Description
China’s blogging community will soon be bigger than America’s and not even the world’s most sophisticated system of web censorship can silence the chatter.
Bloggers like Wang Xiao Feng are armed with a keyboard and a lot of attitude. Wang models his blog on the satirical magazine Private Eye which a friend once brought him from England.
He pokes fun at entertainers, as well as double-talking officials, in a way that wasn’t possible when he wrote for a Beijing magazine. Wang doesn’t regard himself as overly political, but he also knows that there are many ways of making a statement and dodging the censors.
Wang has now started to make irreverent videos, which he posts on his blog site. One depicts a night in a police station for a man – a blogger – wrongly accused of robbery.
Beijing’s semi-underground night clubs have become the latest haunt of China’s most famous blogger. Muzi Mai’s fame resulted from her online sex diaries, which attracted 10 million readers. She was sacked from her job at a newspaper in the southern city of Guangzhou, where the Propaganda ministry withdrew her permit to do journalism – at least, of the conventional sort.
So she moved to the capital and gone into podcasts, recording the wild lives of the City’s underground rock stars.