nationalists. At times, some of these words may be put on individual websites’ “sensitive lists” or outright blocked, but in general they are popular daily lingo for Chinese netizens.

The current list, chosen by China Digital Times editors, is by no means exhaustive and new words are being created daily. But we hope this list will provide a glimpse into online political discourse and make it more accessible to non-Chinese readers.

Help Us Build the Lexicon

This is an ongoing open source collaborative translation program with submissions from volunteers and professional translators. What is currently published is just a seed that we hope to expand upon in coming months and years. If you are interested in participating in this project by submitting and/or translating terms, please contact the GMH Lexicon editors at chinadigitalspace [at] gmail [dot] com.

China Digital Times would like to express deep gratitude for the extraordinary work of our primary translator, who wishes to remain anonymous.

The Sharism Forum will be held in Shanghai on October 22nd as part of the opening day of the arts and culture festival GETITLOUDER 2010. Our one-day symposium will feature thinkers, practitioners and activists whose work concerns and shapes the global movement of a new sharing culture, which has been unified under the ideology of SHARISM. The public at large is invited to join and to become a “shareholder” of this movement. The event will spark calls-to-action and demonstrate new modalities and technologies of sharing.

About Sharism

SHARISM is a Mind Revolution: The more you give, the more you get. The more you share, the more you are shared. Sharism is a belief system for our Internet Age. It is a philosophy piped through the human and technological networks of Free and Open Source software. It is the motivation behind every piece of User-Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons, to share, remix and give credit to the latest and greatest of our cultural creations. Sharism is also a mental practice that anyone can try, a daily act that beckons a future of increased social intelligence. It should not go unnoticed that a superabundance of community respect and social capital are being accumulated by precisely those who share.

Sharism is operative in the very workings of the human mind. Our model of the functional mechanism of the nervous system shows it to be one which shares activity and information via interconnected networks of neurons through patterns of feedback. This has profound implications for the creative process. Whenever you have an intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. You can engineer a process of creative feedback to generate even more ideas in return.

The rapid emergence of social applications that can communicate and cooperate are allowing more and more people to output content from one service to another in a creative ecosystem. This interconnectedness spreads memes through multiple online social networks, which can reach a global audience and position social media as a true alternative to broadcast media. These new technologies are reviving Sharism in our closed culture. The missing pieces are open source hardware and software services that enable true freedom from top to botton in the entire communication stack.

One legal concern is that any loss of control over copyright will lead to noticeable deficits in personal wealth, or loss of creative freedom. But today’s sharing environment is more protected than you might think. Many new social applications make it easy to set terms-of-use along your sharing path (such as selecting Creative Commons licenses or privacy settings). Any infringement of those terms will be challenged not just by the law, but by your community. Your audience, who benefit form your sharing, can also be the gatekeepers of your rights.

Through emergent mobile communications technologies, we can generate higher connectivities and increase the throughput of our social links. The more open and strongly connected we are, the better the sharing environment will be for everyone involved. The more collective our intelligence, the wiser our actions will be.

Sharism promises to be the politics of the next global superpower. It will not be a country, but a new human network joined by social software. We can integrate our current and emerging democratic systems with new collaborative technologies, which will allow us to query, share and remix information for the public benefit. The future of democracy is real-time, and always online.

Sharism is the inspiration that brings it all together.

For more information:
http://sharism.org

http://freesouls.cc/essays/07-isaac-mao-sharism.html

http://freesouls.yeeyan.org/sharism-a-mind-revolution

Forum Guests

Christopher Adams

Christopher Adams is a publishing professional and free culture advocate based in Beijing and Taipei. He is a developer at Fabricatorz and works with Neoteny Labs. “Freesouls: captured and released by Joi Ito” was his first fully Creative Commons-licensed book project. Christopher is a co-founder of Sharism.org and a member of the Creative Commons Network. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a degree in Cognitive Science.

