Internet, Tibet, the Olympics and the EarthquakeRoland Soong6th Annual Chinese Internet Research ConferenceHong KongJune 14, 2008

What About 2008?

What happened on the Chinese Internet in 2008?

Myths: Snow Storms,Tibet, Olympics and Earthquake

I’m not a historian and I cannot tell you what the histories shall say

I’ll only tell you what I observed via the EastSouthWestNorth blog

Greatest ESWN ‘Hits’ of 2008 by Month

Greatest ESWN ‘Hits’ of 2008 By Day

Sexy Photos Gate

Olympics

Wenchuan Earthquake

Four Landmark Events

Sexy Photos Tibet (Lhasa incident; Anti-CNN.com) Olympics (torch relay; Carrefour boycott) Wenchuan Earthquake

Sexy Photos Gate

January 28, 2008Hong Kong's Biggest News Story of the Year

“The discussion forum servers are being overwhelmed today by the massive traffic surge in pursuit of this news story.  Forum posts are being deleted as quickly as they are posted …”

Sexy Photos Gate

Sexy Photos Gate

Sexy Photos Gate

So what? All that happened in Hong Kong with “one country, two systems.”

What has that go to do with mainland China?

Sexy Photos Gate

Hong Kong police cracked down on the Edison Chen photos If you post the photos onto Hong Kong adult forums,

the police will force the forums/ISPs to yield your IP/real addresses and arrest you

Even if you post the photos onto overseas websites and then post links on Hong Kong adult forums, the police will arrest you too

Sexy Photos Gate If you can’t post to Hong Kong forums, you post to the

mainland forums such as Tianya, Baidu, Xici Hutong, etc.

This was where the ESWN traffic surge was coming from! I translated Hong Kong reports into English and then they back-translated them back into Chinese! And they hotlinked to my news photos!

For the first time ever, mainland China proved to more less ‘repressive’ than Hong Kong.

Tibet

On March 14, 2008, Lhasa was burning …

Tibet

James Miles (The Economist) was the sole foreign correspondent reporting from Tibet

Foreign bloggers (e.g. Kadfly) Chinese bloggers too (e.g. Phoenix TV’s Chen Lin) CCTV/Xinhua were sole information provider otherwise,

leading to conflict of views between China and western media

Tibet

The media angle in AFP/CNN photo:

Tibet Anti-CNN.com was spontaneously established as netizen reaction

of western media bias to act as self-appointed monitor

Olympics Torch Relay The Olympic Torch Tour As Public Relations

“There is a public relations disaster, but the question is for whom? … Faced with the beautiful heroine with one leg, how is any liberal dissidence on behalf of a Free Tibet going to work inside China?  … That would guarantee that those causes will never become accepted into mainstream Chinese opinion for the next generation.”

Olympics Torch Relay

Carrefour Boycott: Spontaneously organized? France → LV → Carrefour

Wenchuan Earthquake

May 12, 2008

Wenchuan Earthquake

Everything else is off the table for now: Free Tibet Olympics Boycott

Darfur Human rights …

New modes of civic action/reaction through the Internet

Reality

Chinese netizens are heterogeneous and constantly changing

Size matters because 0.01% of 210 million Chinese netizens is 21,000

External events are change agents, especially so far in 2008

Plenty more to come still …