Breaching the great firewall

The partys all-powerful Publicity Department tells operators to filter postings for sensitive words. Their detection means automatic deletion. But dissidents are undeterred. News on October 8 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 Lius 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 20 million registered users since it was launched in August 2009. Last August,China Youth News,a newspaper run by the ruling partys Communist Youth League,reported that in a nationwide survey more than 45 per cent of people under 40 said they were frequent weibo users. More than 94 per cent said that weibo had changed their lives.

Hu Yong of Peking University estimates that more than 10 million 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 Chinas authoritarian regime.

Many of the governments 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 Chinas 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 Prize winner,during an anti-Japanese demonstration. Mid-ranking officials in Beijing are being trained at the citys 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 Chinas microblogging services relabelled themselves as beta versions,a possible hint that this was all just an experiment.

The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010