:: “men,” as in 门 (the Chinese word for “gate”), is an important element of modern Web culture in China. Chinese netizens and even the local media at-large are fond of tacking “gate” (门) onto scandals and memes, perhaps even more than the Western press. Chinese netizens are even quicker on the draw; online conversation about scandals is often a forest of “gates,” many of which have similar or even identical names. This week’s Friday 5 takes a look at recent examples from five of the most common categories of “gates” on the Chinese Internet: food quality, donations, cars, espionage, and of course, the centerpiece of all durable Internet buzz, sex!

food: radiation-gate ::
Food safety has been a serious issue for Chinese netizens this year following the melamine milk scandal of 2008. A number of brands have been embroiled in their own additive scandals (a previous Friday 5 addressed Mengniu and Wang Lao Ji); in July, two instant noodle makers, Master Kong and UniPresident, found themselves in a scandal over labeling and irradiation. The allegations, published by a prominent business newspaper, accused the two companies of distributing instant noodle packages without clearly labeling that they had been irradiated. Both companies denied the charges and insisted that their products were completely safe. Dubbed “radiation-gate” (辐射门) by netizens and media, the scandal was related more to the deception than the radiation itself (although a small but significant portion of the online conversation was devoted to radiation fears). The initial response of both brands was mealy-mouthed: UniPresident claimed it did not use radiation but “could not rule out” use by its suppliers; Master Kong pled ignorance, saying it didn’t know it had to note that its suppliers used radiation. A rather snarky news report made the rounds of video sites and caught the attention of online gamers and other netaholics who survive off of instant noodles at Web cafe’s, etc. (“Woe to my instant noodle life!” reads one comment on the video.) Other netizens piled on with other quality complaints. Ultimately both brands said that they would improve their package labeling. Although the news caused considerable stir immediately after it was reported, Chinese Internet users quickly tired of the affair and it is no longer brought up in discussions of the brand and instant noodles in general. As with many of the minor “-gates” that crop up in online conversation, “radiation-gate” does not exclusively refer to the instant noodles affair: it’s also been used by Chinese netizens to describe mobile phone radiation scares and the effect of high-voltage power pylons on residential neighborhoods.

Yu Qiuyu’s “donation-gate” ::
Yu Qiuyu (余秋雨), a drama professor turned popular essayist turned TV commentator, has long been dogged by controversies ranging from accusations of being a henchman of the notorious Gang of Four to having accepted a luxurious villa from the Shenzhen government in exchange for favorable reviews. The source of Yu’s latest controversy, known as “donation gate,” was his old foe Xiao Xialin (肖夏林), whom he once brought to court for defamation. On May 14, 2008, shortly after the Sichuan earthquake, Yu announced that he would donate RMB 200,000 to build an elementary school in the quake-stricken Dujiangyan. In a blog post published on May 5 of this year, Xiao Xialin suggested that Yu had not spent a cent of his own money. He demanded that Yu provide proof he had really donated. A blog post Yu made in the wake of the earthquake in which he issued a “tearful plea” to the Chinese people had been mocked by a wide swath of Internet users, and his silence on the donation issue revived his “tearful professor” title and prompted more mockery from netizens, including this article sarcastically proposing that the Chinese government should help Yu to forge a donation receipt. Some public figures, such as Yi Zhongtian (易中天), also urged Yu to show evidence. The belated response came in June 22, when Yu denied the charges following a newspaper report that quoted a local government official from Dujiangyan confirming that Yu did donate RMB 200,000. According to the government official, because the construction standard has been upgraded after the earthquake, RMB 200,000 was no longer enough to build a school, so it was spent to buy books for three school libraries to be named after him. This was not enough for some netizens, who were put off by the thought that Yu had made the donation under public pressure or out of self-promotion. “Whether the donation is real or not, I think that the actions of Yu and his cronies are more disgusting than misappropriating RMB 200,000,” read one comment.

car scandals
In the beginning of September, a driver in Shanghai named Zhang was stopped by a pedestrian who complained that his stomach was killing him and who asked for a ride to the hospital because he couldn’t wait for a taxi. Zhang refused his passenger’s offer of payment, but when he reached the hospital, the passenger grabbed his keys, and the car was surrounded by seven or eight uniformed individuals. Zhang was charged with illegally operating a taxi. In many Chinese cities, unlicensed taxis are frequently targeted by law-enforcement campaigns and their drivers are subject to fines, license suspensions, or even more serious punishment, but this kind of fishing expedition, preying on the good intentions of ordinary citizens, raised the hackles of many netizens who already had a fairly poor opinion of local law enforcement. The situation first came to public attention when Han Han (韩寒), a bestselling author and race car driver who keeps a phenomenally popular blog, posted two letters under the heading “This is certainly just a rumor” on September 11. From Han, who has been named an online public opinion leader by a number of media outlets, the story received immense exposure, and the mainstream press tracked down and verified the story. “Fishing-gate” spawned op-ed columns on entrapment, the rule of law, and the limits of administrative authority, and these in turn generated even more netizen debate (“Where is my Party, my great Communist Party? We miss you so!”) and parody. Han prefaced his repost of the rumors with the following comment: “I’m republishing two posts that have not been verified. It’s highly likely that they’re just rumor-mongering by reactionary elements bent on ruining the National Day atmosphere. I’ve selected them so that the relevant departments can proceed with arrests.” This is a reference to the arrests of previous online rumor-mongers, including one of the netizens involved in a previous car-related “gate”: the “Hu Bin stand-in-gate” (胡斌替身门 or “surro-gate”, as one translator put it). That scandal captured netizen imaginations over the summer and demonstrated the limits of the power of crowd-sourcing to determine the truth from questionable photographs. Hu Bin, who struck and killed a pedestrian, turned up in court looking very different from photos taken at the scene. Rumors sprung up online that he had hired someone to take his place in prison. The “human flesh search engine” tracked down a likely stand-in. Someone masquerading as that individual denied the rumors, but it took the mainstream media to clear up the situation and determine that Hu Bin had actually appeared in court.

spygates ::
Espionage has considerable cachet online in China. Unverifiability of much of the information about spies has rumors flying fast and thick, and Chinese netizens attempt to ferret out the truth even as the mainstream media remains tight-lipped. In June, rumors snowballed that Fang Jing (方静), the host of prime-time CCTV programs such as Defense Watch who had lately been absent from the screen, was accused of being a spy for Taiwan, detained, and missing for three months. “Fang Jing Spy-Gate” (方静间谍门) led to a lot of speculation online about the situation, even after she denied the rumors. Later it was revealed that rival CCTV presenter and professor Ah Yi (阿忆), who could have been jealous of her, exposed her status as a “spy” for Taiwan in a cryptic blog post (since deleted; repost here). Fang Jing quickly returned to present another program for CCTV to put an end to the rumors altogether, although conversation about the incident continued: a blog post on Sina BBS dissects the heated discussion following Ah Yi’s rumormongering. In another recent spy-gate, Rio Tinto employees, including the Shanghai General Manager, were detained by the Chinese PSB in July on suspicion of stealing state secrets. Known as “Rio Tinto Gate” (力拓门) or “Rio Tinto Spy-gate” (力拓间谍门), the case came at a time of bad relations between the Australian government and China, and it sent a shock through the international iron ore industry. The murky situation was quickly elaborated upon, but the online response in China was widespread. Both the Fang Jing and Rio Tinto Spy-Gates were talked about in light of the then-popular espionage TV drama Hidden (潜伏), which involves a Communist spy in the KMT before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Variations of the spy cases have cropped up, after Rio Tinto’s “gate” turned into a “spy and espionage gate”: on the Netease Money BBS, for example, netizens talked about a senior member of Shougang (首都钢铁公司) being taken away for corruption. In the iron industry, it seems, espionage “gates” are closely tied to bribery “gates” at the moment.

sex-gates ::
Since the Edison Chen (陈冠希) “racy photo-gate” broke in 2008, leakages of private / bedroom photos and videos have turned up fairly regularly on the Chinese Internet. The ones that attract the most attention involve celebrities who inadvertently got their overexposed personal pictures leaked. Often these get compared to the Edison Chen scandal (as the topless paparazzi photos of Zhang Ziyi (子怡) – “beach gate” – was in January), but they tend to fade away much more quickly. Other popular sex scandals involve teens who intentionally post their own racy photos or videos to the Internet. In “breast rubbing gate”: In a video which has been circulating on the Internet since late June, a female student is lying on a desk in what looks like a classroom; around her are a number of male students fondling her breasts. Via “human flesh searching” tactics, Chinese netizens eventually discovered the real identity of the girl, a student at a vocational school in Cixi, Zhejiang Province. After the incident broke, the girl in the video posted to her QQ page (repost) that she was under immense pressure and felt suicidal. Netizens engaged in heated debate about the moral issues involved. This blog post argues that the moralists who criticize the girl have done more damage to her than her classmates. Netizens also discussed another issue highlighted by the incident, the imbalance gender ratio: as the only female in the class, the girl said she gave consent to the boys for the “solidarity of the whole class.” For these sex scandals, even though most websites swiftly delete the content whenever it pops up, a sufficiently determined and patient Internet user can eventually locate a reposted copy.

/// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work for Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: 相比较于西方的同行，中国媒体对为各种丑闻贴上“门”

/// AjS

[Friday 5是我服务的爱德曼数码(中国)的一项产品。这里是全部Friday 5 的存档。 有意通过电子邮件订阅双语Friday 5者可通过以下地址向我发送邮件索取：adam 点 schokora 在 edelman 点 com。]

:: viral ad / marketing fatigue shows up in a number of videos on this week’s list. It’s worth noting that viral ads are still well-received when they’re well-crafted and original, but Chinese netizens are liable to turn on brands they feel are attempting to manipulate them with obvious advertising. Overly obvious branding and messaging doesn’t work. Entertaining, compelling, and unique content does.

For more of the latest hot videos, check out the Youku Buzz blog, which posts recent hits along with snarky commentary from Kaiser Kuo, one of the site’s authors / contributors (check out his dismissal of Zeng’s talents), or the just-launched Eyes On Me feature of the In2Marcom blog, a monthly roundup of popular viral videos.

Zeng Yike spoofs ::
Zeng Yike (曾轶可), who was introduced in a previous Friday 5, was eliminated from the Super Girl talent competition in August, yet she remains a popular subject for Internet videos. Her catchy tunes led Netease user Scapegoat (替罪羊) to collaborate with video engineer Flying Frog (飞飞蛙) on a video of Scapegoat singing Zeng’s “Leo” in the voice of 15 different famous Chinese singers, such as Andy Lau (刘德华), Cui Jian (崔健) and Fei Yu-Ching (费玉清). Another popular video was made by students attending a summer military training camp at Shanghai Jiaotong University. The boys sing “Leo” to girls who are lined up on the opposite side. Two other songs follow. Zeng recently became embroiled in “Copy-Gate” (抄袭门), a scandal in which she was accused of plagiarizing the melody of “Leo” from “Horizon,” a song from Taiwan. Although we’re still waiting for standout viral videos about the discovery (all that’s come up so far have been comparisons of the two songs), it’s been the subject of quite a few BBS posts and blog posts, particularly concerning her befuddling defense to the accusations: “Horizon” was written by “another self in this world.” Netizens have been having fun with Transformer mashups lately, and Zeng Yike was the focus of one of the most popular, Transformers 3: The War of the Earth (变形金刚3：地球之战). Zeng’s unique qualities help her save the world from alien invaders in a short film full of product placements and brand messages – most likely a parody of movie-making practices in both Hollywood and China these days, and something that shows up in a surprising number of the most recent virals (more on that video here).

Citroen “advertisements” ::
Continuing with the Transformers theme, Youku user C-Team Transformers (C派变形金刚), a Citroen fan, has posted two popular Transformer-themed mashup videos. The earlier (and more popular) of the two was posted in August under the title C-Team Rendezvous (C派集结登场), and takes the form of mash-up of previous authorized Transformer-themed Citroen commercials, including an ice-skating spot and a dancing robot spot, covered in a previous Friday 5 on video marketing. Then in early September, the same user released a Citroen-themed parody of Crazy Racer (疯狂的赛车) in which aspiring champions compete for second place because of Sébastien Loeb’s multi-year dominance of the World Rally Championships driving for Citroen. This video was far less successful: apart from a bemused response on some auto forums, the majority of netizens who viewed the clip felt it was a “third-rate ad” (二流广告) or asked how much Citroen had paid the netizen who posted it. Ensuing discussions devolved into denigrations of the brand, which may, in fact, have had nothing to do with the videos at all.

Product placement in Meteor Rain ::
Product placement backlash was even more visible in the response to a knockoff version of the Taiwan TV drama Meteor Garden. The original, adapted from Japanese manga Boys Over Flowers (Hana Yori Dango), was a runaway success among Asian TV audiences when it first hit screens in 2001. This year, mainland entertainment station Hunan TV produced a copycat version called Meteor Shower that began airing in early August. The stars of the original, known as F4 (for Flower Four, from the original manga), were replaced with four new teen idols known as “H4.” However, fans of the original didn’t see eye to eye with the media juggernaut, calling the new version a “shanzhai” Meteor Garden. A backlash against the remake took place in various forums, with blatant product placement being one of the major complaints. Netizens produced videos mocking the drama to an enthusiastic response. One popular video assembled a number of the most distasteful product placements, including a long, pointless introduction to a Nanjing-manufactured MG 3SW. For fans familiar with the earlier version, it seemed ridiculous that a scion of a wealthy family would dream about owning a car that cost less than 80,000 yuan. Netizens on Douban and other online forums found the parody hilarious. Ironically, some netizens complained that all of the product placement was offensive to a Chinese audience mired in economic doldrums. Another video posted on a gaming forum highlighted a silly, stilted discussion about the MMORPG ZT Online. It looks like such product placement is only going to get worse: SARFT has placed limits on television commercials and commanded that commercial breaks last no longer than 90 seconds. In response, Hunan TV said that it would incorporate even more product placement into its shows. This will likely lead brands / marketers in China to leverage online video even more.

Hyundai viral ads ::
Turning to viral video marketing that’s been more effective, Hyundai has put up a number of entertaining clips over the past month. In late August, a vignette between a clueless driver and a hapless police officer was passed around a number of major social networks and overseas Chinese websites. The clip makes use of stereotypes about woman drivers in a dialogue-free story that makes heavy use of physical comedy. In a second clip, a careless man gets himself into a lot of trouble trying to do too many things at once: drive, light his cigarette, and use his mobile phone. A third clip shows a drift racer squaring off against a parkour traceur. Auto forums enjoyed this one, and used it as the starting point for discussions of drifting, or whether a stock Hyundai could perform as shown. These videos aren’t exactly subtle: the Hyundai logo is shown in frequent close-up, and each clip closes with a credit screen mentioning Beijing Hyundai. But most netizens found them entertaining. Yet even here fatigue seems to have set in. The “woman driver” clip garnered a huge number of views overnight, and the amount of positive votes / comments on Youku far outweigh the negative ones. The “careless driver” clip has slightly more positive votes than negative, but the “parkour” clip has been voted down heavily, with some commenters even calling, “bury all crappy films!”

National Day in China ::
National branding turns up in videos celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. TV reports about the preparations for the military parade and showing the kinds of weapons and the types of troops that will be seen on October 1 are popular with online viewers. A report from Beijing TV uploaded three days ago has garnered 1,468,413 views and 2,482 comments. Netizens have incorporated tanks and airplanes into their comments; this meme shows up on other reports about the preparations, including this one from Dragon TV (东方卫视). One of the high points of the celebration is the film The Founding of A Republic (建国大业) which has many trailers on Youku, and one of them has been viewed 923,781 times and commented 455 times. The trailer is incredibly star-studded, leading netizens to comment on the plethora of famous acting talent on display: Zhang Ziyi (章子怡), Jet Li (李连杰), Zhang Guoli (张国立), to name just a few. Some netizens responded with comments saying how the government is great, while others complain about the money spent. A little older but still relevant is a Warcraft machinima created by patriotic gamers at the Qingdao Technological University. Vast arrays of troops line a simulacrum of Changan Avenue as tanks and other armored units parade past. Negative attitudes do show up in text-based forums, with a lot of complaints about the traffic controls that are imposed when students, soldiers, and artillery displays practice for the big day, or how much of a headache it is to be chosen to participate, but videos about the anniversary of the PRC brand are pretty much all positive and excited.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work for Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: 大众对于病毒式传播的视频广告逐渐产生审美疲劳。尽管制作精良，

// AjS

:: China’s Web 2.0 space is in constant flux. Companies rise and fall, and the ones that remain are forever adjusting their positioning, rolling out new services to compete in new sectors, and even changing their corporate identity altogether. And that’s without accounting for the hand of the government in all-things digital.

:: in China, discussion of online Internet word of mouth (IWOM) PR crises always seem to be focused on foreign companies, but this is a bit misleading because local Chinese companies get it too. Online crises in China comes in many forms. Sometimes they are brought on by circumstances outside of a brand’s control – a freak accident that explodes into a storm of online controversy, or changes in government policy that throw a benign long-term practice into the worst possible light. Other crises are unfortunately engineered by the brands themselves, through carelessness or malice. The five examples below of Chinese brands in crises online in China show that in many cases, rather than the details of the problem itself, what’s important is how a brand responds to the initial crisis that makes a lasting impression on Chinese netizens. A swift, engaging, well-targeted response can make all the difference between a satisfied group of online consumers / stakeholders, and a devastating rumor that will continue to harm a brand’s image and reputation for years to come.

BYD’s “five-star” scandal ::
BYD is a domestic Chinese auto manufacturer that aspires to be an international brand. Although it has attracted considerable attention this year for its electric models, more recent news reports have focused on a safety scandal involving a traditional model. In July, a BYD F0 car rear-ended a mini van. Although BYD has boasted about the car’s superior safety rating (BYD claims “five-star” passage of the C-NCAP collision test) none of the F0′s air bags inflated when the collision occurred. The owner of the car took BYD to court for misleading customers with false test results. Shortly afterward, the China Consumer Association, the quality supervisor, issued a warning that the collision test results for the F0 are not due to be released until September, so the “five star” test results cannot not true. This statement brought the incident to the attention of the national media, and from there it spread to online forums where netizens blasted the company’s dirty dealing. In the aftermath, BYD responded by releasing an open “letter of gratitude” implying that the lawsuit was an effort by its competitors, referred to as “foreign brands and co-brands,” to fight the pressure of BYD’s climbing sales figures. An article entitled “BYD incident exposed an unspoken rule; the collision test gates is all bullshit” was published in the print media and widely republished on the major portals and auto websites. On a more grassroots level, an online post entitled “Protest! F0 was bullied. Let’s comment and tell the truth” emerged on a BYD sponsored forum and has been reposted elsewhere. Although these articles have currently diverted attention from BYD’s misleading advertising to focus on the company’s victimization at the hands of big brands who feel threatened, the cycle of the scandal is probably not finished yet. It remains to be seen whether BYD’s appeal to nationalism will ultimately work out to its benefit on the Chinese Internet, or if it will eventually have to speak directly .

Mengniu’s OMP Scandal ::
Milk Deluxe (特仑苏), a premium brand of milk from Chinese dairy heavyweight brand Mengniu, was marketed to wealthy consumers as an especially healthy beverage choice. The packaging and advertising heavily emphasized the presence of “osteoblast milk protein” (OMP), an additive that Mengniu claimed would help the absorbtion of calcium to promote bone growth. With consumers and the Chinese government wary of any and all additives to pure milk in the wake of 2008′s melamine scandal, the attention of Chinese netizens and the local mainstream media turned to OMP. A government quality investigation of Mengniu’s OMP practices hit the media in February, 2009, and sparked intense online debate (“Who’s messing around? It’s Mengniu! Is someone afraid of chaos? Are we just supposed to sit and drink poisoned milk in silence so the world will be at peace?!”). Because the product was aimed at a relatively limited consumer group, Mengniu’s difficulties were not directly related to the additive itself. Instead, it was its ambivalent response to the crisis that got it into the most trouble online from Chinese netizens who are highly sensitive to perceived hypocrisy. Initially, Mengniu claimed that OMP contained IGF-1, but when news came out that IGF-1 could be carcinogenic in large doses, it changed its tune and said that OMP was essentially Milk Basic Protein, an accepted food additive. Fatigued consumers didn’t care much at this point (“Experts say milk with OMP isn’t harmful to your health.” “Then let the experts drink it first“). However, when third-party tests were released showing that OMP did not have nearly the extent of health benefits that Mengniu claimed, the company was hit again. A posting on the influential popular science community blog Squirrel Society concluded “To make such claims about efficacy based on such preliminary research, it’s quite an understatement to say they merely ‘exaggerated the effects’.” The additive was eventually banned, and Mengniu, which had emerged relatively unscathed from the melamine scandal, ended up with a black eye.

Wang Laoji’s additive scandal ::
Wang Laoji (王老吉凉茶) is a “herbal tea” drink that rivals Coca-Cola in popularity in China, but is preferred by many because it’s a Chinese product rather than an international or American brand. It also plays up the health qualities of its formula, which is based on the use of traditional Chinese medicinal ingredients. This practice got the brand into trouble earlier this year. In May 2009, Ye Zhengchao (叶征潮) accused Wang Laoji of giving him gastric ulcers because it contained prunella vulgaris (夏枯草), an ingredient usually associated with Chinese medicine. The Ministry of Health had once claimed that adding prunella vulgaris to food and drink violated the Food Safety Law. The charges were heavily reported in the media and became a popular conversation topic on BBS discussion forums (“Wang Laoji is poison that’ll hurt your liver!”). Web portals, such as the Influential Brands website has a whole channel devoted to Wang Laoji and the case. The case even acquired its own “gate” : Additive Gate (添加门). [Chinese netizens are in the habit of adding "gates" to the ends of catch phrases representing particular online scandals.] Anti-fraudster and TCM-buster Fang Zhouzi weighed in with a blog post about implications of drinking herbal teas drinks, further polarizing the issue: now Wang Laoji’s defenders were sticking up for the entirety of traditional Chinese medicine. The popular nationalist-leaning Tiexue BBS hosted many threads related to Wang Laoji, both positive and negative. Defenses were widespread based on Wang Laoji’s previous reputation: for example, a post dated May 11 details the first time that netizens noticed the brand, which was during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008: “Wang Laoji donated 100 million yuan instantly, and is far superior to the wealthier Coca-Cola and Pepsi,” and said that the Ministry of Health should take care of Coca-Cola first if it wanted to clean up Wang Laoji. Elsewhere, netizens were not entirely negative about the additive itself: a Baidu Knowledge answer talks about the widespread notion that people in Guangzhou use prunella vulgaris to brew medicinal soups, and that it’s not bad for the body at all. The company made no response: when China Newsweek tried to interview a company spokesperson about the case, they were rebuffed as were other Chinese media outlets. On May 12 the Guangdong Food Profession Union (广东省食品行业协会) declared that prunella vulgaris had been listed in the Ministry of Health’s list of legal food additives in 2005 and that it is not known to cause gastric ulcers. So the takeaway seems to be that if you’re a well-regarded national brand known for philanthropy and that’s connected to a point of national pride, you may be able to ride out a health crisis by simply relying on the government and the patriotic public. Wang Laoji  may have avoided a crippling scandal this time round, but the poison allegations will continue to circulate online, and when they are brought up in the future, there will be no company response to rebut them.

China Post’s EMS handling scandal ::
Around August 24, a several minute clip appeared online that showed postal workers unloading EMS (China Post’s Express Mail Service) packages from the back of a mail truck. Rather than handling them carefully, as customers might imagine, the workers rolled or threw the packages onto the ground, where they landed with audible “thumps.” One of the comments on the post read, “This is a serious infringement on consumer rights….it must be strictly investigated, and management must be overhauled. Otherwise, our countrymen will have no choice but to choose Fedex, UPS, or DHL.” The video quickly spread to other hosts, like 56, and sparked animated discussion among netizens. On the Xitek forums, the netizen who started the thread said “Don’t use EMS from now on,” and similar sentiments echoed across the Chinese Internet. However, netizens confessed that many times they are in a bind: in urban areas there are lots of choices of delivery services, but China Post is practically the only option in smaller towns across the country. The response so far from China Post has been entirely media-driven. Although the mail truck’s plates placed it in Panzhihua, Sichuan, it was the Hangzhou-based Qianjiang Evening News that picked up the story in the interest of its readership, which would be particularly concerned because the city is home to the headquarters of online auction house Taobao and many small online retailers. The newspaper reported a mealy-mouthed statement from the Panzhihua Post Office: “The truck in the video isn’t likely to be ours because our mail trucks are mostly Chang’an vans. From the scene, we are not able to confirm the registration number at the moment,” which also suggested that the clip could be a malicious hoax. The paper also spoke to a Hangzhou postal official, who said that such mishandling never occurred in his city. Netizens who commented on QQ’s repost of that news item were dubious, with most seeing the official’s statement as a purely cover-your-ass action.

Google.CN’s porn scandal ::
In June, Google China was the subject of CCTV news reports that accused it of violating social morality. As part of a national campaign against pornography and other corrupting online influences in easy reach of the country’s youth, CCTV revealed that Google.CN would suggest filthy phrases and sentences to innocent netizens searching for completely ordinary, benign terms. The accusations blanketed the national media both online and off, and although netizens were generally sympathetic to Google because of previous prejudices toward CCTV’s hatchet-jobs in the service of government propaganda campaigns, it is still instructive to see how Google responded to the crisis. Unlike the dodgy medical ad crisis last December, during which Google China’s protestations made it appear like a defiant outsider attempting an end-run around China’s advertising law, its attitude all along was one of active cooperation. Its fast response drew a favorable reaction from many Chinese netizens. Initially it worked to remove the search suggestion tool that had gotten it into trouble, and thereafter made periodic statements that it was cooperating with the authorities to ensure that its search results were acceptable. At least in the context of Internet word-of-mouth, what started out as a slam on Google’s online reputation turned into a credibility hit for CCTV. Google declined to comment, preferring to let netizens draw their own conclusions about the Google.CN vs. CCTV “PK” matchup. Some netizens even suggested that Baidu, which had been blasted by CCTV for accepting paid ads for medical products it knew were of questionable legality, had made up with the network and had called in the hit on its international search rival. And when Chinese netizens discovered that CCTV had interviewed its own intern for a man-on-the-street response, and when they unearthed evidence that CCTV had essentially gamed the search suggestion tool to create the pornographic sentences, Google China continued to cooperate the authorities and let the IWOM play out on its own.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work for Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: my weekly Friday 5 briefs on the Chinese Internet are (hopefully) a useful resource and (fingers crossed) an excellent way to keep up with online trends / culture, local web communities, and social media engagement on the Chinese Internet. However, you are still left six days out of the week in which you can’t expect a Friday 5. Fortunately, there are a wealth of other respectable online sources focused on social media, online marketing, and digital trends in China. The selection below represents English language content of such sources, ranging from websites put out by ad / marketing / communications agencies and consultancies, to personal blogs by individuals and groups captivated by China’s Internet culture.

personal ::
In2Marcom describes itself as “a weblog all about INnovative and INsightful marketing communication, around Digital and Social Media in China.” It’s run by Jason Zhan Jia (ZJ), who started it up just this past March after working in digital and social media for several years. One interesting recent post looked at the development of a “test paper” meme, in which netizens repost exam questions answered with sarcasm, dirty jokes, or non-sequiturs, and its use as a marketing tool by Peugeot, Cadillac, and finally BYD. Dutch entrepreneur and social media practitioner Marc van der Chijs is an online personality based in Shanghai. The co-founder of Tudou.com and CEO of The Netherlands Spil Games Asia (“the world’s ultimate online game destination”), he keeps an English-language blog with a pretty good following. He’s an enthusiastic Twitterer, and many of his posts are about Twitter, for example, when his “Tweet” appeared in a Dutch newspaper from June 2009, which was about a frustrated attempt to book a flight on KLM, the Royal Dutch Airlines. Another notable post was “Talking and Talking”, from July, in which he spoke about Spil Games in Holland and Internet entrepreneurship in China. Included at the end of the blog post is an embedded video interview with an online TV station.

group ::
88 Bar (八八吧) is maintained by Jason Li and Lyn Jeffery and is the successor to Virtual China, the blog they ran for the Institute for the Future. They launched 88 Bar when their focus on Virtual China expanded from purely virtual culture to include offline culture and interactions between the two. They still blog regularly about Chinese social media, trends, and viral memes, although more as pointers to in-depth treatments on other sites. Recent posts include a look at steampunk animations and coverage of the World of Warcraft protests at this year’s China Joy. Danwei, a group blog that covers Chinese media as a whole, also dips into social media from time to time. It recently interviewed Dan Brody of 360quan and covered the shakeup of China’s microblogging platforms in the wake of the Urumqi riots.

tech ::
TechBlog86 (the number refers to China’s IDD prefix) is kept by David Feng, whose gossipy, insiderish writing style assumes that readers are familiar with the larger context behind the latest developments in China’s digital sector. The blog, which relaunched in May following an unfortunate hiatus, covers a wide and (sometimes random) variety of topics, from the most interesting MSN signatures to conference writeups (CHINICT 2009) to speculation about impeding changes in the local Web 2.0 industry: will Xiaonei get shut down? No, it’s just changing its name to RenRen. MOBINODE (动点博客) is a group blog focused on the Asia tech industry, with an emphasis on China. It’s maintained by Gang Lu (see this interview on 56minus1). Recent notable posts include advice to Facebook to forget about its prospects in the China market, and a look at Tencent’s rebate program. MOBINODE is associated with Mobinode.tv (动点博视), a series of Chinese-language interviews with Asia tech professionals. It has plans to develop an English-language counterpart, but has only done one subtitled interview, with Yeeyan co-founder Jiamin zhao, so far.

agencies / consultancies / professional entities ::
CNReviews, which hosts active discussions on hot-button issues in Chinese politics and culture, also features content from Blogger Insight that looks at the Chinese SNS / social media scene. Recent highlights include a look at the four distinguishing characteristics of Chinese SNS websites and a hilarious examination of opaque 3G advertisements. One of the things that makes CNReviews such a fun read is that it stakes out a firm position on issues – no wishy-washiness here – which generates energetic comment threads. Little Red Book looks at advertising and marketing in China, with a particular focus on the Internet and social media. It’s run by BA360, a “boutique marketing firm” (from its about page), and the major contributors to the site are strategy director Rand Han and media director Sherry Xie. Posts introduce viral marketing campaigns, quirky print ads, and SNS strategy as well as general Chinese Internet and youth culture issues. Little Red Book also provides a forum for further discussion of ad and marketing issues that haven’t made it to the front page yet. Many of the social media marketing / SNS case studies excerpted on Little Red Book come from ZeroDegrees, a project launched by BA360 in association with postcard design firm Mailman. ZeroDegrees has a fairly active comments section, and it also features discussions of more abstract issues, such as this recent post on the actual significance of Shanghai’s Expo 2010. Recent highlights include a look at micropayments in QQ, an unimpressed examination of Pepsi’s SNS campaign, and a look at how L’oreal celebrated its centenary on Chinese SNS. Ogilvy Digital Watch, although gathering dust now, has an great archive of posts about social media in China and the local tech / web industry. It unfortunately has not been updated since December 2008, about the time the agency’s key digital ninja Kaiser Kuo departed. The China IWOM Blog at CIC Data should already be on your RSS reader. The blog covers IWOM trends / culture, social media marketing case studies, and strategies for monitoring / measuring online public opinion and Internet word of mouth conversation. Mostly teasers for the company’s full-length reports and white papers, but even the excerpts are fairly interesting, and the linked PDFs invite careful perusal. An archive of past CIC slideshow presentations is available even if the latest installments, such as “Social Media Getting Closer to Real Life”, are unavailable to the casual user. Similarly, for the non-subscriber, Ad Age China has promising headlines (“Watch Out Ebay! Here Comes Alibaba” and “Can Baidu Keep its Crown as King of China’s Search Market?”) that tantalize from behind a pay-wall.

updates ::
Two other notable sites that look regularly at Chinese SNS and local social media in general are China Web2.0 Review and China Youth Watch, which were covered in a previous Friday 5 brief on Chinese bridge bloggers. China Youth Watch recently featured an article titled SNS and the Changing Chinese Youth, as well as an interview with 360quan.com editor Hui Wang. 56minus1 interviewed CYW co-founder Zafka Zhang back in November of last year. China Web2.0 Review recently covered the Xiaonei / RenRen changeover. (Incidentally, if you’re a fan of cheesy soaps and boom-era product placement, check out the TV show Heart-Net (心网), the story of a group of friends who start an Internet cafe in Shanghai. The old RenRen.com, which was huge back in 2000, is all over the show). Also mentioned in the Friday 5 brief linked above were  ChinaSMACK and Youku Buzz, two blogs that regularly feature the latest hot memes and viral videos to hit the Chinese Internet.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: with hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users these days, if you are a Chinese netizen and have a question about something, there’s a good chance that someone out there knows the answer. But how do you connect with them? Through “ask” sites, of course. Listed below are ask sites that range from broad, general interest information to specialized topics, from the intelligence of crowds to authenticated experts, and from free for the asking to paid answers-for-hire. Nothing guarantees the quality of any of the answers you receive, but if you’re a savvy Internet user, you already double-check the accuracy of anything you find online.

general knowledge on baidu knowledge ::
As China’s leading search engine, any additional features that Baidu adds to its core compentency get an automatic boost. This can be a good and a bad thing. Baidu Knowledge is an excellent resource for general knowledge questions. The website operates on a points system. Anyone who posts a question on Baidu Knowledge needs to ante up (fortunately, registration automatically gives you a chunk of credits), and you can attract a better quality of responses by promising a larger bonus for acceptable answers. If you don’t feel confident to judge which answer is best, a vote can be called once time expires so that netizens can decide for you. The system works best for general knowledge questions, particularly those for which netizens can simply search the Internet for an answer and copy over the results. More specialized questions, and ones that require offline data, are not as successful. It’s also great for language issues: obscure chengyu, dialect expressions, and filthy slang all attract decent responses. But even an innocent ask-answer website needs a dose of celebrity glamor: The Baidu Knowledge blog recently launched a feature called “what the stars want to know“. In the installment linked here, Huang Yali, a 2005 Super Girl star, asked a question: “I am afraid of snakes, so what I am going to do when I encounter a snake?” There are 97 answers to this question so far. Real life credentials are an important factor for people to decide whether to take one particular answer seriously. Baidu has a expert board, which is composed primarily of real-life professionals in certain fields. Brands have taken advantage of the opportunity: for example, one user was having a hard time choosing between two smart phones, the HTC Touch Viva and the Moto A3100. Rola, a Baidu-accredited expert who is also a Motorola marketer, offered her opinion: after listing all the fancy features about the A3100, Rola only mentioned the HTC as being “not as good in terms of quality and basic functionality, and not as practical as Motorola, whose user experience is more guaranteed”. Sohu’s Sogou search engine has a similar Q&A service, Ask, which also features an expert board. Users who apply to be experts must answer two questions per week to maintain their status. Fighting spam answers is a major challenge for most Q&A websites. To solve this problem, Baidu offers prizes to users who report spammers. Currently, the user who reports the most “worms” in a month will win a USB flash disk.

other portals ::
Although they’re not as popular or well-known as Baidu Knowledge (partly because BK results show up so high in Baidu searches), other portals and search engines offer their own approaches to the Q&A game. Tencent’s Soso search engine has a Q&A feature called Wenwen, which is categorized, with QQ-related questions pretty near the top. Wenwen fosters community involvement through a typical rankings system, but also through a “Stars of Wenwen” feature: So far, 26 separate answerers have been voted to become the subject of extensive profiles, complete with photos, mini-bios, and space for other users to post their impressions. The Stars are drawn from Wenwen’s registered users, who have their own SNS-like channel. One cute feature Wenwen has is a keyword cloud that shows what words and phrases turn up most frequently in questions. Currently the top selections range from interesting curiosities (“how did the ancients brush their teeth?”) to net-slang (思密达, a Chinese phonetic transcription of a Korean sentence-ending word that’s used in post-90s net-speak) to pure weirdness (Panda Blood, anyone?) Sina’s iAsk search engine calls its Q&A feature “Knowledge Person” (知识人), and promotes it as “a billion netizens helping you with your problems.” It too has an expert channel for when you’re not satisfied with answers from ordinary people. There’s a section for mobile phones, questions rated by rank and by the number of votes received. By voting on Sina iAsk the user can also collect “points” and win prizes. Marginally related to the Knowledge Person service is Sina’s iAsk Resource Sharing – think of it as the answers you receive when you ask for specific books, music, or other media. It’s supposed to be more than just a den of pirated content, of course, but it’s a fairly novel way for individual Sina users to share their wealth of information with other netizens.

harnessing the power of forums on qihoo ::
Qihoo, a website originally known for its anti-virus tool “Safeguard 360″,  now bills itself as “the Q&A website with the most complete answers.” Its Q&A system is based on its blog and forum searching service. Questions are not answered by netizens directly. Instead, the system harnesses forum content to return blog entries and forum posts according to their relevance to the questions. The site’s front page features a scrolling list of questions asked just seconds prior: How do you use a mobile phone battery to make it last as long as possible? Is it true that if you pluck one grey hair, ten more will grow back? What are the priciest luxury brands in the world? The usefulness of this approach varies. When it works, you turn up tons of relevant forum posts that are talking about precisely what you’re looking for; in less fortunate cases, the experience is not much different from looking for answers through a typical search engines like Google or Baidu (although Qihoo does narrow its search range to forums, so you’re not paging through government boilerplate). To amend this weakness and harness the wisdom of the Internet crowds, Qihoo has another section, a “prize-for-answer” community, which is similar to Baidu Knowledge. However, Qihoo does Baidu one better with its “PK” (head to head) feature, which takes place in a “voting bar“. A questioner who has received several different answers to a own question, but who is uncertain which one is better (or who wants to know what the silent majority thinks) can put it to a vote. Unlike Baidu, the votes are featured prominently on the site. For example, a high-school student failed this year’s college entrance exam and wants to know if he try again next year, look for a job, or go to a vocational college. The results indicate that most users want him to prepare for another year and try again. Qihoo has also extended its question-answer service to mobile handset users, who can send their questions through wap.qihoo.com. Some individual discussion forums have their own Q&A sites. Tianya has a Q&A function which its membership can participate in. Oddly, it does not seem to be filtered as much as more general Q&A sites: there is quite a substantial amount of sex-related searching going on in the recent search listings. Questions are categorized, sometimes fairly specifically: clicking on “Study Abroad 留学“, for example, leads to a whole subsection about moving abroad to study including a post about how much it would cost to study in Britain.

specialty sites ::
Maybe you have a more specific question and want to seek out people knowledgeable in that particular area. There are Q&A sites for all kinds of obscure interests. OK Wave is a direct import from Japan, where it is the biggest question-answer search engine. Its Chinese version became active at the end of July, 2009. The questions that are asked on OK Wave seem to be Japan influenced. How does one learn Japanese in a new Japanese speaking company, for example? From the “hot tag words” list — study abroad, visa, travel, Japan, employment, food, spa, cherry blossoms, university — the Japanese focus is fairly obvious. OK Wave has rudimentary SNS functionality in the form of “My Spaces,” but the registration process is quite lengthy. How about Law? Don’t want to put your technical legal question to the unwashed masses. Ask a Lawyer is part of the comprehensive law site Guangdong Lawyer. Asking a question involves entering a specific question, wait for an answer, and then rating it. The Ask a Lawyer Q&A site says it deals with marriage law, criminal cases, employment law, and traffic accidents. Many questions on the front page involve accidents and monetary compensation. Infant-oriented website Cradle, which is all about mothers, pregnancy and taking care of newborns, has an affiliated search site, Ask Cradle, which separates the searches into categories such as weight loss (for mothers), nursing the baby, and children’s sex education, among others. It also lets users ask questions according to the age of the infant. A typical question asked is “Does my baby move too much?“, which is filed under the One Year Old section. Are you a practicing Muslim who wants to know how you ought to interact with your non-believing neighbors? The Gansu-based Islam Q&A, part of Window on Islam, features a number of scholars (阿訇) who answer questions from netizens about various Islam-related issues. Questions are generally visible to the public, but they can be made private, too. Given the nature of religion in contemporary China, the scary-looking front-page should come as no surprise: rather than a welcome screen or a list of topics, there’s a ten point list of content that’s not to be submitted as a question, with citations to the State Secrets Law and various digital information regulations.

paid sites ::
Sometimes your query is a little more complicated. Call it a “task” rather than an “ask.” Well, the Chinese Internet has that covered, too. Witkey (威客) is the name for a system by which individuals or companies seeking to accomplish particular tasks can draw upon the talent of Internet users. At witkey sites, questions are posted (often for a fee), and site members contribute answers, for which they are compensated if their answer is chosen. Remuneration varies. On Witkey (威客网), the top recommended task seeks a slogan for China’s Sports Lottery and offers 10,000 yuan to the winner. Most of the other featured tasks are creative in nature: advertising slogans and logos, mostly. The site has a SNS-like feature where members can post their skills and interact with colleagues and potential clients. At VikeCN (威客中国) features a wider selection of lower-paying design tasks alongside online drudgery: “300 RMB: 0.5 yuan per forum post; the more you post, the more you earn” reads one, which is apparently recruiting 50-cent gang members to astroturf for a medical company. You can also earn cash by clicking on Google adwords. Not all witkey sites have the word “witkey” in their name. Zhu Bajie, named after the Journey to the West character, is just one of the several dozen other witkey sites out there. It’s got a busy design that’s reminiscent of human resources websites (which tend to be big advertisers on witkey-style websites). Tasks range from the technical – 2,000 RMB for developing a JSP-based website, which as of this writing has 28 applications and 8 submissions; to the whimsical – 100 RMB for lyrics to a corporate theme song, which currently has 65 applications and 28 submissions; to the sketchy –  500 RMB for an original, 40,000-character master’s thesis in computer science. For more tasks, see the extensive list on the Witkey website, which indexes a whole bunch of general ask sites and more specific witkey task sites.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: under China’s current press rules, anyone who wants to launch a new magazine is required to first register with the General Administration of Press and Publication in order to obtain a publication license that is tied to distribution area and content type. These publication licenses are hard to come by, and practically out of reach of small start-ups who lack the backing of major state-owned publishers. There are grey-market ways around this, but for many magazines, it might be easier to reach a target audiences by publishing exclusively online, where regulation is significantly more relaxed. It’s also less of a risk, a way to roll out a magazine without the capital outlay involved in printing and distribution.

China’s e-magazine marketplace is home to small, short-lived titles as well as digital versions of major print publications. Many of them are downloadable in executable files of about 30M in size (which means they are only readable on Windows machines), or are viewable as a Flash application in a browser window. Although a small percentage take advantage of the multimedia possibilities offered by digital publication, the vast majority basically reproduce the experience of reading a print magazine, “enhanced” with virtual page-flipping, (cheesy) background music, and an animated advertisement or two.This also means that the text is frequently non-searchable (and non-copyable), but despite the limitations, e-magazines are still a surprisingly active sector of the mainland Chinese internet. Below is a snapshot of a few of the ways they’re used online in China.

celebrity brands ::
e-Magazines have been around for years in China, but it was only when Xu Jinglei launched Kaila in early 2007 that they really attracted much attention from the mainstream media. Xu and other celebrities have extended their brand to the e-publishing world, giving them some of the benefits of a personal magazine without the hassle of the print regulation system in China. Kaila builds each issue around a particular theme (the current issue is all about weddings) and features writing by well-known columnists and ordinary readers alike. In the past two years, the magazine has extended its brand to two new titles: Kaila Street Photos (开啦街拍), which focuses on pictures of fashionistas, including Xu herself, and Kaila Workplace (开啦职场), which is even more closely-targeted at urban white-collar life. As e-magazines, the presentation occasionally takes advantage of digital functionality like audio and video clips; the current issue of Workplace features a parody of a song by pop-group Shin done by a graphic design office in Shanghai, who sing about pulling long hours to edit their images (it’s also viewable on Youku). Readers can interact with the magazine through Kaila’s forums, and there’s a sub-board devoted to article ideas, including a post seeking submissions for the August issue. The new celebrity e-mag H-Sports (最体育) was launched on June 26 (Paolo Maldini’s birthday) by Huang Jianxiang, a high profile TV presenter with a long history in football commentary. The magazine takes advantage of Huang’s extensive connections in the field: the current issue features race-car driving novelist Han Han on the cover and a lengthy interview that Huang conducted with him. The e-mag presents the interview as a video, but it’s also available on Sina, which is one of the magazine’s sponsors and the host of its official blog. Two other celebrity e-mags that are fairly popular belong to the “Oprahs of China,” Yang Lan and Chen Luyu, and like Oprah’s O Magazine, they’re primarily aimed at women and feature the two TV personalities on the cover. Yang Lan’s is hosted on Tencent, while Chen Luyu’s is on Zcom.

online glossies ::
SoMode is an online magazine agency that publishes several fashion-oriented titles. Its flagship publications are Me (Me爱美丽), a women’s fashion magazine, and Wo (Wo男人志), an FHM-style men’s fashion and gadgets magazine. Both magazines are available as downloadable executable files (Windows only) and as a set of full-page images readable online. The men’s magazine gets the most publicity on the Internet because of its scantily-clad cover girls and racy photo sets, but the online BBS discussion forum is almost entirely devoted to the women’s magazine. SoMode also publishes a travel title, LaVie, an e-magazine aimed at 25-35 year-olds. There are flash graphics for most of the spreads in the magazine, which sometimes feel like adverts for hotels and furniture. Some sections of the magazine even have a smoky female voiceover announcing the labels and comfortable cotton clothes that are ideal attire for going outdoors. Here’s one for Sander Mulder, a design label from the Netherlands. Another online glossy magazine is Aria (ARIA阿丽雅), a music magazine published by Kuke, a digital library of classical and other music styles that are not mainstream pop. It’s a downloadable, Windows-only executable, but some of its articles are available online in text form as well. The full e-magazine features musical selections from Kuke’s library of albums, accompanied by liner notes and other text.

