China: Liveblogging from ground zero
As much as it was a precedent for publicly-organized, nationally-observed mass demonstrations in China ending peacefully, the protest held in southeast China’s seaside city of Xiamen—borne out of widespread public anger at the planned construction of a toxic chemical plant dangerously close to the city core—early June 1 was also a landmark for China’s leading independent blogger’s collective Bullog.
With a media blackout on news of the demonstration, the time, location and target turnout of one million people were spread almost exclusively by SMS, bbs postings and on blogs. The government was able to stop the SMS from spreading for several days and nearly all bbs webmasters and blog service providers were swift to delete any related discussion, leaving Bullog members free to go on to post several in-depth posts this past week looking at various angles of the situation, including one of of the key public figures lobbying against the PX plant, Southern Metropolis Daily columnist and Xiamen resident Lian Yue.
Several other Bullogers took it a step further by attending the demonstration in person, leaving one at home to post their SMS live updates straight onto Bullog, giving it a national exclusive as to what was happening minute-by-minute down on the ground which, by the afternoon of the 1st, had attracted enough readers that Bullog’s host server was left unable to keep up. With Bullog inaccessible, the live SMScast was temporarily moved here, from where many of the below discussions mixed in with the live reporting were taken.
Disclaimer: this blogger was there SMS-blogging the tail end of the procession.
In addition, a video of the march has been uploaded to YouTube.
Flickr users Miao Ben Zhou, Aaron Roy, hellhell007 and shgbird have also been following it very closely.
Protest theme: wear a yellow bribbon
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