A month ago, in a post I wrote on my Imagethief blog about the pecking order of foreigners in China, an anonymous commenter asked me what I thought of a blog at chinabounder.blogspot.com (currently closed to the public, so don't rush over). I hadn't heard of it, so I went to have a look. It turned out to be a blog called "Sex and Shanghai" claiming to be the sexual exploits of a randy English teacher in Shanghai. It read like a string of juvenile fantasies and I dismissed it as such, writing the following reply to my anonymous commenter:

[I categorize this guy] along with other people with overactive fantasy lives, such as the guys who wear Star Trek jerseys to the supermarket.

Chinabounder was brought to my attention just a day or so after the long-censored Blogspot was unblocked in China, in early August, and it didn't take long before other blogs started to take notice. I ignored it, and I continued to ignore it even when the story took the turn that would ultimately propel it to mainstream attention when, on August 25, a Chinese academic named Zhang Jiehai posted a long, angry rant (in Chinese--ESWN's translation) on his blog essentially calling for Chinabounder's head to be brought to him on a plate for the crime of disrespecting Chinese womanhood.

We come for Chinabounder!

So why write about it now? Well, partially for the cheap hits. But also, with most of the hysteria over, it seemed like a good time to recall the entire sordid story for those of you who have missed it. It's also a good time to reflect on it a bit on the underlying phenomenon that makes the story interesting. Prof Zhang's angry and xenophobic broadside kindled yet another incident of that phenomenon du jour, the dreaded Chinese Internet mob. This has manifested itself in various ways recently, including in the Foxconn debacle involving the poorly conceived suing of two Chinese journalists, and in various other episodes, many of which have been recently chronicled on Danwei. Shanghai journalist Howard French first wrote about this topic back in early June. The first major incident I can remember was the infamous kitty snuff case of last February and March. It was probably happening before that. It will certainly happen again.

The Chinese Internet mob phenomenon is getting an increasing amount of attention in the Chinese and foreign press. But it's interesting how much more effective this case was as a catalyst for such coverage than, say, the recent Foxconn crisis which played out as a business story and never made it much beyond blogs, wires and tech media. Of course, it's not hard to see why Chinabounder made the mainstream leap. As a hook for talking about online mobs, it was much more broadly appealing. Sex + louche foreigners in Shanghai + Chinese nationalism + Internet lynch mob! Why, it practically writes itself. And it duly wrote itself into The Guardian, The Mercury News, The Independent (subscription), The AP (via The Sydney Morning Herald and CNN, among others), and a bunch of other publications including the English language China press. Most of the stories worked Chinabounder into the larger context of Chinese online mobs. The LA Times picked up the mob story last week and managed not to mention Chinabounder at all, even though the timing was fortuitous. Time did a story mostly about Foxconn's mob, but used Chinabounder as the eyeball-grabbing lede.

But it got better. Just five days after Prof Zhang got the ball rolling, it emerged that Chinabounder might be a hoax. This was actually revealed in the AP story carried by the Sydney Morning Herald and CNN (above), among others. The article reported:

[A] person responding to an email to a contact address on the site
said the authors were a group of performance artists who had fabricated
its content as an investigation into online vigilante behavior.

"We did not anticipate quite the level of anger this would raise,"
said the message, which said the authors behind the cyber name
"Chinabounder" included a British man, an Australian woman, two Chinese
men and a Japanese woman.

A day later, definitive Shanghai blog Shanghaiist also ran a long post revealing that some Chinese people thought they might have identified Chinabounder (probably incorrectly, one would think), while others had used their sleuthing powers to deduce that Chinabounder was neither English, as claimed, nor in China, as also claimed. At a talk in Beijing last week, ESWN's Roland Soong said one foreigner's name, in particular, was being batted around the China blogosphere. Tough for him if he's not actually Chinabounder.

So what's the truth? Only Chinabounder knows for sure. However, I, for one, am not inclined to lend much credence to the "performance artist" theory. That seems like yet another bit of fantasy. I am not much for conspiracies and generally believe the simpler explanation (one person with a rich fantasy life, no actual girlfriend, and a fondness for the Asian Sex Gazette--NSFW) rather than a more complex explanation (a bunch of loft-crawling intellectuals who dreamed up a wicked scheme to conduct an investigation into Internet vigilantism). The explanation seems just a touch after-the-fact, and perhaps a bit too much like a bit of autotherapy that an accomplished fantasist might use to overcome feelings of martyrdom.

