Blogging Everyday Life in Chinese Internet Culture

Since the mid-1990s China has undergone an explosive growth in Internet usage and coverage. China became the second largest Internet nation (next to the United States) in 2002, with 59.1 million Internet users. By June 2006, the number hit 123 million (although this still comprises only 9.4 per cent of China's total population of 1.3 billion).] The Internet has become an integral part of the daily lives of urban Chinese. For most Chinese Internet users, the Internet provides aggregated sources of a rich variety of content: a platform for online commerce, a huge virtual billboard for advertisements, games and social networking (including cyberlove, or wang lion). This entertainment-and-consumption pattern of Internet use at the micro, individual level is often put side by side with a control model at the macro, institutional level, which views information and communication technologies (lCT) as a means of control (see, for example, Qiu, 2007). People in the West are frequently told about the suppression of freedom of speech by the Chinese government, constraints on politically sensitive websites, arrests of cyber activists, and global Internet search companies (such as Google, Yahoo and MSN) giving in to the Chinese government by imposing stricter censorship to control the flow of Internet information.