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Bloggers Who Pursue Change Confront Fear And Mistrust
Taking On Microsoft
Blogging arrived in China in the summer of 2002 as a response to censorship, but not by the government. Fang Xingdong, the author of a book that attacked Microsoft's market dominance as a threat to national security, said he created one of the country's first blogs after an essay he wrote about Microsoft disappeared from chat forums.
Although Microsoft denied it, Fang concluded the company had pressured the sites to erase his essay. When he posted it on his new blog, he realized he was using technology that could change China.
  Zhao Jing, Known as Anti in the blogging world. (Photo Of Zhao Jing, Known As Anti, By Philip P. Pan -- The Washington Post) |
"The more I thought about it, the more excited I was," said Fang, now the chairman of Bokee, China's largest blog service provider. "I felt I had seen the future of the Internet. . . . Each individual would have the power to fully express his creativity."
Fang said he believed, then as now, that big corporations like Microsoft presented the greatest threat to freedom of speech on the Internet, not government censors. But when he launched his firm, he said, he devoted meeting after meeting to persuading party officials to accept blogging.
"At the time, they thought, 'If everyone can publish, wouldn't we lose control?' " Fang said. "But I argued that a blog is like a person's home, and very few people would put something inappropriate in their home."
Fang's company, and others like it, expanded quickly as millions of Chinese embraced blogs as a channel to express themselves and an alternative to the bland fare on state media. Pioneers using pen names such as Mu Zimei, a young reporter who detailed her sexual escapades online, and Meizi, a housewife who described the meals she prepared daily, attracted huge audiences, demonstrating the potential of the Internet to render the party's culture czars irrelevant.
Like most journalists, Zhao Jing dismissed the blogosphere at first. But near the end of 2004, the slim, fast-talking native of southern China began to see it as a potential medium for journalism.
Zhao, 30, was a news junkie, a former computer technician who got his start in newspapers when an editor spotted a political essay he posted on an Internet bulletin board. He picked the pen name Anti because he believed it reflected his contrarian spirit, and in 2003, he was one of the few Chinese reporters to travel to Iraq to cover the war.
But the Communist Party shut down his newspaper, the 21st Century World Herald, after it published a retired official's call for political reform, and Zhao was summoned home before the war began. Despondent, he quit and turned to the foreign press, working briefly as a researcher in the Beijing bureau of The Washington Post before moving to the local office of the New York Times.
He launched his blog in December 2004 with high hopes. "Most blogs were diaries or entertainment, but I wanted to do something different," he said. "I wanted to produce a high-quality blog about politics, like a column, with each entry good enough to publish in a newspaper or magazine."
Zhao polished his writing before posting it. He gave each entry a strong headline and an eye-catching photo. In the beginning, he spent $60 a month to buy ads on Google that would appear when users searched for information on hot political issues.
"Anti's Daily Thoughts on Politics and Journalism" tackled a variety of subjects, from public attitudes in Jordan toward the war in Iraq, to the growth of democracy in Taiwan, to the state of Chinese journalism. Zhao generally refrained from topics sure to upset the censors. But his political views were clear.
