This week, influential blogger Lian Yue started publishing a novel on Twitter, believed to be the first time a Chinese-language novel is released on the popular service.

The novel, entitled “2020,” revolves around a character named Mao Zhiyong, described as a pale, overweight middle-aged man, and it will be written in regular installments through the year 2020. In Wednesday’s chapter, the protagonist Mao became a father to twin boys and was promoted to head of the Communist Party propaganda department in the city where he lives.

The author announced plans to start the Twitter novel on his blog late last year. “It will only be available on Twitter,” he wrote. “If you are interested, try getting a Twitter account.”

Even though Twitter– like other foreign social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook– is currently blocked in mainland China, Internet users can find their way around the restrictions by using proxy servers or third-party applications.

Lian Yue is the pen name of Zhong Xiaoyong, a writer and social critic based in the east China city of Xiamen. He has written freelance columns for various Chinese publications and published several books, including “I Love Asking Lian Yue” (in Chinese, 我爱问连岳), a collection based on his “I Am Chicken Soup” column that ran in Shanghai Weekly.

The decision to write a Twitter novel was described in the following terms: “This is like singing in the shower. When you are relaxed, you will entertain yourself; you have the passion to be creative and expressive. Shower singing cannot be public. Those who happen to hear it may suffer. But the guy who’s enjoying himself in the misty bathroom can’t control himself.”

Lian Yue said he plans to write no more than 20 novel-tweets a day and will limit updates to four times a week in order to “avoid the overload of information that both gets on people’s nerves and slows down the work.”

The debut has already caused stirrings of anticipation among China’s active Internet community, with some people setting up new Twitter accounts just to read the popular writer’s work.

To date, Lian Yue has nearly 33,000 followers on Twitter.

– Juliet Ye via

More than 55 percent of the nearly 1,000 respondents said they had scarce knowledge of GM food, the survey conducted by China Daily and Sohu.com showed last week. At least 52 percent said they were unaware of the prevalence of GM food in their lives.

“Genetically modified products such as papaya, soybean oil, tomatoes and potatoes have been largely available in the country”s market since early 2000,” said Professor Jiang Gaoming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences” Institute of Botany.

As these products are relatively cheaper than non-GM food, people are eating them without being aware of what they are consuming, he said.

A survey conducted by Greenpeace China last year showed a large majority of the papaya sold in major Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai was genetically modified.

“Worse, they are not labeled,” Fang Lifeng, spokesman of Greenpeace China’s GM program, told China Daily Wednesday.

In the latest survey, 73 percent of those polled said they would check the GM status of products while shopping for food, while nearly 67 percent said they were unsatisfied with the current level of GM labeling.

“When I shop for soy oil, I always find it hard to spot the GM label, which usually appears in small print,” said food safety-conscious Wang Yi, 31, a white-collar worker in Beijing.

Relating that her mother is unaccustomed to checking on the status of GM food, Wang added: “For her, price is the top concern when choosing food.”

China leads the world in public biotech crop research, experts said.

GM crops in the field trial stage include rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, potatoes, cabbage and tobacco. GM cotton also accounts for 30 percent of the country’s cotton acreage, official statistics showed.

Under such circumstances, public awareness of GM food should be largely improved, particularly its potential negative impact on health and the environment, Fang urged.

“Despite the relatively lower price of GM food, people should be equipped with the knowledge, both positive and negative, when choosing what to eat,” he said.

Internationally, advocacy groups have strongly opposed GM technology being put in the human food chain, citing its unforeseeable impact.

Studies also found GM food damaged laboratory rats fed with these ingredients.

In response to food safety and health concerns, nearly 88 percent of those polled said they would choose traditional food over the GM variety, the latest survey showed.

However, Yang Xiaoguang, a food nutrition expert with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, thought otherwise.

“GM food is safer than ordinary food in terms of pesticide residue,” he explained.

GM plants are often created to resist disease and eliminate the need for pesticides. Their perceived advantages, such as a hardier texture, higher nutritional value and faster growth, create a type of “superfood,” studies showed.

Worldwide, 70 percent of soy, 46 percent of cotton and 24 percent of corn are genetically modified.

