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Webfiles: Life on China's New
Frontier
Want
to know more about how the Chinese really think? Then
try the anonymity of the Internet
By CRYSTYL MO
Friday, August 10, 2001
Web posted at 08:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 08:00 a.m. GMT
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If you want to really learn about people, go online. This
is especially true in China, where, over the past five years,
thousands of Internet cafés have sprung up and tens of
millions of people surf the net. One of the most popular activities
is online chatting, a service offered by nearly every Web
portal and many international companies. Through chat rooms
you can meet a range of people you might never get a chance
to talk to otherwise, from classes and professions high and
low. True, anyone going online in China has to be wealthy
enough to afford about 50 cents an hour at an Internet café,
but beyond that, that's all most people know about each other.
In a country where the less some people know about you, the
better, the Internet can be liberating.
Last month, Yao Ming, China's star basketball player, told
me he likes to chat anonymously online, where he is not a
celebrity and is not 60 cm taller than anybody around him.
No one stares at him and no one asks for an autograph. My
friend Lu Dandan from Tsinghua University says she spends
time on the Internet because she can't afford to buy VCDs.
I don't usually have problems with people begging for autographs
and I can afford at least a handful of $1.20 VCDs, but as
someone who looks foreign in China (my father is American),
I get plenty of stares. In fact, my appearance is a distraction
when I first meet people.
So this week, when I had to conduct interviews with a number
of young people, I decided to go online, where I would be
faceless and country-less. Whizzing through Beijing in cyberspace
sure is a lot faster than coughing through dust storms and
dodging spluttering motorcycles. Within minutes, I had contacted
several people. Levine told me he is an engineer. His job
is to be alongside eye surgeons in the operating room to ensure
the laser is working properly. Dong Dong, a cellular phone
programmer, has always got a bawdy joke. The best I've heard
involves a bear, a rabbit and a genie. I'll save it for some
other time.
I discovered that with black type on a white screen, people
somehow become more sensitive to nuance than they are on the
street. For many Chinese, their country is either great or
utterly corrupt. Foreigners are all vastly different from
Chinese, and so on. But on the computer screen, shades of
gray emerge. No one can see my face or hear my accent and
I am accepted as whatever person I claim to be. Gao and I
chatted late one night about American movies (he likes Tomb
Raider and Shrek), his parents (they are retired and live
in northern China), and his dormitory (he has six roommates,
and his monthly rent is about $24). He told me about dropping
out of school, working jobs at six different companies and
now saving to go back to school. By the time the sky was becoming
light, he was calling me "little bird," while my own contribution
had degenerated to monosyllables. It was probably the most
earnest conversation I've had with a Chinese person I'd only
known for a few hours. And it all happened in the newest frontier
in China, the virtual world.
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