BEIJING — China’s Twitter was raucous Thursday with horn-tooting over Beijing’s gold rush at the London Olympics, a digital reflection of the nation’s exuberant mood — embellished with flashing emoticons. Earlier passions have been ignited on the site by a deadly high speed rail crash and outrage over factory pollution.
Launched in 2009, China’s leading microblog site, Sina Weibo, has given a digital megaphone to more than 300 million Chinese, prompting many to wonder if it might drive Arab Spring-style political change and democratic reforms. Others see the platform as a brilliant new surveillance tool for the communist government in Beijing.
“You get to know what people are saying and ... it’s a way for the middle class to let off steam,” said Michael Clendenin, managing director of RedTech Advisors, a tech research company in Shanghai. “It’s better to let them blow off steam in a way you can control and delete rather than have 500,000 students all of the sudden show up at your doorstep.”
And Weibo is heavily censored. Sina employs around 1,000 people who sift through the digital morass, catching sensitive material that keyword filters miss and deleting it. Not infrequently, they delete whole accounts. The government requires Sina and other Internet companies to do this in-house, and at their own cost, under threat of fines and shutdowns if they fail.
The government too has a corps of Internet police, believed to be in the tens of thousands, who patrol the Web and its total population in China of 485 million. They even boast a mascot, a pair of cartoon police officers named Jingjing and Chacha, a play on the Mandarin word for police.
Sina has domestic competitors that offer their own weibo, which means microblog in Chinese, but Sina’s service has become synonymous with the Weibo label and has attracted the most high-profile and prolific users. Though modeled on Twitter, Sina’s version has more bells and whistles, like embedded video and images for posts and threaded comments.
Clendenin calls it a ‘frankenclone.’
“It’s taken a little bit of Twitter, of Groupon, of Hulu, or YouTube and essentially grafted all these pieces together. In aggregate it’s actually much better than what Twitter is.”
Weibo power users are pop and movie stars. Leading the pack, with more than 22 million fans, is a pillow-lipped beauty with glossy black hair and a passion for refugee causes. No, not Angelina Jolie, but Yao Chen, a 32-year-old actress who frequently tweets about her handsome grey cat Badun — named after U.S. Gen. George Patton.
Weibo is rife with cat images and banal observations about pets, as well as entertainment gossip, jokes and the ravings of sports fans.
“Chinese athletes, you are so great!!!,” Damengmeng Betty posted Thursday on how she felt watching so many of her country’s competitors at medal ceremonies. “I feel so excited! Tears fill up my eyes. Can’t use words to describe how that feels.”
But the service has also given Chinese an unprecedented public platform on which to rage over serious social problems.
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