zines ::
The e-magazine format is also used by non-professionals looking to produce periodical publications. Although they’re not as readily readable as plain text blog entries and the like, PDF and flash-based e-mags are more convenient than print and less influenced by keyword filters and censorship than blogs and discussion forums. Besides, there’s a certain special feeling that comes with producing a single, 80-page digital publication that’s not found in a list of links to separate blog posts. New Realms of Fantasy and Science Fiction (新幻界) is a SF zine produced by fans of the genre that aims to provide a space for new writers to publish their material in an edited journal and for readers to critique SF and fantasy writing that appears in other venues. China’s SF and fantasy audience is fairly Internet-savvy, so the online community is quite active, with a Douban group that fosters interactivity between the magazine’s volunteer production team and its readers. As a PDF of text and images, it does not utilize the multimedia capabilities of other e-mags, but it has taken advantage of relaxed content regulation as compared to print magazines: the novelette Darkroom (暗室) by the well-known SF writer Han Song, which was featured in the June issue, had previously been killed by print magazine Science Fiction World for being too sensitive. The e-mag format is also a relatively easy way to produce a publication tied to a particular event. Young China Speaks (少年中国说), a magazine of politics written by post-80s Chinese young people, is affiliated with Wang Xiaodong and Huang Jisu, two of the authors behind the recent nationalist bestseller Unhappy China, and its launch was timed to the media frenzy surrounding that book’s release. While a short-term print magazine would have been overly expensive and logistically difficult, Young China Speaks was able to release five full issues before the Unhappy China phenomenon faded from public view. The magazine was produced in PDF format for maximum readability, and had an associated Douban ID and group which, along with the Sina blog, allowed for reader-writer interactivity.

digital print ::
Tons of print magazines have digital versions for sale (providers like Dragonsource handle digitization and subscription services for hundreds of titles ranging from popular fashion to arcane academia), and a number of titles turn up frequently on e-mag-specific websites. e-Magazine portal ZCom (see below) for example, has a digital version of China National Geography (中国国家地理) as a featured brand on its front page. The latest available issue, from March 2009, focuses on the Yangtze and the three other great rivers in China. The magazine is downloadable but cannot be read online, and is one of around 60 other travel e-magazines. ZCom also has an extensive list of business magazines, ranging from CBN Weekly (RMB 409 per year) to The Founder (RMB 229 per year). These digital versions are mostly identical to their print counterparts, meaning there’s virtually no online-specific content for any of these titles. In an interesting reversal of the print-to-web process, Blogbus, a blog host, recently launched a print magazine, iCity, that draws content from its stable of bloggers. iCity is oriented toward a well-off, urban, white-collar, creative readership (the same sort of people whose blogs make up most of the magazine’s content). It has published three bimonthly issues so far this year, all of which are available both online and in print. With netizens active in the production process as well as making up the readership, iCity is an interesting example of e-mag interactivity – it even claims to be “The First Interactive Chinese Magazine (中文第一本互动杂志).

e-Mag providers ::
Although some e-magazines are self-produced and independently hosted, the vast majority of China’s huge range of e-magazines find a home at one of a number of e-magazine providers. ZCom, founded in 2004, provides software for designing interactive e-magazines and offers hosting and subscription management services. It’s the 500-pound gorilla of e-magazines in China: it has a hosting deal with all of the four celebrity magazines mentioned in “celebrity brand” section above, and a large stable of digital versions of popular print titles to boot. In addition to providing reading material, ZCom also hosts a magazine-oriented SNS, where netizens can discuss particular titles, articles, or other e-mag-related topics. As befits an SNS portal that grew out of a photo-sharing service, Poco’s e-magazine section features the photography magazine Interphoto at the top of the front page. Poco’s flagship title is Pocozine, a fashion-oriented urban lifestyle magazine. Brand presence in Poco’s in-house titles matches the promotional campaigns that appear throughout the rest of its online offerings: ice-cream brand Magnum, for example, is running a game on Poco’s SNS (see this earlier Friday 5) and has a section in the current issue of Pocozine that features a number of photographers and a free photo instant message promotion (page 21). Poco also hosts digital versions of major titles like Betty’s Kitchen and Auto Magazine along with a vast array of e-magazine startups. iebook is an e-magazine developer with a slightly different focus: corporate and organizational publications. Listed on the front page are ready-made plans for e-pamphlets for companies and government agencies, advertising circulars, media and educational institutions, and wedding photography. iebook has a few brand-name clients, such as the Ray Li stable of fashion magazines.

/// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: you’re an active consumer, but you don’t trust advertising or mainstream media. You’re new in the city, and you want to find some great places to eat, but you don’t know anyone who can give you any tips. You want to go south for the holidays but you don’t want to end up getting fleeced in some Disney-fied tourist trap. Or you’ve just bought an amazing / terrible new digital camera and you want to convince the rest of the world to buy one too / not buy one. Where is the best place to accomplish this, share your point of view, and get answers to your questions? The web of course! The Chinese Internet has a wealth of resources for rating products, from restaurants and travel destinations, to cosmetics and technology. Heck, you can even find out which universities and professors to avoid.

Of course, you’re not going to simply believe anyone who claims to be an “ordinary netizen,” so you’ll have to rely on other Web2.0 community tools to get a feel for which reviewers are trustworthy. And if the review website appears to have integrity, you’ll probably be inclined to view its brand partners favorably as well. Brand presence on review sites is mostly limited to straightforward advertising at the moment, but there are a few interesting partnerships going on, and lots of opportunity for further development and full-on brand engagement in ways that add value / unique information to review site communities.

restaurants ::
Dianping (大众点评 http://www.dianping.com/ ), which managed to grab a URL that all other review sites now wish they had, started out in 2003 as a website on which Shanghai residents could review local restaurants. It gradually expanded to Beijing and Hangzhou, and then to other parts of the country, and attracted investment from Sequoia Capital. Eateries are still the main focus of the site: members rate establishments on taste, environment, service, and average price per person, and their ratings are analyzed into various rankings: best restaurants (http://bit.ly/3NIhKi ), tastiest (http://bit.ly/qmfWG ), hot this week (http://bit.ly/vUImd ), top OL (“office lady”) choices (http://bit.ly/PBZhZ ), and top student picks (http://bit.ly/10Ixjy ). The website also provides an online reservation service, and has photos and menus contributed by community members. Other categories in addition to food include shopping (http://bit.ly/13sAfA ), entertainment (http://bit.ly/lqKo ), and services (http://bit.ly/oCtqv ) — it turns out that no one really thinks all that highly of Beijing Railway Station, for example (http://bit.ly/EteS3 ). For the past few years, Dianping has been publishing annual print guides to restaurants in major Chinese cities (http://bit.ly/2XMVUS ) that are produced using ratings and comments from netizens. The website has also been at the forefront of copyright disputes (who owns netizen comments?) and libel disputes (can restaurants sue over bad netizen reviews?); a summary is available here (http://bit.ly/YeYOG ). In terms of business partnerships, Dianping offers a membership card that is good for discounts at many of the restaurants it indexes and that accumulates points redeemable for mobile phone cards and gadgets. Promotional offers available to card-holders (http://bit.ly/jdoyG ) often take the form of a week or two of Dianping-related incentives to visit local businesses. Currently, Dianping members can get a free cup of coffee at any Sculpting in Time cafe (http://bit.ly/12bMOm ).

travel ::
Visiting someplace new with an untested tour agency can be an unsettling prospect, so many Chinese netizens turn to specific websites that offer peer recommendations and ratings. General review sites for travel include the popular portal for booking plane tickets and hotels, Ctrip (http://www.ctrip.com/ ). CTrip features a destination guide (http://destguides.ctrip.com ) whose landing page lists top-rated destinations, which at the moment are Hunan’s Zhangjiajie (http://bit.ly/oPHbt ), with over 11,626 reviews, and Yunnan’s Lijiang (http://bit.ly/yoij8 ), with around 1,600 reviews. Each review page has a combination of photographs, routes to nearby tourist and scenic spots (such as the Tiger Leaping Gorge outside of Lijiang), and a temperature graph for the area. In addition to rating the sites, netizens can ask and answer specific questions. The review section of travel portal Let’s Travel Together (http://www.17u.com/comment/ ) is more comprehensive, with destinations in every major city including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, and smaller ones such as Wuhan and Suzhou. The website has community features in addition to straightforward reviewing: 17u hosts a blog section (http://www.17u.com/blog/ ) whose posts can be promoted through a “digg”-type system. On a smaller scale is the Yododo travel website (http://www.yododo.com/ ), which lets netizens search for reviews and upload videos from their favorite destinations (http://bit.ly/LYxf1 ). Yododo’s reviews are short and quick (http://www.yododo.com/review/ ), more like a message board than the in-depth analysis encouraged on other sites, and feature only one or two lines for each city. The range of travel review websites is quite broad: many individual destinations have websites devoted to them alone, where netizens can appraise food, lodging, and attractions. Zhangjiajie, for example, has a travel site with a review section (http://www.zjjok.com/dianping/ ), and the city of Wuhan hosts a travel website (http://www.gotowuhan.com.cn ) with a review subsite (http://dp.gotowuhan.com.cn/ ), as well as blogs (http://blog.gotowuhan.com.cn/ ) and a BBS discussion forum (http://bbs.gotowuhan.com.cn/ ).

cosmetics ::
Cosmetics and personal care products are quite possibly the most popular items for netizens to review online. I Am 2ya (http://www.i2ya.com/ ) is a multimedia cosmetics review site. Members can rate products and upload photos of their own stash (http://www.i2ya.com/ddx.aspx ). Highly-recommended products are listed among the site’s top rankings (http://bit.ly/VDscT ). Apart from web ads, brand presence comes in the form of “test groups,” promotion activities in which qualified members are offered the chance to review new products. The current campaign is from Yves Rocher, a French natural beauty label (http://bit.ly/4hhHl1 ). Ten sets of Yves Rocher body-slimming products will be handed out to registered reviewers who will have to write up a review if they’re chosen. The page features existing reviews of the product by girls in their twenties, some of whom have lost weight using the product. I Am 2Ya is affiliated with Niu’er Beauty Net (http://www.niuer.com.cn/ ), a cosmetics portal run by Niu’er, who’s apparently a well-known beautician. He’s got a special section on I Am 2Ya, too (http://bit.ly/176apD ), and clips of his presentations, as well as excerpts of a Taiwan beauty show (http://bit.ly/ixYy1 ), form the multimedia section of the site. Beauty Make-Up (http://www.5i5p.net/ ), whose URL decodes to mean “I Love Being Beautiful” (我爱我漂亮), bills itself as a “professional cosmetics review website.” Top reviewers, some of whom have assessed more than one hundred products, are listed on the front page alongside a category breakdown that lists products by type and region of origin (domestic, Korean / Japanese, Euro/American, and other). The website also hosts a forum (http://www.5i5p.net/bbs/ ) where members share shopping strategies and swap beauty tips. More radically, some review sites focus on plastic surgery procedures and specialists. Plastic Surgery Review Net (http://dp100.net/ ) reviews plastic surgeons and hospitals, and displays pertinent information such as professional CV, specialty, and age. The front page currently features nose-jobs (http://dp100.net/xiangmu/65 ), with five doctors and three hospitals recommended for the procedure. Recognizing the possibility for astro-turfing, the website allows netizens to evaluate the usefulness of other netizen’s reviews by voting them “useful” (有用) or “fake” (太假).