Due to concerns over consumer rights, at least 35 countries and regions including China, Australia, the EU, Japan and Indonesia have adopted mandatory labeling for any product that has been genetically modified.

China’s labeling regulation stipulates that all products containing GM ingredients including seeds, animal feed and food should be labeled under the framework of the Biosafety Regulation of GMOs in Agriculture, first announced in June 2001 by the Ministry of Agriculture.

“The regulation, however, is poorly enforced as many GM products are sold without labeling at all,” Jiang said.

“A lack of strict management and the absence of a monitoring mechanism is largely to blame,” he acknowledged.

Other reasons include the lack of a cost-effective method for detecting GM products with sufficient sensitivity, coupled with business concerns that labeling would result in lower competitiveness, said Professor Wang Canfa of the China University of Political Science and Law.

“Given that GM products like soybean oil, papaya, tomatoes, potatoes and tobacco are now widespread in China, the labeling rule, which is about consumer choice and rights, should be forcefully and strictly implemented,” he said.

He also called on the government to further regulate GM labeling, including having these details prominently displayed on packaging, so consumers could choose whether to buy those items.

[source:china daily]

Google initially attributed Tuesday’s outage to a technical glitch, a string of text “gs_rfai” that began appearing in Web addresses in the last 24 hours. Because of the characters “rfa,” Chinese filtering systems associated the searches with Radio Free Asia, which is inaccessible in China, the Internet search giant concluded. Google did not say how the string of text was created. Chinese Internet users speculated Tuesday that the addition of the characters triggered the error messages.

But, after an investigation, Google on Tuesday blamed the outage on China’s Internet filtering system.

“It’s clear we actually added this parameter a week ago. So whatever happened today to block Google.com.hk must have been as a result of a change in the Great Firewall,” a Google spokesman said. “Our search traffic in China is now back to normal even though we have not made any changes at our end. We will continue to monitor what is going on, but for the time being this issue seems to be resolved.”

– Jessica Guynn via

• After a cyber attack that the company first revealed in January, which it said was aimed at identifying political dissidents in China, Google announced on Monday that it is now re-routing searches through Hong Kong, saying:
  

  Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach…is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced.

• The move by Google clearly leaves the field in China to domestic giant Baidu, which had been gaining on Google in search market share even before the U.S. company decided to leave — the Chinese company’s shares have climbed more than 50 percent since Google announced its decision in January. Other competitors likely to benefit include Microsoft, which has said that it continues to do business in China and is working with the Chinese government, as well as domestic Chinese players Tencent and Alibaba.
• The second-largest mobile operator in China — China Unicom — has said it won’t install Google search on its new Android handsets as a result of Google’s actions. The company is reportedly in talks with Microsoft to use its Bing search service instead.
• Domain name registration company Go Daddy has said that it will no longer register domain names in China. The company said that increased requirements for identifying registrants “appeared, to us, to be based on a desire by the Chinese authorities to exercise increased control over the subject matter of domain name registrations by Chinese nationals.”
• According to the Indian prime minister, that country has heard from Dell that the giant computer maker is looking elsewhere for some or all of the $25 billion in business it does in China (although Dell has since denied this).
• Google’s director of public policy, Alan Davidson, testified before a federal commission hearing on China on Wednesday, calling the decision to move servers to Hong Kong “a practical solution to the challenges we’ve faced — it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.” He also said that censorship of Google by the Chinese government was a trade issue, since it would favor local search companies. The Wall Street Journal has excerpts from the testimony, which is also posted in full on Scribd and embedded below.
• David Drummond, Google’s chief legal counsel, talked to The Atlantic about the connection between the hacking attempt and the decision to stop censoring results, and why the company decided to wait so long after the hack attack to shut down its China-based search site. Google has also posted an official notice on its Google Enterprise blog for users of Google Apps talking about the effect that its Chinese moves will have on corporate users.
• Sergey Brin has called upon the U.S. government and other countries to take action against China. But some have argued that Google isn’t really in the best position to offer moral advice to anyone about China, since it was the one who effectively caved in to the Chinese government and censored its search results for so long in an effort to build its business there. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, not normally a critic of Google’s practices, wrote:
  

  I’m no fan of Chinese censorship. I was greatly disappointed when Google caved into it. I’m glad they’re no longer doing it. But having done so, Google’s hardly the poster child to tell anyone else what to do. Not right now. Not yet. Not just because Google suddenly found it was no longer in its business interests to stay in China.

