China Blog’s not Dead

who's muzzling your voice?

A Popup Chinese author writes that

The China blog is officially dead, moribund, cadaverous, extinct, buried, bereft of life, defunct and totally-and-utterly-inert.

Which makes no sense to me. There are many China blogs. And many of them are still posting.

Blogs like the MyLaowai webstore which still engender love and fascination within China, and interest in China without.

There even seem to be fairly new ones.

Blogs like The Otherside, who (or that’s how I understand it) started blogging in February this year, and, um, OK, will stop posting on July 31. But that would be because the blogger will then leave China and return to his native land. [Update, July 27: Chris Biddle will keep us posted beyond July 31.]

Or One to the Third, who apparently started posting on May 19 this year.

Or The New Dominion, who ended their hiatus in March this year.

Or Adam Cathcart‘s blog, not much older than a year, I suppose, and with posts you can’t squeeze into Twitter. You can only twitter links to his posts (and you should, if you know people who are interested in China and its neighborhood).

Or Woeser’s Invisible Tibet (看不见的西藏) – an extremely prolific one, and a real source of information about the sides of Tibet its governors and party secretaries would prefer to ignore, or to annihilate altogether – plus High Peaks, Pure Earth, with a lot of English translations of Woeser’s posts.

And yes, I do remember EastSouthWestNorth. I actually read the posts regularly.

I’m not sure why there are bloggers who seem to take a decline in their traffic (if there is a decline, or if there has ever been traffic) so serious. It’s almost as if all they have a mean CEO standing behind them, watching their statistics, and telling them that the numbers will be up by next week, or else…

Or as if they used to earn tons of Adsense (or whatever kind of money) with their blogs in the golden past. I haven’t heard of a blogger yet who ever lived of his or her blog.

Blogging is a good way to write for yourself if you enjoy it, and for others who might care to read – if what you have to say takes more than 140 characters.

I suppose that’s what a blog, including a China blog, is about. And as a rule of thumb, blogs – in a free environment, anyway – are likely to last while they don’t bore the bloggers themselves.

Tags: blogging, China, communication, feelings, international, journalism, media, national minorities, statistics, Tibet, Wordpress, Xinjiang