Web influence

Amazing how things have changed with the web influence in China since I arrived a year ago. It has become more "transparent". There were several "heavy" news first broke from the Chinese websites frequent by younger netizens. To name a few events: Sichuan earthquake and its subsequent news updates and the Beijing Transport department staff's rude behaviour in a Shenzhen restaurant. And now the taxi driver strikes in Chongqing and Sanya. The news from the web has forced the commi3 (not a typo) gov't to think how best to handle the crowd. And sure enough, it has bent to the public; more open and more readily "admitted" to mistakes. The commi3 has to as the newer generations are more computer savy and less tolerant to "@buses".

From the latest Sanya strike, the city gov't and the provincial gov't had sacked three high position officials, apologized on TV (that's the first) and got the taxi rental company immediately to refund overcharged amounts. Some taxi drivers were overcharged as much as RMB 7,400.00. That smoothed things over really fast. If it weren't for the Internet age with bloggers and video cellphones, no pressure would have placed on these yahoos. The taxi drivers would have suffered.

This friend of iron-wife called the other week, she was wondering how to report "abuse" of power with the Shxxxhai gov't. You see, this friend and another CBC have a restaurant in a location that the gov't wants it for development. After negotiation, never in your favour in value, they refused to "relocate". One night, the restaurant was trashed. They suspect "you know who" did it. They want to let the world know about this, to expose this type of behaviour....

This won't work. 1) Right foreign newspaper wants to write this after their gov'ts want some bailout money from over here and 2) It's old news, so what else is new there for the foreign journalists to write about. They need to turn to the bloggers here and have video capturing the destruction, etc... The domestic younger crowd seems to feel more "self-righteous" and can do more "good". Have not heard from them since the call. Maybe they "settled".