Chinese politicians on the internet: Fu Rong
March 26, 2006, [MD]
EastSouthWestNorth
has long been among my favorite blogs about China, providing real
insights into the media and internet world by posting long translations
of newspaper articles, forum postings and the like. That’s where I got
the story of Fu Rong, the mayor of Lingao in
Hainan, who logged on to one of the
most popular discussion sites in China, Tianya
under his real name, and started to communicate with the users. At first
they were shocked, and refused to believe that he was who he said he
was, but the forum called his office and confirmed that it was him. He
even left a cell phone number, inviting people to call him with ideas
and suggestions. Since then, there have been many discussion threads in
the forum, and the users have treated him surprisingly “civilized” while
he was finding his ropes in the internet world. (See ESWNs translation
of an article from South China
Daily, my favorite Chinese
weekly newspaper).
During the national People’s Congress meetings, Danwei, another must read on media in China, who even started putting short TV shows online, talked about the blog aggregator put together by China Daily. Many of the delegates (about 3000 if memory serves me right) to the conference were blogging, and often the comment sections had hundres of comments. How sincere the attempt to engage with the citizens is, is of course debatable, and I am not raving about this as some great democratization. But it is a very interesting phenomenon, and at least in the case of Fu Rong, he seems to be very sincere. It’s always fun when China can “show the way” in uptake of new technology uses as well.
Stian\ Over at Arab E-Gov, they’re saying: in China, politicians are blogging, what about us?\ Photo by jfrichard
Stian Håklev March 26, 2006 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus