Three recent events have demonstrated how new media on the internet are dramatically changing the way Chinese citizens engage with the government

----By Jeremy Goldkorn and Maya Alexandri

It started on May 30 in Jiangsu province. A student at Wuxi, using the handle "Thin Cute Girl", posted pictures of Tai Lake (or Taihu) on the popular Tianya.cn forum website. Earlier that week, as a result of pollution, Taihu had broken out in an "algae bloom," a putrid-smelling, bright green bio-mess spread across the lake's surface. One important result of the algae infestation was that 2 million people in Wuxi were left without tap water. By June 1, Thin Cute Girl's page had generated eight pages of comments and her pictures had been reposted widely across the Chinese internet.

Meanwhile, in Xiamen, about 10,000 people marched in protest against a chemical factory under construction near the city. The factory was to manufacture paraxylene (PX), a chemical many citizens perceived as a threat to the environment and their health. The protest was organised using mobile phone text messages, postings on websites, and instant messaging platforms like MSN and QQ. Zuola, a blogger who'd achieved notoriety by covering the Chongqing Nail House affair (see EUROBIZ May 2007), provided live online coverage of the protests via his mobile phone, and pictures of the protests were posted on the photo-sharing website Flickr. Video of the demonstrations was available on a number of video-sharing sites. A freelance journalist blogging under the name Lian Yue continued extensive, blog-based coverage of the factory's construction and citizens' backlash.

Then, on June 7, 400 fathers from Henan posted an open letter (again on Tianya) seeking the return of their children, who'd been kidnapped and sold into slavery in Shanxi's "black" brick kilns. The letter described the fathers' attempts to rescue their children from Shanxi and how the local authorities obstructed their efforts. The closing paragraph beseeched: "Who can rescue [our children]? With the governments in Henan and Shanxi passing the buck to each other, whom should we ask for help?" The resounding answer appeared to be, "China's 137 million internet users." Public outcry in response to the letter prompted extensive press coverage and central government involvement.

When old media fail

These three events share several significant similarities. All were premised on long-standing issues. As early as 2001 Wen Jiabao, now China's premier, was calling for the reduction of pollution in Taihu. The PX factory had been approved for construction in 2005. Slavery in the Shanxi brick kilns had been a problem for years and had even gained attention previously, when an enslaved worker sued his foreman for having severed his legs in 2002.

In all three cases, individuals had been championing action on these issues via traditional, offline methods, but with little success. Just one week before filing a lawsuit about the deteriorating water quality in Taihu, Wu Lihong, who had campaigned against pollution in Taihu for more than a decade, was arrested on charges of extortion. Authorities claimed he'd demanded RMB55,000 (€5,500) from polluting industries.

Zhao Yufen, a chemistry professor at Xiamen University, had organised a petition and spearheaded efforts to persuade Xiamen and Beijing bureaucrats that the PX factory was ill-considered. Her concerns were outweighed by economic considerations, and Xiamen's propaganda bureau silenced the local press from reporting on the factory's potential downsides.

In the case of the Shanxi brick kiln slaves, hundreds of parents had journeyed to Shanxi, hoping to rescue their children. As the 400 fathers wrote in their open letter: "What disheartened and disappointed us was that the public security department in the village not only disregarded our request, but even obstructed us by all means to take away our children. They stood by indifferently when the kiln owners threatened us."

Then, in early May, Henan TV Metro Channel reporter Fu Zhenzhong, following a tip, travelled to Shanxi for the first of three trips in search of enslaved children. He reported on the story 10 days later, prompting 1,000 parents to contact the television station, seeking assistance rescuing their children. Fu returned to Shanxi with groups of parents and film crews, but according to his own account, authorities and kiln managers frustrated his efforts to free all but two of the scores of children he saw.

¡­try again, online

In all three cases, the story gained momentum only in tandem with online exposure. Thin Cute Girl's stark pictures of slime and dead fish made immediate the revolting situation at Taihu. Live blogger coverage of the Xiamen PX factory protests made the government take account of concerns about the factory that it'd previously dismissed. And the open letter from the 400 fathers spurred swift criminal investigations and prosecutions.

These three examples seem to be part of a trend. A degree of political engagement is probably an inevitable result of the rise of online social media like blogs, forum sites, and other user-generated content sites like Wikipedia and YouTube, both of which have Chinese equivalents. Social media, by their nature, create hubs where information can spread quickly and widely, and make it difficult to censor.

There is some uneasiness about the trend. Xiamen has moved to ban anonymous online posting. And Flickr has become the target of the "Great Firewall" (a nickname for China's internet censorship regime) after pictures from the Xiamen protests were posted there.

Nonetheless, the Chinese internet has become both a functioning petitioning platform for certain social issues, and a valuable way to find out what citizens are really thinking. Given the pragmatism that characterises much of the Chinese government's approach, it wouldn't be surprising to see Beijing, over time and with caution, embracing social media as a valuable and socially stabilising way to engage its population.

Jeremy Goldkorn has more than a decade of experience working in the Chinese media, and is the founding editor of Danwei.org, a website about media, advertising and urban life in China. Maya Alexandri is an intellectual property attorney, novelist, and contributing editor at Danwei.org.