Whether it is about US arms sales to Taiwan or how the film epic Confucius stacks up to Avatar, the world’s first snapshot of Chinese opinion often comes from chinaSMACK.com.
A computer screen displays the homepage of website chinaSMACK.com.
The website combs China’s rowdy web forums, translating popular topics into English to provide a glimpse of what is on people’s minds on the other side of the “Great Firewall” of government censorship.
“Chinese people see the Internet as one of the only real tools they may have,” chinaSMACK’s founder, who goes by the pseudonym Fauna, said in an e-mail interview. China is home to the world’s largest web population, with 384 million people online, but experts fear censorship and language barriers mean it is growing isolated from the global Internet.
With 1.3 million page views and more than 500,000 visitors in January, according to the site’s figures, chinaSMACK has become a leading “bridge blog”—a site that translates Chinese content for an international audience. Fauna, who keeps her identity secret to avoid the wrath of Internet users and authorities alike, said she started the site 18 months ago to improve her English. The items and comments she translates are often lurid, salacious and sensational, but Fauna said she and her four-person team of contributors do not intentionally seek out racy posts. Their formula is to simply translate the most active forum discussions—avoiding overtly political topics.
“The material that becomes popular on the Chinese Internet is usually very shocking or controversial,” Fauna said, explaining the “SMACK” in the site’s name captures what she imagines first time visitors feel. Recent postings featured Chinese netizens sounding off on how the “50 Cent Party”—civil servants are allegedly paid 0.5 yuan (seven US cents) for each pro-government web comment they post—seems to be working overtime.
Others include a man marrying his fiancee at her funeral, soldiers being buried half-naked in snow to train for the cold and “Leopard Print Man,” who is enjoying 15 minutes of fame for wearing strange outfits on Shanghai’s subway. Some postings such as the racist reaction to Lou Jing—a black Chinese girl who performed on an American Idol-style reality show—have gained national and international media attention after appearing on chinaSMACK.
About a third of chinaSMACK’s readers are in the United States, 18 per cent are in China, while Britain, Canada and Singapore each account for roughly five per cent of traffic, Fauna said.
Source: AFP
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