Taiwan Blogs: Bridge-building takes work

I had a fabulous time this weekend with my new friends from the Taiwanese blogosphere. Special thanks to Ching Chiao (seated far right in the picture above), the main instigator-organizer who invited me, and to the China Times which sponsored my plane ticket and hotel. (One of their blogging journalists has already written me up in Chinese here.) I was especially excited to meet Portnoy Zheng, who has been faithfully posting Chinese translations of Global Voices posts on his blog since last summer. Portnoy you are awesome. It was great to meet many of the other major Taiwanese A-listers, as well as the people who run Taiwan's major blog-hosting services like Wretch.cc and Yam.com. It was also fabulous to finally meet Gen Kanai, formerly of Technorati in Japan, now representing the Mozilla Corporation. We had some interesting conversations about the need for regional ping-servers and other ways for members of the Chinese blogosphere to find each other better, as I discussed in this post on Saturday.

I gave a talk about why I left CNN to blog, about Global Voices Online and the global blogging phenomenon, about the growing but fairly separate Chinese language blogospheres (Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), censorship next door the People's Republic, etc.

A major emphasis of my talk was that when blogospheres grow organically, most of them tend to be fairly inward looking (with the Middle East as the major exception, and Africa to some extent also). As Hoder likes to say, blogs can be cafes, they can be windows, and they can be bridges. By my observation, most blogospheres fairly naturally develop into cafes, in which community members who know each other talk amongst themselves. To blog in a way that opens a "window" into your country/region for outsiders to understand takes more effort. "Bridges" rarely ever grow organically - they have to be built through concerted, usually difficult effort. Just like bridges in real life, you rarely make money off them - at least not directly - even though they provide an important service to society by which everybody's life is improved.

(photo courtesy Vista)

Right now, Taiwan's blogosphere is mainly a cafe. Given how little media attention Taiwan tends to get in the international press (and what they do get is either economic news or about Taiwan's relationship with mainland China), Taiwanese bloggers can potentially play an important role in opening a window for outsiders to understand the island better. So far they have not really played this role. Likewise, Taiwanese blogs have for the most part not made much effort to form conversational bridges with bloggers elsewhere. There is very little linking even to the other Chinese language blogospheres - Hong Kong and mainland China - and very little conversation taking place between Taiwanese and mainland Chinese bloggers. Of course, a major barrier to conversation is the Great Firewall of China: Chinese users are blocked from accessing Taiwanese blogs unless they are geeky enough to know how to use proxy servers. But I strongly urged Taiwan's bloggers to link to mainland bloggers anyway. In my experience, if you link to a Chinese bloggers they will go to a great deal more effort to access your site and engage with you - even if your site is blocked on Chinese ISP's. If you aren't paying them any attention or making any effort to engage with them, they're not going to go to the considerable effort to engage with you either.

The Internet was supposed to be borderless, but when it comes to mainland China and Taiwan, people here admit that the gulf in cyberspace feels nearly as great as the physical gulf across the Taiwan Straits. The situation is only going to get worse unless people make concerted efforts... efforts which may or may not be helpful when it comes to things like trying to make money with your blog or achieving local fame. But I argued that people in Taiwan have a major security interest in engaging mainland Chinese online, despite the difficulties. Right now Chinese internet users have very little exposure to the views of ordinary Taiwanese - many of whom aren't exactly in agreement with Taiwan's current President, the man that China's leadership loves to hate. Lack of nuanced understanding of human beings on the other side of the Taiwan straits will make it easier for the Chinese government to manipulate the Chinese public in the event that military tensions were to escalate. With some effort, Taiwan's bloggers could do more to improve that understanding. It won't be easy at all, but given the stakes, it might be worth trying a little harder.

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Comments

[Gen Kanai]

Rebecca, it was a pleasure to finally meet you and hear you speak (even if I don't understand Mandarin :) I'm glad you posted this overview of your speech.

Just a small clarification, I'm working with the Mozilla Corporation, not the Foundation.

