Back in September 2010, Mengniu Dairy Co, China’s biggest dairy company by market value, was embroiled in a scandal over allegations that it used a public relations company to attack two of its major competitors, Synutra International and the Yili Group. A division manager at Mengniu, An Yong, and staff at the PR company, BossePR, were later arrested by police. At the center of the scandal were allegations that BossePr had mobilized an army of online pushers, or wangluo tuishou (网络推手), to actively promote rumors about Mengniu’s competitors online, tarnishing their reputations. The story drew much greater attention in China’s media to the role played by “online pushers” on China’s Internet. A news search through the Baidu search engine in December 2010 turned up many different news stories about the use of this questionable method of manipulating public opinion. In this cartoon, posted by artist Da Peng (大鹏) to his QQ blog, one corporate boss sits casually and unsuspecting in the background as a competitor peeks around the corner, holding a huge red-eyed monster labelled “online pusher” on a leash. “Competing with me . . . He’ll see!” the competitor mumbles.

When talking about domestic microblogs in China, we tend to broad-brush these services as “Twitter clones” or “Twitter-like,” in deference to the service that popularized microblogging worldwide. But in fact, domestic Chinese services such as Sina Weibo have already distinguished themselves in interesting ways.

Launched in July 2006, Twitter is an online social network that popularized the concept of the “microblog,” a broadcast medium consisting of sentence-length messages, images or embedded video. The founders of Twitter opted to limit the length of microblogs on their service to a concise 140 characters (or units of information), a practical decision allowing users to conveniently update their Twitter accounts from a mobile phone using short message service (SMS), which has traditionally allowed 140 characters.
In the midst of the July 2009 unrest in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, China’s government blocked access to Twitter, making the service unavailable to the vast majority of users (those, that is, who aren’t familiar with tunneling software to get around the technical censorship system, or Great Firewall). Despite controls, Twitter is still used in China, and remains popular among a certain subset of Chinese academics, journalists, artists and so-called dissidents, who use the service to chatter quite openly about issues of mutual interest and concern.
Over the past year or more, a number of indigenous microblog services from Chinese Internet giants have sprung up to fill the void left behind as Twitter and Fanfou — an early domestic microblog service — were blocked post-Xinjiang.
Chinese Internet giants Sina and Tencent (QQ) were the first to step into the void left by Twitter and Fanfou, offering microblog services to millions of users in mainland China. The pace of development of these services has been staggering. By November 2010, Sina Weibo — weibo (微博) is the Chinese term for “microblog” — had already signed up more than 40 million users for its service.
Sina Weibo focused its strategy on becoming a text-based broadcast entertainment medium, offering exclusive content from celebrity microbloggers across China.

Figure 1. Former Google China chief and Internet entrepreneur Kai-fu Lee is one of the ten most popular “Weiboers” in mainland China with 2,624,200 followers in December 2010.
As I suggested earlier, the reference to Twitter in talking about homegrown Chinese microblogging services can be simplistic, if not sometimes outright unfair. At the same time, however, the reference is often inescapable. We routinely use the term “tweet” to refer in English to that most fundamental, or “atomic”, unit of the microblog — the individual, indivisible microblog entry.
The “tweet,” as we call it, can generally perform one of three functions. It may be 1) an ordinary message (tweet), 2) a repetition of another user’s tweet (a retweet), or 3) a reply to another user’s tweet.
So how have Chinese microblog services like Sina differentiated themselves with their use of the individual tweet?
First of all, instead of using “RT” to signal a retweet, the Sina Weibo user writes “//”, followed with the retweeted user’s name. Behind these apparent trivialities, the structure of the group conversation is in fact dramatically different in practice between Twitter and Sina Weibo.
Users of the American microblogging service often deviate from the adopted syntax (by using “via @somebody”) or employ Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck and HootSuite, that may not appropriately mark an entry as a retweet. By contrast, Sina Weibo makes a good case for preserving original postings.
On Sina Weibo’s official interfaces (both Web and mobile), the equivalent of a Twitter retweet is indicated instead with two amalgamated entries: the original entry and the current user’s actual entry — which is a commentary on the original entry — often with a record also of his sources (if the original entry was obtained, for example) from an intermediary.
Not following? The difference is best illustrated with an example. Take the following figure.

Figure 2. Amalgamated entries on Sina Weibo.
This is a status update made by Taiwanese celebrity user Dees Hsu and shown on her user timeline. In this example from Sina Weibo, the user quotes a entry by singer A-Mei Chang (note 1) who herself retweeted an entry originally written by celebrity Liu Hanya (note 2). The two are distinct Weibo entries, displayed as an amalgamated entry on Dees Hsu’s user timeline, along with comments and the number of reposts (note 3).
The subtlety of this conversation might actually be lost on Twitter, where the different parts have to be retrieved over several user timelines.
In a further distinction from its American forebear, the Sina service borrows from its experience as one of China’s biggest blogging service providers and introduces a crucial function entirely absent from Twitter — the comment.
Conversation on Twitter is achieved with combinations of hashtags and search, or with successive replies. On Sina Weibo, these functions are also present, but comments contribute an additional layer of familiarity and structure to the microblog conversation.
Putting a user entry side by side with the original entry also has the effect of centralizing conversation on one original entry. With Sina’s focus on celebrity users, the timelines of these VIP users often resemble a television game show with an added dimension of interactivity. Acquainted celebrities talk with one another directly. The masses, meanwhile, respond in the comments section and repost the conversation to their networks.
Pictures posted on Weibo are also directly hosted by Sina and directly linked as a property of a given entry — rather, that is, than eating up valuable space in the text field.
Aside from these differences in function, fundamental differences in language contribute further richness to the world of the Chinese microblog. While a single English word can consume a whole string of characters, a single Chinese character is far more condensed, conveying an entire word or concept in a single computing ‘character.’ Consider, for example, the richness of a typical four-character Chinese idiom such as ba miao zhu zhang (拔苗助长), or “trying to help the shoots grow by yanking them upward,” which means to ruin something through overbearing enthusiasm. That’s a precious four characters in Chinese, but a verbose 53 in English.
Given these advantages in terms of both language and function, it’s perhaps no surprise that microblogs are transforming the landscape of information consumption and diffusion in China, having a dramatic influence in shaping news stories like the recent Yihuang (宜黄) self-immolation case.
Cedric Sam is a technical researcher in digital media at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. He is also pursuing a graduate degree in interaction design from Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design. You can follow him on his research blog, The Rice Cooker.

