chineseblogresearch

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The first organizational website aimed at promoting  blog in China was found by Fang xingdong and Wang jun xiu, both veteran IT writers in Beijing. Fang regarded blog as a revolutionary device to create a personal publishing platform. The website BlogChina.com was supposed to providing daily feed of selected, neutral, and personalized information and resources. It did not become a blog service provider until later, starting out as a personal website updated daily by the diligent Fang. Reportedly, Fang adopted the style of Alwayon.com, which claims to “invite some of the smartest chiefs, investors and boosters to come play in our spontaneous and uncensored arena.” Fang asked the permission of some big shots in the IT industry and intelligentsia to set up blogs under their name. Instead of having the big shots update their blogs everyday, Fang collected their articles and posted those pieces to the website day in and day out for several years until the year 2004, when he was able to enter the business of blog service provider (BSP) with certain venture capital gained.   

The first BSP in China, Blogcn.com was set up in Huangzhou, Zhe Jiang province in December 2002 . A month later, Lu liang (identity in Blog: 6e) and Wen xin, two Chinese postgraduate students in Texas, founded Blogdriver.com. Blogbus.com was another BSP established in the same year, based in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province in central China.

Notwithstanding the emergence of nascent blog services, most of Chinese bloggers then preferred to use BSP overseas. 90% from the 100 bloggers registered with CNblog were staying with blogger.com, blogspot.com in US.    From the year 2003 to present time, Chinese government have been blocking overseas BSP from Chinese bloggers. Hence bloggers had no choice but to move on to BSP inside the Chinese Great Firewall. From June to December 2003, Blogcn.com recorded a steady growth of 10,000 new users per month, and by the end of 2003, the BSP served its first 100,000 bloggers.

Chinese Mass media paid sporadic attention to blog in its early stage of development. Although Fang and Wang attempted to mount a media campaign to promote Boke ((pronounced boh-ke, means “pundit” in Chinese), a concept invented by Fang to accentuate the knowledge-acquiring aspect of blogging , blog didn’t become a buzzword until November 2003, when a sex-diary in blogchina.com made “Blog” household knowledge.

A magazine writer in Guangzhou in southern China, who wrote under the name Mu Zimei, began keeping a sex diary on blogcn.com. “I have a job that keeps me busy, and in my spare time I have a very humanistic hobby – making love,” she wrote. “The partner I take in my hobby is one I choose and always changes. I rely on a large supply pool. I do not need to take any responsibility for them; neither should I give them love. They will not cause me problems. They are like CDs, which will not make a sound unless I play them.” 

With explicit details and sometimes even publishing real names, Mu Zimei’s sex diary was a hit. By mid-November 2003, more than 160,000 people had logged on to her site and the number was growing by 6000 a day. Xiao summarized that While her explicit writing and lifestyle challenged traditional morals, causing heated debate in the Chinese media, Mu Zimei also made bo ke a familiar word for hundreds of millions of people.  

University intranets began providing blog system for students in 2003. Nanjing University activated its own blog system and then Chinese Science and Technology University followed. 

Major Internet portals became keen to take part in the new wave of Internet fashion. Tianyaclub.com, for example, the biggest online forum in China started its blog service in the beginning of 2004. Many famous online literary writers that were active in the forums soon had their first blogs in Tianyablog.com.   

Moreover, running a BSP is increasingly easier with the development of nascent blog software. The advent of Oblog, an open code and free blog software developed by nascent programmers, enables all interested Internet companies or community to provide blog service in their own servers . Chen xiaotao, an attentive IT industry observer and blogger, listed 392 sites of these new BSP as well as the number of bloggers they have. According to Chen, there are around a thousand websites that have included blog into their services by using Oblog. Chen explained why his list is incomplete. Firstly, some websites have replaced all “oblog” codes in the programme. Secondly, about thirty set of Oblog programme had been sold out. Their identities were confidential according to the Oblog developer team.   Chen estimates that all these BSP accommodated about a million bloggers.

By the middle of the year 2005, the market place of the BSP in China was dominated by three biggest companies: the blogchina.com, the Blogcn.com and the Blogbus.com. Blogchina.com. Considering the 1.5 million blogger accommodated by the biggest three BSP, there are at least 2.5 million bloggers in mainland China. Besides, there are also various blogs powered by blog programme other than Oblog. Therefore, there are presumably 2 -3 million of Chinese bloggers altogether.  Cheng’s estimation is parallel with that of Suren, listing the top ten BSP with the biggest number of registered bloggers, which added up to 1.8 million.    Taking into account that the number of Chinese netters amounted to 100 million netters by the end of 2004, the percentage of bloggers is a meagre 3%, which suggests the possibility of substantial growth in the future.

How did these nascent Chinese BSPs come into being? The next paragraph will discuss in detail how these BSPs managed not only to survive, but also to thrive.