via: eswn - Follow-up on the Great Massage Milk Hoax
update: Jeremy clarifies his stand on talking about chinese censorship issues at danwei.
Jeremy (via: shanghaiist)
Mr. Wang, the Massage Milk blog host, disclosed his motive of closing his blog in an interview with interfax:
"I just wanted to make fun of Western journalists? [Content] doesn't need to be serious on the Internet. I don't like it that Western media take a distorted view of China, though China does have problems. I thought that if I closed my blog, it would stir their imagination and then they would begin blah blah. It really is as expected. So let's they have an April Fool's day in advance."
it comes no surprise to me considering how unsatisfied that Mr Wang felt about his experience with western media, and although he expressed his views in such a dramatic way, it's not a an improper behavior suggested by a chinese journalist-blogger.
western media's bias towards china aside, one interesting aspect of the whole "massage milk hoax" incident is who swallowed the bait first. as i know, danwei was the first one to report the shut down of massage milk blog and, Jeremy Goldkorn, the host of danwei blog, was the first one to link the closedown of massage milk blog with the chinese censors. the great irony here, is that jeremy is one of the few western media people who lived in china long enough and agaisnt attaching too much importance to the censorship issue than it should be, and is supposed to be the last one to link the close down with censorship.
he wrote two related posts shortly afterwards, one to explain why Mr. Wang closed his blog by himself and tried to mitigate the embarrassment brought by his first post about the clsoe down of massage milk blog, the other to report the China Digital Times block and tried to try to justify his perspectives to interpret th e massage milk blog close down in the first place.
danwei is a blog about the dynamics of chinese media and advertising, although critical and cynical of chinse state media, danwei is not an active members of western media that keep close attention to chinese censorship issues. but recently danwei becomes more and more involved into the reporting on censorship issues, which is a little incomprehensible to me. i know there are more cases of censorship in recent months, but at the same time i just wonder if it's the "peer pressure" that gradually changed danwei's reporting focus