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

sorry Gen! I'll fix that now.
Fabulous to meet you!
R

[schee]

Actually, bloggers from Taiwan have been engadged in prolific talks with many of whom from China since the late 2002 and worked competitively in one way or another to bring in the Creative Commons to the Chinese speaking world. It's just that these "traces" of conversation has not been well-preserved... :(

And why many Taiwanese bloggers know each other is becasue... they tend to meet almost every other week or so since 2003. :)

Nice to meet you again Rebecca. :)

[Vista]

Hi Rebecca, nice to meet you again.

不到一年的時間能見到兩次面，實在是很愉快的事情。也謝謝妳把我拍的照片加入Flickr的最愛。

[Michael Turton]

What? Nobody told me about this meeting! Damn! BTW, there's an English blogosphere about Taiwan that is also trying to build bridges and open windows -- was it represented there? I regularly fire off letters and contact people when the US/foreign media does one of its usual screw-ups with Taiwan. As far as I can see -- the language issue -- not enough Taiwanese are blogging about politics in English and not enough are reading the English-language global media -- to really respond intelligently to the World Out There.

Also, who are these A-list bloggers? Can I find a list of them? I'd love to blog on their blogs.

Michael

[taipeimarc]

Interesting how this blog conference came along, but the best blogger in Taiwan, by far, Michael Turton was not invited. I highly recommend anyone interested in Taiwan to visit his site: http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/

[Tim Maddog]

Rebecca wrote:
- - -
Special thanks [...] to the China Times which sponsored my plane ticket and hotel.
- - -

What a stunning admission! You wouldn't be "required to filter out long lists of politically sensitive words" or phrases (e.g., "authoritarian-leaning KMT," "anti-democracy Lien Chan," etc.) when writing about Taiwan in the future, would you?

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

Thanks Schee for your excellent point.

Michael & Marc, a couple of the Taiwan A-listers have just posted comments in this thread and I've linked to a few others. There's an aggregator on the conference blog where much of Taiwan's A-list is represented. I'm sorry to hear that there is so little interface between the English-language expat bloggers and local Chinese-language bloggers.

Tim, I am just trying to be transparent about disclosing my funders. Given my nonprofit and academic job I don't have a travel budget to attend conferences and rely on conference organizers and sponsors to fund my travel and hotel. This is pretty standard practice. If you think I can easily be bought, you are welcome to think so but you would be wrong.

[Michael Turton]

I'm sorry to hear that there is so little interface between the English-language expat bloggers and local Chinese-language bloggers.

Heck, I didn't even realize how bad it was between the Chinese Blogosphere and the English one until I saw that there were no English-language bloggers at the meeting (and my blog and David at Jujuflop and a couple of others are regularly pointed to from Global Voices Online too!). Two blogospheres so close, yet worlds apart.

Fortunately Schee and I will both be at a blogging roundtable this weekend down in Tainan, and mayhap we can start thinking about ways to bridge that world.

Many thanks to Schee and Gen for their kind comments on my blog.

Michael

[Tim Maddog]

Rebecca replied:
- - -
Tim, I am just trying to be transparent about disclosing my funders. [...] If you think I can easily be bought, you are welcome to think so but you would be wrong.
- - -

I'm just speculating on the practices of the anti-Taiwan media here. What may not look like an outright bribe can still be a way of gaining influence. One can only wonder why so many of the people writing about Taiwan in the international media echo the memes of papers like the China Times (which doesn't seem to know that it's in Taiwan). Why, oh why, does the int'l media constantly say, for example, that Taiwan "separated from the mainland in 1949 after a civil war" when Taiwan was never part of that China? Am I to believe that this just happens spontaneously?

I worded my question very carefully, allowing a big opening for you to give the answer you did. I think it was best for me to say it out loud, though, rather than to merely wonder.

Here's the part from the ellipsis in the quoted section at the top of this comment:
- - -
Given my nonprofit and academic job I don't have a travel budget to attend conferences and rely on conference organizers and sponsors to fund my travel and hotel. This is pretty standard practice.
- - -

And here's an Upton Sinclair quote which could be applied to either gender:
- - -
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
- - -

Now, when can we look forward to some scathing blogging about the lies in the China Times? ;-)