China Herald: China's internet: the online revolution

fast change: Guangzhou
via WikipediaThe dam is leaking all over the place, is one of the conclusions Roland Soong of ESWN draws in his story about the past five years of the internet in China. Soong was supposed to give the speech last weekend at the 2008 Chinese blogger conference in Guangzhou, did not make it, but posted his thoughtful overview on his weblog.
ESWN has been one of the first "bridge-bloggers" as they are being called, bloggers who tried to translate what they considered crucial issues on the internet in China into English. ESWN has been rather instrumental but has also been hit by the tidal wave of online debate now close to 300 million Chinese internet users have entered the scene.
ESWN:

the Internet has grown so big that it is beyond normal control. How do you monitor what 253 million netizens are doing? How do you monitor the contents on 11 million Chinese websites? The mythical 30,000 Internet police are helpless against those numbers. If there are banned subjects, they must run to thousands each week. How is any website supposed to implement the bans? It is humanly impossible. There is no well-defined, active system in place. Instead, there are only opportunistic, reactive systems that operate slowly and imperfectly. The dam is leaking all over the place.

In the past Western media provided a - admitted poorly equipped - tool for stories to enter the outside world and caused often a correction of corruption, forced evictions, mining disasters and whatever could go wrong on a daily basis in a country with 1.4 billion inhabitants. Now, the internet has become a force in itself, for good and for worse. The traditional picking-mechanisms of foreign media - how poor they were - have now replaced by a tsunami of information where distilling what is important and why has not become easier. But, ESWN wonders, whether he still has a role to play, now the role of the foreign media has been eroded. ESWN:

My base has just been driven into insignificance. If once upon a time western media coverage, which affects the opinion of western politicians and citizens, mattered to the Chinese people, this is no longer the case.

More thoughtful considerations at ESWN.

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