Page 175 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 6. The Xiamen PX plant event

net companies is controlled by Cyberspace Administration of China in both cen-

tral and local level. If any problem bursts, the internet companies would receive a
notice letter from official departments and they need to solve the problem accord-
ingly as soon as possible’ .
27
In this case, Fish Community Forum had a dilemma over whether to serve its
users or obey rules from the authority. With rounds of government intervention, the ad-

ministrators chose to shut down the website temporarily so that it stayed away with this
sensitive topic. It is a situation that all private internet companies could face – to take
side between the governing departments and the users.

6.4.2.2 Blog service providers’ position: complying with government’s regulations

According to CNNIC (2007), by the end of November 2007 there were 180 mil-
lion internet users in China, including approximately 47 million blog users, 80% of the
bloggers started using the internet after 1999 and 50% of bloggers had experience in

using the internet for 1-5 years.

Bullog: used a ‘wait-and-see’ approach to temporarily maintain the information

In 2006, because of personal experience in being censored by Sina (the most pop-

ular commercial blog site at the time), Luo Yonghao determined to setup a platform
that tolerated free speech. Huang Bin, who was in the software industry, also wished
to create a space that sustained knowledge sharing among the young generation which
should differentiate from the Party-led media place such as CCTV or People’s Daily.
They became partners and created Bullog.cn which attracted many popular public

speech writers who competed with each other, which encouraged positive circulation
within the network. One commentator indicated that:
‘Writers in Bullog have the competence in writing articles for newspapers. They

offered more vibrant products for Bullog which was absent from the newspaper.
I consider it as a way of showing off for their superior intellectuality, which is
good. These bloggers do not work to despise others, neither do they lower others

27 Translation provided by the author.

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