IT ::
After cosmetics, IT seems to be the most popular product category for netizens to review. Major tech sites like Donews (http://donews.com ) and ZOL (http://zol.com.cn ) provide ratings functionality alongside more professional reviews and product promotions, and IT is featured prominently on more general-interest review sites. For example, Holaba (http://www.holaba.com.cn/ ), a Shanghai-based review website with a brand-based concept, features IT as the top category on the front page, and at the moment most of the featured products are IT-related. Members can rate brands and their products on a 1-10 scale, and leave more detailed ratings in comments, which themselves can be rated by other members. What’s most interesting about the Holaba site is its “Brand War” feature (http://www.holaba.com.cn/brandwar ), which right now is pitting Motorola, Nokia, and Apple-branded mobile phones against each other (as of this writing, more than 3,000 ratings have been entered for each brand and Apple is in the lead with 9.7, versus Nokia’s 9.4 and Motorola’s 9.2. Members who vote get a chance to win a prizes: in the first stage, 600 10-yuan phone cards, in the second stage (currently in progress), 150 100-yuan phone cards, and in the third stage, an actual mobile phone (the model depends on which brand wins the Brand War). Members can choose to recommended (and not-recommended) products, which are then featured on their member page (here’s one from leading commenter “apang” http://bit.ly/1qHbyS ). The site’s contact page (http://bit.ly/WbBzC ) has a “business cooperation” category, but it’s not clear on the rest of the site if any brands featured are a result of a partnership. 92DP (http://www.92dp.com/ ), whose digit-name translates as “I just love reviewing” (就爱点评), has a mix of cosmetics and IT on the front page. Its unique offering is video-based reviews: members upload clips of their impressions of products they own. In this clip (http://bit.ly/18oscq ), user “shuyuting843″ reviews the Sony T700 digital camera using a typical post-90s overhead camera angle. To foster community participation, the website encourages new users to post their “mug shot” in an introductory thread (http://bit.ly/10nqMw ), and other special activities are frequently updated on the features page (http://www.92dp.com/zhuanti/ ). Brand participation is mostly limited to web ads (tech has a presence in the form of ads for the iPod Nano), but there are also a number of brand landing pages, such as Canon (http://www.92dp.com/brand/canon ) and Shiseido (资生堂 http://www.92dp.com/brand/ ), which is linked directly off the front page. There’s virtually no limit to how specialized review sites can be, so long as there’s a ready audience. The Wow8 (http://wow8.org/ ) website is a source of maps for Warcraft and other RPGs. It has a fairly standard BBS discussion forum, but it also has one subsite devoted to map ratings (http://dp.wow8.org/ ), where netizens can rate and leave comments on the maps featured on the site.

education ::
Rate Teachers (评师 http://www.pinglaoshi.com/ ) claims to cover a million instructors at over 3,000 institutes of higher learning. Smack on the front page are links to pages rating teachers at China’s most prestigious universities, such as Peking and Tsinghua, and rankings of professors by quantitative merit (http://bit.ly/vVSem ), charm (http://bit.ly/H6TJJ ), and a more qualitative aggregation of user comments (http://bit.ly/zfkDS ). Site members grade professors according to course difficulty (易), helpfulness (助), clarity (晰), and course interest (趣), as well as personal charm (魅力). Here’s a page for a professor at the Central Academy of Drama (http://bit.ly/GABsS ) who is generally liked by students (one even has a crush on him), although a few think he’s a little abnormal. Teachers can respond to reviews left on their page once they have verified their identity, but that function doesn’t seem to be used much. As befits an education-related site, sponsorship is from book-related sites such as Amazon.cn. The Rate Teachers caused a bit of controversy back in 2007 (http://bit.ly/r7vOd ) when the mainland media reported that some teachers were upset about negative reviews they received, and other observers suggested that the site could be subject to libel claims. However, those concerns seem to have been in the minority, and the website takes pains to focus on the best teachers rather than the worst. RVedu (http://www.rvedu.com/ ), a website run by e-learning provider Ambow (http://www.ambow.com.cn/ ), is a general education portal with a focus on ratings (the subtitle of the site is “Education Ratings Net” 教育点评网). At RVedu, schools rather than teachers are the focus of ratings (http://www.rvedu.com/daxue ), and the website covers state-run, private (http://www.rvedu.com/minban ), art school (http://www.rvedu.com/art ), exchange programs (http://www.rvedu.com/liuxue ), and individual majors (http://www.rvedu.com/zhuanye ). Would you believe that city planning (城市规划) is currently the hottest major on the site?

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: in light of the role Web 2.0 and online communications played in the recent unrest in Xinjiang, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at where and how China’s ethnic minorities congregate via online community in China. A bit of context for unknowing readers: China has 56 officially recognized ethic groups. 55 of them are minorities, with the majority ethnic group, Han, accounting for 90+% of China’s population.

The scale and diversity of the Chinese Internet means that members of China’s 55 ethnic minorities looking for online communities that reflect their offline culture have a wide variety of options available to them. Although there are occasional problems, as in the case of Uyghur discussion forums suspended after the Urumqi riots, or when community websites of groups in China’s more “restive” regions sometimes have to deal with the firm hand of government authorities, the Chinese Internet still has a wealth of resources for people who want to meet others like themselves online, or who want to converse in their own language.

Below is a snapshot of some online communities for five different minority groups in China: Uyghur, Tibetan, Mongolian, Hakka, and Manchu. Non-Chinese languages might require installing special fonts or viewing pages in a particular web browser, but discussion on many of the linked sites is conducted in standard Chinese script.

Uyghur ::
The most visible forum for Uyghurs in Xinjiang was the Uighur Online BBS discussion forum (维吾尔在线), run by economist Ilham Tohti. After the recent Urumqi riots, the website was blocked because of its use as a communication tool for rioters, and Ilham was detained by police. It’s still available through a proxy, though. It has active sub-forums for Uyghur issues, ethnic thought, and Han society, and even one for Hui people in predominantly Uyghur areas. On the newsy side of things, sub-boards range from current events to Uyghur issues in the foreign media. Translation between traditional ethnic languages, Mandarin Chinese, and English is a featured activity, with assignments handed out to interested members in exchange for system credits. A companion Uyghur-language BBS has a wide range of posts written in Latin script. My Uyghur is a Xinjiang-registered portal written in Uyghur Arabic script, and hosts BBS discussion forums in both Uyghur Arabic and in Chinese. Interestingly, many of the discussion threads on the Chinese forum are written in a mix of Chinese characters and Latin-script Uyghur. The My Uyghur website has an associated blog group on Netease with around one thousand members who post about Uyghur culture, faith, and customs, mostly in Chinese.

Tibetan ::
Tibet Culture, a Gansu-registered blog host and discussion forum, is an active community for Chinese-language discussion about Tibet and Tibetans. The BBS discussion forum has a range of sub-forums including Tibetan culture, literature, and Buddhist texts, but the blog section is far more interesting. An RSS feed of the latest posts pulls down several dozen blog posts a day ranging from art to t-shirts to current events like the Urumqi riots to Tibetan Buddhism. Most of the blog posts are in Chinese; occasionally Tibetan-language posts will be put up as image files. The government-run Tibet Information Center also hosts a blog service that covers many of the same topics; judging from the tag cloud, education is a major focus, as is the Dalai Lama, who takes a major drubbing from the site’s bloggers. Displaying Tibetan script is still an issue for many web browsers today, so Tibetan-language websites are doubly impenetrable to outsiders (you may have to try some of the links listed here in a number of different browsers to get them to render properly). ChodMe is a Tibetan-language blog host associated with the news portal TibetCM. Discussion-forum-wise, the Tibetan Youth BBS gets a fair amount of traffic.

Mongolian ::
The Mongolian Youth forum is a bilingual BBS that hosts discussion in both Chinese and Mongolian. On the Chinese side, the sub-board for international Mongol issues is quite popular and focuses largely on the country of Mongolia, with threads like this look at the army. The Mongolian-language side has less traffic, and the most popular sub-board seems to be about the environment and customs. The Mongolian Teacher Forum describes its mission to be “saving ethnic education” (拯救民族教育). The forum is mostly dedicated to pedagogical topics, with discussions over ethnicity-related issues quite common. In one re-posted article, the author questions why Inner Mongolia has no real Mongolian university: “Why can’t the Mongolians, who once founded the mightiest empire of the world, even build a Mongolian university in their own autonomous region?” Many of the active posters are teachers. For example, “Chasna”, a female Mongolian elementary school teacher has 541 posts. In one post, she talks about her experiences teaching ethics to young students. “Taliinhan” (塔林汗), which means “friend of the prairie” in Mongolian, is a forum about environmental protection issues in Inner Mongolia. A large proportion of discussion is dedicated to laws and regulations. The “Taliinhan environmental protection association,” an NGO founded in 2004, is the force behind the forum. Taliinhan seeks to “protect the prairie and the interest of the farmers within the boundary of law,” and one of their offline activities is the distribution of law texts to Mongolian farmers. QQ (57162485) and MSN (msn2319@bbqun.com) groups are available to further facilitate group communication. Sites in Mongolian occasionally give users a choice between a Cyrillic version (used more in outer Mongolia) and vertical Mongolian script (which has only become practical since the introduction of Windows Vista, and which still generally requires the use of the Internet Explorer browser). This BBS discussion forum, affiliated with the Mongolian News Portal of China, uses software from Inner Mongolian IT company Menksoft. Other solutions exist: The MGLBlog host uses Flash to display Mongol script.

Hakka ::
Although it arguably should be, Hakka (客家) is not officially recognized as one of China’s 56 ethnic Groups. Hakka speakers are classified as Han Chinese, and they live mainly in Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Fujian. The lack of official recognition rankles some young people, who discuss various propositions for a “Hakka Province” or a “Hakka Municipality” (or even, tongue-in-cheek, a “Hakka Kingdom”). A thread on the Hakka Online BBS discussion forum argues in favor of a Hakka homeland, which one commenter suggests establishing around Meizhou, Guangdong. Earlier this year, Hakka Online launched its first annual pop music competition, which solicited original videos for Hakka-language songs (most of them from Taiwan). Another website, Hakka Forum, receives a couple dozen posts a day and has message boards for topics ranging from Hakka folk music and films to famous Hakka people, including an analysis of the family tree of Sun Yat-sen, who was born into a Hakka family. Hakka identity is a factor here, too: the discussion forum carries the tag-line, “The 56 ethnicities are like 56 flowers. One flower is the Han, and it has eight petals. One of these petals is the Hakka.” Hakka musicians and political figures are also featured on China Hakka Hall. The Hakka Sky BBS is a relatively active forum with about a thousand comments a day, most of them in the Hakka News and Cultural Encyclopedia boards. As Hakka people are spread across a large part of China, there are numerous smaller, local forums like Guangzhou Hakka, and Meizhou Hakka, which launched just this past April. Recent posts of interest include a student’s account of a trip to Yongding in Fujian, where he enjoyed ancient streets and earthen buildings that have been granted World Cultural Heritage status. Another post is about the “brewing” (酿) of food in Hakka culture, in this case, how to make brewed bitter melon. Interestingly, despite the unique language that defines part of Hakka identity, most of the conversation on all of these Hakka forums is conducted in Mandarin, except in cases where the finer points of Hakka itself are under discussion.