Edmon Chung

Edmon Chung currently serves as the CEO for the DotAsia Organization and as Vice Chair for the Internet Society HK Chapter. Edmon is also an elected member of the Elections Committee of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, an elected councilor of the ICANN GNSO Council, and Secretariat for the ICANN APRALO (Asia Pacific At-Large Organization).
Edmon is an inventor of patents underlying technologies for internationalized domain names (IDN) and email addresses on the Internet. He founded Neteka, Inc. in 1999, and went on to win the Most Innovative Award in the Chinese Canadian Entrepreneurship Awards in 2001. In 2000, Edmon was selected by The Globe and Mail as one of the Young Canadian Leaders.
Edmon has a Bachelor of Applied Science and Master of Engineering from the University of Toronto, and is a PhD candidate at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

Li Gong

Li Gong is Chairman and CEO of Mozilla Online Ltd, the Beijing-based subsidiary of the Mozilla Corporation, the producer of the Firefox internet browser. He was Venture Partner and Head of China Office for the US venture firm Bessemer Venture Partners until 2009. He previously held positions as General Manager of MSN China at Microsoft, and General Manager of Sun Microsystems’s R&D center in China. He has co-written 3 books (published by Addison Wesley and O’Reilly) and numerous technical articles, and has received 14 US patents. Li Gong has worked as a research scientist at ORA and Stanford Research Institute (SRI), has held visiting positions at Cornell and Stanford Universities, and served as Guest Chair Professor at Tsinghua University. He has served as both Program Chair and General Chair for IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, and IEEE CSFW. Li Gong received BS and MS degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, all in computer science.

Hu Yong

Hu Yong is associate professor at Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication, and a well-known new media critic and Chinese Internet pioneer.
Before joining the faculty of Peking University, Hu Yong worked for a number of media sources, including China Daily, Lifeweek, China Internet Weekly and China Central Television. He is a co-founder of the Digital Forum of China, a nonprofit advocating a free and responsible Internet, as well as Chinavalue.net, a leading new media business in China.
Hu Yong is a founding director of the Communication Association of China (CAC) and China New Media Communication Association (CNMCA). His publications include Internet: The King Who Rules, and The Rising Cacophony: Personal Expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age. He has translated several groundbreaking books on digital technology, including Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, Esther Dyson’s Release 2.0 and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. In 2000, Hu Yong was nominated for China’s list of top Internet industry figures.

Brianna Laugher

Brianna Laugher is a passionate free software and free culture enthusiast. She has been an avid editor on the Wikimedia projects, with over 10,000 edits, and was the first president of Wikimedia Australia. She has spoken at venues ranging from the National Library of Australia to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer is vice president of Creative Commons. He holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has experience as a software developer and consultant. He joined Creative Commons as Chief technical officer in April 2003, and held that position until April 2007 when he became vice president. He also co-founded Bitzi, an early open content/open data service.
Talk description: What does it mean for “culture” to be part of the “freedom stack”? How does free culture relate to other freedom stack components? What is its progress, prospects, and can sharism make a difference? This talk is informed by the speaker’s 7+ years at Creative Commons–providing licensing and public domain tools to increase sharing in the arts, education, media, science, and beyond.

Liu Yan

Liu Yan is the CEO and event curator of Xindanwei, the first collaborative workspace and community for creatives and start ups in China. Since 2004, she has been advocating cross-culture and inter-disciplinary connection and collaboration between Europe and China through events like PICNIC and Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF). She is also the chairwoman of 3S ReUnion in Shanghai, an event for people from arts, technology and academic fields to meet and share their knowledge.

