Ever since chinaSMACK popped onto the English China blog scene with its regular translations of popular and quirky (if not outright scandalous) news and phenomena from China’s ever-vibrant and ever-teeming BBS discussion forums, more and more other English China blogs have begun copying their formula.
To be sure, chinaSMACK wasn’t the first (nor the last) to succeed in the niche of what it calls “cultural voyeurism,” offering insights into China’s modern society and culture through translations of original Chinese material. Both EastSouthWestNorth and Global Voices Online preceded chinaSMACK, the former translating mountains of Chinese news articles and the latter regularly translating Chinese netizen comments to contentious and often political issues as they appeared on China’s internet.
However, chinaSMACK is arguably the first English-language blog about China to really position and promote itself as featuring (and only featuring) translated Chinese internet pop-culture phenomena, putting the thoughts and comments of actual Chinese netizens front and center. This contrasted starkly if not refreshingly against the majority of English China blogs dominated by the personal (and often political) commentary of the “Western” expats that operated them. By translating, offering context as needed, and even supplying a glossary for common Chinese internet slang and memes all in one place, chinaSMACK made Chinese commentary of China accessible, and you were more or less left to draw your own conclusions.
Growth and Success
By most accounts, chinaSMACK has been very successful, itself citing an average of 7000 visitors per day. Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast all show chinaSMACK’s growth and healthy traffic, despite all of them being flawed in their own ways (i.e. Compete doesn’t measure traffic from outside the United States).
Mind you, it isn’t YouTube, but these are pretty damn good numbers for a niche blog about China. The only other major English China blogs with more traffic are Danwei and Shanghaiist. However, both have been around for years, whereas chinaSMACK has only been online for a prepubescent nine months. Furthermore, chinaSMACK boasts a healthy community of commenters, with each post now easily garnering 50, 100, or hundreds of comments.
Changing The Game
So is this sort of success motivating other English China blogs to expend the effort in directly translating Chinese source material, including Chinese netizen comments from the depths of China’s popular discussion forums? Has there been a shift in English blogging about China?
Having long watched and subscribed to many English China blogs, I certainly have noticed so. A lot more content on English China blogs these days are being sourced directly from China’s news portals and discussion forums by an increasing amount of blogs, so long as their authors can read the Chinese.
One notable example: Shanghaiist. Despite its namesake, Shanghaiist is something of an aggregator of news for not just Shanghai but all around China. If you look through their archives, you’ll notice that they typically derived most of their past content from the Western news media (WSJ, New York Times) or portals (i.e. Yahoo News), official Chinese news media sources (i.e. Xinhua, China Daily), or other smaller English China blogs. Yet, starting from this past January, we suddenly saw a lot more posts from Chinese news portals and discussion forums, particularly Netease.
However, the most telling signs of chinaSMACK’s influence upon the English China blogosphere comes from the flattering imitations of…
China Digital Times, an exhaustive American aggregator of all China news inconveniently blocked in China:
- A Satire That Caused an Uproar in Both China and The Philippines
- For Sale: One Life in China
- Official Sacked for Overseas Trip, with Netizens’ Reactions
- Persian Xiaozhao: My First “Tea” Experience (Part V) (With Comments)
- Persian Xiaozhao: We Are in This Together
- “Erroneous” Western Democracy Not For China, Says Official (Updated with Bloggers’ Reactions)
ChinaGeeks, a well-written blog that was recently redesigned and starting to make a name for itself:
- On Dating Foreigners and Penis Size
- Thoughts on the New Healthcare Proposal
- Do Chinese People Only Listen to Foreigners?
And the most recent example who today just threw up its first two posts translating Chinese discussion forum mischief?
littleredbook.cn, an aspirational China advertising media portal that combines 1 part business portfolio, 1 part blog, 1 part psuedo-Alltop, 1 part Ning social network, all mixed with a generous squeeze of good design and poured into four shot glasses:
- Visa; Going out to dinner with China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; Chinese netizens react to politically charged ad
- Chinese netizens respond to ladyboys publicly crying for help in southern China.
