Wang Jianshuo Interview: Shanghai’s Veteran Blogger (part II)

Wang Jianshuo, Veteran Blogger of Wangjianshuo’s Blog from Shanghai, China.

Part II: Wang Jianshuo, noted Shanghai blogger, explains his philosophy of perspective and how he keeps control of the online debate on his weblog. Part I is here.

Interview Transcript

How do you deal with extreme comments on your blog and maintain neutral?

First, most important thing is to understand how this world works. My favorite story is the “blind man and the elephant”, anything in this world is like the elephant and any person is like the blind man. You can only grasp part of it (the world), most of the time just a very small part of it. So when I read all those comments, I assume that every comment I read are all part of this world. I realized for any questions, there are many different correct answers even though most people think there should only be one correct answer. Actually, there are many conflicting answers but they are all correct answers.

For example, is China a good or bad country? It’s a good country and a bad country. Is it a rich country? Yes it is. Is it a poor country? Yes it is. I think there are many reasons: first reason is that you can only see part of it, just like the “blind man and the elephant”, the second reason you see it from different perspective. It’s just like this name card for example, is this a white name card or a red name card? I think it’s white, no, it’s red. From different perspectives, you can say different things. So you mix all this together and you can see the different opinions.

So as a blogger, I facilitate the communication, and I try to understand no matter how extreme an opinion is, he is telling the truth, he is right, and the guy on the other extreme, he is also right. My responsibility is just to help these two people to see which part this person see, which perspective does this person see, which relevant scale does this person see, so adding all this together, we can put these two guys together and have them shake hands and say ok, we have a better understanding of the world.

I remember in my blog, there was someone from the proud Tibet, and he shared his feeling about this, he said “Before I came to this blog, I really hated the people in China, because of this, but after being here, I’ve read a lot of comments here and now I don’t hate them anymore because I know there are reasons behind it. ” I think it’s the same with the anti-Tibet group, so they come together.

How does this make you feel that you are changing people’s perception like this?

For example, in Tibet, there are two groups fighting with each other, I will see it differently. When they are fighting against each other, you draw the line right here (between the two groups), but actually I draw the line here (next to the two groups). I say “there is a group of people like you and me trying to bring people together, and there’s an other group who do not want to sit down together”, so we just grab them from this camp although they have different opinons and put them into the other camp and have them start talking and communicating with each other and making it a better world. Just like the French and the Chinese at that time boycotting Olympics. Here we had the anti-Carrefour protests. The French and Chinese are coming together to bring a worst future for the world; what they are doing is destroying the whole world I think, so we are in the other camp.

Where can people go to find you and your blog?

home.Wangjianshuo.com