Last Tuesday I attended a talk by Chinese journalist Michael Anti at Harvard’s Berkman Center… from my living room in Beijing (viva MediaBerkman & IRC!). The topic was blogging in China, which I often think about these days as I help prepare a conference on new media at People’s University in Beijing at the end of the month. Berkman fellows liveblogged the talk and Q&A.

Anti showed surprisingly little awareness of China’s recent history (saying for instance that blame and self-criticism are not part of Chinese culture), of its burgeoning civil society (saying it has no NGOs), of “Western” blogs (saying they are either for elections or lobbying), and even of Internet companies in China (overestimating the use of Gmail, whose hosting outside of China costs Google many potential customers). That he might be representative of famous netizens in his generation, who grew up after the cultural revolution and during economic liberalization, is making me rethink the Chinese blogosphere…

I was particularly interested in three thoughts that I think he put forth:

1. The Chinese blogosphere is growing because for now bloggers are a better source of infotainment for media outlets than J-school grads (who are “really stupid”); new media are not so much embraced as they are a staffing strategy
2. Celebrity bloggers and IT geeks dominate in China because other citizens lack the resources – and freedom – to blog
3. Anonymous blogging won’t catch on because Chinese bloggers want fame or at least recognition

#1 and #2 are probably true: just like a sensationalist, over-marketized press has come to account for more of what people spend on news media than many wish (in China and elsewhere), societal factors cause celebrity “blogs” to attract more able Chinese bloggers and to take a greater share of China’s online audience’s attention span than might seem desirable.

But my answer is: so what? Who cares about the ratio of tabloid-like blogs to actual citizen media blogs if the latter category already consists of millions of ordinary Chinese citizens taking the time and often the risk to write about meaningful things online? The Brits, for example, pick up tabloids on their way out of the tube, but are still watching the BBC and pioneering grassroots journalism online.

So instead of disparaging the blogosphere / Web 2.0 as Michael Anti tends to do, we need to stress the flexibility of new media, imagine various potential uses for blogs, and educate readers about distinguishing between types of blogs and bloggers – including anonymous ones.

Anonymity is commonly cited to explain the popularity of chatrooms – “BBS” in China, for “bulletin board system” – in relation to blogs (Michael’s argument) or other Web 2.0 phenomena like twitter (see this video) . But according to staff here at Internews, anonymous – or pseudonymous – blogging raises at least as much interest and questions in China as Ethan Zuckerman reports (globally, I’m guessing). One question is whether it should be allowed (it’s illegal in China), and another is why one should believe what an unidentified blogger writes. Ethan’s “stock answer” to the latter is:

“You judge the reputation of a blogger by network and by track record. Read back through that blogger’s posts and you’ll get a good sense for where she’s coming from and what her biases are. Look at who links to her and what they say about her, and you’ll find out what her credibility is with other bloggers.” This answer satisfies some questioners and disappoints others.

I myself am satisfied to see links as endorsements that build credibility and authoritativeness in a community. But a conversation with a Chinese friend several years ago (about using academic sources and building on previous research) made me realize that trusting sources is not always the default in societies with different histories, notions of authority, communities of readers, and ratios of dubious vs. trustworthy writing. Not every country has built as strong a tradition of – or legal protection for – anonymous writing as the US, whose Founding Fathers published anonymous pamphlets, or the UK, where the authoritative weekly newspaper The Economist is written anonymously.

So when Ethan further asks…

“‘Why the heck do you want to know this person’s name?’ I don’t know about you, but knowing that a blogpost was written by someone named “Mohammed Hassan”, rather than by “Muslimpundit” tells me approximately nothing. [...] Knowing someone’s real name can be less useful in this case than knowing an Internet persona – there’s a lot of Mohammed Hassans in Cairo”

… Michael Anti’s answer that “name is everything” in China reminds us of cultural and political differences. What I know about Chinese literary does confirm the importance of name and recognition, but then again the medieval “Accounts of Lofty Reclusion” and “Accounts of High-minded Men” contain biographies of people who earned a lasting reputation anonymously, and classical poets like Tao Qian and Su Shi used pseudonyms [号, hào]).

Instead of generalizing about cultural preferences as if they were fixed in stone, why not hope that anonymous blogs in China and elsewhere will be allowed, used judiciously and understood for what they contribute to the public sphere?