It was the last straw for Shanghai graduate student Wu Heng, when he heard that restaurants near him were using toxic chemicals to make pork taste like beef. He started a food-safety blog out of his dorm room in January. In April, he got 10,000 hits. In May, he got 5 million.
"Word spread on Weibo," he says with a grin.
Weibo - China's version of Twitter - has created a vigorous virtual public square since it was launched by the Chinese internet company Sina three years ago this month. The site, which allows users to post photos, videos, comments and messages, has since expanded with scorching speed. It now boasts some 350 million users.
"These days, a lot of people use Weibo as their main source of information, and information on Weibo can pass very fast," says Wu. "So I update my Weibo account every day, with the latest news on food safety."
Food safety is but one of the hot-button issues that have raised a public outcry on Weibo, providing a new source of public pressure on the government. A similar outcry came last summer after a high-speed train crash killed 40 people, just days after the expensive and high-profile project was rushed into service. Weibo comments mocked official excuses and attempts to cover up bad management.
"This is unprecedented in Chinese history," says Kaiser Kuo, the director of Corporate Communications at Baidu.com, the leading Chinese search engine. "There's never been a time when there's been a comparably large and impactful public sphere. It's now driving, in many ways, the entire national dialogue."
So far, China's leaders are ambivalent. On the one hand, Weibo gives them a window into public opinion they never really had before, letting at least some people blow off steam online rather than on the street. On the other hand, China's leaders are neither used to nor comfortable with public scrutiny, much less public ridicule.
Wang Chen, who heads China's State Internet Information Office, has said that Weibo and other microblogs should "serve society," and not threaten public security.
Exactly what does threaten public security is open to interpretation, and Sina and other microblog providers are expected to interpret broadly as they exercise censorship on behalf of the government. Critical comments are wiped away; entire Weibo accounts are sometimes deleted. Popular blogger Isaac Mao had 30,000 followers when his account was closed in June. He'd written a comment criticizing China's space program as a waste of money.
A couple of months earlier, Chinese microbloggers woke up on a Saturday morning to find the message: "Recently, comments left by microbloggers have started to contain much illegal and detrimental information, including rumors." To clean up these rumors, the message continued, Weibo would suspend its comments section - the function that allows lively, often irreverent discussion - for three days.
"People who didn't say something before, they start to realize there's something wrong with this system," Mao said at the time. "I think they [censors] fear if they shut down Weibo totally, it will backfire. But they're testing to see how people respond to more restrictions. Because Weibo is now a battleground between the official voices and the voices of civil society."
Not necessarily, says Chinese blogger and journalist Michael Anti. He says Weibo has its uses for official circles, too. "Now, when someone in the central governments wants to take action against a local government or some princelings [children of senior party leaders], they put the news directly on Weibo or Twitter," he says. "Microblogging is really changing the pattern of how we follow news, and how news is leaked." If Weibo is a battlefield, he says, the government seeks to occupy it, not destroy it.
And lest ordinary citizens think they can get creative in their own political uses of Weibo - Anti has his doubts.
