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?

Maybe we should do the same. Too often foreign observers get misled or turned off by official rhetoric and stuck in dual thinking (authoritarianism vs. democracy), concluding that there’s nothing to be said - or done - because there’s no evidence of change in China’s government. Take Jasper Becker: in a talk just before the 17th Party Congress last month, he made the usual remarks about how decisions are made in advance in closed smoke-filled rooms in some island resort; said of an optimistic op-ed that foreigners can write whatever they like, since no Party member will come out and say they’re wrong; and laughed politely with the audience when a young Chinese man educated in the US asked which year China would become a democracy. Of course Party Congresses are scripted and staged, and of course foreigners and Chinese people alike can be naïve. But journalists at our training this weekend and bloggers at last month’s conference are thinking as seriously about China’s governance and eventual political liberalization as I am sure Chinese leaders have. Many of them have taken action too, e.g. by suing governments or Internet service providers, sometimes successfully. The rest of us could be more perceptive and reassess a bit more thoroughly different political scenarios for China’s future.

An exception among foreign observers is Professor Scalapino, founder and first chairman of the American National Committee on US-China relations, who was interviewed last week on CCTV9 (China’s international state TV channel). He blinked neither at his interviewer’s repeated prefaces about “the cynical Western media” nor at a request for a one-word prediction on eventual confrontation between Washington and Beijing. Instead he explained that President Hu wants to preserve political stability while opening up to public interventions in governance - which of course doesn’t mean democracy (Hu used the word 60 times, but my understanding is that he referred mainly to inner-Party democracy). But it confirms what Scalapino wrote in 1998:

“communication at the nonofficial level of conferences, educational exchanges, and business meetings is more open than ever. In these forums, Chinese citizens and foreigners sometimes frankly exchange views on a wide range of subjects.”

I think China’s leaders and intellectuals are ambivalent about democratization and want to test public opinion. Because a functioning civil society - interested not just in political representation but in public policies - is no more likely to emerge spontaneously than markets were when capitalism replaced communism in many parts of the world, there is lots of work to do at the bottom to prepare for opening up from the top. Luckily, that work is well under way at least among some of China’s grassroots and professional media.

I helped research and write the Open Net Initiative’s most recent Burma report, and hope that the publication of ONI research in February (Access Denied, MIT Press) will improve the way journalists understand filtering. One of them, writing for the Asia Times Online, misinterprets ONI’s investigations in Burma: state-controlled ISPs did not consistently block Gmail, Hotmail and 85% of the Internet until two years ago, and in any case it is not in strictly technical terms that Burma has one of the world’s most expansive web filtering system. See the ONI report’s conclusion:

Although Myanmar does not deploy its filtering regime with the same sophistication and breadth as other countries with similarly repressive online environments, the paranoid grip of the SPDC is felt in the restrictions on access, the high cost of services, and the frequently brutal clampdown on information and expression in all other spheres of Burmese life.

I also doubt that a “global proliferation” of censorship circumvention tools since 2005 explains why the Asia Times Online’s correspondent found connections to foreign proxy servers in Burmese Internet cafés. Nor did the junta innovate with last month’s Internet blackout: Burma was disconnected for 4 days in May 2006 (damage to an undersea cable was also alleged then), Nepal for a week during a 2005 coup (as one blogger remembers), and so on.

Rather, I suspect that recent changes have been not so much in Internet policy or filtering and circumvention capacities, but in people’s willingness to take risks – like a student connecting to a proxy server or perhaps an Internet café owner turning off programs that take regular screenshots of user activity. Worsening economic conditions pushed more Burmese people in that direction, as did the possibility to send reports and proofs of the crackdown outside the country.

This is where the Internet comes into play – transnationally rather than domestically. And it’s quite obvious to me that the outcome will differ from that of 1988 only if Burmese people get strong outside support, starting with personal sanctions on their leaders.

As many have noted, including Roby Alampay in a Washington Post op-ed, Burma raises questions about similar scenarios on a bigger scale and involving a greater power – most obviously, China. Here domestic actors would play a more decisive role than reluctant foreign powers. Unfortunately global institutions are not about to move control of the Internet away from national governments; for some time at least Burmese dial-up subscribers will have to use workarounds to surf beyond the small “Myanmar Wide Web,” and Chinese students (at Peking University at least) to pay an additional fee to access the “international web.” So laws against the provision of filtering software (Google & Co. in China and Fortinet & Co. in Burma) as well as advanced circumvention tools (e.g. PC users abroad offering anonymous, uncensored connections via Psiphon) are a good start — but they don’t help when governments pull the plug completely, or if China spun off its own Internet, which would be bad for Chinese people and for everybody else, as we’d be cut off from all online interactions between its citizens and government.

What about providing citizens with wireless Internet or SMS networks via satellites during democratic uprisings? The US could and should have done the opposite in Rwanda, as Samantha Power has often pointed out, by at least jamming radio broadcasts used to organize the genocide. Thirteen years later we are still paying too little attention, I find, to telecommunications in non-democratic regimes – perhaps because we still shy away from seeing communication (not just information access) as a human right.

I plan to be blogging very soon from Beijing about things like the Internet & politics, local government innovation, and Chinese media culture - but what would a blog be without the occasional tangent or personal impression? After two months interning in Tokyo though, it’s difficult to summarize all the impressions the city has given me. Most are superficial, since the Japanese I learned was limited to survival phrases and words like hanabi (fireworks), kabuki (traditional theater), onsen (hot spring), tonkatsu (pork cutlet), freeters (underemployed youth), matsuri (festival), Makuuchi (top sumo division), jinja (Shinto shrine), and taifuu (typhoon).

As for tangents, here is a quick one: I was puzzled today by a news report saying that the German version of Wikipedia will soon restrict instant edits via review by trusted editors. I am not finding other sources confirming this though…

Voilà, to be continued from Beijing. Happy OneWebDay everyone!