  Gawker called Google’s move “a clever way to dress up a security breach — and an embarrassing attempt to partner with China’s authoritarian leaders — as an act of nobility and courage,” a view that was echoed by author Sarah Lacy in a piece on TechCrunch entitled “Google’s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil.”

• At the congressional hearing on China, a number of U.S. legislators praised Google’s move and at the same time bashed Microsoft for continuing to work with the Chinese government to censor search results.
• Sergey Brin told the Wall Street Journal that he pushed for the company to get out of China because that country’s dictatorial government and repression of its citizens reminded him of the totalitarianism of his youth growing up in the former Soviet Union. He said that he was always concerned about the censoring of search results that Google was required to do by the Chinese government, but that his concerns grew after the Olympics as the government became even more repressive.
• Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped has a rundown of what is likely to happen as a result of Google’s redirecting of searches to a Hong Kong domain. Although the Chinese government could simply block access to Google.com.hk, that apparently is not happening (or possibly happening intermittently, according to Google).
• Since Google announced its decision to move its servers, the state-run Xinhua News Agency published a government bulletin that said:
  

  Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks. This is totally wrong…[we] express our discontent and indignation to Google for its unreasonable accusations and conduct.

• According to the New York Times, the overseas edition of the Chinese newspaper People’s Daily, an organ of the ruling Communist Party, carried a front-page opinion piece that said: “For Chinese people, Google is not god, and even if it puts on a full-on show about politics and values, it is still not god. In fact, Google is not a virgin when it comes to values. Its cooperation and collusion with the U.S. intelligence and security agencies is well-known.”
• However, the state news agency also published a piece calling the dispute a “shocking cultural clash between the West and the East” and said that the Chinese government “cannot afford to sit by and watch.”
• For a great overview of some of the reaction within China to the moves by Google, check out Global Voices Online founder Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog.

via http://gigaom.com/2010/03/25/google-and-china-what-you-need-to-know/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%29

On January 12, we announced on this blog that Google and more than twenty other U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China, and that during our investigation into these attacks we had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered—combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger—had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn.

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.

In terms of Google’s wider business operations, we intend to continue R&D work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there, though the size of the sales team will obviously be partially dependent on the ability of mainland Chinese users to access Google.com.hk. Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them. Despite all the uncertainty and difficulties they have faced since we made our announcement in January, they have continued to focus on serving our Chinese users and customers. We are immensely proud of them.

And there is a Chinese version here.

Zhang Yuzhuang village is a small hamlet in China’s northern Henan province of about 2,000 residents.

About 15km upstream is a cluster of factories making paper and chemicals.

In January 2008, two young love-struck villagers, Zhang Qiaoliang and Su Yunxia, were married.

The young couple was very much in love and that September Su Yunxia fell pregnant.

But just a few months later, in January 2009, Qiaoliang found out he had throat cancer.

He was just 25 years old.

But Qiaoliang was optimistic. He felt cured after surgery and he and his wife started looking forward to the birth of their new baby.

Qiaoliang loved to put his ear on his wife’s belly and listen to his unborn child.

But the tumour in his throat came back and by May Qiaoliang was dead.

He never saw his son.

“It makes me really sad to see such a young man and a good husband die so young,” says environmental photographer Lu Guang, who became a friend of the family and took these series of photos.

“But it’s not just Qiaoliang that died.

“In 2008, a 22-year-old mother also died from cancer in the same village.

“In 2007, 47 people died, in 2008, there were 38 people were died and last year 18 died just in the three months from January to March.

“More than 90 percent died from cancer.”

This is the reality of China’s water pollution.

via http://www.greenpeace.org/china/en/news/a-henan-love-story

Douban, a Chinese social networking service website, received $10 million in venture capital from its second round of fundraising on January 25, after raising $2 million in 2006. Photo: CFP

He couldn’t take it anymore.

When Hong Kong writer and poet Liao Weitang found his online photo album had been deleted by douban.com, he quit, leaving behind the 3,000 friends he had made over two years.

