China

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Please check the Delicious Tag P2P-China


Blogs

Key blogs:

China Herald, at http://www.chinaherald.net/


Civil society oriented news from a Dutch internet entreneur, Fons Tuinstra.


China Web 2.0 Review, at http://www.cwrblog.net/


I-Wisdom China, at http://i-wisdom.typepad.com/iwisdom/china/index.html


Monitors interactive marketing and business practices in China. By a Belgian internet entrepreneur Jan Vanden Berghe.


Virtual China, at http://www.virtual-china.org/

Excellent news blog on internet-related developments.


The Digital Media in Asia blog, at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dmablog/

This blog by Eric Priest monitors China especially. Hear him explain that "music companies and artists are flexible and effective at adapting to piracy and changing market conditions, and where the line between creator and consumer seems to be disappearing faster than just about anywhere else in the world.


Recommended by Ned Rossiter:

  1. http://www.plus8star.com/: marketing
  2. http://www.chinamediablog.com/ : media
  3. http://www.thedarkvisitor.com/: hacking news

Recommended by Jan Van Den Bergh:

  1. www.danwei.org
  2. 56minus1.com
  3. www.chinasmack.com
  4. www.lonniebhodge.com
  5. http://chinayouthology.com
  6. http://zerosocialmedia.com/what-we-do/


Books

  1. Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (Columbia UP 2009)
  2. Jack Linchuan Qiu, et al. Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China (MIT 2009)


Miscellaneous

Independent Media Hong Kong

URL = http://www.inmediahk.net

A chinese independent internet website based in Hong Kong advocating grassroots journalism, participatory democracy and media activism.


The Golden Shield Project

Details about internet monitoring.


Status Report 2008

From a conference report by Roman Tol:

"According to Severine Arsene (Science-Pro/Orange Labs, Paris) 210 million Chinese internet users share and tag videos and make use of Web 2.0 applications. Moreover, with the rise of an urban and connected “middle class”, there are more and more discussions taking place online. The content is mostly concerning cars, flats, salary and dogs – in other words lifestyle and values. More interesting are Severine’s observations from fieldwork and interviews with internet users in Beijing.

Apparently there is a wide range of popular debates on morality issues, corruption and other social scandals, making one wonder how China’s strict censorship rules will adopt. Severine states that between harsh nationalism and moral indignation, self-regulation and responsibility, moderators as well as users are collectively elaborating formal and informal rules of politeness, and setting new criteria of objectivity. Censorship and control might be self-regulating at the time, the question is, to what extent is it an effect of to the top-down decision-making norm that is China?

Closely related to Severine’s talk was Cuiming Pang’s (University of Oslo, Norway) presentation concerning self-censorship and the rise of cyber-organizations. Cuiming’s results were based on an anthropological study of a Chinese online community: Houxi Street. According to Cuiming the broad use of Web 2.0 applications in Chinese cyberspace, has provided a platform for individual exhibition and open communication, created a new type of social participation, and facilitated the proliferation of cyber collectives in recent years. It is evident that collective action is more influential in spreading public opinion and organizing public activities than is separated and unorganized individual action. However, Cuiming adds, when faced with the threat of a more powerful authority, a grassroots collective would possibly become more fragile than the individual, and is liable to compromise in order to avoid complete annihilation

Cuiming’s observation of the Chinese online community and in-depth interviews with informants both on- and offline, tell a story about internet users and internet service providers’ perception of and reactions to the Chinese government’s censorship, especially regarding how they learn, perceive, and practice self-censorship. Cuiming argues that many Chinese cyber collectives organized in the format of online communities tend to withdraw collective rather than fight for free speech when they encounter the government’s censorship. Even though there is a wide range of criticism towards the government’s political suppression, the community managers still learn and practice self-censorship, rather then taking risk to challenge the government authority, for fear of penalties.

In addition, because technical censorship is complicated and expensive, the focus is on soft-censorship. Cuiming calls this social moderation; community managers tend to establish a friendly relationship with ordinary users, and adopt strategies of negotiation and dialogue rather than restrictions and sanctions, to remind users to be cautious of their own behavior. What this brings is users spontaneously helping managers, and collectively maintaining and protecting the community, ultimately making it easier for the government to practice internet censorship (and more difficult to become more democratic). Well, let’s put it this way, Cuiming had to go to Oslo to study Chinese censorship…" (http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/weblog/2008/05/13/politics-web-20-international-conference/)