Blogging in China

So who are the leaders of the online revolution in China? It's party member and dance girl and the New York Times has the story, Party Girl and she's a blogger.

What I find wonderful is the irony of people speaking their truth to each other in personal weblogs can undermine a rigid, authoritarian regime.

"The new bloggers are talking back to authority, but in a humorous way," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. "People have often said you can say anything you want in China around the dinner table, but not in public. Now the blogs have become the dinner table, and that is new.

"The content is often political, but not directly political, in the sense that you are not advocating anything, but at the same time you are undermining the ideological basis of power."

Sly and sardonic, Chinese blogs are growing quickly, already 1 to 2
million, despite censorship

What I found surprising to me was the notion that in China, the concepts of private life and public life have only emerged in the past twenty years.