Yeah, I’m not sure why an advertising blog is posting about Chinese netizen reactions to transsexuals either.
All of this is absolutely fantastic to any China-watcher who wants to get a broader, deeper, or better idea of what is going on in China amongst the Chinese themselves (as opposed to Western journalists and expats). Tons of stuff are either happening on or being reported on Chinese discussion forums that escape the notice of the vast majority of major English-language media simply because they cannot read the Chinese language. The more people who can translate this stuff, the more everyone benefits from an expanding coverage of China and its denizens.
The Challenges Ahead
But here’s the problem for chinaSMACK: The one thing that made it unique and fresh is now being commoditized. As such, it risks being overshadowed, crowded out, or outright replaced. Sure, it may be inherently male of me to say this but if chinaSMACK wants to remain the standard-bearer, in the niche of translating Chinese netizen pop-culture for the consumption of the voyeuristic English-reading masses, it needs to step up its efforts. There are only so many people interested in reading informative or entertaining content about China with only so much time each day. Does chinaSMACK want to remain the one website, the one name, the one brand that these people will think of and recommend to future China neophytes?
chinaSMACK has benefited from and increasing global interest in China. That same increasing global interest is also what is attracting a new crop of well-written, well-designed, competitive blogs with more contributors, more content, and possibly more funding than a single girl by her lonesome tip-tapping away at the keyboard somewhere in Shanghai, translating what piques her interest that day from the Chinese discussion forums. Understandably, translating Chinese into English is an extremely labor-intensive proposition, but chinaSMACK needs more than one post a day, and the stream of content and activity simply cannot stop just because the founder is sick. It needs its contributors to do more, or it needs more contributors. It needs a better hosting plan.
chinaSMACK was onto something good, but it cannot afford to rest on its laurels, especially if other websites are taking hints from its playbook. There’s an appetite, if not hunger, for what chinaSMACK offers, but it just isn’t serving it up fast enough to satisfy demand. Far greater success with far greater rewards lie in overcoming these challenges. I hope chinaSMACK is up for it because I want to see it succeed.
There’s probably a good motivational story in it.
I think that Chinasmack has become the drudgereport of Chinese blogs. Then again, I tried going there this morning and it doesn’t seem to work. I wonder why…
Interesting timing seeing as you can’t access ChinaSMACK right now. Very enjoyable and in depth analysis, though, Kai Pan.
To be honest I’ve always been a bit skeptical since everybody starting falling in love with ChinaSMACK. For a month there you pretty much weren’t a real China blog unless you sung the praises of this website (this one included). Personally, I’ve always been a bit curious why this site has been such a hit. To me it seems like it’s full of a whole lot of “voyeurism” and not enough “culture”. Just at quick glance at some of their recent posts (Old men getting jiggy with some old women??) makes me wonder why I should even care what the Chinese community has to say about it. Do you really care, I mean…really?
Heck, I could log onto a BBS forum here in Xinjiang and translate hot topics. It would probably boost my incredibly light traffic (at least compared with ChinaSMACK). I don’t because 1) these forums – at least here – only represent a small portion of the population therefore giving a very false impression of Xinjiang to any reader and 2) hot topics like the ones translated by CS aren’t relevant a week later.
To be fair, I think that CS’s glossary is a great contribution to the English-language China community. I know that Fauna and all the contributors work very hard and are meeting a need somewhere (obviously), but it’s not mine. IMHO.
LoL, I actually added the “It needs a better hosting plan” after not being able to visit the website for most of the day.
I can definitely see how the high-brow crowd might not find chinaSMACK to be that interesting. Of course, I don’t think chinaSMACK really cares. Different strokes for different folks.
