This blog post is referring to Kevin Zhuang’s blog post about the impact of Weibo, the Chinese social media giant. In Kevin’s post, he said that Weibo was a great tool to increase Chinese government transparency for people in China, who are not allowed or being observed by the government most of the time through different spyware, such as the famous Green Dam.
Chinese government has been notorious of its controlling of its people voices. It was surprising how they allowed Weibo to be established in China, so did RenRen, which is another Chinese version of Facebook. So why did they allow social media to be Chinese daily lives? Did they want people to have their freedom to talk bad about the government? Did they want China to be an “open” China? If they do want to give citizens some new standards of freedom, why just not allow Facebook to enter the market? This is the reason, from Facebook’s China Problem, “Facebook’s most immediate hurdle in China is a communist government that limits free speech and allows officials access to company data. In return for a license to operate, Chinese companies are required to employ censors at their own expense.”
Aha, it is clear then! Weibo and RenRen are still under control of the Chinese government control! All transparency or hope that Kevin mentioned is just a flash of light! In my point of view, Chinese government is using these tools to check on its citizens and censor them, block them, arrest them! China has not changed. The incident mentioned by Kevin is just a rare one, maybe the news was too viral or ridiculous for China to hide. In a conspiracy side of thinking, Chinese government is using these tools to spread the ideology of the government. Recently, there is a trend in China, and it’s about hating Japanese. The Chinese government might just spread it online in order to get the people to be angry, and thus China has an opportunity to have war with Japan, and seize her resources.
