The Chinese government has a long tradition of keeping an eye to the media in order to prevent critical messages towards the communist party, a task that has become difficult since the rise of the open and worldwide Internet. The government started attempts to control the content on their domestic network, the rise of the ‘great firewall of China’. All network traffic entering or leaving China must pass through government controlled gateways, with dramatic results: bloggers avoid questioning the government to avoid being pulled of the web, and Skype was summoned to filter out certain words in their text messages. Pacific Morning Post pointed me to an interesting article this morning, it seems that approaches are changing, with a new attempt for the Chinese communist government to safeguard their interests on the web.

50 cents army of web commenters

The Chinese government realized in 2005 that they were falling behind, their efforts to block the ‘wrong’ message did not communicate the ‘right’ message towards the people. Nanjing university was forced to hire ‘web commenters’ to safeguard their campus forum, after a government obliged closure of their BBS. Later, party leaders from the same province started recruiting their own teams. These pro communist commenters got their name because they earn about 50 Yuan (€ 0.40) for every pro-party view that they push through chat rooms and web forums. By the middle of 2007, schools and government parties were all reporting success stories from their web commenters. The Culture Ministry started to hold training sessions for web commenters, who are required to pass an exam for job certification. Topics include “Guidance of Public Opinion Problems On the Internet” and “Crisis Management for Web Communications.”

An army to fight against the openness of the internet

Isaac Mao reports to feer.com that the 50 cents army is an attempt to overrule the bloggers and journalists that have the ‘wrong’ message. “This can be seen as another kind of censorship system, in which the fifty Cents Party can be used both to monitor public speech and to upset the influence of other voices in the online space.”

The Chinese internet opening up?

The ideology to pay people to communicate your message on the web is debatable, but analysts say that the 50 cent army might be the first sign of the Chinese internet opening up. As the party is looking for new ways to meet the challenges of the new information age, they seem to relinquish their strongholds on the web. The recruiting of people to send out the right message is a sign of weakening control. Could this approach exist with a possible 1.3 million Chinese on the web in the future?