Media Hack
Last month, when anti-Japanese sentiment in China had reached a fever pitch, Edwyn Chan conducted an experiment.
Although most Chinese were aware that protest rallies were rumbling across the country -- kindled by a new Japanese textbook that purportedly whitewashes Japan's role in World War II -- keeping track of what was happening was next to impossible. The media in China are all or partially state-owned and toe the government's official position (which wasn't endorsing the protest movement but wasn't doing much to stop it either). The only way to find out was through internet forums, where people posted first-person accounts from their home cities, shared pictures or provided articles from foreign news organizations.
Chan, who was raised in Hong Kong but today calls Chengdu, Sichuan, home, realized that doing anything that involves politics could mean trouble, but he also believed this was an opportunity to see whether blogs, which have not yet caught on in China, could translate. Within four days of launching kangri.blogku.com, he reached more than 10,000 people. He also drew the attention of the Gong An, the Chinese police in charge of monitoring the net.
Instead of shutting him down, however, the Gong An told him if he wanted to continue he would have to remove the more heated posts, which he did. Not in keeping with the freewheeling, stand-up-to-authority ethos of the blogosphere in the West, but it sure beats prison.
Now the 24-year-old Chan, who has a business degree from New York University, is hoping to build a blog empire in China. His model? None other than Nick Denton, the Rupert Murdoch (without the money) of the weblog set, who started the Gawker Network, operator of meanie gossip rag Gawker; Gizmodo, which feeds gadget lust; and Wonkette, the Dorothy Parker of the web set.
Chan's media network already has three blogs up and running, including Dianziren, which covers consumer electronics; a humor blog called Shuanga; and Jiaexp, a site for gamers. He also has plans for two more: one for women that would be about beauty and cosmetics, the other he hopes could mimic Gawker (except it would be funny).
Chan chose these niche topics based on three criteria: The subject had to be popular with the emerging new generation of Chinese people, who prefer to get their news over the net; the blog had to be relatively easy to update with at least five new entries a day; and the subject matter had to be attractive to advertisers.
His blog venture isn't his first foray into the dot-com business world. When Chan was in college, he and two computer programmers developed an internet Chinese-celebrity stock-exchange website that they subsequently sold to an entertainment and media conglomerate in Hong Kong. He moved to Chengdu because labor is cheaper there, and all the first-tier locales (Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong province) are already saturated with internet and mobile startups.
Although fluent in the language and customs, Chan has found that doing business in China is not easy. "All the stories about regulations and guanxi (Chinese business culture) are all true," he said. It took four months just to get his company's business license -- internet firms are tightly regulated and foreigners cannot hold the majority of shares. (Chan is regarded as a foreigner even though he is a citizen of Hong Kong). And he is still waiting for his Internet Content License, which he hopes to obtain in the next two months. "If I didn't have a local partner, starting here would have been next to impossible."
There are other obstacles. Blogs haven't caught on in China, so even when Chan can hire bloggers, it's hard to market them to consumers, attract advertisers and raise venture capital. The investors he has met don't use blogs as sources of information, so they generally have no clue of what a blog is. "All they know is that it's something hot which they hope to be able to cash out hopefully in less than a year," Chan said.
Although no one has gotten rich off blogs in the West, which usually rely on advertising for revenue, China has the additional benefit that its consumers are accustomed to paying for news sent to their mobile phones. They don't mind paying a small fee for the convenience of getting their news on the go if they can't be by the computer the whole day.
Is Chan worried that blogging, which embraces a free exchange of ideas and an independent spirit, could run counter to what the Chinese government authorities would allow?
"There is a saying in Chinese: When you are in somebody else's home, follow their rules," Chan said. "I don't plan to run a permanent political blog on my blog media network, so hopefully there won't be any chance I will piss them off."
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Adam L. Penenberg is an assistant professor at New York University and the assistant director of the business and economic reporting program in the department of journalism.
