China Herald: Giving access to China's internet

A sanitized view
via WikipediaOne of my favorite stories in my first weeks in Shanghai in the 1990s was the story of a famous lawyer in maritime law who wanted to set up a small library of all the Chinese print publications on maritime law available. He abandoned the nice idea when he discovered that the China Post office could provide him with 156 publications on this subject. He would never bee able to work again, even when he would browse through all those publication.
Now close to 300 million Chinese are online and increasingly enjoy engaging in debates, shouting and more polite conversations, keeping an overview of what is happening on China's internet is impossible, even when you are able to follow the increasingly changing online lingo.
Fortunately, a growing number of bloggers is selecting the most important - in their view - and translating it into English for a foreign audience. A short overview.

ESWN is of course a leading source and has been lonely at the top for a long time. Ronald Soong can translate - when he is not too busy doing other things - faster than I can read. He has always maintained to be strictly objective in his comparison of Chinese sources, but even by selecting subjects, there of course must have been a bias.

Global Voices has been also a nice addition, although in their hurry to be complete they only translate a part of their selection and are otherwise an aggregator of Chinese sources. That is understandable, but makes them less useful for a non-Chinese audience, while the Chinese must be too busy in browsing the Chinese internet anyway.

China Labor News Translations has become a recent addition and a useful one, as it focuses on labor issues. Unfortunately, but again understandable, their output is rather low, especially when you are used to deal with Ronald Soong's production. It could be a useful model, focused on a specific model, that could be more useful than the more generic approaches.

A very enjoyable recent addition has been ChinaSmack, who give an insight at the really rough side of the Chinese internet. Jeremy Goldkorn's Danwei did a very nice interview on this wide-ranging service. Most recent contribution was on the anti-Japanese riots at Shanghai's University for International Studies, one of the more prestigious universities in Shanghai. While Roland Soong ESWN did not circumvent the often raunchy side of China's internet, he seemed to have been more careful compared to ChinaSmack.

Those are the services I would use religiously. There are more and there should be more in the future.

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China's society is changing very fast and its internet gives a good idea about what is happening on the ground in a society where the official media are very much sanatized, and follow government policies. At the China Speakers Bureau we have eminent speakers on all those subjects. Do let us know if you need on