Wikipedia, as one of the most popular online encyclopedias, is not only used by ordinary people out of personal interests but also used by professionals as the first step for their research. I consider myself as a good example: I surf both English and Chinese versions of Wikipedia almost everyday, and I also start with Wikipedia for background on my journalistic studies. One could say that Wikipedia has gradually become part of people’s lives.

Up to December ^4th 2007, the Chinese Wikipedia has about 155,667 articles, and has become the 11^th language with over 100,000 articles with a sustainable growth to catch up with other three major languages that have over 500,000 articles. This is a significant development for Chinese Wikipedia; however, one of its biggest problems is its blocking in mainland China as part of the government’s strict and complex system of internet censorship.

According to Wikipedia, the blocking first started in June 2004 due to the 15^th anniversary of Tiananmen Square protests of 1989; Wikipedia’s ban in China has been constantly lifted, only to be re-imposed afterwards, and was completely blocked once more by the “Great Firewall” again this August. This has drawn a great attention from all over the world, including from wikipedians, bloggers, and professionals. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has commented on the Chinese blocking: “You can’t block the Internet and have economic growth, particularly censoring a free educational source.”

The reasons and techniques of blocking Wikipedia in mainland China are complicated, as one blogger pointed out. As a PR professional in China, he also said “Blocks are, rather, implemented at various levels corresponding to different parts of China’s network infrastructure”. However, I don’t agree with one element of his reasons for Chinese censorship, in that it is done as a way of “gaining leverage over foreign companies and finding ways to give domestic companies an advantage“. Despite the possible economic purposes, the blocking of access to Wikipedia in mainland is mostly political, banning the people from free but possiblly sensitive information.

The CCP gives out the order and internet services providers implements with different provinces and cities at various levels. A former-professor as well as a wikipedian, Andrew Lih, has provided a clear chart to show the access at different locations during the 2006 blocked-unblocked-blocked period. Lih also provided statistics and graphs charting the number of new users, suggesting that the blocking had restrained and damaged the development of Chinese Wikipedia.

The newest the controversy is about the Chinese online encyclopedia Baidu Baike, founded by the largest Chinese search engine company in April 2006. Since its creation, Baidu Baike has been known as a copy of Wikipedia with a self-censorship “to avoid offending the Chinese government”. Business Week has pointed out a big problem in a recent article that Baidu Baike “lifts content from Wikipedia’s Chinese edition without proper attribution and inclusion of the GNU Free Documentation License.” And when Lih tried to contact people from Baidu Baike just simply to inform them about the GFDL, he was refused by them because Baidu feels threatened by Wikipedia.

I recall a few months ago, when I was surfing Baidu and discovered their new encyclopedia, I found that a lot of content was copied word-for-word from Wikipedia. However, checking Baidu Baike last week, I didn’t find as much Wikipedia content as before. Maybe Baidu is trying to fix this problem, but it’s still very immature to stay away from using the simple and free GFDL and to even avoid talking about the problem. One of the possible reasons is that perhaps Baidu doesn’t want to have any contact with Wikipedia, since the latter has sensitive topics with opinions neither Baidu nor the CCP wants to hear.

While Wikipedia is currently being blocked in mainland China and Baidu Baike is still in development to becoming the most popular online encyclopedia, the sharing of free information is inevitable. According to Wikipedia itself, 46% of its users are connected from mainland China through different ways and 29 out of 86 administrators come from the mainland as well. Meanwhile, other forms of Web 2.0 websites, where the content is generated by its users, are flourishing in China. Those with non-sensitive political or religious topics, such as personal blogs are a hit in China. Other wiki-based websites are developing too; the best example is Cinewiki, a Chinese online encyclopedia dedicated to cinema and film-related topics. In my opinion, Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 sites are unavoidable in mainland China; everything is just a matter of time.

For the past week, I have interviewed two young candidates from Civic Party: Adam Cheng and Ng Gene Bond. There are several similarities between them:

First, both of them are very young. Adam is only 21-year-old, who is still a third-year science student in HKU. Bond just graduated from HKU this summer and works as a secondery school teacher at age of 22.

Second, both of them are affiliated with Civic Party, which was established on March, 2006. Both candidates mentioned that Civic Party is very willing to accept young members and that’s one of the reasons they chose to join it.

Third, both of them are strong believers of democracy in HK and has had this idea since they were kids. They also strongly support universal suffrage for 2012, as their party fighting for it.

Due to the agreement of pro-democracy camp, young candidates like Adam and Bond have been allocated to New Territories. Their constituencies are considerably small and most residents are grassroots. Since they are new to their constituencies, they require assistance from other party members and they need to spend a lot of time there to promote themselves.

My problem is that I haven’t heard back from any candidates from the DAB, in order to make a balancing reporting. Also, campaign strategies for DC candidates are very simple and sole, since they are constrained by election regulations. So I have to put more effort on making the reporting more interesting.

Topic: “Young Blood” Phenomenon

Stage 1 - do a more detailed research on all candidates and put them into age groups.

- lay out the general information of young candidates: education background, occupations, and parties.

- tables and charts will be used to make statistics more vivid and interesting.
The purpose of stage 1 is to provide readers a general understanding of the young blood phenomenon in District Council Election. In terms of the age grouping, I would like to divide all candidates into three categories:

1. The first category will be young candidates, whose age are under 35-year-old. The reason I make it 35 is there’s a sub-committee of DAB, called Young DAB, and it’s members should be under 35-year-old. Although most of other parties also have youth committee, their websites are not as informative and active as Young DAB. For examples, majority of the Youth Committee of the Democratic Party website is still under construction and the website of Young Civics shows that they don’t a formal committee and there is less frequent activities.

2. Candidates over 6o-year-old will be the second category, since according to the World Health Organization, the definition of “old age”  is 60.

3. The last category will be candidates whose age are between 35 to 60.

Stage 2 - contact ideal candidates & interview 3 to 4 of them  with focus of their initial motivations & political platforms.

- both audios and photos will be available of these young candidates.

There are several ideal candidates for interviews. Since all of them are young, most of them of their own blogs with their activities and , which are linked to their names.

Three are from Civic Party:  Thomas Yu Koon Wai, 24, the chairman of Young Civics as well a member of the Executive Committee of the Civic Party; Ng Gene Bond,  22, co-founder of Hong Kong Secondary Students Union; Adam Cheng Tsz Kiu, 21, the youngest candidate from the Pro-democracy Camp.

Two from DAB: Yiu Ming, 21, who just turned to 21-year-old at the last day of nomination; Siu Ka Yi, 24, a pretty young woman who’s dedicated to community works.

One thing I would like to point out is that DAB has a separate website for 2007 District Council Election, which has a detailed profile of its candidate. The statistics in the profile shows young candidates between 20 to 30 constitute 11.3% of their candidates.

Stage 3 - do a analyze on all the information of young candidates I’ve obtained and try to answer questions like: personally decisions or party strategies? future trend or temporary phenomenon? implication of HK politics?

- interview an academic or a expert for his/her opinions on “Young Blood” phenomenon.

Victor Jap, a political science graduate, is working as a paralegal in a prestige law firm in town.
He’s also a part-time law student, aspiring to become a lawyer one day. Because of his background and occupation, Victor follows the news about the District Council election and prepares for the voting on Nov 18th. He has his own opinions about the District Council, which for him is an important government body without enough power and attentions. In terms of choosing his ideal District Councilors, he prefers lawyers since they are accountable and sensitive about political issues. However, he insists that he won’t vote for someone who doesn’t know the community at all. He also finds some candidates distributing their flyers to passers-by at train stations are very annoying. Different people have different preferences. How will candidates fulfill voters’ appetite?

interview-w-victor.mp3

Today I interviewed Maggie in class. Here’s the audio:

Maggie

Pan-democracy campaigners organized a mass rally to advocate 2012 Universal Suffrage on Sunday afternoon. Thousands of people gathered in Victoria Park and participated in this event to show their support. People used different colors of umbrellas to form the number “2012″, blue as the background and yellow as the numbers. 2012 is the earliest possible date for the practice of universal suffrage in HK.

First, people opened umbrellas and moved them up and down according to the organizers’ orders. Then, they held umbrellas as high as they could for more than one minute, in order to make a world record. People were sweaty but they were still trying their best just to express their strong desire for “one-man, one-vote”.

Later, people started a “March for Democracy” from Victoria Park to the government building, which Anson Chan also joined to show her support. Her competitor for the coming by-election, Regina Ip, criticized the Pan-democracy earlier for only organizing demonstrations but not making any practical suggestions for universal suffrage.

On this purticular issue, I’m with Regina Ip though I don’t always agree with her. Just think about this: what will a world record bring to the actual introduction of universal suffrage in HK? Unfortunately nothing. Universal suffrage as a symbol of full democracy is more than slogans and desires. It requests a well prepared government as well as its people.

Anson Chan gave a speech on the Green paper and universal suffrage at HKU last Saturday.

Photoshop is the premiere tool for working with digital images of any kind. It can be used to do anything you can do in a traditional darkroom, and much more. Images may originate from a digital camera, from scans, from stock photo libraries, or from existing Web-ready artwork. Photoshop can be used to work on line art as well as photographic imagery.

After the class last Monday, I kept thinking about this question: why the HK local media pay so little attention to the District Council Elections? Despite the fact that this election is a truly practice of universal suffrage,  which thousands of Hongkongnese are advocating now,  HK media tend to pre-assume that the general public need no further information about it. Reporters may say there are other more important things going on or the DC has very minimum and trivial power. However, they probably ignore the fact that every DC member is supported by one party or someone who’s powerful and wealthy, in order to run the election. So it is a process of building power from the basic level, which may have bigger influences than anyone’s expectation.

