Internet

We've passed half of the year of 2007. The name of Zhou Shuguang or Zuola is definitely one of the men of the year in mainland China. This "citizen reporter" has become famous for less than half year. Early this year, he covered the story of "the strongest nailhouse" in Chongqing and other eviction incidents in China. In June he went to Xiamen to study the movement against the project of PX chemical plant. In July, he came to Hongong to observe the mass rally on July 1. "Now I want to make more money. I am going to return home to work as vendor selling vegetable," he told me.

(Editor note: this article is written for indymedia book project which will come out later this year.)

By Gabriele Hadl and Sun-quan Huang (‘Inertia’)

IMC Taiwan (Twimc http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.twimc.org) was set up by members of POTS (Taipei alternative free weekly paper), and Twblog.net (an experimental blogging network), teachers, mainstream media people, grassroots and activist groups. The site existed from 2003- 2005, the collective was active from 2003-04.

As Indymedia (IMC) activist and researcher, I recently did an e-mail interview with Oiwan Lam, a researcher and organizer of inmediahk.net and Interlocals.net. A shorter version of this will appear in a book about the Indymedia network.

Gabriele Hadl: There is a lot of net-based activism in Hong Kong, but no IMC afiliated with the network. Why is that? There was an IMC in Taiwan (2003-5) but they had problems with the language barrier, both in communicating with the so-called ‘global groups’ and in adapting the software. Did you have a similar experience?

Joel Martinsen at Danwei.org has briefed a recent Chinese media response to the alleged "Anti-China" sentiment of the West that was printed by the official Glabal People magazine. The magazine summarizes those western "attacks" as stemming from absurd theories like "China Threat", "China Collapse", "China Split" and "Yellow Peril".

In Umberto Eco's novel, The Name of the Rose, the blind librarian Jorge committed a series of murders in order to hide the secret of Aristotle's Book of Comedy, Book II of the Poetics because he regarded laughter as the most threatening heresy. The story shows the fragility of authority / truth.

When the portal website of Baidu.com broke down recently, what reasons came into the mind of Liu Jianguo, Baidu.com's Chief Technology Officer?

Baidu.com, the biggest search engine in China, was attacked by hackers on September 12. The breakdown lasted for almost 30 minutes. Baidu claimed that the attack was pre-meditated and highly organized. Some speculated that it is related to its recent cutbacks in personnel and its litigation with former clients.