I do want to say that “culture” as a concept is rather subjective. I’d argue that chinaSMACK offers tons of culture, whether you want to call it pop culture or modern culture but culture nonetheless. It just depends on how you look at it, or if you’re looking for it at all.
The main reason I think so many people like chinaSMACK is because its subject matter is easy to identify with, even if you denigrate it as being on a very basic level. For example, you may not like it, but the taboo of old people “getting jiggy in the woods” resonates with far more people than more high-brow “cultural” esoterica that most people can’t or won’t care to relate to.
Next, I disagree with the two reasons you give for why you don’t personally find much value in what chinaSMACK does (translating BBS stuff). 1) You wouldn’t GIVE a false impression if you don’t misrepresent what you’re presenting. Whether others GET a false impression or not is largely out of your control. 2) The topic of the Vietnam War came and went but what endures to this day are the reactions of those who protested it, the social phenomenon that surrounded an event. The old men getting jiggy in the woods may not be relevant next week, but how a subset of Chinese society reacted to them can. Again, it just depends on what you’re looking to learn from it all.
Take that discussion for what you will, because I’m certainly not trying to begrudge you of what you personally prefer and subjectively value as important. Cheers.
Meh…I guess I come across as high-brow, but my opinion has little to do with the type of content – I think the results of this blog translation phenomenon have been fascinating, and I believe your analysis of it is spot-on.
But why, when the Kappa girl story first broke, did ChinaSMACK feel a need to offer the unedited video for download from their site? Why is it that if Zhang Ziyi gets caught doing crazy stuff with her boyfriend they feel a need to proudly post the NSFW photos? It just seems unnecessary.
I think that if ChinaSMACK wants to succeed they’re going to need to offer more frequent contributions (like you said) covering a wider range of subjects, but it’s my hope that they can do so with a little more common decency.
I’ve followed chinaSMACK since the early days, so it is with a historical observation that I suspect this:
chinaSMACK always intended to post exactly what they see, only translated. This includes all the shocking or uncomfortable profanity, violence, and nudity. If they found a story that was viral precisely because some indecent photos or videos were making the rounds, they wanted to share it as it is.
However, two things forced them to compromise.
1) Hosting limitations: Their hosting isn’t set up for handling too many people downloading larger video files.
2) Advertising restrictions: Google or Adbrite probably told them they can’t be too explicit with the nudity.
If Zhang Ziyi is a hot topic, it would make sense to show why, wouldn’t it?
chinaSMACK is not afraid and perhaps even seeks to show what it reports as brutally honest as it can get away with.
Again, the above are just what I suspect, having observed how chinaSMACK has evolved over the past 9 months or so, and from what I know about internet media and publishing.
“Common decency” is subjective. Some want their information to be moderated or censored to their personal sensibilities. Others prefer the opposite, so they can draw their own conclusions.
Hmmm… are you my alter ego, Kai?
LoL, no, that would actually be FDLR.
The future is in being available to everyone – that’s why all of my posts are in English and Chinese. I reckon Chinasmack would be even more popular if it offered both languages (and not just English in translation).
Oh, and CS’s glossary is the shit. Really, really, reallllly great.
If they can’t even get one English translation post out a day, I don’t think they’re ready to start doing two-way translations.
Great post Kai. And loving the new design of CN Reviews (if it’s not actually “new”, please blame my RSS reader).
One site you didn’t mention is Danwei.org, who has been an excellent connection to the “in-Chinese” world for English-speaking bloggers/readers for years.
Thanks, sexalicious Ryan. New design is about 5 days old so no need to blame your RSS reader (I live in mine too).
I actually did mention Danwei, though not explicitly with regards to translating Chinese content. They definitely do that in the process of producing the news digests and content they publish, but relative to the other sites mentioned, they don’t present it as “here’s the translation” so much as “this said this.”
