The Liberating Internet

I am quoted in the recent article entitled "The Liberating Internet" from Guanxi: The China Letter. A PDF of the article can be found here.

The article does a pretty good job profiling the net culture behind and within BBS in China. It quotes Charles Zhang's "internal research" to provide some impressive numbers about Internet use:

Chinese Internet users numbered more 150 million and possibly up to 200 million. The United States, by contrast, had 154 million active Internet users in January 2006. Chinese Internet users spend nearly 2 billion hours online every week; people in the United States, 129 million.

The article also breaks down GTER, a famous BBS for those who are applying for student visas for the United States. This is classic "user experience" word of mouth which I discussed here previously (as opposed to "news" or "crisis" word of mouth like we have seen with Foxxcon and Apple recently. For more on this case, see here, esp. "related links").

Issue based BBS communities thrive anything that is complex, expensive, has lack of transparent information, and/or expensive. In this case, no one knows the "right" answer for how to pass the visa interview, so thousands of experienced interviewees will weigh in on what went right or what went wrong with an interview:

Because a personal interview is involved, the results are unpredictable, and a denial means the end of a dream and the loss of years of effort on the part of the student and his/her family. On GTER, students get to share their experiences with one another and offer tips on how to "beat" VOs (visa officers), including how to answer certain questions, how to present materials, and details on the different tastes of various VOs.

A typical post to GTER might recount--sometimes word by word--the interview process with the VO, and tens to hundreds of follow up posts will help analyze the reasoning behind each question the VO posed and why the answers the students gave may or may not be right.

The article also mentions the relatively high status of Chinese net stars as well as Xujinglei's fame as a blogger are also discussed. I discussed these issues previously here and here and here.

Guanxi is a subscription based, monthly publication from Berkshire Publishing. Lyn Jeffery from Virtual China is an adviser. More info can be had from liz (a) berkshirepublishing.com publishing or by going to Berkshire's site. berkshirepublishing.com