Wilson Lau New Media

One of the first bloggers in China, Isaac Mao, expressed confidence that many Chinese on the mainland are blogging their way to free-thinking. The Web 2.0 community and blogging form part of the “new social media” in the country. It’s a flat media in which news spreads very quickly, much faster than government-controlled media because government-controlled media represents only one voice, he said.

 The social media, on the other hand, represents many voices. People connected by the Internet can generate many ideas and diversify their decisions and their perception. People have become more receptive to new ideas and therefore they seek better solutions to social problems. There is no single point of failure because it is so diverse that it is difficult to be shut down. He was also confident that Chinese could break through the central government’s existing tool for censorship - the Great Firewall (GFW).

Isaac was the speaker at a seminar on Chinese Grassroots Media: A Search for Free-thinking organized by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC), University of Hong Kong. He took an in-depth look at how ordinary people in China can make use of the Internet to improve the quality of social life. Through several projects by his Social Brain Foundation (SBF), he has charted the changes in people’s mind and behavior since 2002 when blogging was first introduced to China.

A native of Shanghai, Isaac is a real force in Chinese blogging community and a social entrepreneur, assistant professor at JMSC, Rebecca Mackinnon said in her introduction of the founder of cnblogs.org. He advocates online social networking and “incubates” projects for social good through his Social Brain Foundation. This February he made waves in the IT community with his open letter to the founders of Google, challenging them to support anti-censorship efforts and change its strategy in China. For more details, check out his site: isaacmao.com/meta  

All human beings can be free-thinking individuals, Isaac said. We are totally capable of that because we are far more intelligent than other animals. But many people in China have continued to find barriers to free-thinking. He identified the factors that are preventing many people in China from becoming free-thinking individuals. Their intelligence is blocked. The barriers include values we receive at home, indoctrination at school, and social blockages installed by the government. As a result, we always think of things as simply “right” or “wrong”. It is a one-way path of thinking. We cannot diversify our ideas and we do not foster versatility. “One-tune harmony” rules in China, so where is diversity, Isaac asked.

One thing he found quite peculiar to Chinese is their “Stockholm syndrome” - they have been so oppressed that they have come to sympathize with their oppressors. On many occasions he found some people could be critical of the government in casual chats. However, they would defend the government and its decisions when they were being solicited for their opinions in formal interviews. Their behavior prompted Isaac to do a study of demographic model of Chinese thinking. Its conclusion is people in China just don’t honestly express their opinions in public.

Some survey findings showed that 90 percent of respondents chose silence; 7 percent put up a defense when China was criticized by overseas organizations; 1 percent were so-called “functional”, they used the Internet for self-promotion; and another 1 percent were aggressively using Internet to express themselves. “Don’t be surprised when you talk to people in those thinking models … they have blockages. Many [government officials] talk one way and act another way,” Isaac added.

But the good news is there is an emerging group of bloggers who have continued to defy conventions to become free-thinkers. In Isaac’s profile of these free-thinking individuals in China, they are mainly professionals with a lot of experiences in business and well-educated. They don’t mind what other people think of them and ignore or get around government’s intervention.

Blogging has helped to improve free-thinking among Chinese. It’s first introduced to the mainland in 2002 as a tool for self-organized learning activities, consisting of writing, creating, publishing and sharing information. People make use of blogs to exchange ideas and at the same time stimulating each other to think. After 2003 Isaac found that trust among bloggers had been fostered. People became connected, he said. As blogging has become more stable in China, his organization has had more teams working on blogs, some in a commercial way. By his estimates, there were a total of 600,000 bloggers in China in 2003. Some people were surprised at the rapid development of blogging in the country. “Blogging is a new social identity tool for Chinese. Bloggers want you to know them … many of them are professionals and they accumulate social capital [through blogging],” Isaac said.

The blogging community with a social conscience has developed and encouraged fellow bloggers to take part in some collaborative projects. Among these project is one in which a blogger appealed to hikers to each carry 1 kilogram of donated items in their backpacks when they were on their visit to rural areas. Over 40,000 hikers/ bloggers responded and helped to take around 400,000 kilograms of items to the rural areas in a little more than one year.

Another example of the growing power of bloggers is the “nail house” incident in Chongqing in Sichuan Province. The “nail house” story was picked up by bloggers first, Isaac said. After two months of coverage on the net, the traditional media began to pay attention and eventually reported on the plight of the couple who had refused to let the municipal government of Chongqing demolish their commercial premises without proper compensation. Irritated by the media frenzy, the authorities imposed a ban on all coverage of the nail house by the traditional media. However, bloggers defied the order. One of them, Zuola, had traveled to the city to meet up with the couple and continued putting news blog posts on the development of the story. His blog was viewed by 40,000 every day. Isaac said that last Monday the municipal government had finally given in and reached agreement with the couple. “It’s multiple pressure effect and bloggers have participated in that,” he said. “Zuola is the first grassroots reporter.”

