War on Weibo??

As I mentioned a couple of days ago (flippantly, in passing - but that doesn't make it not true), I really think the Chinese government needs to stamp all over the micro-blogging fad as soon as possible. I speak from their point of view here, not my own.

They have, very wisely, suppressed Facebook and Twitter for the past couple of years. (I facetiously argued in that earlier post that this might be misguided, because these services actually had little potential to foment revolutionary idealism, but, on the contrary, provided an addictive distraction that might serve to defuse rising social discontent. Events in North Africa earlier this year might be said to have proved me wrong on that. And anyway, there are plenty of mass media 'opiates' with which the CCP can stupefy its population. Foreign social networking sites are of little interest to anyone here, but the government would mess with World of Warcraft at its peril.)

However, by some strange (ahem, probably 'commercially motivated' - did anyone say bribe? OK, now I did) oversight, they have allowed a Chinese micro-blogging site, Sina Weibo, to become enormously popular.

Enormously. It was only launched just over two years ago, and only seems to have really been gaining major traction during the last year. But it now has over 60,000 registered users (hmm, query Wikipedia on that - I suspect it might well be 60 million!), and  between 100 million and 150 million regular readers, and is starting to eclipse rival domestic services, with a survey earlier this year showing  it had more than 50% of active users and more than 86% of browsing time in the micro-blogging market. Very nearly all urban middle-class Chinese now have at least occasional access to the Internet; and perhaps 35-40% of them are fairly regular users. Sina Weibo is well on its way to achieving 100% penetration of that powerful demographic wedge.

It has now announced plans to launch an English version of its service before the end of this year - initially, one supposes, with a view to wooing the expat population in China who may be growing weary of having to 'tweet' via a VPN all the time; but before long, one suspects, they aspire to try to go toe-to-toe with Twitter and Facebook and the rest in overseas markets. And, oh yes, Tianjin Airlines last month launched a passenger jet in the Sina Weibo livery; it's the first Chinese website to sponsor a plane in this way (though I bet Jack Ma of Alibaba is kicking himself that he didn't think of it).

Well, good luck to them!

The thing is, since the rash of Jasmine Revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East at the start of this year, the CCP is crapping its pants at the now dramatically confirmed potential of these social networking tools to coordinate mass protests. And it would really, really, really like to squelch poor old Sina Weibo. Sometimes, filtering isn't enough. With that many people taking part in the conversation, you can't expect to effectively moderate the conversation - you've just got to put a STOP to it.

But it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Sina Weibo has just got way too big, too successful, too famous, too popular. They've got their own airplane, for heaven's sake. And they're getting ready to fight for the pride of the nation against the most powerful brands in the worldwide Internet. You can't shut down an operation like that.

All you can do is make it less and less easy to use, especially from mobile devices - by outlawing the provision of free wi-fi in public places.

A 'pilot scheme' of this sort seems to have been launched in the past few days. Cafés, bars, and restaurants in several parts of central Beijing - such as the trendy shopping streets of Nanluoguxiang and Wudaoying Hutong, near where I live - have been receiving visits from the police, gruffly warning them that they face stiff fines if they continue to offer wi-fi services without installing a 'security package'. According to this item in yesterday's New York Times, this package is a piece of software which purports to 'identify' users who log on to the Internet through a wi-fi network. God knows how that's supposed to work, since the idea of introducing 'real name registration' for China's Internet users has been mooted a number of times in the past, but has, predictably, never got off the ground.

The software's developers claim they charged $310,000 to create the program. The PSB are attempting to extort around one percent of that from every café owner who wants to continue to attract patrons by offering a wi-fi connection. Major franchises like Starbucks and McDonald's will presumably shell out, just to keep on the right side of the government. But the fee being asked is so outrageous that it seems inconceivable that any small independent business will agree to pay it. If the amount had been a painful-but-affordable 5,000 or 10,000 rmb rather than 20,000, we might have supposed that this was just another little scam - another way of soliciting "contributions" to the Policemen's Benevolent Fund or whatever. At this price level, however, it is plainly an attempt to outlaw wi-fi altogether.

Will it work? Well, probably not. People, after all, can log on to Weibo using their work or home computers. And there are lots of unsecured wi-fi signals bleeding out of offices and apartments (there are at least three neighbours in my xiaoqu that I piggyback off occasionally when my own connection's gone on the blink). Maybe you can access it via the cellular phone network as well - I don't know.

And I doubt if there'll be any real follow-through on enforcement. It would take a HUGE commitment of manpower to try to monitor every bar and café (and restaurant and shop and hotel and gymnasium and...) offering a wi-fi service in Beijing.

As so often with this sort of initiative, the implementation is going to be completely half-arsed (remember the census-that-wasn't-a-census last year?); the guys on the ground don't really give a damn about it anyway, and the high-ups will eventually realise how hopelessly impractical it is and quietly forget about the whole idea. And the majority of venue owners will probably ignore the crackdown as well, perhaps making a show of compliance for the next few weeks, but then putting their wi-fi beacons back into service, and only discreetly turning them off again for 10 minutes or so when a neighbourhood copper is seen ambling down the street with an i-Phone in his hand.

Let's hope so, anyway.

Not that it bothers me. I never use wi-fi. And I loathe Twitter and all of its ilk (even if they might occasionally be useful for starting a revolution). But I feel sorry for friends who do rely on wi-fi for their work (and their 'tweeting', if they must; some of them assure me that a lot of it is 'work related'). And I feel sorry for bar and café owners whose business might be seriously impacted by this measure.

So, Communist overlords, you must think again. You have to find a way of killing - or emasculating - Sina Weibo, before it does the same to you. But you have to do it by such gradual increments that nobody notices enough to make a big fuss about it (think Gramsci's Frog). I'd have a look at that 'real name registration' idea again - not for wi-fi Internet surfers, but for Sina Weibo account-holders.