This is Beijing-Beijing English blog

Online social networks are growing in popularity. Since launching in May 2008, the Chinese social networking website kaixin001.com has seen incredible growth. It is now the 13th most viewed site in the nation. But in an already crowded sector – and in a country where online copying is rampant – it’s anyone’s guess whether it will continue to remain popular. Who knows when and if another site will come along and surpass it.

Daniella and Maggie, two twenty-somethings living in Beijing and working for Lenovo, are hooked on China’s hot new craze. The western world has Facebook and MySpace; China has Kaixin, which means happy.

Kaixin001.com is similar to many other social networking sites, but also has online games. For example they have a game called Parking War where each user parks his or her cars in a friend’s parking spot to earn virtual money. This money can then be spent on buying more cars. In the game Friend Sales, each user can be bought for a number of hours, and forced to do things like clean a toilet, make a cup of tea or sing a song.

Daniella Zhang, one Kaixin user said “Before work starts, I’ll get on it and check it out, then during the day when I’m a bit bored, and then again at the end of work. I park my cars, buy some friends, vote in some polls.”

Kaixin has quickly established itself as China’s top social networking site. An estimated 30 million users log on everyday.

iResearch Consulting Group places the total market value of Chinese networking services in 2007 as upwards of 500 million yuan. Of this amount, social networking services accounted for more than half. The total market value is predicted to hit 1.6 billion yuan by 2011.

But, China’s online market is different than many others because copying is rampant. If one site has even a hint of traction, others doing the exact same thing will spring up seemingly overnight.

After the recent success of kaixin001.com a copycat emerged. The registered, but previously inactive domain name kaixin.com was purchased in October 2008 and launched a site of similar design and operation to kaixin001.com.

The new Kaixin has become popular in its own right, thanks in part to people who think they’re logging onto the original Kaixin.

Tan Xiaosheng, CTO of Myspace China highlights the instability of the market. He notes that even the top ranked sites still only reach a small percentage of China’s vast population.

And while he expects the growth of social networking sites to continue at breakneck speed, he cautions that the turnover of sites could be greater than ever.

Tan Xiaosheng, CTO of Myspace China said “If one enterprise or a website doesn’t build up their own core competence, and they can’t produce a unique product they won’t be competive. Also, if they don’t have their own marketing, PR, or creativity, they won’t survive.”

Somewhat troubling for Kaixin is the fact that two of their most fervent supporters aren’t convinced it has staying power.

Daniella says she is already beginning to lose interest in the site, while Maggie says the site could be a distant memory in a year’s time.

What is clear is that social networking in China is already hugely popular and continues to grow. But for the dominant sites in the sector, the trick is not just getting to the top, but staying there.

With the hot of blog several years ago, lot of main website build their BSP for people’s blog. And China’s portal site Sina is one of the main BSP. Their strategy is to ask famous star or people to start their blog on Sina.

This time NBA megastar Kobe Bryant come to Sina. He build his bilingual blog on the sport chanel of Sina.(http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5b072a050100bre1.html?tj=1)

Anyway, Kobe Bryant is very popular in China. So they will care more about his activety rather than why he build his blog on Sina.

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BEIJING — China has shut down another 50 websites for containing porn and lewd content, bringing the total number of blocked ones to 91 since last Thursday.

Authorities have vowed to beef up crackdown efforts in the following days and urged law-breakers to voluntarily turn themselves in to local public security departments.

The sites closed on Saturday such as www.789b.com and www.678tp.cn have become inaccessible by Sunday.

They violated the top legislature’s regulations and other laws regarding public distribution of sexual images, said a statement issued by the Special Operation Office for Crackdown on online Porn and Lewd Content.

The month-long campaign to purify the Internet was launched last Monday by the State Council’s Information Office, Public Security and Culture ministries as well as four other government agencies.

Public distribution of pornography is illegal in China. Last Friday, the office announced the shut-down of 41 such illegal websites.

Previously, it had named and shamed 33 websites, including search engine Google and Baidu and Microsoft’s MSN China, for posting lewd content or offering links to pornographic sites.

There were more than 50 million bloggers in China by the end of November 2008, a growth of some 6.38 percent from the end of November 2007, said Gao Lulin, deputy head of the Internet Society of China on Tuesday.

The number of bloggers, or blog authors, which are personal online journals intended for public consumption, was 47 million at the end of November 2007.

The increasing number of bloggers was because more and more Chinese want to express their own views about local and international events through the Internet, Gao said.

The Internet Society of China, devoted to tracking development of the Internet in China, said the country recorded its first blog in August 2002. Now there are more than 100 million blogs. The society is a non-government institution sponsored by 70 organs, including Internet service providers, network access carriers and research institutes. It did not reveal how it tracked the number of blogs or bloggers.