“I had a great time here,” he wrote in his leaving statement to users of the Chinese mainland social networking service, “despite my account twice being suspended and having 100 posts deleted.

“But just lately this website has gone insane. It’s like half of the 5,000 most-commonly-used words are banned.”

The final straw for Liao was the deletion of The Beautiful and Strong People, an album featuring Hong Kong youths and artists involved in a protest against the HK$66.7-billion Hong Kong to Shenzhen and Guangzhou high-speed rail link. Photos of kneeling, barefoot youths were apparently deemed too political.

“I shot beautiful young faces, nothing radical or provocative,” Liao said. “But they just couldn’t let it go.”

“I stuck it out for two years with Douban, posting poems and comments, trying to bring a little truth and alternative values to my friends behind the Great Firewall.

“But I’ve got to have a bottom line somewhere. The Web master repeatedly tested my principles. So finally I decided to leave this website that is becoming renowned for self-castration.”

Douban used to be more flexible with him back in the old days, Liao said. For example instead of deleting, website managers might close off content by making it “private” not public. Or entries were not erased immediately, perhaps after a day or two, he recalled.

“That way, hundreds and thousands would see them,” he said.

As one of only a few Kong Hong writers willing to operate in this compromised Internet environment, Liao said he had savored the opportunity to communicate with isolated mainland friends.

“I posted on Douban what the public needs to know, saving more personal stuff for my blog.”

Initiated in 2005, Douban has 33 million registered users: mostly students and intellectuals who enjoy the social networking service’s simple design and user-generated content like books, movies and albums. More recently, Douban’s tightening censorship has upset some veteran members.

It got to the point that Peking University student Fang Kecheng wrote an open letter of complaint to Douban for suspending his account, dubbing the website a “dictator”.

According to Fang, users and Web masters had been forced into playing hide-and-seek with Big River, Big Sea – Untold Stories of 1949, a banned book by Taiwan writer Lung Yingtai.

As the book’s International Standard Book Number (ISBN) was forbidden on the mainland, users kept the title but altered the ISBN in order to share their comments and ratings.

Douban’s Web masters spotted the incorrect ISBN, erased the title and re-inserted the original, correct title. Seeing this, Fang changed the title back again, which led to his account being closed.

“I can’t believe contributing entry content can be a crime,” Fang said. “Any user can submit information they think is right on a website that relies on user-generated content.”

Fang wanted to find out whether the book’s sensitivity had contributed to his punishment and so he got his friend to change the title back again. His friend’s account was also closed.

It wasn’t the censorship per se that enraged Fang and other Web users, it was Douban breaching its own published code of conduct.

“Douban’s ban is unreasonable and random,” Fang wrote. “It’s authoritarian because you can be banned for three days, seven days or forever with no justification and all your diaries, albums, collections and messages are gone.”

Douban’s rules state users must receive three warnings before such a final, permanent closure: After a first warning, the account is suspended three days. The second warning leads to a week’s ban. Only after a third warning is the account supposed to be closed down permanently.

Fang’s open letter led to the lifting of a closure on his account.

A protester holds the banner “Anti high-speed railway in an ascetic-style (kowtow-every-26- step) walk” during a march against the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong high-speed railway outside the Legislative Office of Hong Kong on January 15. Douban deleted this photo two days later. Photo: courtesy of Liao Weitang

Commercial survival

Self-censorship is the rule of survival that prevents popular websites from being shut down, Zoe Wang, a veteran website developer told the Global Times.

“I can understand an author being outraged when his post gets deleted, but it’s even harder to operate a website as I have to suffer the humiliation of supervisory organs and handle all the criticisms coming from users,” she said.

“How can you hope to pay your staff or maintain your users’ statistics if the website is shut down all because of one sensitive post?”

“You can never relax,” said the small website operator.

“You’re always keeping your phone switched on and waiting for that emergency call from the authorities requiring deletion of a post.”

What’s worse, she said, was the complete absence of clear-cut rules for deciding whether or not to delete an online post.

“The criterion of sensitivity depends on many aspects such as the political environment, the website’s background, size and location, as well as the different understandings of Web masters.”

Douban was extraordinarily cautious about its content as it had no background or ties to government, according to a source close to an editor at the site.

