Reflections Of A Bridge Blogger

[At the 2008 Chinese Blogger Conference in Guangzhou, I was scheduled to give a talk. A family medical emergency forced me to cancel. The following is the talk that I would have given.]

I am honored to be a speaker at the 2008 Chinese Blogger Conference. Some of you here may know me very well, but it is likely that many of you do not know me at all. That is because I am a Chinese bridge blogger who writes in English. Rebecca MacKinnon wrote: "What is a bridge-blogger? Somebody who acts as a 'bridge' between their blogging community and the rest of the world." Since 2003, I have been making some parts of the Chinese Internet community (but obviously not all parts) known to the English-reading world at large. I would like to talk to you today about how things have changed in those five years as I see it.

I am interested in many different things in Greater China, including media fairness, mass incidents, rumor mongering, social hypocrisy, censorship, public opinion polls, earthquake prediction, nationalism, Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing), fake photography, sexual mores, etc. But here today, I would like to concentrate on how the treatment of social incidents has changed over time. It tells a lot about what is happening in Chinese society as a whole.

Let me begin with a process model about a generic incident in the pre-Internet era.

1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).

2. The local government suppresses all information.

3. All media reports are censored. [If it wasn't reported, it didn't happen as far as people are concerned.]

4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice. The road is long and hard (see The Long Road To Petition) with dim prospects.

This model has been in existence in China since antiquity. The assumption is that the Emperor (President/Chairman/Premier) is benevolent, but is sometimes shielded from the truth by his corrupt underlings. If only the truth can be brought to his attention, justice will be rendered. If the Emperor fails to respond, then it is time for yet another rebellion to find another Son of Heaven to take his place.

The Internet showed up in China in the late 1990's with many bulletin board systems. By early 2002, personal blogs began to appear. How has that affected this process model? Here is the revised version around 2003 when I started my bridge blogging.

1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).

2. The local government suppresses all information.

3. All media reports are censored. [But if it wasn't reported in traditional media, there are other alternatives now on the Internet.]

4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice. The road is long and hard, and nothing ever comes out of it.

5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case. But within approximately 48 hours, all traces of information are erased by order of the authorities. [Thus, one of the excitements of my blogging activity was to find and translate that information before this window closes.]

6. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through. This creates an international scandal.

7. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.

Of course, it was never as simple as that. The reality is that western media have 'short attention span.' I am not denigrating the western media here. I am just stating the facts of life. First, compare how many 'injustices' occur every day in a country with 1.4 billion people and how much column space The New York Times or The Guardian can give to coverage on China? You can imagine how one incident must compete against all others for that single daily story in The New York Times or The Guardian. I observe that deaths (preferably documented by photographs) usually help. The core message is as the Chinese blogger Michael Anti once said, "If it isn't reported in English, it didn't happen." And that is really dismaying.

Secondly, how long and profound can that story be? The most typical setup is 800 words, with one paragraph for background, two paragraphs for the actual incident, one paragraph for one expert, one paragraph for another expert and one paragraph for the overall context (as in, "there were 87,000 mass incidents last year in China"). This is not going to generate international pressure in most cases. International pressure comes only when many media cover the same story for many days in a row. This is not an impossible mission, but people have to be very crafty and astute in presenting and positioning their case to the western media.

Nevertheless, I regarded my blog as a value-added service. If a English-language reader is intrigued by a English-language report on some 'atrocity' in China, he may be tempted to search for more information on the Internet. He will be able to find the full translation about the incident at my blog. For example, I provided in-depth coverage in early 2004 about the matter of The Chinese Peasant Study by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao. There are many examples in my blog archive about other social incidents under this foreign interventionist model. In 2006, a survey of foreign correspondents by Rebecca Mackinnon found that my blog was the top blog as well as an important source of information. A number of Chinese bloggers have found that they were receiving international attention through my translations of their blog posts. That was how they found out about me.

But we are now in late 2008. How have things changed? I would revise the process model as follows:

1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).

2. The local government suppresses all information.

3. All media reports are censored.

4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice. The road is long and hard and nothing ever results.

5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case.

6a. Within 48 hours, all traces of negative (i.e. against the authorities) information are erased by order of the authorities, or else by self-censorship at the portals/forums/blog service providers.

6b. Positive (i.e. on behalf of the authorities) information appear from Internet commentators who are paid by the authorities for their efforts.

5. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through with an international incident.

7. But there are just too many portals/forums/blogs that important information will eventually seep through.

8. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.

So what are the most important changes over the past five years?