The Beijing Times, a commercial spin-off of China’s official People’s Daily, reported recently that it has now been one full year since five scholars issued a proposal to the National People’s Congress for a review of China’s national Demolition Ordinance, hoping changes to the regulations might curb the rampant problem of unrestricted demolition and eviction by local officials seeking to make economic gains through development projects. Forced demolition and removal has become a source of broad discontent in Chinese society, and a number of recent cases have drawn national attention and outrage. The Beijing Times article said, however, that proposed changes to the Demolition Ordinance have met sharp resistance from local governments and other vested political interests, and a new ordinance has now become virtually impossible. In the following cartoon, posted by the Kunming-based studio Yuan Jiao Man’s Space (圆觉漫时空) to QQ.com, tiny, inconsequential scholars, those presumably who appealed to the NPC, tug with all their might against a larger-than-life local official as they stand atop a book of proposed new regulations labeled “New Demolition and Removal Ordinance,” meant to restrain the practice of forced demolition and removal. The local official, seeming utterly unaffected, casually grips the rope between two fingers as he brandishes a huge mallet that reads “forced demolition and removal” and stands atop a “sycee,” the gold ingot currency of ancient China (symbolizing in this case both greedy self-interest and feudal backwardness).

Changing Media, Changing China, a new edited volume by Susan L. Shirk, director of the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and professor at UC-San Diego, has been released by Oxford University Press. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in how the world’s most populous nation is grappling with a new global media culture, and what impact this is having on Chinese politics and society.
The book opens with a chapter from CMP director Qian Gang and CMP researcher David Bandurski called “China’s Emerging Public Sphere.” The chapter deals with changes in China’s media through the 1990s and up to today, including such trends as media commercialization, journalistic professionalism and the rise of new media.

Other writers in the volume include Hu Shuli (胡舒立), former Caijing magazine editor-in-chief and founder of Caixin Media, Chinese journalism professor Zhan Jiang (展江) — both CMP fellows — Xiao Qiang, editor of the Berkeley-based China Digital Times, and Columbia Law School professor Benjamin Liebman.
A full description of the book can be found at the Oxford University Press website.

China has taken a series of measures this year to cool down development in the domestic real-estate market, including curbing lending and raising mortgage rates. But the measures have failed to adequately check property market growth, and fears of a bubble persist. In this cartoon, printed in China Daily on December 9 and posted by artist Luo Jie (罗杰) to his QQ blog, a black-suited man labeled “Chinese government” spanks a property developer over his knee. The developer seems bored and unaffected, glancing all the time at his watch. The explanation on the cartoon reads: “The Chinese government’s re-adjustment policies for the property sector have dealt property developers a blow on the rear, but greater strength is still required.”

On December 8, the International Herald Leader, a publication of China’s official Xinhua News Agency, did a lengthy news report looking at the problem of antibiotic resistance in human and animal populations as a result of the careless and unregulated use of various antibiotics and growth hormones in China’s pork, poultry and fisheries industries. The report likened antibiotic resistance to a “time bomb” ingested by consumers of pork, poultry and fish products. In the following cartoon, posted by artist Xu Jun (徐骏) to his QQ blog, a fish is on the point of ingesting an antibiotic pill with a burning fuse. Mouth wide, a human consumer then prepares to eat the fish.

In China, where the gap between the haves and the have nots has widened significantly in recent years, the slightest whiff off favoritism for the rich and powerful rankles. Guangzhou’s New Express newspaper reports today on an exclusive toilet system installed at Starlight 68, a new shopping complex in the city of Chongqing, which requires VIP cards for access. In order to qualify for a VIP card (and gain toilet access), customers must spend at least 5,000 yuan during a single visit. In this cartoon, posted by the Kunming-based studio Yuan Jiao Man’s Space (圆觉漫时空) to QQ.com, a very desperate man, without a VIP card, is unable to gain access to the men’s toilet, while a well-heeled shopper is welcomed into the women’s restroom as she brandishes her “VIP Card.”

In recent weeks, many children of local Party and government officials have been surrounded by questions about improprieties in the handling of civil service examinations, with allegations that rigged exams have ushered the well-connected into official government posts. A recent issue of China Comment (半月谈) argued that “fair, impartial and open” principles for civil service examinations were crucial to ensuring fair competition for government posts for those who wished to serve their country, and to ensuring that the testing system had credibility. In this cartoon, posted by the Kunming-based studio Yuan Jiao Man’s Space (圆觉漫时空) to QQ.com, a grown parent tiger donning a senior official cap cuddles with his cubs, who are wearing junior official caps.