| Page 3 of 4 < > |
Bloggers Who Pursue Change Confront Fear And Mistrust
"I thought of myself as a salesman, and what I was selling was the concept of democracy," he said. "People think discussing politics is dangerous, but I wanted them to relax, to see it was normal and that it's not so sensitive."
By July, Zhao said, his blog was getting 7,000 visitors a day.
  Zhao Jing, Known as Anti in the blogging world. (Photo Of Zhao Jing, Known As Anti, By Philip P. Pan -- The Washington Post) |
Then, in August, he posted a copy of a letter by an editor at the China Youth Daily who had attacked a plan to muzzle the paper's reporters. Hours later, the government blocked access to his blog, and every other blog on Blog-City, the overseas site where he had set up his page.
Zhao posted a message apologizing to his fellow bloggers for cutting them off from their readers in China. Then he moved to MSN Spaces.
A Joint Venture
Microsoft has struggled in China. Piracy of its software is rampant, and much of the public sees the company as a foreign bully. Analysts believe it is losing money here. When it launched its free blogging platform last May, part of the Chinese version of its MSN.com portal site, it hoped to turn things around.
The site was the result of years of negotiations with Chinese officials. Microsoft lined up the Beijing Youth Daily, a state-owned newspaper, and others to provide content. Just before the launch, it struck a partnership with a state-owned investment firm in Shanghai run by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former president Jiang Zemin. The joint venture marked one of the first times a foreign-invested firm had obtained a license to provide Internet content in China.
Free speech advocates quickly attacked Microsoft for preventing Chinese bloggers from using words such as "freedom" and "democracy" in the titles of their blog entries. But MSN Spaces was a hit, and in less than five months, surveys showed it was overtaking Fang Xingdong's Bokee as the most popular blog site in China.
Bloggers flocked to the site because of its superior software, which made it easy to include slideshows and was linked to Microsoft's popular instant-messaging program. But Zhao said he chose MSN Spaces because it seemed less heavily censored than its Chinese competitors.
While Chinese firms used filters to stop bloggers from posting entries with prohibited keywords, Microsoft applied its filter only to the titles of entries. And while Chinese sites often erased politically sensitive content, Microsoft didn't appear to be deleting much. Meanwhile, other foreign blog sites, like Google's Blogger, had been blocked by the government.
"Anti's Blog" thrived at its new address. Zhao continued to write about Taiwan, opposing independence for the island but praising its democracy. He mocked North Korea, picking apart propaganda photos from President Hu Jintao's visit to Pyongyang. He examined the success of a Chinese television program modeled after Fox's "American Idol," comparing it with an experiment in democracy.
But as his audience grew, Zhao exercised more restraint. He worried about the censors. He also knew that swaying China's Internet users would be difficult.
"With more readers, I needed to be more reasonable," he said. "I always said I supported democracy, but I tried to explain it in a sensible way. Otherwise, people would start calling me a traitor or an American running dog."