Manchu ::
Although a sizable group of people identify themselves as Manchu in China, the language and culture has practically vanished. Consequently, online Manchu communities feature discussions of traditional Manchu culture and introductory language materials from a learner’s perspective. Solonju, for example, has an online Manchu textbook and a BBS forum for discussion in both Chinese and Romanized Manchu. The Manchus website and BBS discussion forum, registered in Beijing, is written almost entirely in Chinese (except for a title written in Manchu and Jurchen script). One of the popular sub-boards is “Root finding,” where netizens can trace their genealogy based on their family name and the area they once lived. Other active boards include discussion of Manchu history and “Modern Manchu,” which consists of notifications for current Manchu cultural activities. Similarly, in the iManchu discussion forums, the hottest sub-board is devoted to the discussion of ethnic history. A Manchu blog group on Sohu has moderately active discussions of topics like Manchu script and traditional culture in a modern setting. The Internet also provides a number of Manchu language tools. A Manchu script creator converts Romanized Manchu into vertical Manchu script, and Enenggi hosts a Manchu word of the day and an online Manchu dictionary. Although the Manchu people of the northeast may have lost their language, the Xibe people of Xinjiang, who are related to the Manchu but are classified as an entirely separate ethnic group, retain a language that is quite close to classical Manchu. Xibe Web has a low-traffic BBS discussion forum where posts are made in Romanized Xibe. The website Xibe Culture has a similar Xibe-language BBS discussion forum.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: microblogging platforms like Twitter, Fanfou, and Jiwai (see this previous Friday 5) are used by Chinese netizens to pass around links, memes, short tidbits of breaking news, and other kinds of information that can fit into 140 characters. In other markets, particularly the US market, companies and brands have long been taking advantage of this platform as a communications / marketing tool, and while the tactic still seems to be in its embryonic stage in China, a number of commercial entities have found success with their interactions with audiences on microblogging platforms. The below five-point brief outlines a several examples of this, and provides a reasonably comprehensive overview of what companies and brands are using microblogging in China and how they are using it.

[Note that because micrblogging platforms are often used by netizens to share "sensitive information" and Coordinate related offline political activities, etc. (see recent events in Iran and Xinjiang), the Chinese government occasionally interferes with their operation. This week is unfortunately one of those occasions. Twitter is currently blocked on the Chinese mainland and Fanfou has been inoperable since Tuesday night (following a brief "maintenance hiatus" over the June 4 Tiananmen Square anniversary). As a result, some of the links below may not work properly if you are accessing the web from mainland China without a proxy or VPN. All links will be fine once accessibility to Twitter and Fanfou is returned, hopefully soon.]

cars ::
GM has a Fanfou account launched with little fanfare in February. It now has 14,469 followers, placing it fourth out of all organizations on Fanfou (the rest of the top five are media outlets and Fanfou itself, although the rankings are a little suspect: see HP below). A Global Entrepreneur article on microblogging in March featured the GM Fanfou experiment, and it has since become a standard case study example of a major brand taking advantage of a microblogging platform in China. GM updates its Fanfou page every few days with links to videos and photo collections of offline promotional activities, most recently the Transformer 2-related Camaro push. The individual maintaining GM’s Fanfou account interacts with followers fairly regularly: about a third of the recent updates are replies to other Fanfou users, which have included topics such as 4S shops, fuel economy, the official status of the account,  and its 10,000th follower on June 26. By comparison, check out Ford China’s official Fanfou page, which is far more recent and has just a couple dozen followers. A fan-maintained account for Ford Racing is more popular and provides links to race information, results, outside blog posts, and to the Ford Racing website.

computers ::
Hewlett Packard leverages its Fanfou account basically as an interactive customer service hotline. Fanfou users following HP ask the company questions about its product specifications and service issues. Fanfou users accustomed to inauthentic company / brand accounts frequently inquire about the account itself: is the account HP-authorized or just run by a fan? Replies generally include a customer service number and a link to the HP homepage. HP has recently had to deal with other Fanfou users asking about the controversial Green Dam filter software. The account also makes use of Fanfou’s photo sharing capabilities to post images of cool HP and Compaq-branded gadgets. Dell’s home sales service has a popular English-language Twitter account, DellOutlet, which posts product announcements and cool online deals. It has tens of thousands of followers. By contrast, the Chinese versions on Fanfou, and Jiwai, had only a couple dozen followers and mostly stopped updating in April. However, Direct2Dell’s Chinese Twitter account run by @Jaqui Zhou, who maintains the company’s Chinese-language corporate blog, continues to update with product announcements and links to articles, so it appears that Dell’s success with microblogging in Chinese has been mixed. Lenovo has two accounts on Fanfou, one for the company itself and a second for its ThinkPad brand. The Lenovo account mostly reposts updates from the ThinkPad account, which mostly posts links to the Yamato Lab blog on Sina, which is kept by Arimasa Naitoh, head of Lenovo R&D in Japan, and which, thanks to its promotion on Sina’s tech channel, has a far greater audience than either of the Fanfou accounts.

software ::
Opera, the Norwegian web browser developer, keeps a popular Fanfou account that has several thousand followers. The company has been actively targeting the Chinese market for several years and has cultivated a dedicated user group for its desktop and mobile editions. It uses its Fanfou account to interact with other users, which has recently included information on how to post from the Opera China BBS to Fanfou, font issues in Opera Mini and China recruitment. By contrast, its less-trafficked Jiwai account is mostly devoted to reposting news from its official China site. Applications software developer Kingsoft has microblogs set up for many of its utilities, such as Defender (金山密保) and Shield (金山网盾), along with its Labs (金山互联网安全实验室). These Jiwai accounts mostly carry notices of and links to incremental software updates, virus definition updates, and bug reports. Kingsoft has customized the right-hand sidebar of its Jiwai pages to include a button that allows netizens to download the software directly from the page itself rather than having to click through to the Kingsoft website. Kingsoft’s Fanfou page for Antivirus (毒霸) is mostly devoted to feeds from its official blog, but the company has personalized the page: “Antivirus Safety Bulletin” enjoys the music of Aerosmith, Radiohead, Coldplay, and Jonathan Lee, and likes the films Fight Club and Amelie. Perhaps because of the sheer number of Kingsoft accounts, none is followed by more than a couple hundred people at the moment. Not to be outdone, Rising, another anti-virus company, has its own Fanfou account that lists the latest additions to its list of websites that contain trojans or viruses. This information is normally sent automatically to users through virus definition updates, which may escape the notice of ordinary users, so its presence on a daily Fanfou update gives followers an image of a company that’s committed to its software.

media ::
Microblogging would seem to be a perfect fit for online media outlets: as more and more people are using Twitter and Fanfou feeds to locate interesting links, media entities can post teasers to their microblog and direct their followers to their website. The Southern Media Group, known for its investigative journalism and incisive commentary, is using microblogging in a big way. Southern Metropolis Weekly (南都周刊), for example, has around 1,500 followers on Twitter and over 20,000 on Fanfou. Another publication, Southern Weekly, has 3,268 followers on its Twitter, which it gratefully acquired from a fan just a couple weeks ago. Malicious username squatting and hoax Twittering usually makes the headlines, but once in a while a brand can obtain an easy-to-remember account from a benevolent microblogger who registered it first. Southern Weekly has several thousand more followers on Fanfou. The Beijing News, which is affiliated with the Southern Media Group, has a popular Fanfou account as well with upward of 15,000 followers. Muckracking business magazine Caijing has a Fanfou account with 1300+ followers. None of these accounts is interactive: they all make use of the easy link sharing functionality of microblogging, but do nothing else in the way of brand building or engaging readers / audiences in conversation or dialogue about news, events, etc. General exposure and traffic back to the main publication website is their aim – a missed opportunity indeed.

local brands ::
Smaller local brands can use microblogs as an efficient way to interact with increasingly wired audiences. A boutique chain like Sculpting in Time Cafe (雕刻时光), cafes that cater to a young, hip clientele, is a perfect fit for the sort of netizen that follows microblogs. Its Fanfou account, run by one of its Nanjing staff, interacts with other users and posts news tagged with its locations in Beijing, Xi’an, and Nanjing. The account was recently upgraded by Fanfou to become an “official” microblog. Recent updates include a link to a blog post about romance writers visiting a Beijing location, and a number of exchanges with followers about the identity of the person behind the account. Guangzhou’s Tophour bar is fairly Web2.0 enabled, with a Douban group that lists QQ, MSN, and Google groups, as well as a Fanfou account. Tophour is a venue for salons on literature and current events, so many of its updates involve spreading the word about upcoming items of interest. It’s also fairly interactive with its roughly four hundred followers, including a recent exchange about how it conducts promotion for concert events. Yilin Publishing House, which issues translations of foreign literature, launched a Fanfou account in June that currently has more than 800 followers. It interacts with other Fanfou users and posts links to new titles, cover photos, and reviews on Douban. Recent interactions include a user asking about how illustrators are recruited, and a joking personal response to another Fanfou user that came with a prominent disclaimer, “This does not represent the official position of Yilin Publishing House.”

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: online communities in China can link people together based on common interests. Sometimes, these interests are located online — gaming, net lit, online video, tech — but often times people are involved in offline pursuits that they wish to share with their netizen friends. Some communities / discussion forums are national in nature and connect people from across the country. Others are more locally-focused and serve as online outposts of a groups that meet frequently in the real world. Although each of the following activities takes place offline, practitioners meet online to plan events, share videos, seek help with techniques, or shoot the breeze with other people interested in the same thing.

parkour ::
Parkour and the art of free-running, which started in the 80s actually, has exploded in popularity worldwide over the past few years, and China is no exception. The Parkour and Free Running Training website offers background information on the sport as well as space for traceurs to share their experiences. These include photos of interesting moves and videos of stunts (here’s Guangzhou’s “city spanker” club). Some videos attempt to work parkour into a narrative, like the 20-minute “I’m not a solitary hero”  (我不是独行侠), the story of how one parkour team was formed. A Douban group for parkour enthusiasts recommends the Paoku.com.cn website. Individual local teams sometimes have their own websites. City Monkey, a Beijing-based team of traceurs and one of the forces behind Paoku.com.cn, keeps track of its activities on a website and a blog. The group’s updates are infrequent, but it has received a fair amount of local media coverage as parkour has entered the public consciousness over the past year. Other teams are listed on the LeParkour website, which includes groups in Wuhan (C-traceur) and Xi’an (Freefly). For more information (and lots of Parkour videos) see an earlier post I did on fifty 5.

biking ::
Biking has a huge online presence in China. Most online biking communities are BBS-style discussion forums, although a few sites, like Qixingquan, have attempted to build a Web2.0 SNS community out of bikers, to limited success. ChinaBike (车友论坛), whose full name is “China Bicycle Enthusiast Net,” is a typical BBS aimed at bicyclists. The most popular sub-boards are those devoted to road and mountain bikes, which mostly consists of technical issues, and a marketplace for second-hand bikes ( ). The site is quite active, garnering several thousand comments a day, and it has a huge list of links to a wealth of other cycling websites at the bottom of the home page. Many of those sites are local forums, and university clubs are particularly common. PKU has a bike club, the Cycling Association of Peking University, whose online presence accompanies an offline organization founded in 1995. The site exists to organize bike hikes, share information, and connect student bicyclists with each other. More generally, Qiche8 is a BBS aimed at college student bicyclists across the country, and has sub-forums for schools in various regions. Within the scope of bicycling, BMX (小轮车) is the focus of quite a few community forums. China BMX is one major clearinghouse for BMX-related information. showing off their members who have made the covers of BMX-related magazines. Nukebike is a general forum for BMX, street bike, and dirt bike exploits, but similar to parkour, biking is an activity pursued by local clubs across the country, many of whom have their own online presence. A BMX club in Wuhan keeps a blog on Blogbus which hosts some striking action photographs and multiple-exposure images of jumps. Enthusiasts often post videos of their skills to various video hosts. Here, Yang Mingkai (杨明凯), a twenty-something BMXer in Beijing, shows off to the sound of the Beastie Boys on a sidewalk, and in competition.