“Once you’re shut down, nobody can save you,” the source said.

No editor from Douban would go on the record when the Global Times contacted them.

“Douban recalls clearly the fate of Fanfou, Yeeyan and Blogbus,” Fang said.

They were three of the most well-known mainland websites closed down last year, according to the Southern Metropolis Weekly. The latter two were recovered in January.

Fanfou founder Wang Xing was pondering how much to up censorship during the July 5 Xinjiang riot last year when he got his answer.

The Twitter-style microblogging service for 100,000 registered users was closed down almost immediately for “violating related rules”, according to the China Business News Weekly.

Wang hasn’t given up hope of bringing Fanfou back some day. Seven months on, Wang still refused to comment.

A site that published collaborative user-submitted translations of English and Chinese articles, Yeeyan was shut down in November last year for violating the regulation on “running a news information service”.

According to this national regulation, any organization applying for the establishment of an Internet news information service on the Chinese mainland must have registered capital of no less than 10 million yuan and at least five Chinese mainland editors who have engaged in journalism for longer than three years.

Yeeyan relaunched 39 days later under tight self-censorship, with all “political” news removed.

“It was difficult to figure out what we can say and what we cannot,” Chen Haozhi, founder of Yeeyan, told the Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend.

The most devastating issue for translators was finding so much of their hard work deleted, said a former volunteer.

“It wasn’t our fault because we couldn’t twist the original meaning of the news stories,” she said.

“I’ve got absolutely no idea what is sensitive and what is not.”

Admittedly, she said, they knew their work was “risky” as “most foreign news about China is negative”.

Yeeyan’s partnership with the Guardian newspaper had made the staff especially proud, the translator said.

“The website attracted many readers as it helped them bypass the two walls,” she said. “Most Chinese face two obstacles: the Great Firewall and the language barrier.”

Neutering was the only option for Yeeyan if they wanted to continue in business, she said.

Yeeyan was also bound by copyright law, she said. The translation company had to delete a group translation of Dan Brown’s blockbuster The Lost Symbol and apologize to the book’s Chinese publisher last year.

No appeal

Aside from suffering censorship or shutdowns for reasons unknown, a common complaint among Internet users and website operators is the lack of an appeal.

“You can only go to related departments and beg them to give you another chance,” Liao said.

As the Web master of an online poetry forum, Liao has a list of sensitive words he received from the local Internet authority.

“They hope we will delete posts containing these words,” he said, “but I don’t see it making much sense.”

The forum was shut down twice last year.

“We have no idea why,” he said. “It came all of a sudden.”

In response, the site’s server was moved to Hong Kong.

“It’s impossible to rescue your website if you violated the related law,” a Web master from China Unicom, Beijing branch, told the Global Times.

“As long as Douban is growing, it won’t care about what users say because the real threat comes from the authorities,” Fang said.

It’s pointless fighting the system, he said.

“We can only fight the slavish social environment and gradually gain a sense of citizenship,” he said.

Vague laws

There are 14 general laws and regulations governing illegal online behavior, all vague and lacking in detailed, practical provisions, according to Li Yonggang, a professor of Internet politics from Nan-jing University, in his newly published book Our Great Firewall: Expression and Governance in the Era of the Internet.

“As a result, it’s difficult to draw a line when operators and Web users censor, apart from the well-known restricted field of political issues,” he wrote.

There are more than 10 government organs entitled to supervise the Internet, Li said. This inevitably gives rise to conflicts, he believed.

Bans are also increasingly unpredictable, he said. Recipients receive no explanation and no comeback. Chinese mainland Web users tend to react with a pessimistic, alienated and impotent attitude.

“Chinese may criticize the evils of society, but at the same time they feel like participants,” Li said.

“In fact the Great Firewall is rooted in our hearts as so little ‘harmful information’ will ever come to light thanks to individuals’ self-discipline and website operators’ self-censorship.”

Online opinion is a double-edged sword, said Wang, also a bulletin board moderator. Irrational online outcries aren’t helping anyone, she argued. She cited the online petition for Sun Zhigang, famously beaten to death in 2003 for not carrying a temporary living permit.

Observers attributed the ending of the policy of custody and repatriation to online public sentiment. In fact, Wang said, the change of policy came about because of the SARS breakout.

