Let a Hundred Websites Bloom

When I arrived in Shanghai in the early 2000s to begin a half-decade assignment covering China, I often marveled at the distance between the common Western image of the country as a repressive dictatorship and the many spaces for communication that seemed to escape the government’s control. My first inklings of this came in random encounters with Chinese people, in bank lines, on trains, or on the sidelines of public events. They were as curious about the world that had produced me as I was about the world that had produced them. Moreover, many seemed as disinclined to pull punches in expressing criticism of their society as I was of mine.These early impressions quickly deepened as I began to explore the country’s Internet. Certainly there were clear taboos, beginning with questioning the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party and criticizing the country’s central leadership. Alongside these topics were the forbidden so-called big Ts: Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen. But surprisingly large realms of online speech remained wide open. Without too much effort, one could find public threads about almost anything else. And people used bulletin boards and discussion groups on Chinese Web...