By tracking all kinds feeds and news, I found that there’s still not much coverage on the DC election; and without any surprise, there are a large amount of news about the By-election with its focus on political stars like Anson Chan. One in depth analysis of the DC election has introduced by EastSouthWestNorth, which is a comprehensive news blog based in HK. The analysis is also from a HK blog whose opinions are very unique and profound, expecially on the recent situation of the DAB. Will there be more HK blogs talking about DC and its election that we havent found yet, particularly in Chinese? Keep researching…

“The role of the District Councils will be expanded.” The Chief Executive, Donald Tsang stated this in his Policy Address in the end of 2006. One year after it, the third election of the District Council will be hold and the implement of CE’s policies will be tested soon after it. Announced by the government on August 31st, the nomination period will last two week from October 2rd to 15th; and the actual election will take place on November 11th.

During the process of researching 2007 District Council Election, I was very surprised by the limited information I could got, especially in terms of personally blogs. There are couple major websites that I found very useful. First, the official site of 2007 District Council Election has all the basic information about district councils as well as the coming election; it’s well-designed too. Second, the Chinese page of Wikipedia on District Council of Hong Kong has a clear explanation on the development of the council.

In terms of individual sites, I almost didnt find any blogs that have discussed specifically about this coming District Council Election. This is one bloggers talked about the district councils after the 2003 election and disputed that the members you voted for in the district council election maybe wouldn’t vote for your favored legislators. I would argue that one of the reasons of why there are not many blogs concerned about this election is that more than 66% of voters are over the age of 40, who are not major users of blogging, according to a HKU opinion poll about the 2003 District Council Election.

One of the major issues that will crab people’s attention is the distribution of votes among different parties. Since the previous election was at 2003, which was a dramatic year for everyone in HK with both the SARS and Hong Kong July 1 marches happened, the Pro-democracy camp won the majority of seats. Especially the Democratic Party, who were blamed heavily for unsuccessful carrying out their duties later, won 95 seats out 0f 120 candidates they sent. So this year, Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong will try their best to get their seats back.

As a conclusion, I found most of Web 2.0 websites are very useful and convenient not only for school works but also for personal lives, expecially the Google Reader and RSS. The searching service Technorati is also very useful in terms of searching blogs; however, it’s not as useful as common search engines, like Google, in searching for 2007 Hong Kong District Council Election.

The internet, along with its latest trend, blogging, is expanding in China and affecting its journalist profession concurrently. However, “We the Media” have a very limited influence in China, in the sense that anyone with basic knowledge about Internet and have access to internet care capable of reporting news in their own way.

Unlike the U.S., where freedom of speech and freedom of the press is protected by the First Amendment, China has a state-owned media system and its news is highly censored by the central government. This is especially the case with sensitive political issues, like Tiananmen Square protest in 1989, along with any types of criticism of the CCP its members. These are the topics that are generally avoided by the public and mainland news outlets. When it comes to internet and blogging, which empowers ordinary people with much more information and a bigger space to express themselves, the CPP puts a comprehensive censorship system on all mainland internet users. As a result, the development of the new media in China has not followed the same trend as the U.S., whose media industry began as, and arguable still is, a democratically-based system.

Blogging in China is getting more and more popular with the public, particularly for the younger generation. People blog about everything in their lives and express all kinds of opinions; many social issues have been brought up and discussed by bloggers. In one of the biggest Chinese blog sites, Sina Blog, posts are divided into different sections, such as entertainment, business, education, etc. One feature that makes the Sina Blog popular is the appearance of celebrities on the blog sites, writing about their daily lives. Although blogging has seeped into the workings of the big media journalists in China, these mainstream journalists are still considered to be polar opposites to their grassroots counterparts.

There are a group of bloggers in China, who have established the Chinese Blogger Conference in order to bring different ideas and discussions about the development of blogs in China. Most of them are supporters of freedom of express oneself and using blogs as a medium of communication, but some said this whole conference is neglected by the Chinese mainstream media intentionally. Some bad news about blogging in China was revealed by Reporters Without Borders recently: over 20 Chinese blog service-providers signed a contract with the Ministry of Information Industry of the CCP, that true identities of bloggers can be found through the signing providers. Chinese grassroots journalism is going to face a bigger challenge of surviving within this hostile environment and of finding a viable way to spread to the wider population.

The pursue of freedom of speech is unavoidable for human beings, but such a change can’t happen in China overnight . The internet and blogging will still play a big role in Chinese Journalism and its importance will continue to increase. For each news organizations, they need to pay more attention to their online readers and audiences; for individual journalists, they need to prepare themselves for the continuing tidal wave that is the blogging trend.