Isaac Mao

Isaac Mao is a venture capitalist, pioneering blogger, software architect, entrepreneur and researcher in learning and social technology. He is the Vice President of United Capital Investment Group and Director of the Social Brain Foundation, and advises Global Voices Online and several Web 2.0 businesses. Isaac co-founded CNBlog.org and co-organizes the Chinese Blogger Conference (CNBloggerCon). He also serves as director of the Shanghai Youth Development Foundation.
Isaac is a regular keynote speaker at business and technology conferences around the globe, and has contributed to numerous commercial software projects. He earned a BS degree in Computer Science and followed an MBA training program at Shanghai Jiaotong University. From 2008 to 2009 Isaac was a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Ou Ning

Ou Ning’s cultural practices encompass multiple disciplines. As an activist, he founded U-thèque, an independent film and video organization; As an editor and graphic designer, he is known for his seminal book New Sound of Beijing; As a curator, he initiated the biennale exhibition Get It Louder (2005, 2007) and launched the sound project in China Power Station, co-organized by Serpentine Gallery and Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art; As an artist, he is known for the urban research projects such as San Yuan Li, commissioned by 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003), and Da Zha Lan, commissioned by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. He is a frequent contributor of various magazines, books and exhibition catalogues and has lectured around the world. In 2008, he was appointed the chief curator of 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture(09SZHKB). In 2009, he is chosen to be the jury member of the 8th Benesse Prize at the 53rd Venice Biennale. He is now working on 2010 Get It Louder and preparing a new literary magazine Chutzpah(Tian Nan in Chinese) which will launch on January 2011. He’s based in Beijing, and is the director of Shao Foundation.

Evan Prodromou

Evan Prodromou is an American writer and programmer based in Montreal, Quebec. He is founder of Wikitravel, the free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide inspired by Wikipedia and running the MediaWiki software. He is also the founder of wikiclock, Vinismo, certifi.ca, and kei.ki. He is the founder and CEO of Status.Net, the open source open microblogging software and service that powers Identi.ca and thousands of other sites.

Jon Phillips

Jon Phillips(rejon) is a developer contributing to society and building meaningful relationships. In 2002 he helped launch the open source drawing tool, Inkscape and the Open Clip Art Library, built Creative Commons‘ community and business development strategies from 2005 until 2008 and is growing the media company Fabricatorz in Beijing and San Francisco. He is community director for the open source social messaging service, Status.Net which powers Identi.ca, and is CEO of Aiki Lab in Singapore.

Jack Qiu

Dr. Jack Qiu is an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. His academic interests include Internet and society, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and class, late capitalism, globalization, grassroots media, China, and the Asian Pacific.
His publications include Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China (MIT Press, 2009), Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (MIT Press, 2006, co-authored with Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, and Araba Sey), and many chapters, articles, and review essays.

Wolfgang Spraul

Wolfgang Spraul is COO of Sharism At Work, a manufacturing company making the Ben NanoNote mini-computer and leading the copyleft hardware movement. At OpenMoko, a project to create a family of open source mobile phones including the hardware specification and the operating system, he served as the Vice President of Engineering.

Phil Tinari

Philip Tinari (b. 1979) is editor-in-chief of LEAP, a bilingual, bimonthly magazine of contemporary Chinese art and culture based in Beijing and published by Modern Media Group. Since 2007, he has also run the publishing imprint, editorial office, and translation studio office for Discourse Engineering. Tinari is a contributing editor to Artforum and adjunct professor of art criticism at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He serves as China advisor to Art Basel and worked previously as academic consultant to the Chinese contemporary art department at Sotheby’s. He has written and lectured widely on contemporary art in China, for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Parkett, and Dushu. Recent projects include the book Hans Ulrich Obrist: The China Interviews (2009) and the exhibition The Hong Kong Seven, mounted by the Foundation Louis Vuitton at the Hong Kong Museum of Art last year. A resident of Beijing for much of the past decade, he holds an A.M. in East Asian studies from Harvard, a B.A. from the Literature Program at Duke, and was Fulbright fellow at Peking University.

