News: Bloggers post hopes for change

Bloggers post hopes for change
Zhu Sun
April 4, 2005
The Standard

Two years ago, when more than 500,000 people flooded the streets in Central to protest against controversial Article 23 anti-sedition legislation, Yan Sham-Shackleton stood on a pedestrian overpass documenting it with her video camera.

At 5am, she had started writing Internet essays about Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy.

A few hours after she went to bed, “I woke up and went to the protest,“ she says. “I took a lot of video. And cried a bit.”

Then she went home and turned her thoughts into a blog called Glutter.org.

A blog, short for Web log, is a personal Web diary that often provides hyper-links to Internet content as well as comment space for readers.

There are an estimated 30 to 40, perhaps more, Hong Kong-themed blogs that run the gamut from personal to political.

In the case of a few Hong Kong-grown blogs like Glutter.org, their authors are adding voice to a growing grassroots democracy movement that may be virtual in presence but very real in the belief it represents: that Hong Kong people should work together to form a civil society.

These local bloggers use art and essays to analyze and express con-ditions they say indicate Hong Kong can develop into a democratic society that values open discussion of issues, universal suffrage and individual rights.

Andrea Leung is a Hong Kong-born blogger who works in Toronto as a business developer.

On her blog, http://www.t-salon.net, she writes: “My learning interests include [Chinese] civil society.” Talking to her in person, it is easy to see that her concern about democratic developments in Hong Kong is not just an obsessive collection of articles and links. It is a step in the direction of a form of grassroots activism through opinion sharing and data collection.

“Hong Kong has no future. It’s not its own master,” she says. “All the things are decided at the top.”

She is troubled over the way so few people in Hong Kong actually have the power to make change.

“When people revolt, like July 1, you see the effect of people power,” she says. But “you can count on your hands,” the number of democracy activists of any notoriety, she says.

By blogging, Leung says she hopes to create “a better understanding, especially outside Hong Kong, that there are people who want a more open and democratic system and that they are trying really hard to make that happen.”

Many bloggers work like amateur journalists and researchers, working collectively in their individual spaces to scour the Web for their passions, be it politics, football, television game shows or food, and often share their information with thousands of other bloggers.

Blogs have shaped more than one public event.

Examples include the discovery that American television journalist Dan Rather had presented phoney docu-ments indicating United States President George W Bush had dodged his Air National Guard commitment.

A blogger, Harry MacDougal, who went by the name of Buckhead, did his own research and posted his findings on a Web site called freerepublic.com, pointing out the documents were likely made on modern computing equipment.

The uproar over his posting became so loud that CBS investigated and later admitted the mistake. Rather resigned.

Hong Kong has seen nothing like that, but, “Simon,” an Australian and one of the few expatriate bloggers who analyzes Hong Kong’s political system, thinks the situation is ripening. He uses his blog, simonworld.mu.nu, to keep track of thousands of articles printed in local and international media, and writings on hundreds of blogs, to assess and interpret the direction of Hong Kong, politically and socially.

Chatter Garden (www.chattergarden.com), a recent addition to Hong Kong’s blogging world, adds to the grassroots journalism movement. It is a Web site operated by students in the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong.

Anyone can join the site, and after taking on a pseudonym, they post to their own blogging space.

Sunny Chung’s “Cloudless Consciousness,” (www. clouded.net) does not hold back with its call for democratic values.

He was frustrated by the SARS fiasco. He felt that even the Democratic Party was only the best of a range of bad choices in governing Hong Kong during the elections last year.

“I used to only listen to music, instead of political talk shows,” he said. “[Tung and SARS] annoyed me. I decided I had to do something.”

One thing he did was begin his blog.

“I was trying to do whatever I could to make people understand the importance of having a democratic system in Hong Kong,” he said. He joined some political Internet groups. He started writing more on his blog about what he felt people should do to affect change and to escape from the dreariness of the system by participating in it more to improve it.

In a March 7 post Chung posted the writing of another blogger at a Chinese language site, http://www.thinkdifferent.to/hongkong/, an activist Web site for citizen journalists. It reads in Chinese: “The government should explain to us the whole story about Tung’s resignation. Hong Kong cannot accept a rerun of a CE appointed by China.

“The public is urged to keep up its watch on public administration and participate in the third election,” it reads.

Critiquing and inquiring about the city’s public consciousness, and appealing to the masses, is something Sham-Shackleton is adept at accomplishing.

A former participant in the dot-com bust, she now runs her blog in between freelance editing projects and the occasional trips to Australia or California, where she went to college.

Her current attempt to bring democratic awareness to the SAR centers around an art project using a spin-off of the iconic 1960 Alberto Korda photo of late Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara found on the T-shirts of radical legislator “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung and elsewhere. “It’s now a symbol of freedom and the end of oppression for many,” she said.

Spurred on by the January death of former Communist Party premier Zhao Ziyang, she has added a “Democracy Hardcore” art series to her blog, taking images of Zhao, who helped renew much of China’s agricultural and industrial sectors before he was marginalized for trying to warn off students in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and converting them into T-shirt designs and pop art a la the Guevara image.

Sham-Shackleton is certain about what she wants her blog to do.

“I want a personal record that hopefully will turn into a historical record of the Hong Kong story,” she said.

In a March 23 post called “Letter to the Void,” she wrote passionately about an enduring facet in this changing record: “I try to keep the positive, idealistic, and artistic self I once was in California. I don’t know if I was happy there but I felt free. I wish I could explain how it feels to suddenly realize that maybe all those rules and [the Chinese] culture of shame, all the head bowing, and expectations suddenly get strewn away and you can keep your head high and look people in the eye,” she wrote.

“What I really want is to be able to live that way in this city.”

staff.reporter@singtaonewscorp.com