A big progress for social media in China

One of the hot topic is China’s earthquake. The earthquake happened at 2:28pm, May 12th. Five hours after the earthquake, China Central Television (CCTV) started offering non-stop and comprehensive live reporting. Meanwhile, there was synchronous online live reporting in CCTV website – www.cctv.com.

In Chinese media history, there has been no such live reporting for a disaster before. Every piece of news which will be reported on CCTV or published in CCTV website, must be checked and approved by the government authority. However, for this disaster, all reportings in CCTV website are not checked by the government authority, which means all are first-hand information and reflects the truth. Moreover, people post thousands of pictures about this earthquakes in all kinds of Chinese website’s bbs. Also, people freely state their viewpoints and feelings about government’s reaction to this earthquake. One of Chinese popular websites is www.tianya.cn.  

From 19 May to 21 May, there were National Mourning Days. During these three days, the color turned to be black and white in all of  Chinese websites, no matter their servers are in China or outside of China. All gaming websites and online game providers closed all games and entertainments, reporting the earthquake from different angles instead. All video sharing websites stopped offering other entertainning videos. When people wanted to search for some entertaining videos in video sharing websites, it displayed “no result found” in those websites. People could not even use the searching function in some video sharing websites. Instead, there were all videos about the earthquake.

In fact, Chinese government is highly praised for its reaction to this earthquake. Most Chinese feel it is big improvement to let social media have more freedom.  

by Si Xuan