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

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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.

Hellooooo, everyone!

My name is Tia. I am a student in the New Media Workshop class of HKU. I’m originally from Chongqing, China. I spent the past five year in Canada for my undergrad study.

Nice to meet all of you.