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... the Chinese have become very good at coming up with puns, alternative words, and memes. For example, they talk about the battle between the grass-mud horse and the river crab. The grass-mud horse, caonima, is the phonogram for "mother-fucker" - what the netizens call themselves. The river crab, hexie, is the phonogram for "harmonisation" or "censorship". So you have a battle between the caonima and the hexie. When big political stories happen, you find netizens discussing them using such weird phrases and words that you can't understand them even if you have a PhD in Chinese.
So why is Chinese social networking booming despite the censorship? Part of the reason is the Chinese language. Posts on Twitter and Twitter clones such as Weibo are limited to 140 characters. In English that comes to about 20 words or a sentence with a short link - in effect, a headline. But in Chinese you can write a whole paragraph or tell a whole story in 140 characters. One Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. In some ways, Weibo (which means "microblog" in Chinese) is more like Facebook than Twitter. As far as the Chinese are concerned, if something is not on Weibo, it does not exist.
Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship.
You have Google, we have Baidu. You have Twitter, we have Weibo. You have Facebook, we have Renren. You have YouTube, we have Youku and Tudou. The Chinese government blocked every single international Web 2.0 service, and we Chinese copycat every one.
There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.
China is a BRIC country. BRIC country means Brazil, Russia, India and China. This emerging economy really is helping the revival of the world economy.
Chinese national Internet policy is very simple: Block and clone.
Social media changed Chinese mindset. More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright, not some imported American privilege. But also, it gave the Chinese a national public sphere for people to, it's like a training of their citizenship, preparing for future democracy.
