When it comes to the internet, the Chinese government may have taken inspiration from the Great Wall of China and created the largest digital boundary in the world, blocking 500 million users from accessing the global-standard social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. But blogger Michael Anti, whose real name is Jing Zhao, explains in a vivid talk given at TEDGlobal 2012 that the internet landscape of the world’s most populous country is far more complicated than that simple story. Chinese innovators have copycatted popular Western social media sites. While we have Google, China has Baidu. While we have Facebook, China has RenRen. While we have Twitter, China has Weibo — and 300 million microbloggers using it, as 140 characters allows for a full paragraph to be written in Chinese.

In his talk, Anti looks at some of the fascinating ways in which social media are changing Chinese life, and shifting the balance of power in the country. For example, after local authorities tried to cover up a train crash in Wenzhou in 2011, people took to social media sites to criticize the move. With more than 10 million messages about the cover-up visible for all to read, an official investigation was eventually launched. Anti also explains that on Weibo, people regularly tweet their misfortunes, waiting for them to be picked up by popular micobloggers and shared widely.

So what exactly is huge on ChinaNet? Below, a look at 8 popular memes, many political in tone and others the Chinese equivalent of Keyboard Cat.

Free CGC

When Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng escaped from house arrest this spring, this meme — a send-up of a Kentucky Fried Chicken ad — began spreading across the Chinese internet. Why? Because while his name, and even his initials, were blocked by the government, the image got through the country’s censors. The spreading of the meme has been called “guerrilla activism.” [Christian Science Monitor]

Dress the Nude

China Central Television inspired this hilarious meme when they aired a broadcast about an exhibit at the National Museum of China … and blurred the genitals on Michaelangelo’s famous David. Ever since, internet users have poked fun at the “anti-vulgarism campaign” by putting clothes on famous nude works of art. [Ministry of Tofu]

Singing Schoolchildren

The song “Shang Bu Qi” has become something of an anthem of the Chinese internet. So when this video appeared on Youku — the Chinese version of YouTube — featuring a bus full of schoolchildren singing the song, it instantly went viral. [China Smack]

Dark Glasses Portraits

Another show of support for Chen Guangcheng, Chinese internet users snapped photos of themselves wearing the blind activist’s signature sunglasses. [Christian Science Monitor]

The Salt Panic Incident

In 2011, China was very fearful of radiation following the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan. When chatter began that salt could fight the effects, thanks to its iodine content, people began buying stores out of salt. And images of empty salt shelves became all the rage on the internet. [China Whisper]

Grass Mud Horse

These alpacas might look cute and fuzzy, but they are an example of a highly political meme in China. Grass mud horse, or Cao Ni Ma, first appeared in January 2009 as a symbol of anti-censorship sentiment in this video. Earlier this month, the alpaca symbol was seen on many signs in a protest in Hong Kong as Chinese President Hu Jintao celebrated the 15th anniversary of the city’s handover to China. On the internet, July 1 was officially dubbed “Grass Mud Horse Day,” as high numbers of people posted alpaca images. [Tea Leaf Nation, NY Times]

Sunflower seeds

Similarly, the sunflower seed has become an online symbol for artist Ai Weiwei, whose name and likeness where quickly scrubbed from the Chinese internet when he was detained in 2011. (Watch the talk Ai Weiwei made for TED2011, just weeks before he was put under arrest in China and his studio destroyed.) As supporters realized that Weiwei’s nicknames, and even puns related to him, were also being blocked, they channeled his famous sunflower fields installation at the Tate Modern as a form of protest. [Fast Company]

Pu-Wen-Er

For this highly popular meme, three photos are cobbled together — one representing the “ordinary youth,” another representing the “artistic youth” and finally the “idiotic youth.” The meme became so popular so quickly that gained a Chinese acronym, 普文二. [Ministry of Tofu]

The TED Blog would like to extend special thanks to An Xiao Mina, whose research on Chinese memes formed the framework for many of the articles above. Watch her speak at MIT’s Personal Democracy Forum and read her piece in The Atlantic, comparing the Chen Guangcheng meme above to the Trayvon Martin hoodie meme. And check out her column on Chinese political and social memes at 88-Bar.com.

A sick brick

“I want to make my friends understand: China is too complicated,” begins Michael Anti. “You can’t tell a one-size story.” According to some, China is a brick, helping the world economy. According to others, it’s a sick country, with no access to Facebook. (The second phrase was as claimed in the Facebook IPO papers.)

“If you’re a fan of Game of Thrones, you know how important a wall is for an old kingdom. It prevents the weird things from the north,” says Anti. China also had a wall to prevent invaders. But now, he says, it has a great firewall, the biggest in the world. That wall works to separate China from the world, and also separates Chinese internally, into sections.

In the past 15 years, Anti says, there have been non-stop cat and mouse games between authorities and the netizens. There are 500 million internet users in China. Even if it were totally isolated from the world, the internet there is still booming. He shows how there are versions of every service Westerners are familiar with: Google, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are all replaced by equivalents. The government blocks all the international services, and clones spring up inside. The policy is simple: clone and block. This fulfills two needs: to satisfy people’s need for social media, but also the need to keep the server in Beijing.

Some leaders, says Anti, haven’t understood this. Mubarak shut down the internet, so people had no choice but to go to the street. In Tunisia, the government allowed Facebook, and didn’t keep control of the servers.

Booming even with censorship

But the firewall and control of the servers doesn’t mean that social media isn’t powerful within China. In July 2011, there was a train wreck in the city of Wenzhou. Immediately afterward, authorities tried to keep quiet, “to literally bury the train.” In response, there were 10 million criticisms on social media platforms. The minister was fired and jailed.

One of the reasons that Chinese tweets have so much power, says Anti, is that they have three times the information volume as English tweets — 140 characters is a paragraph in Chinese. Furthermore, Weibo, the Twitter equivalent, is actually more like Facebook than Twitter, allowing comments and other ways of interacting. With 300 million users, it’s the biggest media platform in China. According to Anti, “It has become the media platform. Anything not mentioned in Weibo does not appear to have occurred for the Chinese public.”

Anti says that this is enabling the people to have strong voices, because they are able to tweet their stories. Call it “a Weibo petition.” Some stories are picked up and re-tweeted by popular online personalities — reporters, lawyers, actors — while others put pressure on local government. It’s becoming a real public sphere.

But there is a flip side. Weibo has a sophisticated censorship system. You can’t post the name of the president of the country, or even search for the surname of the top leaders. If you mention words like “get together” or “meet up” in a post, it might be automatically data-mined, recorded or sent to a pool for analyzing. So why is it sometimes successful?

A complicated picture

Something important is happening in the cat and mouse game, says Anti. There is the big cat — the central government — but also local cats, the local government. The central government tries very hard to control the local governments, which have no access to the data. Again, the servers are all in Beijing.

The most interesting question about the train crash is not why there were 10 million critical posts, but why in the first five days the central government allowed a window of free speech. Simple, says Anti, it was “because even the top leaders were fed up with this guy. They wanted an excuse to punish him. This kind of freedom is targeted.”

Social media has become a political tool of the governing party. This is new technology, but is culturally an update of the cultural revolution, which destroyed every local government.

We are the mouse, says Anti, and the mouse should always fight with the cats. And this fight isn’t restricted to China. In the West there were attempts to restrict internet freedoms, cats with names like SOPA and PIPA. Anti reminds us that “Facebook and Google claim they are friends of the mouse, but sometimes we see they are dating the cats.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson