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"The cat and mouse game is not only the government versus the netizens," said Michael Anti, an
Internet researcher in Beijing. "You also have a local cat and a central cat ... Weibo more and more is becoming a vehicle for the central government to control the local governments." Provincial print and broadcast news are routinely censored at the source, while internal government reports are invariably burnished by the cadres preparing them. With Weibo, which is centrally censored by Sina with input from the government, Beijing has a valuable new national monitoring system
-- one that should make lower-level officials more accountable and prevent them from covering up problems in their backyards. Jeremy Goldkorn, director of Danwei.com, a firm that researches Chinese media and Internet, says Weibo could add "flame to the fire of any kind of anti-government event," but has also become an asset for the ruling Communist Party. "They've put a lot of energy and effort into understanding the landscape of the Internet and how to use it for their own benefit," said Goldkorn. "I don't really see Weibo as causing the next revolution anytime soon." Even with the weeding out of so much content, Sina Weibo's data tsunami
-- with more than 100 million messages posted each day- is valuable intelligence to government officials, marketers and any curious China watcher. It offers a more unvarnished and personal glimpse of China than anything you will see on Chinese state-run television, or the scrupulously-vetted print media. Users try to fool the censors by posting blocks of text as images so they can't be scanned by automatic keyword searches. They also make liberal use of puns, initials, nicknames and homonyms to dupe the digital knife. The evasions are hit and miss. Isaac Mao, a popular blogger in Shanghai, had more than 30,000 users when his Weibo account was deleted in June after he made a series of questioning remarks about China's space program. Mao tweeted that it was "a waste of resources" for China to compete in the space race rather than pursuing less expensive cooperation with other space-faring nations. He said he was "heartbroken" when he found he could no longer log in. Sina's customer service refused to give a reason for booting him off. He and others, including prominent blogger and social critic Wen Yunchao, have written to investors to urge them to dump Sina stock to express their disgust over its collaboration with government censorship. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq-listed company has struggled to find a way to monetize its hugely popular product. Still, Mao is bullish on Weibo's potential to help make China a less repressive place. He says it's teaching Chinese how to debate and tolerate diverse opinions while getting them used to the idea that an individual can take part in directing the public agenda. Mao said the platform is eroding the government's grip on public opinion. "People are starting to know more. They're not stupid like before," Mao said. "The government wins some small battles but they are losing the (information) war."
[Associated
Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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