Does your country have a huge “Blogosphere?” China does. And it’s getting interesting.

First let me state that we’re talking about the English China Blogosphere. The actual Chinese blogosphere has completely exploded over the past couple years and broken a lot of these “WESTERN” blog rating websites. This is from the International Herald Tribune back in 2005.

China now has a 14.2 million-site “blogosphere,” with a new blog, or Web log, created every second, according to Technorati, a Web site that tracks blogs.

Western people want to find out which blog is the best and it turns out to be a Chinese website. They just shrug, scratch their heads and say, “well, that’s China.” Since they don’t understand Chinese and think that the language is insurmountable they just disregard it all and move on with their own lives. This is from 2005:

Something else happened as well. The Chinese showed up.

The new rankings, which feature recently popular blogs, have some similarities - especially at the top of the rankings. But they’re radically different outside the top 20. Of those 20 new blogs in the top 100, 11 are in Chinese.

Here is a European perspective but it sounds like an American speaking. Basically because the top blogs out there are in Chinese the guy just disregards them because, “they’re Chinese.”

I speak absolutely no Chinese, as a Dane I’d probably brush up my Spanish and French before learning a completely different language. That means that Technorati’s top 100 has lost value for me: As the list has become more diverse, it looses value for me, because my interests are not as diverse.

Well, stinks to be him and the rest of the people with that idea.

The Short History

Let’s start at or somewhere near the beginning. The dawn of our China Blogosphere dates back around 2002. How can you be so sure you might ask? Well, the information is on the China Blog list. This is an exhaustive and almost annoying list of blogs that are even in a map showing you where all the people are blogging from. This list has the good the bad and the ugly. It also contains the updated, the regularly updated, the randomly updated and the no longer updated.

Most of the descriptions are the same: Joe in China or My Musings on China or What I think about China or (my favorite) My random thoughts about life in China. Perhaps the most traffic for a lot of these sites are from family and friends. Honestly it’s a lot easier to just write a blog about what you are doing than to write e-mails to a million of your friends. Plus you might miss one or two of your friends or family members and that might cause problems. It’s easier to pop a link into the e-mail and hope their internet skills are halfway decent.

There was a blog/news website that came out sometime in 2003 which updated a couple times a day and is always apolitical and fascinating for the foreigner. The name is even funny for both foreigner and Chinese. It seems like, from the archives, the first post was October 24th 2003 with the death of Song Meiling. Perhaps according to the Chinese that wasn’t a very auspicious story to start with but I’m sure the website, DANWEI has been going strong ever since.

According to another website conglomerate called Gothamist, they started back in 2003 too. But the archive system on their website is harder to figure out than my taxes last year, which was really hard, so I was unable to find out the first post of the Shanghaiist website. Funny how they don’t have a Beijingist. It wouldn’t be the same. Shanghai seems to fit. They focus on everything that happens in Shanghai. From new musicians coming to literature and old stuff to new stuff.

But it seems that the first blog out there to hit the blogosphere was around April 2002. The website has a clever name, one that you can’t really make fun of because it is very creative and cool. The American guy who writes the blog demands your respect right away. He’s the guy who also runs the China Blog List mentioned above and also writes in Chinese and speaks both Chinese and Japanese. His Chinese blog, hosted on the same site, started in January of 2003 and stopped somewhere around 2007. Understandably so, maintaining an English website, Chinese website and working full time would burn anyone out. The one thing I can’t figure out is at the top of his website he has an ever changing sentence of how long he’s been in China. Everytime I actually log on and not just read the RSS, it has a different number. Pretty cool.

Ok… so is there a problem?

The problem is this: most of the foreigners in China have read the vast amount of books that are on the local bookstore’s shelves. Books about life in China, (on Amazon there are more than 800 books) traveling in China, (on Amazon there are over 900 books) people who came to China, business in China, (a shocking 26,046 results!!!) crazy times in China etc. etc. This gives most foreigners an idea. “I’m going to live in China. I could write a book like these!” The first couple years their heads are swelling with ideas about how the life is fun, hard, easy, nice and different than home. They write a few things here and there but after a while they are too busy. We all get that way with teaching, tutoring, working, dating or just living. I think the most popular blog post out there on the English China Blogosphere goes like this:

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. So much has been happening. I’ve been so busy with _________________…

or…

I’ve been home lately and I’ve taken a break from posting. Life in ___________ is ok but I miss China.

In other words they don’t take it seriously. There are millions of bloggers out there who say that you can make a good steady income from blogging. Can the people on the China Blogosphere do it?

Actually blogs are a good way, if you’re plan is ultimately to put the material in a book, to give yourself a creative outlet and see how the world reacts to your posts, writing and ideas. But there are a lot of people who are writing blogs who adopt an overinflated ego.  Since they have traffic on their site and people are commenting, they post about different things that are irrelevant to China or the Chinese. They are able to slip in their political ideas and their problems with their home countries. I don’t want to link to them because they don’t need the traffic to continue to inflate their egos. But they know who they are. Politics should continue to stop at the shores even more so when you write a blog.

The Future of China Blogging

By the time my son can sit up at the computer, and by the time he is able to write his first post, the China blogosphere will be mature. Not fully mature but it wil be more mature than it is now. Actually I’m wondering if I really want my son to write on this blog or even spend a lot of time on the computer. But that is the way life is now and I’m sure that is the way it will be in the future. Even more so.

But so much has been written about experiences of foreigners in China. So much has been written about our misunderstandings. So much has been written about our foibles, faux pas and our friends. So what do we do with all this stuff? It’s content that is just sitting there and simmering. Somebody has to come along and put it all together. I’m envisioning a Hollywood blockbuster that takes the best of the best from all the stories that have been written and squishes them all toghether into a movie about the best and worst of life in China for the foreigner. It would be blocked of course but it would come out on the street for 5 yuan. Your names would be in the credits and I would make the money for thinking of the idea. Hopefully the check is in the mail.

Tags: China blogs

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