China promotes and takes great pride in the growth of the Internet in the country,under its careful monitoring. But its over 450 million surfers mean something more than Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg choosing to vacation in Beijing and visiting its Web company Baidu; it also means an online image,a blog post,a message on one of its Twitter clones,can create chinks in Chinas great firewall. Which is what happened last weekend: the death of 53-year-old Qian Yunhui might have been forgotten as an unfortunate road accident,but the image of his body crushed under a truck became a viral sensation. The online outrage was directed at government officials for their suspected collusion in what the Netizens alleged to be murder,since Qian had been campaigning against their alleged illegal land grabbing in his village. The Net is where the Chinese are staking out,in very small measures,their own space for free speech; where they are creating an alternative dialogue on issues that the state-controlled mainstream media is not interested in; where people are asserting a domain of their own. It happened in late October,when a young man rammed his sedan into a college girl and drove off,saying,My father is Li Gang a deputy police chief. Comment,sarcastic,critical and grieving in turn,proliferated online; until Li Gangs son,a news report said,was arrested. Social networking sites became the space not only for collective mourning but also for a personal discourse on the state of China when schoolchildren were attacked in a series of horrifying incidents early this year. China has muzzled major corporations like Google,but managing the micro narrative of millions of its own intensive surfers could be a tough one.
