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Blogger.com
The mysterious author(s) of the controversial blog "Sex and Shanghai" now allow only invited readers. |
Emotions can fly high online in China. This week, they reached a new peak.
A writer with the pseudonym "China Bounder" had been publishing his Sex and Shanghai blog for months. There, he described his sexual adventures of a British English-language teacher at one of Shanghai's universities.
Last week, China Bounder suddenly found himself embroiled in an emotional controversy and closed his blog to all except invited readers, using Blogger's new privacy feature.
Very few Chinese net users had stumbled into this racy weblog because domains from Google's Blogger service were blocked by the Chinese censor for rather unclear reasons. For equally unclear reasons Blogger-hosted weblogs were later unblocked. That's when a larger group of Chinese net users found Sex and Shanghai.
First, the new readers started to hunt for clues to identify the anonymous weblogger. Quickly, that hunt turned nasty when psychology professor Zhang Jiehai started a campaign to kick this foreigner out of the country (according to a translation by ESWN):
"In his blog, China Bounder used extremely obscene and filthy language to record how he -- a foreign language teacher in Shanghai -- used his status as a teacher to dally with Chinese women, most of whom were his students. At the same time, he did everything that he could to insult, debase and distort the Chinese government and the Chinese men."
Traffic and comments to Sex and Shanghai went through the roof. The scared author decided to hide his weblog. In a statement he made to the media China Bounder now claims that Sex and Shanghai was a hoax from the beginning. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:
"'We did not anticipate quite the level of anger this would raise,' said the message, which said the authors behind the cyber name 'China Bounder' included a British man, an Australian woman, two Chinese men and a Japanese woman."
...If that e-mail was no hoax, of course.
Blogger Mark Baker offers some thoughtful commentary on this flap today.
