A tale of two microblogs in China

Twitter has become a byword for the potential of new and social media to affect political change, among other things (see Dann, 2011 for a review). The microblogging platform has been cited in popular commentaries (Barry et al., 2009; Last, 2009) and some academic research (e.g. Mungiu-Pippidi and Munteanu, 2009) as having empowered activists and dissidents in less free societies from Moldova to Iran to Tunisia, although the phenomenon of ‘Twitter revolution’ has been debunked as a largely media-driven manifestation of cyber utopianism (Morozov, 2009a, 2009b). Despite agreement that China is in the midst of a ‘microblogging revolution’ (Canaves, 2011; Hu, 2010; Yang, 2011), Twitter is far from being the dominant market-leading microblog that it is globally. Indeed, Twitter has been blocked and unavailable behind the Great Firewall since mid 2009. Alongside Facebook, YouTube and other familiar US-based social media services, Twitter is essentially cut off from the Chinese internet, accessible only by the virtual private network (VPN) software that a small number of dedicated netizens (and expats) use to ‘scale the wall’. By contrast, the leading Chinese microblog service, Sina Weibo, had around 150 million users in August 2011 and is growing at a rate of almost 10 million per month (Bishop, 2011). The number of people using Twitter in China is estimated to be a fraction of 1 percent of those using domestic microblogs (Zuckerman, 2011). But what separates Chinese microblogs from Twitter is censorship and freedom from it. Mainstream microblogs (weibo), by definition state tolerated and specially tailored for the local market (Economist, 2011), have been allowed to grow their user-bases and add billions of dollars in value to their parent companies at a price: multiple layers of self-censorship (Mackinnon, 2008; Weber and Lu, 2007). Jiang (2010a) characterizes these domestic services as ‘government-regulated commercial spaces’, privately owned platforms that are subject to (stringent) government regulation and censorship requirements. These requirements have not deterred the majority of Chinese netizens, who, like