Thanks for the mention, Ryan, but Danwei doesn’t really do all that much translation of Chinese forum content. It takes a certain level of commitment to translate entire comment threads, and to keep it up so that readers can gain a sense of the character of particular forums, and it’s too easy when translating a selection of comments to slant things in a particular direction, whether deliberately or unconciously (plus the fact that different forums have different personalities, so even an entire thread might be misleading as a representative of online sentiment). I personally tend to choose to translate texts that are intended to be relatively independent while fitting into a larger conversation – blog posts, op-eds, and occasionally even top-level forum posts – rather than comments that really require an entire thread as context.
So I admire what ChinaSMACK is doing, and the material they put up is interesting to me from time to time, which is all you can really ask of a site that draws its content from the entire breadth of Chinese cyberspace.
chinaSMACK is fun, interesting and (once in a while) thought-provoking. I love it and have contributed a few things myself. On the other hand people need to remember to take things in context. Just as commenters at http://www.freerepublic.com do not represent average Americans, some of the Chinese comments don’t represent “average” Chinese either.
I do notice that the more racy / controversial posts get way more comments than the others, but that is definitely not unique to chinaSMACK.
Chinasmack, though enjoyable in a somewhat sleazy, gossipy way, isn’t anything particularly insightful or clever. Being “first” might count for something if it had established any firsts, but as the OP said, it didn’t. She does get major props for being a woman who runs her own blog among the mostly white guys who filter and explain China to the folks back home.
ESWN is without peer, in my opinion. His archive – if he truly is a one-man band, as he purports to be – is phenomenal, and he has multiple posts EVERY day. Not only that, but Mr. Soong uses his marketing and business acumen to great purpose when examining various things, and his story about how he got started, working for the FBI, is fantastic.
I’ll give the English language China-themed blogosphere more respect when it’s more than just a bunch of white guys from a few countries, writing pithy rebuttals to the NYT, CNN, etc; and who tended to see China in monolithic qualities (frequent posts on China as a herd or group, rather than giving cities their own personalities, understanding regions beyond food, etc)
Or who romanticize China’s poor in a way that might never do with those of, say, Liverpool, Baltimore, etc.
I agree with you entirely on ESWN. Soong is a beast of a man, breast-fed by the most sought after prize-winning stud bulls. Yes, only he can be breast fed by bulls.
With chinaSMACK, I think the insights or “cleverness” are dependent more upon the observer. If you’re already familiar with Chinese discussion forums, you won’t find chinaSMACK very interesting, since you can already read the source material. However, if you’re not, you’ll find their content to be significantly different from the usual topics by the “bunch of white guys from a few countries, writing pithy rebuttals to the NYT, CNN,etc.” you mention. Therein lies the possible insights one could gain. As with all things, YMMV.
Overall, I’m all for people blogging about China, as I think it’s a good step for people to organize and improve upon their understanding of China.
Oh, and saying that the highbrow crowd doesn’t appreciate ChinaSmack, is that accurate, or some kind of populist putdown :-)
I drink Schlitz with my caviar, not champagne, yet I find ChinaSMACK pretty banal. Now, where exactly does that place my brow?
To my knowledge, CDT predates ChinaSMACK. The former’s been around at least since 2006.
Yes, CDT is older. I unfortunately cannot access CDT directly from here in China. Does anyone know or care to dig through their archives to see when they started doing the whole “let’s translate Chinese netizen comments!” thing? I got the feeling that it only started happening after chinaSMACK. However, given the sheer amount of aggregated and reposted stuff through CDT, the translated ones aren’t that noticeable.
One important aspect, something I see as hugely important in fact, is with a greater number of blogs and other content providers translating a greater sample of the China blog/BBS-o-sphere can be understood by outside observers.
ESWN and Global Voices play an important role in this regard, but with more voices filling more niches, and importantly these voices being commercial successes (being sustainable) an understanding of issues affecting China, and the opinion of Chinese netizens, can be better understood by the world.
Of course different tastes affect different niches.
I would expect more and more of these, but first-mover advantage probably counts for a lot.