The Internet has always been good for people who want to blow off steam. Its appealing combination of anonymity and instant gratification have long made it a receptacle angst and hostility, as anyone who runs a blog with a lively comment section knows. The Chinese are great fans of forums and bulletin board-style sites, which are particularly conducive to id-channeling behavior, official exhortations to "文明办网" (use the Net civilly) notwithstanding. Periodically there is a fluster of official anxiety over whether it is proper for people to engage in such angry discourse online.

To which I would reply, it's better than engaging in it on the subway. But nobody is asking me. Nevertheless I was interested this morning to stumble upon a Xinhua article fretting over a complaint-driven Web site called "China Hate Wall" (中国恨墙).

Pour out your anger against your teacher, curse your mother, insult your lover, rail against regulations; letting it all hang out by posting anonymous online sticky notes has become China's latest Internet fad.

It's not the Great Wall but the "Hate Wall", where Web surfers with any kind of gripe can get relief from the stresses of life by writing away their blues.

Xiao Xu is a typical poster on Hate Wall who says she feels better after repeatedly plastering a phrase over and over again. She goes online and writes a single word--yu men, meaning depressed--on a post-it note that is then stuck on the animated wall.

"I am addicted to it now. I log onto the Web site whenever I am upset, no matter how trivial the cause," Xu told the Shanghai Youth Daily.

Although she feels better after pouring out her emotion, she finds the exercise is giving her personality a boost of aggression. "I've begun to use dirty words in daily life, which I've never done before, " she said.

Dirty words? Looks like Hate Wall has put Xiao Xu on the fast train to Hellville, and a future of juvenile deliquency, porn addiction and illegal music downloads. Another young life trashed by the evil swamp of the Internet. Indeed, various sober authorities are making various sober noises about the site:

Xu Leiting, psychologist and vice director with the Beijing Internet Addiction Treatment Center, said Web sites designed for emotional outlet are no substitute for professional help.

"Outbursts on a Web site won't solve people's problems," he said, adding that exercising or listening to music may be better mood-improving therapies.

Indeed. But they don't offer quite the same gratification.

Let it all hang out at hatewall.com.

In fact, there are a few sites like this out there. China Hate Wall has been going since July, in which time it has amassed about 1,100 postings. This is pretty small beer measured against China's incredibly active forum scene, in which a hot post can generate tens of thousands of comments in a few days. Most of the postings have no comments, although the site supports them. In fact, although the site has been going for the past four months, about a quarter of the posts have materialized in the past week, coinciding with the burst of free publicity from this bout of hand wringing in the press. That suggests that Hate Wall is a ways from unraveling the fabric of Chinese civilization.

There is certainly some vulgar and hostile stuff up there, including vague wishes that various unnamed people would drop dead, juvenile threats and crass "your momma!"-style insults. There is also a lot of gibberish and inanity. A typical post (loosely translated):

Why must girls be so snobby? It drives me to frustration! Don't flaunt your sex appeal in front of me!

I'd say that pretty accurately reflects a sentiment held at one time or another by almost every teenage boy on the planet (and probably more than a few grown men). Hardly the stuff of social collapse, even in China.

Related: The police will install surveillance cameras in all Beijing Internet cafes, according to Beijing Times (via China Digital Times). This will about attempt number 8,492 to make local Internet cafes more civil, and probably about as effective as every previous attempt. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time telling what someone is doing at a computer unless I can see the screen.

On the other hand, Internet cafes are known to be dens of various kinds of seedy offline behavior as well, and that may be more what this is about.