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2 SPEAKING
FREELY Cracking China's Great
Firewall By Richard Daniel
Ewing
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
Late last year,
anti-Japanese demonstrations rocked the Chinese
provincial capital of Jianye after a Japanese flag
was displayed inside a government building.
Thousands of angry Chinese
stormed the government
complex, then poured into the main city streets
where they chanted anti-Japanese slogans and
demanded redress for the national insult that they
had suffered.
Authorities were tense -
poised to take action to shut down the fast moving
protests. After the key agitators were jailed,
their organizations disbanded, and the offending
flag was removed, the mass movement eventually
subsided.
Never heard of the protests or
Jianye city? That's because the demonstrations
happened in the virtual world of Fantasy Westward
Journey instead of on the streets of Beijing or
Shanghai. While the event is easy to dismiss
because it occurred in a video game, the incident
encapsulates technological, social and political
issues facing China that are being driven by the
next-generation Internet, social-networking
communities and user-generated content.
How China's government, companies, and
citizens respond to these trends will have far
reaching impact for both China's socio-political
evolution and the global evolution of new Internet
technologies.
In a country where tens of
millions of people play online video games,
Fantasy Westward Journey is one of China's most
popular titles, with hundreds of thousands of
concurrent users. The game is set in a
mythological version of the Tang Dynasty's famous
Journey West era when the monk Tang Sanzang and
the Monkey King traveled across China in search of
sacred Buddhist texts.
Last July, players
thought they noticed a Japanese flag erected
inside a government office in the game and were
incensed by the notion of Japanese presence in
their midst. News swept the online gaming
community, bringing thousands of virtual
protesters on to the streets of the virtual town.
These protests, in fact, were feeding off
real-world anti-Japanese feelings that were
running high among China's youth, as evidenced by
the demonstrations and boycotts that broke out in
April 2005.
Despite being the world's most
populous country, China has historically been a
relatively small player in the global Internet.
That is changing quickly. In 1996, China had only
half a million Internet users (0.3% of the
population) and trailed far behind the United
States, Japan and other countries. Today, China
has more than 130 million people online and will
soon become the largest Internet-using country in
the world.
If China's Internet penetration
reaches the levels in advanced nations, its
hundreds of millions of users will dwarf the
United States' users, making it the most
influential Internet market in the world. In
short, given the sheer size and growth of the
China market, how the country chooses to develop
this technology will have global ramifications for
the Internet in general and Web 2.0 in particular.
What is Web 2.0? It's tough to put a
finger on exactly but, as a US Supreme Court
justice famously said of pornography, "I know it
when I see it." In general, Web 2.0 refers to the
growing trend of user-generated content,
peer-to-peer exchanges and social networking
(think Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr). By
putting creative power in the hands of individual
users, it represents a major shift in the Internet
(or perhaps a return to its roots) and it is a
powerful new force in the evolution of the
Internet. Web 2.0 is coming to China in a big
way and starting to change the Internet landscape
there already. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for
example, is working to take MySpace to China,
Intel is investing in 51.com - China's largest
social-networking site, with 60 million registered
users - and there are scores of local competitors.
In fact, every successful Web 2.0 company has an
aspiring counterpart in China.
For
example, Mop.com is an equivalent to MySpace,
Xiaonei approximates FaceBook and Tudou.com and
YoQoo.com are Chinese-versions of YouTube, with
millions people sharing amusing home-made videos
every day. Finally, Entropia (a Swedish maker of
virtual worlds) has announced a deal with the
Beijing municipal government to develop the
world's largest virtual world, capable of
accommodating 7 million concurrent users from
across China and abroad. Designed to be similar to
Second Life and focused on commercial
applications, users will be able to build and
explore a vast alternate universe.
Web
2.0's leading edge in China, however, is already
well established in the form of online video
games. As the Jianye incident demonstrated, online
multi-player games are really part arcade game and
part social network. They bring together hundreds
of thousands of people with similar interests and
characteristics (eg, access to and familiarity
with computers).
Moreover, the guild
system - groups of characters within many games
that band together to form a community and perform
group activities together - can be a powerful
social force. The World of Warcraft, for example,
has millions of users in China exploring a land of
orcs, dragons, and trolls. At the same time, it
connects a diverse group of users from across
China into a coherent online community.
These capabilities raise important new
questions for China. Is Entropia constructing the
virtual equivalent of a massive Tiananmen Square
that could house virtual protests with millions of
demonstrators? What are the implications of that
capability for socio-political change in China?
Enter the party. Above all else, the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) prizes control and
social stability. The party, in essence, has made
a pact with Chinese citizens that it will deliver
economic growth in exchange for retaining
political power. Despite decades of fast economic
growth and rising prosperity, however, the
government is managing a country with widening
economic inequality and serious environmental
issues.
These challenges could spark civil
unrest. If the CCP has a raw nerve then, it is
organized social and political protest. That is
why
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