PARIS — Within two weeks of starting his personal blog in 2002, Wang Jianshuo noticed something peculiar. A post he had written about shuttle services to and from the Pudong airport in Shanghai was getting a lot of traffic. In fact, it was getting so much traffic that Google ranked it first when searching for the words “Pudong airport.”
The explanation turned out to be simple: Mr. Wang’s post was almost the only information available online in English about an international airport then serving 11 million travelers a year — now almost 32 million.
Since his first post, Mr. Wang has devoted about half an hour a day to updating his entries. He said he liked to focus on “useful things,” like tips about transportation or places to visit in Shanghai. In the process, the blogger, who in his day job is the chief executive of Baixing, eBay’s online classifieds Web site in China, has offered the English-speaking world a window into the daily life of a “new China” citizen.
Mining the hundreds of posts he has written over the past eight years, readers can follow Mr. Wang through his apartment moves, on visits to various countries — when he worked for Microsoft he made several trips to the United States — and even watch his son, Yifan, grow from a mere idea to a chubby-cheeked 3-year-old playing with Legos with his dad.
Mr. Wang talks about how to dodge the Chinese government’s efforts to control the Internet by using tunneling software to gain access to Facebook and Twitter, and he shares his anxiety about which school Yifan should attend to prepare him best to compete with his peers 20 years from now.
Aficionados of Mr. Wang’s blog, which according to him gets about a million page views a month, say that it is still one of the richest sources about contemporary Shanghai available in English. But his is no longer a lone voice.
Want to find the best find hot pot in Shanghai? Or pizza? Or Irish pub? Check out the Shanghaiist, part of the Gothamist network of city-centric blogs founded in New York in 2003.
Want to know what people in mainland China think about the one-child policy? Or what teenagers are saying about the gaokao, the national university entrance exam? Go to the blog ChinaSMACK. Need three dozen cupcakes for a 7-year-old’s birthday party? There’s a blog for that, too. Get in touch with Emily Lopez, of Emily’s Adventures in Shanghai and Emily’s Cupcakes.
John Pasden, a 31-year-old native of Florida, is the man behind the blog Sinosplice. He planted himself in China, first in Hangzhou, then Shanghai, 10 years ago, starting his blog as a way to tell the “folks back home” about his life in a place that was then little known to most Americans. Thanks to Sinosplice, he has become a go-to person for all things related to life in Shanghai and learning Chinese.
Other first-wave mainland China bloggers include Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese-American rock star, writer and media expert, and Brendan O’Kane of bokane.org, an Irish-American who speaks flawless Mandarin and is reputedly one of the best Chinese-English translators around.
Those early bloggers were “focused on the idea of ‘telling it like it is,”’ Mr. Pasden said. “Back then hardly any other Westerners were blogging from China, but we knew that our friends and family back home had no clue what modern China was like.”
The blogs filled a void in information about the country, he added. “We knew the media wasn’t educating them either. China to the average American, at least, was still some murky outdated vision of Mao’s China.”
Mr. Pasden, like some of the other early bloggers, has made the transition from personal blogging to a professional online job — his blog started his career as senior product manager at ChinesePod, an online Chinese language school.
This pattern is in keeping with an overall trend, said Marjorie Dryburgh, a lecturer in modern Chinese studies at the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield in England. In the past five years, blogs from China have “moved some way beyond the quieter, personal type of work that you might associate with the blog-as-online-diary,” she said. Now, there are more blogs about self-help and stock market advice and more official blogs, she said.
According to the China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run nonprofit group, there were 182 million personal blogs and “personal spaces” in China as of June 2009, of which a third were being updated at least once every six months.
Fauna, the online alias of the blogger behind ChinaSMACK, shines a spotlight on “the real China,” at least as it appears online. The Shanghai native, with a small team of contributors, translates Chinese blog posts and comments from popular online forums about juicy, gossipy and very Chinese topics that the average mainland city dweller might discuss around the dinner table.
Through these translations, English speakers can get a perspective on what people think about Chinese men who buy brides in Vietnam; Chinese university students in Australia who tote Louis Vuitton bags and drive BMWs; and a new trend in which teenage girls sport slashed wrists (though it is unclear whether the wounds are real or faked). According to Fauna, ChinaSMACK received more than 500,000 visitors last month, of whom a quarter logged on from the United States, while more than 10 percent were local.
The topic of censorship is a popular one for those dealing with the media in China, but none of the bloggers interviewed said they had ever been shut down. Access is a greater issue, resolved with the use of virtual-private networks, or VPNs, to get around online fire walls created by the Chinese government. Many bloggers, however, said that they self-censored by choosing nonpolitical topics. Because of the nature of what she covers, Fauna, in an interview conducted by e-mail, said she never revealed anything about her identity, beyond her gender.
Professional journalists are also blogging. James Fallows, a correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, blogged while he was stationed in Shanghai, and Adam Minter, an American freelance journalist, runs a frequently referenced blog, Shanghai Scrap. He says he gets 22,000 to 77,000 hits a month on his site, depending on who is counting.
Mr. Minter chose to make Shanghai his home because of “all of the money sloshing down these streets,” a testament to the entrepreneurial vibe that pulses through the city.
Though he makes no money from his blog, Mr. Minter said he maintained it to force himself to write regularly and as a place to put story ideas he found that were too small or too obscure to sell to publications elsewhere. It also gives him additional exposure to the public.
“I’ve received tips, leaks and invitations purely on the basis of information published on the blog,” he said. “That’s an unexpected boon.”
This set-up-shop spirit has drawn, according to the Chinese government, 4.7 million migrant workers into this city of 18 million to walk along the same streets as 120,000 foreigners looking for their piece of the pie. Ms. Lopez, a San Francisco native, is among them, writing a blog and making cupcakes for something to do, but also for profit.
In China, “anything is possible, but everything is difficult,” she said. Starting her business required little more than the idea, a health license and a business license. For her, Shanghai gives people “a chance to be creative and do something that would take more money or wouldn’t be as easy to get started in your home country.” She knows other women entrepreneurs making everything from jewelry to specialty paper goods.
Mr. Pasden said the English-language Shanghai blogosphere was dominated by foreigners, an imbalance that made the work of bloggers like Mr. Wang and ChinaSMACK specially valuable. Mr. Minter said that voices from Shanghai’s huge migrant population were particularly lacking.
“The Chinese migrant experience to Shanghai is going to be as important to the future Chinese self-image as the New York immigrant experience was to the American self-image,” he said.
But whatever its gaps and the limits, Mr. Wang said, the broad rise of blogging has meant a welcome increase in available information; and more information means a better idea of what is really happening in the city.
“Everything in this world is just like the elephant in the blind men and the elephant story,” he said, referring to the tale of blind men confronting a strange beast, trying to identify it by touching different parts and each giving a different answer. “As a blogger, I’m just one of the blind men to feel this elephant. I am very sure that I write everything that I know and I never write anything that I know is not true, but this does not mean that my article is the whole Shanghai.
“Blogging provides a way for all the blind men to sit down together and share whatever they see,” he added, “and when more and more people blog, we can understand this world better from many different perspectives.”
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