Firstly, the Internet has grown so big that it is beyond normal control. How do you monitor what 253 million netizens are doing (statistics from Wikipedia)? 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.

Secondly, there is the emergence of an extremist right and an extremist left on the Internet in terms of public opinion. The characteristics of these two extremist wings are by no means clear. Generally speaking the extremist right might be the ones who claim to automatically embrace the universal values of freedom, liberty and human rights, and assumes that China is worhtless until those values are implemented. Conversely, the extremist left automatically embrace patriotism, nationalism and sovereignty, and assumes that China must defend itself from foreign intrusion at all cost. But that is very much an over-simplification of matters. It suffices that on any seemingly simple issue (such as Chang Ping's essay about how to find out the truth about the Lhasa incident), there exists two diametrically opposite viewpoints that are automated gainsays. They are vigorous, even vicious, but also uninformative and unpersuasive. Each viewpoint is likely to be held by a small number of netizens, but when the majority chooses to keep silent, this becomes much ado about nothing to read about these vitriolic Internet comments.

Thirdly, a more interesting development has been the artful insertion of rumors into public debates. On the seemingly straightforward case of The Police Beat A Harbin University Student To Death, there was a wave of misinformation about the deceased (that is, he had family ties to important government figures; he was a drug abuser; etc) that undermines public sympathy. This gets to the point where one has to tread extremely carefully in every case to tell information from misinformation. That may be frustrating, but it is actually very useful training. You might as well as learn about the art of lie detection in cases with lower social costs than in more important cases with huge consequences (such as elections).

Fourthly, and most importantly, you will note the role of western media has been eliminated from the process model. This means a lot to me, because I am a bridge blogger from China to the English-only readership. 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.

In the political realm, the Chinese people no longer have to believe in the rhetoric of freedom, liberty, democracy, sovereignty and human rights. The war in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison, the Guantanamo camp, hurricane Katrina and other misconduct took care of all that. Why would the Chinese people be interested in what American president George W. Bush have to preach to them about freedom, liberty, democracy, sovereignty and human rights? When the western media invoke those terms, the reaction from the Chinese people is: "Look within yourselves and fix your own problems first!"

In the economic realm, the financial tsunami of 2008 took care of any credibility in the Washington consensus. In its place was an as-yet-undefined Beijing consensus which has less specifics than the general idea of self-determination. Why would the Chinese people be interested in what Alan Greenspan and Henry Paulson have to tell them about how to run their economy when these 'wise men' only have failure on their hands?

In the media realm, the western media have taken a pounding in the eyes of the Chinese public this year. First, there was the western media coverage of the Tibet disturbances (see Chinese Netizens versus Western Media), followed by The Olympic Torch Tour As Public Relations Disaster. The list goes on and on. Why would the Chinese people be interested in western media coverage along the same lines?

So here is how I perceive my role to have changed in these last five years.

Five years ago, I had the missionary complex that I was going to help change China by getting the western media interested in certain matters and hence create international pressure. Maybe good things will occur as a result.

Today, I no longer have any sense of mission. Instead, I am a passive observer who is recording how the Chinese people are forging their own destinies by their own actions.

Here I am reminded of a stanza from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (Little Gidding):

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Once upon a time, some people believed in the importance of western media reports. Other people held the opposite view and considered them demonic. But today, indifference has set in to replace the passions on either side. People in China no longer care what the western media have to say.

I don't have any sense of despair. Instead I am very optimistic. For the longest time, people have said that freedom/liberty/democracy/human rights and all that are not going to come to China through exterior imposition. I mean, is democracy going to come when the United States of America sends their Viceroy Paul Bremer to run China and bring prosperity in addition to freedom/liberty/democracy/human rights? NO! Instead, it must come from the Chinese people themselves. So why would I despair when this is happening here and now? I am just honored to be an observer in this moment of history.

[Postcript: At this 2008 Chinese Blogger Conference, there is a list of seventeen Chinese bloggers who represent how free thinking and an open media will affect the future of China:

安替
长平
连岳
时昭
胡咏
冯三七
周曙光
杨恒均
邓志新
艾未未
老虎庙
温云超
许志永
刘晓原
翟明磊
宋以朗
毛向辉

I don't know how I deserve this mention alongside them. I don't think that I belong here at all because I contribute practically nothing original. In any case, I am very much honored. This is how it is in the year 2008. In another five years' time, there will be many, many more of us. Our power will be due to the fact that we come in different shapes and forms, we have different beliefs and creeds, we have different concerns and foci, and we have different methods and styles. Together, we are the Chinese blogosphere.]