Ever wonder why Twitter’s doing great with just 205 personnel and still manages to crank out 190 million pageviews a month?

Here’s something to ponder about: along the same lines of that stat we’ve just thrown out, Chinese “Twitters” (retermed “microblogs”), being on less libre PRC territory, has way less people in terms of the user base. Yet still, we’re seeing over a thousand people employed.

(Yep, we realize there’s a “number error”. Read on…)

Many of these folks are involved in this peculiar trade of being a “content inspector”. This is censorese for — well — censor. Post anything “inappropriate” (ie political), and your post just got deleted. That’s 90% of all tweets, according to @lzaiting.

And as long as there’s a censorship requirement of one form or the other, Chinese web sites will continue just chugging along — much like an overloaded freight train pulled by a locomotive dating from earlier in the last century.

14:59 update: Tweep @multiple1902@ is now heading out live to the scene of the blast.

First, tragedy:

A powerful blast likely caused by a gas leak rocked a plastics factory in eastern China on Wednesday, killing at least six people and injuring hundreds, state media reported.

The explosion happened about 10 a.m. in downtown Nanjing, the capital of’ Jiangsu province in eastern China, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Xinhua said six people were reported as dead at hospitals treating victims of the blast, and that buildings and vehicles with 100 yards of the blast were badly damaged.

And this (typical here in China):

Officials who answered telephone calls at the Nanjing health department and city government would not comment. An official from the local Communist Propaganda Department said a statement would be released later.

Apparently, according to the Chinese-language twitterverse, the head of the Communist Propaganda Department, Ye Hao (叶皓) got pretty upset when live TV crews poured in — in no time. Media were treated to what could well be yet another 2010 catchphrase on the Chinese Interwebs: Who let you broadcast it live!? (谁让你做直播的)

There’s also footage of the explosion, as well as photos. Needless to say, there’s an increasing number of tweets coming out of this as even a few of the Twitterati head to the scene, live.

Noted Chinese mainland blogger Han Han seems to be in Hong Kong today, and despite reports that the Q+A is going ahead “the old fashioned way” using pieces of paper instead of a microphone (probably for fear of folks being censored?), that hasn’t stopped Han from pulling out his legendary short’n’snappy responses.

One of which, may we note, considers marriage. Here’s what he said:

As a matter of fact, for me, as to when I become father will depend on fate and chance. I’ve a lot of friends who want to be dad but can’t; but some have become fathers just because they met a girl.

The Chinese believe in “fate and chance”, which is yuan fen in Mandarin, and this concept can be very alien to — well, aliens (ie foreigners).

Let’s just say that @DavidFeng took the first half of this month to further studies in the mediasphere, so to speak. One’s never too old to learn, and we’re hoping the readership’s learning new and interesting things about the Chinese web every day through techblog86.

techblog86 is now back, and the site’s going to get an infrastructure update soon, which will allow much more in the way of tweeted updates and “on-the-spot” posts.

We hope we didn’t leave you all in the cold!

The Chinese may have a PRC ID number already in store for President 2.0.

This is a fairly scary bit of “the news” as of late: there’s this bit of “fake ID software” on the Chinese Interwebs (which we’re going to stay legal and not post a link to) which can generate PRC ID numbers for just about any person on the planet. If you’ve had a bad night out, you can even attempt ones for Kim Jong-Il, Superman or even E.T.!

This bit of “official fakeware” (as we’re compelled to call it) found its raison d’être to get youngsters into Internet cafés with valid ID (as those kids back then could not usually get in unless they were 18; young counter-revolutionaries, we question?), but has now emerged as “dark side jokeware”. And while you might get away with a fake ID for, say, E.T., PRC criminal code will likely see you in jail or at least a fair bit poorer for creating fake IDs — a criminal offence in China, and likely everywhere else as well.

