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BEIJING: The Chinese authorities have been worrying about the type of protests that overthrew the autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt since 1999, when they began to encourage the home-grown QQ instant messaging service. In the Arab world, the spontaneous outbursts of anger by people against the oppressive regimes that have ruled over them for decades were partly inspired or at least helped by Facebook and other social media.
The Communists have always been nervous about the power of social media. The world in turn has focused a lot of its energies on criticising the Chinese authorities for banning Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. US President Barack Obama was part of that chorus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently said her government would do what it can to fight censorship of the internet by repressive regimes.
What is less understood is that the authorities in China are also worried about the local home-grown clones of the western social networking sites.
The authorities banned three Twitter clones — Fanfou, Jiwai, and Digu — after the July 2009 uprising in Urumqi, the capital of the troubled western province of Xingjian bordering Pakistan. Fanfou had over a million subscribers when the authorities put a lid on it because of suspicions that rebels were using the Twitter clone to spread their message.
The other challenge before the government is that even the cheapest mobile phone sold in China comes with an inbuilt camera, and the software to upload those pictures on to a wide range of internet fora.
Two Twitter clones, the microblogging sites Weibo and Taotao, have become so popular that even lifting the ban on the original might do little to dent their popularity. The clones are closely scrutinized by the government, but information still slips through the fingers of China's internet police force and into the country's universities and colleges. It is also common practice for young people here to translate articles written about China by foreign journalists, and then circulate the translations via mass email and blogs.
The Chinese government's move this week to pull out photos of the US ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, from Weibo and other Chinese sites is testimony to the fact that even closely watched sites can turn into the vehicles that spread the stories the authorities do not want heard. The photos and video in question showed Huntsman, who is resigning his post this year amid speculation that he might run for US President in 2012, at an anti-government protest in Beijing. The US embassy has since clarified that Huntsman's appearance at the protest rally was coincidental, not a sign that the US was tacitly supporting China's "Jasmine revolution".
The irony is that the Chinese authorities not only created the Great Firewall of China, the computer network that allows them to filter information on the Net, but also encouraged internet innovation and the growth of home-grown social media to fill the space left by the banning of Twitter and Facebook.
The vital question now is whether this internet innovation will grow quickly enough to breach the Great Firewall itself, and end up posing a challenge to the authorities? The first attempts at sparking off a Jasmine revolution in China have been dealt with. But the internet is still being used to spread the word: that Egypt-style protest gatherings are the only route to democracy, and justice. What remains to be seen is whether the people of China will take that message from the safety of their internet chat rooms and out on to the streets.
Source
The Communists have always been nervous about the power of social media. The world in turn has focused a lot of its energies on criticising the Chinese authorities for banning Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. US President Barack Obama was part of that chorus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently said her government would do what it can to fight censorship of the internet by repressive regimes.
What is less understood is that the authorities in China are also worried about the local home-grown clones of the western social networking sites.
The authorities banned three Twitter clones — Fanfou, Jiwai, and Digu — after the July 2009 uprising in Urumqi, the capital of the troubled western province of Xingjian bordering Pakistan. Fanfou had over a million subscribers when the authorities put a lid on it because of suspicions that rebels were using the Twitter clone to spread their message.
The other challenge before the government is that even the cheapest mobile phone sold in China comes with an inbuilt camera, and the software to upload those pictures on to a wide range of internet fora.
Two Twitter clones, the microblogging sites Weibo and Taotao, have become so popular that even lifting the ban on the original might do little to dent their popularity. The clones are closely scrutinized by the government, but information still slips through the fingers of China's internet police force and into the country's universities and colleges. It is also common practice for young people here to translate articles written about China by foreign journalists, and then circulate the translations via mass email and blogs.
The Chinese government's move this week to pull out photos of the US ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, from Weibo and other Chinese sites is testimony to the fact that even closely watched sites can turn into the vehicles that spread the stories the authorities do not want heard. The photos and video in question showed Huntsman, who is resigning his post this year amid speculation that he might run for US President in 2012, at an anti-government protest in Beijing. The US embassy has since clarified that Huntsman's appearance at the protest rally was coincidental, not a sign that the US was tacitly supporting China's "Jasmine revolution".
The irony is that the Chinese authorities not only created the Great Firewall of China, the computer network that allows them to filter information on the Net, but also encouraged internet innovation and the growth of home-grown social media to fill the space left by the banning of Twitter and Facebook.
The vital question now is whether this internet innovation will grow quickly enough to breach the Great Firewall itself, and end up posing a challenge to the authorities? The first attempts at sparking off a Jasmine revolution in China have been dealt with. But the internet is still being used to spread the word: that Egypt-style protest gatherings are the only route to democracy, and justice. What remains to be seen is whether the people of China will take that message from the safety of their internet chat rooms and out on to the streets.
Source