A famous reporter in China once told me: China is a country where truth is in short supply. Well, until weibo came along.
Weibo is
the Chinese name for mircoblog. The most popular microblog service in
China right now is the one provided by sina.com, or Sina Weibo. Weibo is
a concept borrowed from Twitter, which is not accessible in China.
Adopting Twitter’s standard, posts on weibo cannot exceed 140 Chinese
characters, which actually account for more words than do English
letters of the same amount. With 140 Chinese characters, roughly 70
words, a weibo post can express a lot.
The China unveiled on
weibo is very different from the one presented in any traditional media
outlet in the country. Weibo carries facts and opinions one can never
see in traditional media, because weibo, which is open to everybody who
can get online, is not so tightly controlled by China’s propaganda
authorities. Despite rumors that the authorities may shut it down
completely someday, so far, weibo is alive and well.
Weibo thus
has become the platform for whistleblowers to reveal official
corruption, for people to criticize the government or simply express
opinions that might otherwise be silenced. As such, weibo also has
become a window through which one can see China from a very different
perspective.
Starting this week, I will choose on a rather regular
basis interesting stories, debates and phenomena that I spot on Sina
Weibo and present the information through multimedia.
This first
episode is about Lei Feng, a national icon died 50 years ago, and how
people use weibo to articulate different meanings of this icon than
those presented in state media.
The New York Times published an article on March 5 on the same topic.
Related articles:
The real story behind Lei Feng’s photos (in Chinese)
More on Lei Feng (Xinhua resource; in Chinese)