Isaac thought that bloggers and the more traditional media complement each other. Some official meetings are closed to the media so the public rely on the bloggers for coverage. Bloggers also make use of their flexibility and by physically being where an event is unfolding. The nail house coverage is a good example.

China’s blogosphere has grown to a size of 40 million and 10 million of them are active bloggers. He said its Web 2.0 has bred 10 “flickrs” copycat programs, 100 “youtubes”, and 50 “myspaces”. As for Instant Messengers, QQ has 80 million users, MSN claims to have 40 million and Skype has 32 million. And the number just keeps growing.

“All the tools of Web 2.0 help people to give output,” Isaac said. When people searched for information posted online with Google four or five years ago, most of the search results were companies’ sites and portal sites. Now around 40 percent of the results are from the blogosphere, he continued.        

It is becoming increasingly difficult for the government to prevent online social media from developing. “It is too late for them,” Isaac said. “The content has grown to a size that it is difficult to block access to them, though they have tremendous resources. They make laws, pass legislation, and put out administrative orders. They also make use of technical means like GFW. However, they have failed to block access to the increasing amount of information circulating on the Internet.”

But this is no reason to feel complacent. The government still put up three censorship “walls.” There is a wall to block gateway to many overseas sites. There is a wall regulating online publishing and networking. People are required to register their blogs with their real names. The third wall is a collection of banned keywords, such as Falungong and human rights. When people search for them, they get blank pages as a result. “The collection of [banned] keywords is growing very fast. Recent inclusions are ‘Jiang Jiemian’ and ‘Shanghai party secretary’,” Isaac said.            

The chief objective of Isaac’s projects, including the Social Brain Foundation (SBF), is to foster free-thinking among people who are eager to express themselves. His projects aim to help people by providing technical support so that eventually they will learn how to help themselves to break through government censorship.

He helped us to visualize the concept with “the ladder to free access.” When most people find access to what they are looking for is blocked, they just give up. Some more persistent individuals use proxy. That is the next level. Unfortunately it does not work all the time. The more advanced tool of breaking through these walls is tunneling. There is something called Tor that enables people to browse the Internet anonymously and they can build tunnels to help others to use this tool. But the top tool is to make use of social media to pass the messages along. People should help others and themselves by constantly blogging.

SBF is a social incubator. It tests new ideas and their social applications and promotes social networking, Isaac said. “We are an action tank.” The foundation provides services on two platforms. The social platform has a blog memedia.cn. It is a weekly online journal that welcomes help in editing and contribution. It reflects the changes in the blogosphere. The other platform is education 2.0. The site oedu.org supports open online education. It aims to help people to become lifelong learners. It has helped some organization in Taiwan to build up its MIT localization course program for free. It has recruited help to translate the MIT’s coursework into Chinese. The foundation’s cnbloggercon.org holds its annual Chinese bloggers conference. This year’s edition might be held in Shenzhen. In addition, the foundation helps not-for-profit organizations to set up blogs and help them to prevent their blogs from being blocked by the government.

The foundation’s technical platform is constantly searching for the latest tools to combat censorship. He shared a few of them with the audience. There is the anti-GFW tool. For instance, RSS might help to pass through GFW (e.g. anothr.com). There is open ID that helps people to use their blogs as accounts to access other sites without having to register every time. It opens up the access and facilitates sharing of information. The foundation also supports Creative Commons  that encourages people to respect others’ copyrights with attribution. Isaac is not worried about sharing the latest ways to get around the government’s GFW. “It’s a cat and mouse game. There are always more advanced tunnels and encryption system to surf the net anonymously … the censorship methods are too traditional. We use more advanced technology,” he said.

He advised that anyone who is interested in joining his project to set up a blog first. They should express themselves freely in their blogs and let people know them better by looking at the blogs. Then they will become trustful people and he will consider letting them join his projects. Apart from being a social entrepreneur, Isaac is a software architect and investor. He said he is constantly trying to balance his business interest and his social interest. He encourages people to contribute to social work. His organization may incubate projects that will become commercialized later.

Despite the rapid development in Chinese blogosphere, it has not reached its tipping point yet. Isaac expects that we would be near that point when the number of bloggers reaches 100 million with up to 30 million active participants. “There will be more collaboration based on trust … they will make an impact,” he said. On the other hand, the connection among human beings will become five degrees of separation. Singularity will become real, albeit step by step, he said.

So did Isaac get any reply from Google to his open letter? He said the company had acknowledged that they got the message and his suggestion. They said Google would explore solution but it’s a complex issue. The company did not want to make any move that would jeopardize its business interest in China. Isaac said the letter was not addressed to Google only. It was for other multinational companies with operations in China as well. If these companies were more open, they would benefit from having more users. Google lost some loyal users in China after it removed some keywords from its search engine. It’s a way by the users in China to protest and express their anger about the company’s self-censorship, he said.