Chinese Blogosphere

What struck me most about my group's research into the Chinese Blogosphere was how many topics fall under it. There are the major websites that allow the discussion to happen - Sina Weibo, the government-monitored social media site that finds itself most similar to Twitter, QQ (though this is closer to instant messaging than to blogging), Kaixin001, and others. There are the specific people involved - Ai WeiWei, Chai Jing, HanHan, and more. HanHan, especially, brings out an interesting point that I'd like to further explore when he talks about his ability of "knowing the rules and saying things by not saying them." This seems to be a recurrent necessity within the Chinese blogosphere - knowing how to work within the rules set up by the government while still being able to put forward ideas that convince people to further pursue the topics of social and civil rights that cannot be said. For example, China has recently dictated that all authors publish their names along with their ideas online. This removal of anonymity goes against some of the ideas we've discussed in this class. My question is: shat are the rest of the rules? What do bloggers in China need to keep in the back of their minds when they're posting? I'd like to better understand how people navigate these waters.

Finally, Chinese Internet activism is taking on new forms that I'd like to further explore. For example, Chai Jing's Internet film "Under the Dome" gained hundreds of millions of views before it was removed from the Internet. What will the Chinese populace's response to the removal be, as a result? How will other media forms continue to push the censorship of the Chinese government?

There are clearly many subjects that fall under this topic (and even more information about these subjects), and I believe that deciding exactly what to write might be the hardest part of this assignment.