From Overseas Press

Power to the blogging people

(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-09-16 11:27

Loud voices of Chinese bloggers on the Internet are affecting decisions of Chinese leaders, said a columnist Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times on Sep. 14.

Mr. Friedman said that ever since "China began to turn itself into a global economic power, its leaders have followed the strategy of a 'peaceful rise'—be modest, act prudently, don't frighten the neighbors and certainly don't galvanize any coalition against the United States."

However, with "the US economic model having suffered an embarrassing self-inflicted shock," voices have emerged in China saying "the future belongs to us". For now, "those voices come largely from edgy bloggers" who are among an estimated 70 million members. They have put China's leaders under constant pressure.

For example, "how much China's leaders will be able to cool the South China Sea issue will partly depend on the Chinese blogosphere," where a whole generation of Chinese believe that the US and the West want to keep China down. They now have their own megaphones to "denounce any Chinese official who compromises too much as 'pro-American' or 'a traitor'."

Hu Yong, a blogosphere expert at Peking University explained that "China for the first time has a public sphere to discuss everything affecting Chinese citizens." "Under traditional media, only elite people had a voice, but the Internet changed that." He added, "We now have a transnational media. It is the whole society talking, so people from various regions of China can discuss now when something happens in a remote village—and the news spreads everywhere." He continued, "A whole-generation of young people who think our enemies are trying to keep us down now have a whole Internet to express it."

There are a lot of unstable chemicals at work out here today, and so many more players with the power to inflame or calm US-China relations, concluded Mr. Friedman.