Gino Yu

Dr. Gino Yu is an Associate Professor and Director of Digital Entertainment and Game Development at the School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). His research spans Design Automation, Computer Animation, Video Games, Creativity, and Consciousness with over 60 publications. Currently, his main research interests involve the application of media technologies to cultivate creativity and promote enlightened consciousness (meaningful media).
Gino Yu is co-founder of the PolyU MERECL, a commercially oriented digital entertainment laboratory that provides services to industry, and is Chairman and co-founder of the Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association. He received his BS and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley in 1987 and 1993 respectively. He is a composer and father of three.

Zafka Zhang

Zafka Zhang is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of China Youthology, a boutique company focusing on brand-youth consultancy for marketing, communication, and product design targeting youth in the China market. Zafka formerly served as the senior front-page editor and columnist of China’s leading business newspaper, 21st CBH (21st Century Business Herald), and continues to write for mainstream media online and offline. He was an Advisor for the Association of Virtual Worlds and Director of Music Community and Public Relations of Creative Commons China, and was formerly head of research at HiPiHi.
Zafka is also an acclaimed sound artist and experimental musician. His art works have been published and exhibited in China, the US, Europe, and Asia. He obtained two Masters in Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology in Fudan (Shanghai) and SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)

2010 SHAREHOLDERS’ MEETING
Date · 22 October 2010
Venue · Shanghai, China
Event · Get It Louder 2010
Organizer · Shao Foundation

ABOUT SHARISM
Isaac Mao · Sharism: A Mind Revolution »
毛向辉 · 分享主义：一场思维革命 »

AGENDA
The official schedule will be publicized at www.getitlouder.com

Session I: Global Shares
Speakers from Sharism.org, Peking University & the Open Society Institute

Session I: The Freedom Stack
Speakers from Creative Commons, StatusNet & Sharism.cc

Session III: The Science of Sharing
Speakers from Hong Kong Polytechnic University & Chinese University of Hong Kong

Session IV: Open Panels
Speakers from DotAsia, China Youthology, Xindanwei, Leap Magazine & others

Moderators:
Ou Ning (Shao Foundation)
Isaac Mao (Sharism)
Jon Phillips (StatusNet/Fabricatorz/Sharism)
Christopher Adams (Freesouls/Fabricatorz/Sharism)

Shareholders Team
Sophie Chiang (Sharism)
Han Yan (Beijing/Urban China)
Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber (Ars Electronica)

GET IT LOUDER 2010
www.getitlouder.com

SHARISM.ORG
sharism.org

During these years, new social communication flat, such as Flick, Facebook and Twitter, are created increasingly. At the same time, some juristic tool, Creative Commons, have been widely diffused. The new personal 2.0 network appears in the society. All of these creation and develops make an aggregation of human intelligence. They even rebuild the social trust and the relationship among people. Meanwhile, they reform the diffuse way of traditional media. They are not only influenced the pattern of global politics, but also set up a fresh business mode. As one of the most active human intelligence, cultures and arts need to respond towards this worldwide trend. As the new brand of Chinese exhibitions, 2010Get It Louder will show a comprehensive understanding of this new SHARISM.

by Tony Dokoupil and Angela WuAugust 09, 2010

In the history of the web, last spring may figure as a tipping point. That’s when Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”—a site that grew from 100,000 articles in 2003 to more than 15 million today—began to falter as a social movement. Thousands of volunteer editors, the loyal Wikipedians who actually write, fact-check, and update all those articles, logged off—many for good. For the first time, more contributors appeared to be dropping out than joining up. Activity on the site has remained stagnant, according to a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind the site, and it’s become “a really serious issue.” So serious, in fact, that this fall Wikipedia will turn to something it has never needed before: recruiters.

There’s no shortage of theories on why Wikipedia has stalled. One holds that the site is virtually complete. Another suggests that aggressive editors and a tangle of anti-vandalism rules have scared off casual users. But such explanations overlook a far deeper and enduring truth about human nature: most people simply don’t want to work for free. They like the idea of the Web as a place where no one goes unheard and the contributions of millions of amateurs can change the world. But when they come home from a hard day at work and turn on their computer, it turns out many of them would rather watch funny videos of kittens or shop for cheap airfares than contribute to the greater good. Even the Internet is no match for sloth.