Currently, there are more than 290 million netizens in China, ranking the country first in the world in terms of its online population.

Gao said, netizens in China were not only a group interested in virtual space, but also an important force in real life. They can even influence government policy-making.

The cyber hunters who roam China’s online space could soon become the hunted themselves. The Chinese legislature is deliberating a new law to curb the excesses of a growing trend here — the awkwardly-named “human flesh search engine”.

The first case of cyber hunting in China is believed to be in 2001, when a netizen posted a photo of a girl online, claiming that she was his girlfriend. Other netizens found out that the beauty was computer giant Microsoft’s model Chen Ziyao and exposed the lie.

The government wants to crack down on those Internet users who hunt down individuals online and expose details of their personal lives. The draft law says the cyber hunters and the website service providers will be held responsible if they violate the privacy of others. And if victims ask for their personal information to be deleted, the online portals must comply.

This comes after a recent successful lawsuit by a victim against a cyber hunter and an online portal — signifying that the netizens who style themselves as some kind of cyber vigilantes could soon find themselves falling foul of the law.

In a landmark case a fortnight ago, a Beijing court ruled that Wang Fei’s reputation had been damaged by a cyber manhunt. He lost his job and was harassed by strangers after his infidelity to his late wife, who committed suicide, was splashed online. His parents’ home was vandalised and his photos, addresses and phone numbers had been made public.

The court ordered Zhang Leyi — a university classmate of Wang’s wife who posted her diaries online and encouraged the manhunt — and the Internet host to pay Wang 5,000 yuan (RM2,500) and 3,000 yuan, respectively.

This case, which has been dubbed “The Death Blog”, was China’s first known lawsuit against online vigilantism.

Professor Xiao Qiang, who is the director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley, believes the case and the proposed new law, would have a positive impact on protecting citizens’ privacy.

Du Peiyuan, who is in charge of social issues at the popular Mop.com, agrees. He told The Straits Times his website would be more stringent with the posts there. But neither him nor Prof Xiao believes that the new law would end the “human flesh search” phenomenon.

“This kind of ‘distributive investigative behaviour’ will continue as long as the Internet is a public, interactive social space, participated in by a great number of netizens,” said Xiao.

That number is growing. Government figures show the number of netizens in China as at November last year was 290 million — ranked first in the world. There are more than 2.1 million websites and more than 100 million blogs in China. This translates into a potent force, capable of bringing down not just common folk, but government officials too.

In the last month alone, a Nanjing official was sacked after photos posted online showed him wearing a Vacheron Constantin Swiss watch — which retails at about 100,000 yuan — and smoking luxury brand cigarettes. Six local government officials from central Hunan province were also given

the boot after pictures of them dozing off at an official meeting were circulated on the Internet.

Some commentators are calling the trend a sort of “grassroots democracy”.

But while Beijing-based analyst Russell Leigh Moses agrees that these search engines “show how much passion and purpose bubble below the surface in China”, he adds that unbridled involvement by the masses can easily result in tragedy.

“The proposed law is a small step for those who want more of a role for citizens here but also wish to restrain them from mass, unsupervised action.” — Straits Times Singapore

China has announced a list of websites criticized for “low and vulgar practices on the Internet” as part of the latest Net Nanny campaign.

China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (中国互联网违法和不良信息举报中心), under the Internet Society of China, has announced a list of websites which contain “large amounts of low and vulgar content that violates social morality and damages the physical and mental health of youths.”

Each website listed is annotated with either a remark that the website had been given a notice, but didn’t take effective action to clean up its content, or that it did not quickly delete newly added vulgar and low content.

Google and Baidu were both censured for not taking effective action, while all the other websites on the list did not quickly delete offensive content.

This campaign is very similar to countless content cleansing campaigns over the past few years. It does not signify much except that the Net Nanny is making sure everyone knows who is boss before the Chinese New Year starts.

1. Google’s ‘web page search’ and ‘image search.’ The results show many links to obscene and pornographic websites.

2. Baidu’s forums and spaces contain large numbers of low and vulgar photographs, and some sections have obscene and pornographic content. The ‘webpage search’ within ‘Baidu search’ yields results that contain many links to obscene and pornographic websites.

3. Sina’s photo album and blog columns.

4. Sohu’s photo albums, blog columns, and Internet forums’ images section.

5. Tengxun’s Sousou (search) images, photo album columns, and personal spaces.

6. Netease’s photo album column.

7. Chinaren community’s ‘Tietie Tutu (images).’

8.Zhongsou’s community section.

