Great firewall of China

When I’m sending messages home from an internet cafe in an unfamiliar part of the world, I like to check out what the locals are doing there. In China, I saw a lot of people playing complicated multi-user games; they all seemed to be shooting each other. Posters on the walls showed fantasy characters with huge swords and angular haircuts.

But among the gamers, there were a few lonely bloggers. And now it turns out they weren’t so lonely after all.

There are, in fact, more than 47 million of them. In spite

of the Great Firewall of China, the famous censorship system that prevents people from reading and dispersing information, the Chinese have become the word’s most prolific bloggers.

With the world watching Beijing this month, Chinese bloggers are using all kinds of methods to bypass the firewall and get heard - including hosting their sites on foreign servers.

One of the most high-profile Chinese bloggers is Isaac Mao: in a fascinating interview he talks about the whole phenomena, and why he’s proud to have ‘blogger’ on his business card.

- Kate James