That’s why Wikipedia’s new recruiting push will not rely merely on highfalutin promises about pooled greatness and “the sum of all human knowledge.” Instead, the organization is hoping to get students to write and edit entries as part of their coursework. The Wikimedia Foundation teamed up with eight professors at schools including George Washington and Princeton to integrate the once frowned-upon research tool into public-policy curricula. As part of the program, Wikipedia’s “campus ambassadors” will lead in-class training sessions on how to edit the site and help start Wikipedia student groups.

Tech writers continue to tout social media as a transformative phenomenon in its infancy. That’s certainly true for such sites as Facebook, which boasts more than 500 million active users, or Flickr, which hosts some 4 billion photos. YouTube also shows no sign of slowing down. But those sites offer clear benefits to users, including the ability to easily stay in touch with friends, indulge in a game of Mob Wars, share baby pictures, or watch videos of fashion models falling down, in exchange for their time and efforts.

Many other elements of the user-generated revolution, meanwhile, are beginning to look sluggish. The practice of crowd sourcing, in particular, worked because the early Web inspired a kind of collective fever, one that made the slog of writing encyclopedia entries feel new, cool, fun. But with three out of four American households online, contributions to the hive mind can seem a bit passé, and Web participation, well, boring—kind of like writing encyclopedia entries for free.

Evidence of this ennui is everywhere. Amateur blogs, the original embodiment of Web democracy, are showing signs of decline. While professional bloggers are “a rising class,” according to Technorati, hobbyists are in retreat, and about 95 percent of blogs are launched and quickly abandoned. A recent Pew study found that blogging has withered as a pastime, with the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who identify themselves as bloggers declining by half between 2006 and 2009. A shift to Twitter—or microblogging, as it’s called—partly accounts for these numbers. But while Twitter carries more than 50 million tweets per day, its army of keystrokers may not be as large as it seems. As many as 90 percent of tweets come from 10 percent of users, according to a 2009 Harvard study. The others are primarily “lurkers”—people who don’t contribute but track the postings of others. Between 60 and 70 percent of people who sign up for the 140-character platform quit within a month, according to a recent Nielsen report.

Citizen journalism also has stabilized. Fewer than one in 10 Web users say they have created their own original news or opinion piece, according to Pew, and comment sections on blogs or mainstream media sites, which were supposed to turn the old one-way media model into a two-way street, are often too profane, hateful, or off-point to attract people. Only one in four Web users has left a comment—probably no more than wrote letters to the editor in decades past, says Brian Thornton, a University of North Florida professor who has studied the history of the letters page.

Naturally, as some energy goes out of the Web, sites that depend on enthusiastic free labor are scrambling to retain it. The task is made more difficult by the fact that the competition is steeper than ever. Michigan State University professor Cliff Lampe, who studies online communities, says that where there were once three or four sites that invited participation, there are now thousands or even millions. “You’re taking a limited resource—people—and spreading it over a much wider set of opportunities,” he says. “It changes the playing field.”

The smart players are changing, too. Digg began as “the new New York Times,” a digital front-page curated by users who “vote up” their favorite stories. The site quickly became one of the most popular destinations on the Web. But while Digg won readers, it struggled to sign up voters, according to a 2008 speech by its founder Kevin Rose. Now the site is changing format, relaunching (later this year) with a personalized home page that lets users connect with friends rather than just vote on the news. Consumer-review sites like Yelp, Amazon, and Epinions, which use an army of amateur critics to cover products and services, offer elaborate appreciation programs that reward their unpaid people and keep users engaged. Yelp has more than 40 “community managers” scattered around the world, who throw parties for prolific reviewers. (At one recent event for the “Elite Squad,” for instance, the snacks included squid-ink risotto.) And comment-driven news and aggregation sites like Gawker and The Huffington Post, where part of the fun is reading what the peanut gallery has to say, have decided to show the peanut gallery more love: mostly in the form of badges, stars, and special privileges. Even YouTube has added inducements, giving users the chance to play at Carnegie Hall—with a music contest—and partnering with the Guggenheim Museum to help them show off their art.