“They were all eager to sign a petition when something happened but in fact it only led to the shutting down of these significant forums.

“We can’t stop censorship, but we can articulate the truth with a more rational attitude. When different opinions coexist, people find their own answers.”

Censorship is also necessary to prevent certain kinds of harm being done to others, argued Zhu Wei, a professor at China University of Politics and Laws in Beijing.

“The nude picture scandal wouldn’t have run out of control if there was no Internet,” he said. “Unrestricted, freedom can lead to violence.”

According to the newly-passed Tort Liability Law, any Web user or service provider who infringes upon the civil rights and benefits of another is liable.

This new catch-all is a valuable control over online opinion. According to Article 36, the infringed party can inform the Web service provider to delete, shield or cut the links as well as any other necessary measures.

“The Web service provider who doesn’t take necessary measures after receiving this information will bear joint liability along with the Web user,” the law states.

And, as shown by Google’sGoogle recent squabble with the Chinese government, it can be very hard to operate in the world’s most populous country. But Twitter’s Jack Dorsey has faith that TwitterTwitter will be able to operate in China, although it’s currently blocked by the government.

At a New York panel discussion on social media and digital activism, Chinese activist Ai Weiwei asked Dorsey whether he can promise availability of Twitter in China. Dorsey said: “I would say yes. It’s just a matter of time.” Weiwei called this answer “very philosophical”; knowing that a giant like Google has trouble securing its presence in China, a cautious answer like this by a much smaller Twitter instills little confidence.

Weiwei also pointed out a very interesting fact that westerners probably don’t think about: Twitter is a very different tool in Chinese and in English. “At 140 words, in Chinese, you can really write a novel. You can discuss most profound ideas really to democracy, freedom, poetry,” he said. Unfortunately, it seems that this fact didn’t escape Chinese censors, which have been blocking Twitter for nearly a year now.

via http://mashable.com/2010/03/16/twitter-china/

What, brother, is smoking, is not a cigarette, but loneliness!
(…) gē chōu de bú shì yān, shì jì mò

In July of 2009, someone posted a picture of a guy eating a bowl of noodles on a Baidu forum, and titled it, “What, brother, is eating, isn’t noodles, but loneliness!” After that, it ran out of control. People began to use this sentence on many other occasions, such as, “What, brother, is loving, isn’t you, but loneliness.” And “What, brother, is loving, isn’t beer, but loneliness.” This has become lots of peoples’ signature on MSN, QQ, and other social networking sites. (…)

Jia Junpeng, your mom is calling you to go home to eat!
(…) jiǎ jūn péng nǐ mā mā hǎn nǐ huí jiā chī fàn

Jia Junpeng may or not be a real person but, on July 16th, 2009, an empty post named “Jia Junpeng, your mom is calling you to go home to eat!” appeared on a World of Warcraft forum on Baidu Tieba. It was viewed by 390,617 people in the following few hours, and had over 17,000 replies. By the next day, there were 7,100,000 hits, and 300,000 replies. After that, it became the most popular network greeting online, and had permeated all sectors of society, including the media, who spent a lot of time on in-depth analysis of this quotation. (…)

Out buying soy sauce
(…) wǒ shì lái dǎ jiàng yóu de

It literally means, “I’m just out buying soy sauce.” The phrase took the Chinese Internets by storm in 2007, thanks to a Guangzhou TV news clip of a reporter asking a man on the street his opinion on the Edison Chen sex scandal. The man famously replied: “I don’t give a shit. I’m just out buying soy sauce.” Chinese Internet users have taken up the phrase as a cynical euphemism for “It’s none of my business.” or “Who gives a shit?” (…)

Distraught
(…) xīn shén bù níng

One day on CCTV’s, “Focus Interview,” there was an interview with a college student about how Google doesn’t filter out pornography. He said, “I think the harm of online pornography is particularly large. I have a classmate who used to obsess over dirty porn. He visits those website a lot a lot, he was very distraught for a long time.” So after that, whatever happens, people all say “distraught,” …

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Chinese Net Memes | Comments]

[2]http://www.uscc.gov/hearings/2005hearings/written_testimonies/05_04_14wrts/mulvenon_james_wrts.pdf