9. Mop’s images ‘pretty girls’ (漂亮 MM) section.

Now the Chinese domain is growing fastly in China. As the Chinese domain can provide a more efficient communicaton and can expand company’s businesses through the Internet. And statistics from the CNNIC (China Internet Network In Information Center) show that as of the end of last year, the number of Chinese Internet users was over 253 million. However, more than 1 billion Chinese people have no access to the Internet at all. By the first half of next year, Chinese will follow English as the language of the universal domain labeling system.

However, what will be the specific changes created by the upcoming Chinese domain names? For the universal international domain name system (“. com”, “. net” and “. org”), it will add new Chinese domain names before the top-level domain label – such as “Chinese name . com”.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will be in charge of the registration and administration for these domain names.

For China’s domain name system (“.cn”), there will be three kind of new Chinese domain names:

First, it will change the top-level domain names with Chinese characters – such as “.Zhongguo (means China)”.

Second, it will change the second-level domain names with Chinese characters – such as “Chinese name. cn”.

Finally, it will change both the top-level and second-level domain names with Chinese characters – such as “Chinese name.Zhongguo”.

CNNIC will be responsible for its registration and administration.

So far, China’s government specifies four Chinese character domain names as the first candidates which are “.Zhongguo (means China)”, “.Gongsi (means company)”, “.Wangluo (means Internet) and “.CN”, which is the original domain name in China’s domain name system.

By the first half of 2009, when the Chinese domain names are involved in the international top-level domain name system, Chinese literate people around the world will also be able to surf the Internet with all these new Chinese domain names.

And once they successfully register a Chinese domain name, customers will own an email account with the same Chinese name.

According to the news, China internet giant Sina will buy assets from  China’s largest publicly traded advertising company Focus Media.  Sina will acquire Focus Media’s business in office buildings, elevators and supermarkets. The deal may be worth over $1.3 billion, and the deal have been approved by the board directors of the two parties.

This is a step which Sina make to expand its business beyond the internet. The deal may give Sina a  big advantage during the finacial crisis.

Personally, i don’t think there will be big slowdown of the online advertizing, even during the finalcial crisis. The onlile business during the crisis will still be the winner, especially for China, the potencial market of the internet is still under explore.

Chinese bloggers were both enraged and amused by a foreign newspaper claim that the Chinese government paid them to attack President Sarkozy after his recent meeting with the Dalai Lama.

Swiss newspaper 20 Minutes claimed the Chinese government paid 5 fen for each critical post about Sarkozy. Bloggers were left speechless by the report, not least because of the tiny sum involved; 5 fen is one twentieth of one yuan or less than one US cent.

Zheng Ruolin, a correspondent in France for Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po, said, “It demonstrates the foreign media have no idea whatsoever about public opinion in China.”

The 20 Minutes article, citing a report in the French paper La Tribune, said the virulence of the attacks on Sarkozy was a sign they had been organized and paid for by the Chinese government.

But a media student at Renmin University said the newspaper’s claims were ridiculous. “The criticisms of Sarkozy came from their heart – they weren’t dictated by the government”.

A blogger called “Fish swim” who is studying journalism told the International Herald Leader it was well known that foreign newspapers don’t take any notice of studies or surveys. They just report opinion as fact. He said most bloggers would regard the 20 Minutes report as a joke.

Communications scholar Zhang Zhihua said the foreign media’s lack of understanding reflects a profound cultural gap. They have different conceptions of democracy and public opinion. He added that while overseas media proclaim objectivity and fair play as values, in practice a newspaper is often the mouthpiece of a political party.

“We need to do more to get China’s point of view across to the world, because western people are easily influenced by slanted media reports,” Zheng Ruolin said.

(China.org.cn by Ma Yujia, December 17, 2008)

Beijing will establish wireless network within 3 years. People both in urban and rural of Beijing reginal area can use the wireless network.

In order to provide service to the Olympic Games, Beijing began  the trial operation for the “wireless city” in July. The signal covering area include second ring road, three ring road, CBD shoping district, Financial Street, Zhongguocun district and Wangjing economic and technological development district, covering a total area of 100 square kilometers. Accoring to the plan, Beijing will become the largest wireless network city in China. However, many users reflect the “Wireless Beijing” is not “unlimited”, covering many areas of wireless networks are still a large blind spot.

According to the person in charge, Beijing will gradually expand the wireless coverage area. It is reported that many experiment units are under processing for the “wireless city” plan. In addition, almost half of Beijing’s institutions  have been completed wireless networks, indoor and outdoor wireless access point has exceeded 3,000, of which Tsinghua University campus wireless network wireless access point up to 500.