So far it seems to be working. After Gawker introduced its Star system, which gave preference to the work of “Starred” commentators, participation on the comment boards rose to a new high. The Huffington Post, which offers its best users digital merit badges and special rights (like the ability to delete other people’s posts), boasts the most active commenters of any news site. And Yelp says it has maintained a pace of a million new reviews every three months.

Such reward programs are only likely to grow more important, especially as the Web reaches into corners of the world where it never benefited from the frisson of a social movement. Last year, in parts of eastern Africa, Google launched the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge, an effort to grow the number of Swahili-language Wikipedia entries by tying them to the chance to win modems, cell phones, and a laptop. It worked. This wouldn’t surprise Jeff Howe, the author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Back in 2006, he predicted that the winners in the social-media world would be “those that figure out a formula for making their users feel amply compensated.” Prizes are a start. Can cash be far behind? Oh, right, then it would just be a job.

By June 30 2009, the number of netizens in China has reached 338 million, surpassing the total population of the United States. Already the country with the largest number of Internet users since 2008, Chinese Internet now boasts of 2.1million websites and more than 100 million blogs. The fast changing landscape of Internet usage in China has seen both quantitative and qualitative developments. In fact, the visions and thrills of getting online parallel China’s ambition to build a modern society with Chinese characteristics. The Internet has penetrated into social institutions, political processes, cultural activities and people’s everyday life. It is time we look beyond numbers and events and delve deeper into the fabric of China’s social life in order to understand how the Internet integrates, counteracts or cooperates with institutional, cultural and social forces in seeking and creating a modern form of existence. The theme of the 8th Chinese Internet Research Conference, “Internet and Modernity with Chinese Characteristics: Institutions, Cultures and Social Formations,” is designed to bring together scholars, experts and leaders in the field to explore these fascinating developments and trends.

This will be the very first time this conference is held in mainland China. We aim to open a forum where different perspectives and expectations meet, communicate and interact, and where the agendas and hopes of the Chinese population are heard, discussed and analyzed on an international scale. The working languages of the conference will be both English and Chinese, and we will provide translation service if necessary. The forms and contradictions in which China tries to conceptualize and materialize modernity, and how the Internet is helping out in this process are the main focus of this conference.

CIRC Asia: http://circ.asia

The current issue is devoted to the topic of digital library efforts in China. With the help of Sam Sun, long-time CNRI employee and Beijing native, we have gathered a group of authors who speak authoritatively on current projects in China. Four of those articles, primarily describing current and past projects from a non-technical perspective, appear in this issue while some of the more technical articles will appear in issues later this year.

Many D-Lib readers will be unaware of the activities in China, which are extensive and growing. If you read only one article in this issue, it should be the Overview article by Xihui Zhen, which I think most readers will find of great interest. Just as China is assuming a larger and more important role on the world stage, so too it seems to me will they assume a larger and more important role in the digital library world as time goes on. The size of the various projects, the number of universities and research groups in China addressing the issues, and the vast sweep of Chinese history and culture that remains to be digitized and integrated into the world of digital libraries would seem to guarantee that.

Significant language, culture, and political gaps between China and the more established digital library players in Western countries remain, of course, and will present challenges on all sides for years to come. The language gap will even be evident in the current issue of D-Lib, as all of the articles started out in Chinese or in English written by native Chinese speakers. But as the connections between China and the other countries of the world deepen, these gaps will narrow and, in our small slice of the world’s intellectual activity, D-Lib will do its best to help that process.