Legal experts speaking to the Beijing Evening News, however, point out that you’re only handcuffed if you do the deed — as in use a fake ID. Until then, a mere screen showing President 2.0’s PRC ID number, real or fake, is unlikely to get the Supreme People’s Court upset or anything. We caution, though, that this is borderline behavior — as in you’re clearly treading on very thin ice here. Your tech blogger will pay no-one a prison visit if he or she got in by — well, creating fake IDs.

(He’s like this as he’s a law-abiding Swiss citizen.)

No doubts here: this is Cold War 2.0.

(The World Cup, for what it’s worth, looks a fair bit like World War II 2.0: last night, Paraguay’s two extra goals sent Japan home, much like Little Boy and Fat Man “did their stuff” 65 years ago; England is out and the US “just joined” in the last minute, qualifying for the Group of 16.)

The Chinese media have started descending on Google, once again, like vultures feeding on their prey. This time it’s about Google about to lose its mandatory ICP licence, required if it is to use a mainland Chinese web server.

Of course, having engaged in anti-censorship moves to the extent of getting the US Congress all excited, Google stands a fat chance of getting its ICP licence renewed. This is especially the case since March, when it decided (very much “unilaterally”) to have its google.cn domain shift to the uncensored google.com.hk server. In response, the Chinese censors have upped the censorship on Google to such an extent that you are deemed reactionary (and hence eligible for a government-mandated connection reset) if you so much as Google up a carrot (which uses the character 胡, used also — no surprise — in the Chinese name of the Chinese president, Hu Jintao).

The site, as it stands right now, still leads to google.com.hk, but this time, you have to click a link to continue your trek. (So much for user-friendliness.)

The Beijing Evening News goes further in saying that Google Maps might be in a little bit of trouble as well, for it might run afoul of mapping rules. (The government doesn’t want you to leak stuff about sensitive sites — we’ll let you guess here what they must be.) Baidu, its biggest fiend, is in; Google.cn is not.

Meanwhile, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersons were quick to give the standard response of not mentioning Google by name while repeating that they welcome companies who do business in China in accordance with government regulations.

(And provided you don’t report to your home country’s congress when the Chinese government starts going after what you can’t publish.)

Get your tummies ready for a massive laugh attack — especially if you’re fluent in both languages. This kind of Google Maps Chinglish is a nationwide phenomenon…

• Shoudu International Airport No.3 Hang Zhang Bldg? This is supposed to be Terminal 3, Beijing Capital International Airport. What they’ve done is they’ve pinyin-transliterated the Chinese word for Capital, Shoudu (首都) and dropped the “Beijing” moniker altogether (although to be fair, it never was there in the first place). In the meantime, “No.3 Hang Zhan Bldg” is perfect mixed Chinglish for “Terminal 3″, written literally as “3 Number Terminal (Hang Zhan) Building”.

• Two Guantou Bridges: Apparently there is a difference between the “plan-vanilla” Guantou Bridge and, just slightly north of that, “Guantou Bridge” (again), in essence, “Guantou Big Bridge” in Pinyinese.
• Finally: Airporthuayi Bridge. This is a direct, no-spaces-required translation of “Airport Huayi Bridge” from Chinese to English. The fact that they forgot the space and the extra caps is more than just “hilarious”.

  We won’t bother you with more — amongst the tastier ones are “Pavilion Jiatun” (亭家屯; where 亭 seems to be the name of someone’s family), “The Place” (what place?), and “Daludian No.2 Cun” (odd mix of numbers and names).

  Google’s got to get its act together — even if it has left China…

It was just around midnight Beijing time when this happened. We needn’t say any bit more, for both the US and England qualified for the Eighth-finals — and you know what happens when two big English-speaking nations win at the same time.

Twitter broke. In just about no time. England won minutes before the US got a last-minute ball in. The rest, they say, is history. Twitter broke down in no time — for a few moments, even those in China on a VPN couldn’t resolve to twitter.com.

The fact that America won drove the US mad. Both the White House and Starbucks tweeted out their joy.

In England, the response must have been deafening, although England’s own goal early on must have drowned out some bit of the cheering early on. (That was a fair bit back!)

Congratulations to England from America. From China.