skateboarding ::
Kickerclub (ignore the unfortunate logo), is a bilingual website devoted to skateboarding exploits in China. According to the about page, Kickerclub was founded in 2001 by a skater from Qingdao who was studying in Xi’an at the time, and is now working in skateboard-related merchandising. The site features skateboard tutorials, products for sale, and videos of skateboarders in China and around the world. There’s an associated Douban group where members post photos of activities and skate-ups in various cities. The latest was a meet-up in Chengdu for World Skateboard Day on June 21. Another Douban group, Skate, provides a helpful bilingual list of skate lingo, which is fairly fluid, as the three renderings of “ollie” illustrates (翱骊, 豚跳, 带板腾空). China Skateboards is a clearinghouse for skateboard-related information and announcements. These include photos of events, such as recent meet-ups in Nanjing and Shijiazhuang. The website has a channel on Youku where it posts videos, mostly of foreign skateboarders, but occasionally of locals. SkateHere, a product-oriented skateboarding website, hosts blogs from some well-known names in the field. Along fashion lines, it has a tons of photos from the launch of Nike’s SB line of skateboard shoes; a promotional video of the shoes has been pretty big this year, and features Tiananmen and other recognizable Beijing locales.

dancing ::
Break dancing, called “street dancing” (街舞) and Pili wu (霹雳舞) in Chinese has a fairly large online presence. Breakdance China is an collaborative blog that aims to provide information to China’s breakdance enthusiasts. Blog posts are frequent – several per day – and include announcements of upcoming events, photos of recent events, videos of dancing, and complaints about “kids these days.” The website is also host to the Quanzhou Middle School Break Dance Hiphop forum, a community for “Ha.5 Club” breakdancers from Fujian. Breakdance China links to 52 Breaking, a BBS forum for breakdancing fans. The most active sub-board is devoted to teaching techniques. Techniques are also the predominant focus of the active Baidu Postbar on breakdancing, which at the time of writing claims 2,780 members and 55,759 topics. One classic post is instructional and uses videos that mix popular music videos and actual break dance (for example). The BBS Hiphop City, whose URL can be interpreted to mean “I want to dance, dance, dance!” is a forum for all kinds of hiphop dancing, divided by city. The website is inclusive of other interests associated with hiphop dancing and urban / street culture: it has sub-forums for graffiti, MCing, and DJing. Current top stories are mostly in memory of Michael Jackson. Latin dancing is another up-and-coming activity, but because it’s organized a little less organically than breakdancing, online communities are more oriented toward formal training: people posting to the Douban group are largely looking for instructors or training centers, and a lot of websites are hosted by studios rather than community or discussion forums hosted by groups of enthusiasts. There are abundant instructional resources on China’s video hosts (example).

rock climbing ::
China Outdoor Information Center (户外资料网), a widely used website for outdoor activities has extensive information on alternative sports, including climbing. The social networking site hosts groups ranging from mountain climbing to rock climbing, and includes photo albums of indoor and outdoor climbing experiences. China Climber, a Beijing-based forum aimed at a national audience (including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau), has a sub-board where members can share stories of their climbs. Many local climbing groups host their own websites. LS Climbing is a Shaanxi-based forum associated with the Xi’an Rock Climbing Fund, an organization devoted to developing destinations for rock climbers. The Xi’an version is inspired by a similar organization in Shanghai, which is affiliated with the Rock Lizard BBS. A Baidu Postbar on rock climbing has a fair amount of traffic and covers climbing walls as well as outdoor excursions. And of course no sport would be complete without photos of sexy models pretending to take part.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: the topic for this week’s Friday 5 comes from my colleague (and former United States Ambassador to Singapore, 2001 – 05) Frank Lavin, based in Edelman’s Hong Kong office. Thanks Frank. If any readers have any ideas for future Friday 5s, please send through.

Due to China’s digital censorship regime (playfully known as the “Net Nanny”), politics can sometimes be tricky to talk about on the Chinese Internet. On websites affiliated with Chinese state-run / owned media organizations, conversation can carry on freely within the boundaries the sites have set up for themselves, but on more independent venues, Chinese netizens often have to resort to typographical tricks or character substitutions to mention people, places, and events whose names may be deemed “sensitive words” by the Net Nanny. In general, politics as a specific topic is fairly niche – online audiences are just not that interested. However, Daqi’s rankings list for politics forums (时政论坛排行) includes fourteen items. Expanding the view to rankings for “government” forums (政府论坛排行) extends the list to four pages and includes BBS discussion forums on topics such as anti-corruption, rule of law, policy, agricultural reform, and civic society. Below is a snapshot of the political / government landscape online in China – the places Chinese netizens go to converse / argue over politics, government affairs, and political figures.

general politics ::
Beijing’s Utopia BBS discussion forum may be the most well-known forum for debate about domestic and international issues. It tends to slant leftward, and has a special section for Mao Zedong. Leading special topics on Utopia currently include an ongoing critique of neoliberalism and articles on Lu Chuan’s Nanjing Massacre movie City of Life and Death. Marxist Review is a Beijing-based current events forum with an ostensibly Marxist slant. Recent topics include multi-party government, bureaucratic socialism, and democracy in the hands of revolutionary masses vs. the right. School of Athens is a academically-flavored community that slants in a liberal direction, particularly after absorbing many of the members of the liberal Fatianxia law commentary site following its harmonization in December, 2008 (and in fact, many pages on School of Athens imply that it actually is the successor to Fatianxia). Discussion involves the rule of law and civic society. A recent post that reposted an essay on freedom of speech by author Lin Da’s drew a comment thread in which netizens felt that Zhongnanhai (China’s White House) could learn something from it.

domestic politics ::
The forums at China.com are known for their nationalist leanings (they were at the forefront of the great Universal Values flamewar in 2008. The “Peace Forum” (和平论坛) sub-board has hundreds of pages worth of posts, most of them dealing with cross-straits Taiwan / Mainland China reunification. Conversations include “Taiwan still calls us Communist bandits,” dealing with a Taiwanese TV program’s interview with a guest who said his father beat him like a “Communist bandit.”  More recently, a May conversation discussed the short-sightedness of people who live in Taiwan, or more plainly, “Taiwan vs. China.” Caogen (草根), a blog host whose name means “grass-roots,” appears to lean left, and is home to sober commentary from noted public intellectuals like Li Changping (李昌平) and Ye Tan (叶檀), as well as other, more radical ideas. The site’s top-ranked blogger at the moment is Song Hongbing (宋鸿兵), author of the conspiracy-minded The Currency Wars, and other bloggers go off in even more unusual directions. A gem from April: “China should accept Mongolia’s request to return to the motherland” (中国应同意蒙古的回归请求) by Xu Zhaokang, who works in the Dongguan Municipal Copyright Bureau. Site-wide, top-ranked articles mostly have to do with assigning blame for the financial crisis and wondering whether the U.S. will collapse as a result. Young China features a May 4 tableau on its splash page alongside the slogan “embody the power of young China,” and continues the May 4 theme with an About-page image of students carrying a “Hello Mr. Democracy” sign on May 4, 1989. The main site is set up as a blog, but there’s also a nascent social networking site and an associated Marxist wikipedia. It’s hosted overseas, and it looks to be the work of one dedicated politics hound, but it’s still represents a political presence on mainland China’s Internet space.

international politics ::
The Chinese Foreign Ministry hosts a foreign affairs BBS discussion forum that dates back to November, 2001 (and still uses the clunky BBS software of that era). Although the last web-chat between a foreign ministry official took place in October 2008, the general interest board is still fairly active, drawing dozens of comments daily. According to the BBS’s information page, it’s only supposed to be open on weekdays between the hours of 10am and 5pm, but many comments are time-stamped outside those times. Newslist.com.cn has an International Affairs BBS discussion forum. Featured forums are aimed at students seeking to test into masters or PhD programs in international affairs, but the bulk of the site’s activity takes place in the Politics Talk forum, whose subject matter spans the globe. The Internet is home to specialized forums devoted to more specific topics in international affairs, such as China’s disputed territory and its relationship with Japan. China Non-Governmental Alliance to Protect the Diaoyu Islands (中国民间保钓联合会) has a BBS discussion forum that has sub-sections for the islands themselves, maritime rights, Sino-Japanese relations, and other related diplomatic and military topics. The China Non-Governmental Alliance to Seek Reparations from Japan has a similar set-up. A lot of discussion on these topics takes place on more general forums; traffic at these smaller websites seems to pick up when major events occur on the world stage.

local government ::
For local politics there are BBS discussion forums attached to the local Chinese government where citizens can voice their thoughts, such as the forum for locals in Nantong (南通) in Jiangsu province. That site has a section for local political affairs, which is split into three sub-sections: consultations, policy suggestions, and web-chats. Policy suggestions range from “ordinary people only want small things,” a complaint about bad traffic on a certain road to a direct appeal to the city mayor, Ding Dawei, about a chengguan (official urban control officers / thugs) without an official registration number who beat up a woman: “Who is beating up the people?” Although many local governments have set up websites, the level of political involvement differs. The city of Baoying has a government website that includes a citizens’ BBS discussion forum which claims 26,965 members, but unlike the previous government site, policy tends to be drowned out by everyday life. Of the more political-oriented conversations, “Responding to a problem” discussed road congestion partly caused by offices belonging to public security and the judiciary. As for government officials themselves, college-educated rural civil servants have a number of BBS discussion forums targeted specifically at people in their position. College Rural Official Forum features discussion boards where they can exchange information about rural governance, improve their skills, and learn the finer techniques of drawing up official documents. Politics-wise, there’s a discussion forum for current events that mostly seems to be concerned with the economic impact of college students choosing to take jobs as rural civil servants.

political personalities ::
Up until this Wednesday, the place to go to satisfy your passion for the PRC President and Communist Party / Military Commission Chairman Hu Jintao and PRC Premier Wen Jiabao was We All Love Hu and Wen (我们都爱胡总温总). On this website, fans could share stories, images, movie clips, and tributes to the beloved Chinese leaders. However, as of 5:17pm June 10, the site’s BBS discussion forum has been “suspended,” with the explanation: “The People Talk sub-board has been deleted.” People Talk was a place for fans of Hu and Wen to talk about their favorite domestic and international leaders. China’s strict rules protecting the image of domestic and world leaders had previously led the website to plead with users not to use photos of leaders in signatures or as avatars. Baidu has a Postbar devoted to the Wen Jiabao fan club, but posting is restricted to members (who number 30), and the last comment was submitted in July 2008. World leaders are a sensitive subject, too. Take U.S. President Barack Obama for example. He has his own forum on Baidu’s Postbar, but updates slowed after his election and ceased entirely after he took office in January. The forum notes that “because of relevant laws and policies,” only members (of whom there are 23) are allowed to post. Obama’s lucky — his forum still has 6,808 posts available for perusal. Ex-president Bush has no Postbar at all, only an apologetic “Sorry, the forum is temporarily unavailable based on relevant laws and policies.”

News link: A feature article posted to the Global Times website last night reported on the shutdown of unofficial fan club websites for national leaders.

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]