The Chinese online world, a huge mob of “netizens,” is a powerful force, as has been pointed out many times before. They expose corruption scandals and force politicians to put hot topics on the agenda. They skirt censorship and discuss topics that other forms of media would never dare to mention (and the government’s own 5 mao army struggles in its attempts to steer the debate). They introduce new words, and even re-introduce new characters, into the language. They’re used by PR companies for huge viral campaigns. When they turn against someone, they organize a “human flesh search,” and that person’s entire life and personal details are posted online, in an act of complete public humiliation.
They can sometimes be scary, but they can also be a force for good. In this interview with Evan Osnos, who writes for the New Yorker from Beijing, Osnos talks about how his New Yorker pieces about China get translated more or less spontaneously as soon as they hit the press, by volunteers who coordinate themselves and post the translated work online. New Yorker pieces tend to be long — often up to 10,000 words — and according to Osnos, the translations are faithful to the original, an impressive feat. He also says in the interview that the entire weekly issue of the Economist magazine gets translated within a few days of publication and is posted online.
A few days ago, I discovered that a Reuters article about “ant people”, in which I was cited, had gone through the same process. Google my name, and you’ll find that a translated version of the article is everywhere, both on and off the mainland (in both traditional and simplified characters). I was interviewed for the article because I had written about the topic on my blog. I’m hardly an expert on the topic, but I had followed some of the news stories in Chinese media, and so I talked to the reporter about what I had read. I was actually misquoted in the article — the reporter asked me about living conditions, and I told him that reports from Beijing talked about 8-10 people sharing a room far outside of the city center, while the reports in Wuhan only talked about 2-3 people per room in several areas in Wuhan, including the area I lived in. In the article, I was instead cited as saying that Wuhan having 8-10 people sharing a room. By the time I had seen the article, it had already been republished across the world. And with that simple misunderstanding, this new “fact” went onto the internet, and quickly spread, attributed as first-hand evidence coming from me, on dozens of web pages. There was also a typo in the spelling of my name the second time it was written out, which some translations fixed and others decided to keep, staying as faithful to the original article as possible.
Mobs are powerful, but also notoriously difficult to control, and so it’s hard to say what the implications for all of this are for the people who want to use “netizens” for their own gain. Political commentators obviously hope that these “netizens” will push for increased openness and democratization, but the mob is just as likely to turn ugly in an outpouring of nationalism. Either way, there are a lot of people in China spending a lot of time online, and they’re a group to keep an eye on.