Whether it is about US arms sales to Taiwan or how the film epic Confucius stacks up to Avatar, the world’s first snapshot of Chinese opinion often comes from chinaSMACK.com.
The Web site combs China’s rowdy Web forums, translating popular topics into English to provide a glimpse of what is on people’s minds on the other side of the “Great Firewall” of government censorship.
“Chinese people see the Internet as one of the only real tools they may have,” chinaSMACK’s founder, who goes by the pseudonym Fauna, said in an e-mail interview.
China is home to the world’s largest Web population but experts fear censorship and language barriers mean it is growing isolated from the global Internet.
With 1.3 million page views and more than 500,000 visitors last month, according to the site’s figures, chinaSMACK has become a leading “bridge blog” — a site that translates Chinese content for an international audience.
Fauna, who keeps her identity secret to avoid the wrath of Internet users and authorities alike, said she started the site 18 months ago.
She describes herself as a typical Shanghainese woman, “very far” from her 30s, who likes music, movies and TV — but one with a serious Internet habit.
She spends four to six hours daily on the site, plus time reading forums throughout the day.
The items and comments she translates are often lurid, salacious and sensational, but Fauna said she and her four-person team of contributors do not intentionally seek out racy posts.
Their formula is to simply translate the most active forum discussions — avoiding overtly political topics.
“The material that becomes popular on the Chinese Internet is usually very shocking or controversial,” Fauna said, explaining the “SMACK” in the site’s name captures what she imagines first time visitors feel.
Recent postings featured Chinese netizens sounding off on how the “50 Cent Party” — civil servants are allegedly paid 0.5 yuan (US$0.07) for each pro-government Web comment they post — seems to be working overtime.
Others include a man marrying his fiancee at her funeral and soldiers being buried half-naked in snow to train for the cold.
Some postings such as the racist reaction to Lou Jing (婁婧) — a black Chinese girl who performed on an American Idol-style reality show — have gained national and international media attention after appearing on chinaSMACK.
About a third of chinaSMACK’s readers are in the US, 18 percent are in China, while Britain, Canada and Singapore each account for roughly 5 percent of traffic, Fauna said.
At a time when Google is considering pulling out of China over censorship and only a fraction of Internet content is being translated from Chinese to English — and vice versa — experts say bridge blogs like chinaSMACK play a vital role.
Fauna said part of her goal was to dispel misconceptions that Chinese people are united in their opinions.
“I hope chinaSMACK can show the world there are many Chinese netizens and they are not all the same ... Chinese netizens are nice, sympathetic, funny, silly, mean and hateful. Chinese netizens are people like everyone else,” she wrote.
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