The Oakland Tribune writes about the cat-and-mouse game being played out on the Chinese Internet:
A generation of netizens is emerging that is worldly, informed and willing to take pokes at the government. “The Internet has taught the Chinese youth egalitarian values,” said Lisa Li, founder of China Youthology, which examines the attitudes and beliefs of those ages 15 to 25.
There is a significant amount of online freedom, said Guobin Yang, assistant professor at Barnard College in New York City and author of “The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. “In the past year, the nation’s top leaders have held unfiltered Internet chats with netizens. (Premier) Wen Jiabao held a two-hour session with Internet people. He responded to all kinds of questions. They raised very challenging questions. People were very critical of him. It shows how important the Internet is and how the government is paying close attention to it.”
The yin and the yang of China’s Internet plays out daily on the online video site Youku.com, which has become a media and
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cultural force in the country. Its emergence as the nation’s top video site — it gets about 200 million unique visitors a month in a nation with more than 400 million Internet users — illustrates the rapidly changing Chinese Web in a quickly changing country.
