writes Kirsty Needham. Artwork by Karl Hilzinger.

To 22-year-old Zhou Bo, “the news” is whatever appears on her computer screen as she logs in to send an instant message. 

Sitting in a suburban Beijing dumpling restaurant, discussing the tragedy of the Burmese cyclone, or bob hairdos, she is as connected to the global water cooler as many Australian women her age - within limits. Go searching for the “wrong” news - anti-government or immoral - on baidu.com, China’s answer to Google, and, like most Chinese websites, a cartoon policeman is watching - an animated reminder that the Great Firewall employs a legion of cyber cops to keep out foreign and dissident viewpoints. Try to click on the link and you will likely see nothing at all.

The internet is creating unprecedented opportunities for young Chinese to express themselves and switch on to the world, but it is also the focus of a massive blocking effort by a worried Chinese government. And it’s not just about overt politics. Faced with an explosion of blogs, podcasts, socialnetworking sites and instant messaging, propaganda officials are struggling to achieve the same cultural control  they hold over traditional media.

A report by the official China Internet Network Information Centre this year found 107 million young Chinese under the age of 25 were online, making up half of all internet users. Entertainment, downloading music, networked games, making friends and following sport and celebrities were the biggest drivers. One third were blogging, one third used the internet via their mobile, and almost all used instant  messaging.

But CINIC was concerned that three-quarters of online teenagers played “addictive” games that were disrupting their education. The report issued this warning: “Young netizens have not yet formed world values and they have weak ability of self control, so we are facing a big problem of how to help them establish a right consciousness.”

A generation switched-off from the lectures of state-owned TV and staid newspapers has rushed online to energetically create, communicate and share its own downloadable, high-resolution opinions.

In the fashionable grey-brick “hutong” bar street of Nanluo Guxiang in Beijing, the cafes open late in the morning and when the first customers file in, they flip open their laptops as quickly as they order their first lattes. Free wi-fi access is mandatory to draw a young crowd around here, and wave after wave of students and office workers freely blog, message and video conference until closing time. Shi Wenya, 24, says all her friends have laptops. “We use the internet every day for instant messaging and news. Compared to watching TV, there is much more information online. It’s more interesting and more convenient,” she says.

Even in remote desert towns such as Jiayuguan in western Gansu province, once the last outpost of the Chinese empire and the end of
the Great Wall, young Chinese who can’t afford their own computer spend hours in dark, cavernous rooms humming with up to 50 Networked PCs. Posters for the online fantasy World of Warcraft line the concrete walls of these “wang ba” or internet cafes, where 20-somethings (teenagers are banned) can escape from the dusty streets. Across rural China, mobile phone stores promoting new
handsets with even more convenient internet access are now rivalling the wang ba signs.

Andrew Lih, a digital media researcher in Beijing who is writing a book on Wikipedia (banned in China), says young Chinese “are rather sceptical of official news outlets”, but while a tech-savvy elite can use proxy servers to overcome the Great Firewall, he says most can’t  be bothered.

“The internet is mostly used for social and entertainment purposes ... to connect with friends or new people inside China,” Lih says.

Young Chinese want live interaction and are big users of instant messaging rather than email, he says. The most popular free messaging program in China, QQ, has more than 220 million people using chat rooms, gaming and dating services. “A lot of young people are taking to the internet as their primary entertainment because TV is very boring and tightly controlled by the state,” says Jeremy Goldkorn, co-founder of danwei.org, a Chinese media watch website.

As the disposable income of young Chinese rises and becomes attractive to advertisers, Goldkorn says a burgeoning market of celebrity and sports-driven magazines and television shows has sprung up. City newsstands are crowded with Chinese versions of the same glossy women’s fashion, lifestyle, gossip and men’s titles that appear in the West, plus as many local ones.

More interesting, Goldkorn says, is the huge influence on youth culture of blogging (China has an estimated 49 million blogs), and BBS or forum websites where people “discuss everything from news to relationships” (1.6 billion BBS pages are seen a day). He also identifies the trend for spoofing or “er gao” (evil work) - making video-shop parodies of famous films, TV or music clips - as “very popular and slightly subversive”.

“Chinese culture enjoys a good laugh and black humour, more than some people suspect. There are not a lot of public places to enjoy that, but the internet has allowed it ... Part of spoofing culture is taking the piss and enjoying yourself,” he says.

Kaiser Kuo is a cultural commentator who made his name as the lead guitarist with China’s first heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty, and now blogs and works as director of digital strategy for Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing. “It would be hard to overstate the importance of the internet in internationalising youth culture in China,” Kuo says.

“Young urbanites especially are very adept at finding free downloadable media, through peer-to-peer file sharing services (Bit Torrent, eMule), MP3s of international artists of all sorts of genres, and terabyte after terabyte of pirated TV shows. 24, Prison Break, Desperate Housewives, you name it.”

Subtitled versions are often available within a day of a show airing in the US. “With the internet, they don’t just get the media in isolation either: They can understand it in context, through fan sites dedicated to artists or their musical genres, or favourite TV series,” Kuo says.

Among constant measures to stem foreign influence on youth culture and shape morally sound minds, the Chinese government bans foreign animation and outlandish hairstyles on TV; restricts foreign films and recently announced that all podcast websites must be stateowned.
Chinese actress Tang Wei was this year banned from television after appearing in Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s sexually explicit film, Lust, Caution, set in wartime Shanghai.

But breakaway success stories such as the Super Girls reality TV series – a pop idol contest that drew 400 million viewers in its finale in 2006, despite being labelled “poison for the youth” by a party stalwart, show global culture is permeating, to the benefit of Chinese artists, listeners and viewers.

Kuo says the quality of home-grown music and film has improved enormously. “Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea have all been massively influential in shaping Chinese youth culture, but that’s really starting to change ... home-grown pop acts - the male duo Yu Quan, for example - and even edgier artists like Xu Wei from Beijing - are closing the gap.”

He says China has always had raw talent, but was missing out on the international-level producers and engineers. “Recordings I hear now from the mainland are really catching up in quality, and some of the larger labels, whether international or domestic, have shown a willingness to back their acts with significant budgets.”

“Home-grown screen stars - Xu Jinglei and Zhang Ziyi for instance - are garnering international attention, and mainland film has certainly passed Taiwan and Hong Kong in terms of the accolades it receives internationally. Television’s still a wasteland, but hey, you have to start
somewhere.”

Kuo believes the influence of the other Asian cultural centres in China will wane, but he doubts a new selfconfidence in China’s cultural output is the result of Communist Party edicts.

“Much of the culture that’s going to gain international acceptance and penetrate markets outside of the mainland will, I suspect, consist of cultural output the party wouldn’t actively promote - indeed, might actually oppose. Give anything coming out of China an edgy, slightly dissident patina and it tends to do well.”

Kirsty Needham is deputy foreign editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, and
author of A Season in Red (Allen & Unwin).
Karl Hilzinger is a Walkley Award-winning artist with The Australian Financial Review.