A friend casually cautioned that I better watch what I blog since I’m now in China. One wrong comment could land me in who knows where. Worst, access to my site would simply be blocked. What could be worst then losing net connection for a netizen?
I’m indeed worried. Come from a country like Singapore, I have some notion of what "big brother" policies and tactics is like. But China is a much bigger brother.
But it is not like blogging is banned in China. Blogging is hot. One just has to be careful of the content, I reasoned. Now, if big brother buy the reason.
I was surprised to find site like The Horses Mouth which seems to be walking on a tight rope. The China related content seems somewhat sensitive to me (or I’m too sensitive). Of course the è€Â?外1might have some high up connections which I do not have.
Within China, blogging sites like Blogcn, Blogchina probably command a user based comparable in size to sites like Blogger. Technical content site CSDN also recently introduced a blog.
User blogging in Chinese (but not necessary from China) is significant. In fact, I noticed recently that Blogger spots a chinese interface when view with a Chinese-based browser. Though I had not tried, I believe other blogging sites has similar chinese interface.
All the open source blog applications I know has a translated chinese interface and can support Chinese input. So sites can runs the own blog application hosted on their own domain (like my).
This is where things get slightly trickly. Some time this April, China passed a regulation that all personal websites in China must be registered (备案). This includes all the blogs that are individually maintained. I’m not sure whether I fall into that category since my blog is hosted outside of the country. But no matter how virtual the net is, I’m physically in China. So there is genuine cause for concern.
1 Old foreigner, a term use to describe westerner as opposed to foreigner of Asian origin.
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