In China, the police never call the Internet “the Internet”. They call it, in “superior socialism-speak”, the “public information networks” (公共信息网络). Yes, there is a Chinese word for Internet (hu lian wang, 互联网) but it’s still “new”, even after the National People’s Congress (the Chinese version of Congress) made a long, officialspeak-filled “decision” just about ten years ago, something that became the “granddaddy Chinese Internet law”.

This being the case, then, the Web is something new. And that can mean that, as you’re just wading in the Web waters, you’re likely to botch up, regulatory-wise or other. The Chinese government, then, must be pretty busy managing — or mis-managing, rather — the Chinese Interwebs.

In a recent article published on Forbes, Paul Denlinger (@pdenlinger), one of the most insightful tweeps in the Chinese Twittersphere, correctly argues that while the West sees China as being efficient (in some aspects), that kind of efficiency (which to your Swiss blogger any Swiss should be able to outdo) isn’t being shown on the Internet. In control of the Chinese Interwebs are, at the very least:

• the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology

• the Ministry of Culture
• the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television
• the Ministry of Finance
• the Ministry of Public Security
• the Ministry of State Security (that’s why the dissidents get jailed: “breaches of State security”)

and that’s just a few in the lot. As Denlinger says:

Here lies the problem: Every Internet owner and operator has to deal with multiple Chinese government ministries and make sure that he is in conformity with ALL regulations. Violations with just one ministry can kill an operation, as happened when Netease launched World of Warcraft in September last year.

Denlinger further argues:

From a business perspective, this unclear mishmash of regulatory bodies creates delays and inefficiency and, at worst, opportunities for corruption.

These political and bureaucratic turf wars for Internet companies are much worse than in many other industries because it’s a new industry. So why didn’t the government just set up a new Ministry for Internet and Mobile Media? This would have provided the benefit of the operators having to deal with only one ministry for most affairs. The closer the government can come to making ministries and relevant offices a one-stop shop for an operator to go to resolve issues, the better.

Denlinger’s article, despite being titled as some kind of “criticism”, is not the usual same-old-same-old “Westerner anti-Chinese-government” article. Instead of calling for ideological conflict, Denlinger, for a change, argues that the trouble with China in this day and age is that there’s the lack of anyone who’s a clear leader and who will champion the Internet.

In the same veins, news articles in the past months have made sketchy references to a possible PRC Internet Management Law. It’s not sure if a new “Internet ministry” will be responsible, or if the law will, in the same “same-old-same-old” fashion, assign a smorgasbord of mandarins responsible for Chinese cyberspace.

Or at least, the Grass Mud Horse can’t give a damn about the Great Firewall.

In China, Googling the country’s president — as in his name — is an offence punishable by an instant connection reset on Google.com. It is also an offence to make reference to the Tian’anmen incident, as well as to believe in a “certain kind of qigong cult”. The government punishes those online hors-la-lois with the ubiquitous connection reset or the former Google China refrain of fame: “By law, certain search results are not shown”.

That’s the Chinese Great Firewall, blocking you the content you really need. With censorship worsening since the Beijing Olympics (outside sources have warned at the North Korea-ization of the PRC), the Netizenry aren’t simply harkening to Zhongnanhai’s newest commandments about what is considered verboten content online. Instead, they’re venting their anger by means of a Grass Mud Horse (a Net species only), which in spoken Chinese sounds very similar to a common curse: f*ck your mother, most often heard in the streets of the capital, Beijing.

As of late, we’ve been alerted to a new T-shirt coming out, with the Grass Mud Horse “flying” over the Great Firewall. The Chinese Netizenry started with proxies and now are onto more “advanced technologies” for those determined to get to — say — the latest stories about corrupt railway officials and their third wives, which the government’s all about suppressing.

Not sure where you can get that T-shirt — but it’s one your tech blogger has his sights set on. There’s, of course, also the danger that by wearing this, you’re probably going to be arrested for wearing “reactionary propaganda” — if the policeman has a bad day.