Citizen journalism takes off at QQ

the Jinan-page at qq.com

The China Media Project points at a first experiment at Tencent's QQ in mobilizing citizen reporters. On July 18 Jinan was hit by a devastating flood that killed 26. At QQ of Shenzhen-based Tencent editors asked for input of their users:

how is it we have only this frosty [unfeeling] information about "26 dead", 6 missing and 171 injured? We want to know how those deceased passed away, and why ... ( in a translation by the China Media project)

In a few hours time, the dedicated webpage was flooded with material from local citizens, hinting a a failing local government:

Yesterday, the water flooded into our house. Our house is on the first floor. We were just sitting down to eat. Dad went off right away to find sand to fill up bags, but the water came too fast and washed the bags away. It looked like a dam had burst, and the water was putrid. Today Dad's busy building up the threshold. It's too thin and needs to be replaced. No one cares. Our government is just busy making money.

QQ is a highly successful internet service provider, belonging to the top-3 internet companies in terms of traffic and organizing a large portion of the now 162 million internet users in China. Because of that position they are very well positioned to experiment with this kind of citizen journalism and are likely to follow up after this initial success. Citizen journalism is here to stay, how to organize it, that is the question. Officially internet portals can only republish news that has been already in one of the censored traditional media, but this new feature could mean a diversion from those old restraints, if the regulators take it easy.

Update: Global Voices has a thorough overview of all the citizen reporting in China concering the floodings. Nice pictures too.

Crime at the internet: QQ

Virtual China has dived into the legal aspects of virtual property. (The link to the article did not work properly, so you have to find it from the home page.) Between the lines interesting facts show up regarding the crime at the internet.

CNNIC reports that 61% of gamers have had virtual assets stolen and 77% feel that the current online atmosphere is unsafe for virtual assets.

That means the internet is a rather unsafe place to be, worse than anything in the real world. The number of reports on virtual theft is really astonishing.

The Internet Crime section of the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau says they get roughly ten reports PER DAY of stolen virtual assets, which are hard to know how to prosecute given the current status under law. Should they be classified as robberies? Fraud? A judge in Shanghai says that virtual asset cases often cause vigorous debate inside China's courts as to whether they should be classified as crimes or not.
Back in Shenzhen's Nanshan district, legal cases on record have clearly established that 1 Q coin equals 1 RMB, and that Q coins clearly have the attributes of property. Likewise for virtual equipment that can be bought and sold in a market. However, the status of QQ numbers is less clear. Can they be defined as property? Because the value of QQ numbers is hard to estimate, it then becomes hard to define QQ number theft as criminal theft.

More at Virtual China on the legal debate.