BEIJING — China's Twitter has been raucous with horn-tooting over Beijing's gold rush at the London Olympics. Earlier passions have been ignited on the site by a deadly high speed rail crash and outrage over factory pollution.
Launched in 2009, China's leading microblog site, Sina Weibo, has given a digital megaphone to more than 300 million Chinese. That has prompted many to wonder if it might drive Arab Spring-style political change and democratic reforms. Others see the platform as a brilliant new surveillance tool for the communist government in Beijing.
Michael Clendenin, managing director of a tech research company in Shanghai, says the microblogs allow middle class Chinese to let off steam in a way that the government can monitor and control, and — when it chooses — delete.