Just look at how people treat Falun Gong on Baidu forums — you can’t see Falun Gong posts in public posts of course, but occasionally you’d see really irritated forum member posting something like “just stop harassing me you Wheels! I alreeady know what your opinion is and i never want to hear from you again”. “Wheels” is what people use to get around the Baidu filter for “falun gong”. Apparently the Falun Gong people would fish for private emails from forums and then repeatedly spam them with their propaganda materials. A lot of the banned ideologies (Falun Gong, Tibet-independence) really don’t inspire the citizens to risk any inconvenience (let alone their freedom and life) to help.

The story about the seismic rating on the official site after the Yushu earthquake reminds me a lot of stories I read about Mao’s tours of farms in the 1950s: He saw wheat fields so thick with plants that kids could stand on them, vindicating his agricultural policies. The moment his entourage left, the kids were taken off the benches they’d been standing on and the triply-packed wheat was thinned back to a survivable density. Millions died of starvation because local officials couldn’t manage to tell the big guy he was WRONG. 55 years later, more of the same.

Anyhow, I also read of an interesting use of the internet in China; someone posted an anonymous video of a well-dressed woman deliberately stomping a kitten to death. This offended so many people that a group created a site devoted to tracking the woman down – some of those 300+million users must know something, was the reasoning. Eventually her identity was discovered; she lost her iron rice-bowl job, and so did her videographer. So internet vigilantism is another interesting use. Let’s hope the Chinese version is more precise than in America – I have in mind the Tea Party psychos who threw a brick through a congressman’s brother’s window after the health care reform vote – the TP folks had looked up the wrong address on the internet…..

Since online video is so popular, it would seem a good way to express political views. But how is Chinese online video censored? It would be much harder to censor video content than text by automated means.