Spinning a Web

Zhou Shuguang’s brief but spectacular career as China’s first roving citizen reporter on the Internet ended abruptly last December after he was punched in the throat by an angry policeman in the northeastern city of Shenyang. Zhou’s offense: investigating a bizarre pyramid scheme involving ants and aphrodisiacs. The assault took place during a short stint in jail, after which plainclothes cops escorted Zhou to the airport and put him on a plane home, with dire warnings about what would happen to him if he returned. The small, bespectacled 26-year-old took heed. “I will keep silent now because I want to save my own skin,” Zhou later wrote in his blog.

Thus ended a nine-month adventure during which the onetime vegetable seller from a small village in Hunan province had vaulted to Internet stardom as a kind of digital knight errant; his blog, Zhou Shuguang’s Golden Age, publicized the plight of the victims of China’s frantic economic boom. At the peak of its fame, the blog drew 20,000 readers a day. Zhou, who called himself Zola after the 19th century French writer and activist, had hoped to inspire some of the country’s 47 million other bloggers to join him in the good fight, roaming the country and seeking out injustice, armed only with a thumb drive, a digital camera, a BlackBerry and a Gmail account. “All the lack of democracy in China can be traced to the lack of press freedom,” he told me earnestly last year as we sat in a tiny room where he had cadged floor space for the night from a fellow blogger in the southern city of Guangzhou. “That’s why I am trying to do journalism outside the system.”

From the beginning, Zhou knew he risked running up against the authorities, who aim to exercise as strict a control over China’s rapidly expanding virtual universe as they do over their citizens’ everyday lives in the real world. (Any day soon, China will surpass the U.S. as the nation with the largest number of people online.) But because so much of the Internet is ungovernable, it is the freest public space in the country, a place where individuals like Zhou constantly push the limits of permissible activity.

Just how far and fast Netizens are able — or allowed — to go will be a critical factor in the formation of China’s still embryonic civil society. There have been numerous recent demonstrations of the emerging power of the Internet, ranging from exposés of corruption to a web campaign that led to the freeing of hundreds of children and mentally handicapped men who had been kidnapped and forced to work as slaves in brick kilns to the relocation of a chemical plant away from the port city of Xiamen. Still, citizen journalism can be deadly work. Earlier this month, a man who filmed a confrontation between security officials and villagers protesting the siting of a garbage dump was beaten to death by the enraged officials.

Zhou’s vault to Web stardom came last April, when he was visiting Chongqing, a municipality in central China. Intrigued by a dispute that pitted a property developer against a stubborn homeowner whose refusal to leave his property had blocked the launching of construction, Zhou began writing blog entries and posting video and still images on the Web. The incident caught the imagination of Chinese Netizens, and Zhou and the Chongqing “nail house” (named thus because it stood out in an otherwise leveled landscape) became an overnight sensation. Apparently embarrassed by the publicity, the city government and the developer soon came to an agreement with the homeowner. Zhou was acclaimed by fellow bloggers and interviewed by Chinese and foreign reporters. He also began receiving text messages, e-mails and phone calls from other “nail house” owners across the country seeking his help.

For Zhou, it was a moment of revelation. He decided that, as a single, jobless Chinese citizen who “firmly believes in individual freedom,” he was perfectly suited to devoting himself to “helping evicted and displaced persons.” He also cheerfully declared his aim of “hyping” his way to fame so he would “never go back to selling vegetables.” Traveling on a shoestring budget and relying on donations from admirers and the people to whose aid he came, Zhou preached the digital gospel, educating his pupils in the arts of establishing a blog, posting, taking digital photos and videos, using instant-messaging tools and sites like Flickr, Twitter and Skype — often working with people who had never even turned on a computer before. Isaac Mao, co-founder of Chinese site CNBlog.org, describes Zhou as someone who “represents the beginning of a new trend of Chinese Internet users … It’s brave for him to express his opinion on his blog.”

Not surprisingly, Zhou soon found himself “GFW-ed,” as Chinese Netizens call having their sites blocked (in reference to the Great Firewall). By then, though, he was familiar with the techniques Chinese bloggers use to evade the authorities and managed to have his blog reappear on the Internet almost immediately by using proxy servers and mirror sites outside China. But Zhou’s luck ran out when he traveled to Shenyang to interview victims of a pyramid scheme involving a supposed aphrodisiac powder made from crushed ants. Victims handed over cash and were told they would get a guaranteed 30% annual return if they kept supplying the ants. Eventually, the scheme collapsed and hundreds of defrauded investors demonstrated repeatedly outside local government headquarters. After talking with some of the duped investors, Zhou was picked up by police on his way to do another interview; he spent two days and a long, long night in jail (that’s when he was punched after arguing with one of his interrogators). Upon hearing of Zhou’s retirement, reader Fang Qiangqiang (a screen name) tried to dissuade Zhou from returning to his hometown in Meitanba, Hunan province: “It’s not a good idea to go back home because what you can give people by selling vegetables is not comparable to what you are giving people by what you are doing now.”

Zhou claims he has not been changed by the experience, but his crusading days are over. With money borrowed from his parents, he says he is going back into the vegetable business, as well as opening a small coffee shop and Internet café. As for citizen journalism, “I have already spent more than half a year as a living example of how this works,” he wrote on his blog last December. “The task of saving yourselves is in your own hands now.” Many millions of Chinese Netizens will be watching to see who — if anyone — among their number rises to that challenge.