News from everywhere

We are sitting in a café on the shores of Qianhai Lake, Beijing when news comes through of a protest this morning in Jiangxi Province, Southern China.

“Let me just check my Twitter”, says Richard Chen, as he thumbs through the news feeds on his mobile before giving us more details – hundreds of people involved, a dispute over a new furniture tax, clashes with the police, three police cars overturned, there are pictures and videos. Such protests are a daily occurrence in China and, with 600 million mobile users - almost half the population - news gets out immediately.

Richard has been blogging for six years and using Twitter since 2007. At least until his site was blocked following coverage of certain sensitive topics including Charter 2008 and Beijing’s “black prisons”. Richard, known as doubleaf, is one of China’s top twitterers. Earlier this month the website Twitter.com was blocked, but only for a few days around the 20^th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. And there are ways around it including numerous Chinese Twitter clones as well as using proxy servers or SSH.

“Twitter was made for China”, Richard tells us. With a 140 character limit there is not much scope for detail in Roman script, but a Chinese character tweet carries five times as much information. It is enough for a short news story and, alongside instant messaging and ICQ, it has becoming one of the fastest ways to disseminate news and information.

Here is doubleaf’s blog on our meeting

https://doubleaf.com/2009/06/16/888