Anonymity: Is This The Real Chinese Vox Populi?

I don’t often start posts with quotes, but here’s one to kick off with:

In real life, we talk fake stuff with our real names. On the Internet, we talk real stuff with our fake names.

Although yours truly is an advocate of the Real-Name Blogging system (he uses real names on all of his blogs, as well as on other blogs including CN Reviews), he realizes that maybe not everyone wants to use their real names. Even for things as “non-polit” as the time-and-again-delayed opening of Beijing’s new Subway lines, there’s that bit of laoli laodao (唠呖唠叨), or yak yak yak, that is best kept anonymous (one of the recent comments, “the authorities fooled us again!”, is better kept anonymous — China Internet veterans would know why).

This is the funny bit about the Chinese Internet. On forums as diverse in topics as Mac and mass transit, the funniest or most thought-provoking posts are often started by The Mao Zedong Trainset or the Super Rascal Rabbit — yes, people with names that will never make it to the average Chinese ID card. Freeway forums ban people with names named after (pardon the pun) freeway cloverleaves. The heaviest criticisms of The Powers That Be are almost never signed with a true name — the thing coming to the “truest name” is probably a virtual John Hancock by “John Doe”.

Let’s remind ourselves of the fact that the Games are near — and that everyone’s getting on edge. As a result, if the Web gets jittery our side… we’d know why. Getting on edge with a fake name is probably safer than getting on edge with a real name.

Yet this very phenomenon is interesting in its own right. We’re beginning to see uncensored content in Chinese about things that appear closer to “the truth”. The funny thing is, they’re true — but the names of those who wrote the stuff are fake.

On the other hand, the moment a CCTV (or evening Beijing TV) microphone is spotted, many a citizen switch into “satisfy-those-above-us-who-are-watching-us” mode and say the kind of stuff that they know the guys “up there” — well, “want to hear”. Bad commentary is nearly always dumped — at least never shown on the mundane silver screen.

Want to know why this is happening? Go back to the quote at the start of this post.

Interesting.