Nevertheless, if you were going to pick a topic to incite rage, you could do much worse than to study Chinabounder. Few things boil the blood faster than any of the variations on "foreigners defiling our women". Chinese forums and blogs are always great sources of alarming quotes. As you would expect, the response to Chinabounder didn't disappoint, with comments such as these (also from the AP story cited above):

"This kind of garbage, chop his head off," wrote one who signed as "sanipuga". "Pardon me, but I think these women are also garbage, national scum," said another, signed "Jiehuo".

They make great copy. Even I have searched comments for the deliciously printable nationalist rants, most recently when writing about Dell's Internet troubles in China. The impression of China that these stories give to foreign readers is not entirely fair. The invective, coming in the odd cadence of Chinese translated into English, kindles dark memories of pogroms past. But the Internet is, as always, an imperfect window into a society, especially when you don't read the language of the original posts and rely on the selectivity and interpretation of others. It took Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei, who co-presented the talk in Beijing along with Soong, to point out that despite the angry rants, there was also a great deal of rationality and introspection to be found on the Chinese Internet with regard to this issue. That's something that seems to make the jump into print less often.

But the rational voices don't mean the angry voices aren't there. They are, and they have real power. The Internet is a great medium for anger, threats, hysteria and plain old irresponsibility. In part, this is because it is so conducive to anonymity. In general, I think the ability to comment or write about things anonymously is a good thing, especially for people in societies without press freedom. But lack of identity means lack of accountability, and that comes with a dark side, including the ability to freely libel, threaten and abuse. Anyone who has ever suffered the ravages of an anonymous troll on their blog knows how annoying and frustrating this can be. Think how much worse that feeling might become if your livelihood or reputation was really at stake and you were powerless to respond. The Internet may be the best tool for rapid, anonymous character assassination ever invented.

Anonymity means that people need to apply their critical faculties just a little bit harder to what they read on the Internet. This isn't a castigation of the Internet in general, nor is it meant to denigrate the abilities of many fine, anonymous bloggers. It is, however, common sense. Anonmymity protects our ability to speak unpleasant truths. But the inextricable underbelly of that benefit is that it also protects our ability to speak unpleasant lies. Therefore, when you don't know the source of information you need to be suspicious. And even if you do know the source, you need to consider the agenda of the person who wrote it (no one knows that better than a PR man).

I point this out because I think the great Chinese Internet mob has shown itself vulnerable to duping and manipulation. While the consequences this time have been limited--so far--to the shuttering of one ridiculous blog, it's not hard to imagine events taking a darker turn. It has been observed by many people that while guilt is the emotion that constrains behavior in Western society, shame is the one that constrains it in Chinese society. The mobs that arise on the Chinese Internet are violent weapons for inflicting public shame. Sometimes it's hard to argue with the value of a public shaming, as with the woman who was captured in technicolor splendor putting a spiked heel through a kitten's head, and who was subsequently identified on the Internet and hounded from her job. But the mob has also been mobilized in much less noble pursuits, including intervention in private affairs, perceived slights to nationalist pride from entertainers and other wholly trivial pursuits.

Web surfers need to bring a few more critical faculties to bear, especially when responding to anonymous, unsubstantiated posts, or they will become nothing more than the tools of other people's vendettas, grudges and prejudices. Even if there are moderate voices, it won't matter for people who are outed, shamed, identified or misidentified in the course of one of these self-righteous crusades. The Internet has been lauded for its power to promote smart mobs, but it is as capable of throwing up an old-fashioned lynch mob.

Notes:
See a related post from my CNET Asia co-blogger, Doug Crets.

The saga of Lonelygirl15 in the USA is related, in that it was essentially a scam --not to put too fine a point on it-- perpetrated upon YouTube users. Credulity on the Internet isn't just a Chinese problem.

Apologies to readers for my recent scarcity. I hope to be a little more consistent over the next couple of weeks, until the October National Day holiday in China.