Breaching the great firewall

CHINA'S military mouthpiece, the Liberation Army Daily, is not a fan of microblogging. On October 19th it said Twitter had caused chaos during Iran's political turmoil last year, and gave warning that such instant information-sharing tools posed “hidden dangers” to national security. Having blocked access to Twitter, however, China is encouraging home-grown versions. Both the government and its critics have become avid users.

Bloody ethnic riots in the far-western region of Xinjiang in July last year sealed the fate of Twitter and its domestic clones. The government, observing their growing popularity, feared that troublemakers in Xinjiang could use them to foment unrest. Since then Twitter has been available in China only to those with the skills to penetrate the Chinese internet's “great firewall”. But the authorities quickly gave approval to new China-based microblogging services, or weibo, which employ armies of censors. In February even the Communist Party's own mouthpiece, the People's Daily, opened one.

The party's all-powerful Publicity Department tells operators to filter postings for sensitive words. Their detection means automatic deletion. But dissidents are undeterred. News on October 8th that an imprisoned activist, Liu Xiaobo, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize spread quickly through domestic microblogs despite the authorities' best efforts to block it. Users wrote homonyms for Mr Liu's name, or abbreviations in Latin characters.

Since last year, weibo use has grown rapidly. Before it was closed last July, the most popular domestic provider, Fanfou, had acquired nearly a million subscribers in two years of operation. The new leading service, Sina Weibo, says it has gained more than 20m registered users since it was launched in August 2009. Last August China Youth News, a newspaper run by the ruling party's Communist Youth League, reported that in a nationwide survey more than 45% of people under 40 said they were frequent weibo users. More than 94% said that weibo had changed their lives.

Hu Yong of Peking University estimates that more than 10m people are weibo regulars. In an article published abroad earlier this month, he claimed that the Chinese were world leaders in microblogging, using it for everything from “social resistance” to “mailing postcards to prisoners of conscience”. Mr Hu argued that this was promoting subtle social progress rather than lighting the fuse of a “Twivolution”, but he reckoned the phenomenon was nonetheless opening up “new possibilities for reshaping China's authoritarian regime”.

Many of the government's most prominent critics have accounts on the blocked Twitter service as well as on weibo. One of them, Wen Yunchao (who has more than 32,000 Twitter followers), says he prefers to use weibo if he wants information to be picked up by domestic media. Some of China's more aggressive journalists are also keen users. In September several tweeted live on the plight of two women who were hiding in an airport lavatory in Jiangxi province. Officials were trying to prevent them flying to Beijing to issue complaints to the central authorities.

But the government clearly believes that weibo can be useful, too. Security officials can use it to monitor what dissidents are up to. This week a Twitter user in the south-western city of Chongqing was said to have been detained briefly after tweeting that she was preparing to raise a banner in support of Mr Liu, the Nobel prizewinner, during an anti-Japanese demonstration. Mid-ranking officials in Beijing are being trained at the city's Communist Party school in the art of communicating with the public through weibo.

Rebecca MacKinnon, an internet analyst, says anyone wanting to organise something “truly subversive” would not use microblogs anyway, since the government might be able to trace them. And if weibo become more threatening to the party, they can be shut down. In July China's microblogging services relabelled themselves as “beta” versions, a possible hint that this was all just an experiment.