Less Social Media in China

It's both sad and not surprising that China recently shut down 56.com. I saw the writeup in Friday's WSJ, but evidently, the shutdown happened on June 3. 56.com is basically the Chinese YouTube, and like our YouTube, it's extremely popular. According to the WSJ over 77% of internet users in China watched online video last year (and considering there are 225 million internet users in the country, that's a lot of people!).

A December ruling required that companies providing Internet video streaming to be state owned, but authorities say some sites might be given licenses to continue. We know what this means don't we... if they want to continue providing service, they must in either name or in practice, become government run.

This reminds me of the day of the recent earthquake. I was in China, and we had rented a car and driven out to an infrequently visited portion of the wall. We actually paid someone to walk through their back yard and climb up a homemade ladder up onto the wall. There was *no* one up there where we were - far as you could see - in either direction. Pretty neat. Anyway, coming back into the Beijing, crowds of people were standing around outside the office buildings, patiently waiting. We asked several groups of people what was going on. No one knew. We turned on the radio - no news of what was going on. It wasn't until we got back to the hotel and logged onto CNN that we were able to find out about the earthquake. It's completely unimaginable that we wouldn't have access to information like that in the US, but in China, no one really seemed to expect to know what was going on. They just evacuated the buildings, like they were told to do.

I wonder how long this will continue. The old hacker adage "information wants to be free" is really a universal truth. People want to know. That's why, in the lack of knowledge, we speculate and gossip... I don't think you can suppress information or free will, especially as the rest of the world continues to become more open and China so desperately wants to play a big part in global economy (but on it's own terms).