Session 8.1: Internet, Tibet, Olympics, Earthquake… and Sex
Roland Soong covers all the above, as well as the snowstorm. As far as his coverage of these issues on ESWN, he displays a graph showing Edison Chen and Sexy Photo Gate easily won the day with nearly 10,000,000 hits in one day. January 28th, he wrote about how the Edison Chen photos were overwhelming Hong Kong discussion forums which had as many as 200,000 users at any moment. Someone posted some photos asking rhetorically “who are these people?” and the viewers asked if there were more. A great deal of users were from the Mainland, and the slowdown was frustrating Hong Kong users, who then inserted references to Tiananmen and 1989 in order to trigger the firewall and block Mainland traffic from the forums.
The Hong Kong police cracked down on the photos. If you posted the photos, they would force the ISPs and forums to reveal your IP and they arrest you. Even if you post from overseas they will find you. In one example they tracked someone through a Cyprus IP. This was clearly selective law enforcement as there are millions of other obscene/pornographic photos that are not dealt with in such a rigorous manner. So many posters were diverted to Mainland forums. This is where a great deal of ESWN traffic was coming from. The Mainlanders were back-translating ESWN’s English translations to Chinese and hotlinking the photos on his site. This was the first time ever China proved less oppressive than Hong Kong.
Next, March 14th, Tibet. James Miles was the sole foreign correspondent, Kadfly the one foreign blogger. For the first time, Chinese people took extreme interest in Western coverage. Soong shows us the famous AFP/CNN cropped photo that prompted the beginnings of “anti-CNN” and “You cannot be too CNN”, which was once applied to CCTV. Anti-CNN.com expanded to cover various examples of perceived Western bias and clear errors such as photos involving Nepalese police. A minority of Western media made these mistakes, but were put under disproportionate scrutiny. On April 3, Chang Ping wrote his Southern Metropolis Daily essay “Where does the truth about Lhasa come from?” where he criticized as the biggest danger people who abandon objectivity and take refuge in narrow nationalism, which was heavily criticized and was well illustrated by an editorial cartoon displaying China.com patriot/nationalists and those who agree with Chang Ping.
Next was the Olympic Torch relay. In London, where Lord Coe claimed he was pushed by “thug” Chinese security guards, and the Jin Jing incident in Paris. In China by contrast was unprecedented relay for the torch relay, and the I (L) China red heart campaign on MSN. The corollary to supporting your country is to attack your enemies, and Carrefour was identified as one. LVMH, the parent company, could not be easily boycotted for its upscale brands, but its stake in Carrefour was an “incomprehensible” rationalization for the call to action. The protests appear to have been spontaneously organized. Jin Jing opposed the Carrefour protests and was branded by some a traitor, no longer a hero.
With the Wenchuan earthquake, everything was taken off the table.
On Civilian Journalists and Mainstream Media: Soong argues civilian journalists are local sources great at providing tips from the ground, but cannot follow through on verification. Most cases require the resources (skills, money, tools) of mainstream media to do this. Both need each other – it is a symbiotic relationship.
Back to the earthquake. Fuxin #2 Primary School collapsed killing 129 children during the earthquake. The parents took photos of the rubble and posted them on the Internet, and appeared in other photos with framed pictures of their children, as well as posing with a large poster making an appeal. The New York Times followed through with the story of local party boss Jiang Guohua, who dropped to his knees before the parents who continued to shout and march despite his pleas. The Mianzhu party secretary explained why he knelt. Mianzhu has suffered over 11,000 deaths, 37,000 injuries, 100,000 damaged buildings, 500,000 homeless. He has enormous issues to deal with, and promised the parents an investigation but argues he needs time. Soong argues that there is some credence to this.
Soong concludes that Chinese netizens are heterogeneous and constantly evolving. Size matters as 0.01% of them is 21,000 people. External events are change agents, especially this year which has been full of once-in-a-lifetime events.