Does Twitter Matter in China?

Can Twitter really tie people together in a country where it is blocked? Before writing a profile of artist Ai Weiwei—published in the magazine this week (subscribe here)—I had only a vague sense of Twitter’s presence here. It has been blocked since last June, which means that the average Web user who tries to sign on to Twitter from a regular Internet connection will get a page that says that the “connection has been reset,” or words to that effect. But, with a few keystrokes (or a service that costs about sixty bucks a year), Chinese users can sign on anyway—and a significant but unknown number of them do it everyday. (If anyone has reliable numbers on Chinese Twitter users, please let me know.)

But the practical impact didn’t make sense to me until one night I went to dinner in the central city of Chengdu with Ai Weiwei, who had been using Twitter all afternoon to invite like-minded people to join him for the evening. Most of them were strangers to him and each other, but, as I describe in the piece:

His fans began showing up in twos and threes, a lively crowd of mostly young professionals, including lawyers, Web designers, and journalists. The restaurant eventually ran out of seats, so it set up folding tables and plastic stools out front, and soon Ai’s group stretched along the sidewalk. It was a digital free-for-all, with everyone at the tables snapping photographs and sending updates to Twitter from cell phones.

While I was at the dinner table, gnawing on a pig’s trotter in broth, my cell-phone buzzed with a text message from a friend in Beijing, thirteen hundred miles away: “Are you in Chengdu with Ai Weiwei? People on Twitter have identified you in a photo.” Moreover, he said, people online were already hypothesizing correctly that it must mean that a profile of Ai Weiwei was in the offing. Even by the standards of the Web, it was a startling demonstration of the rhythm and mores of micro-blogging in China. Later that night, I went back for a forensic look at the Twitter traffic that had been circulating during dinner. I found that one of the Chinese diners had posted a grainy cell-phone picture of our table, with my face among a dozen tiny smudges. From there, Twitter users in Beijing and Cambridge, Mass., had picked out some faces they recognized, sent on the info in Chinese or English, where it caught the eye of my friend in Beijing, who closed the loop by sending me the text message. All before we had finished eating our pig’s feet.

The upshot depends on where you stand: For those who hope to see Twitter connect people from across a broad spectrum of the Chinese population, that experiment is thrilling. But it is also a stark demonstration that anyone who might seek to punish people for the kinds of activism and dissent that Ai advocates can use Twitter as a phone book for the ranks of Chinese liberalism.

  • One of the few attempts to assess the demographics of Chinese Twitter users suggests that they are, unsurprisingly, male, young, and well-educated. This analysis also has an interesting list of the explanations that Chinese respondents provided to why they use Twitter.