In doing the research for my presentation in Taiwan, I was fortunate enough to interview a couple of experts on blogging in China, including Isaac Mao, the “godfather” of Chinese blogging and Andy Yin, the CEO of a Chinese blogging and RSS company, who are referenced below. Here is what I uncovered:
The blogging revolution is also sweeping China. Xiao Qiang reported in New Scientist that blogs were first discovered in China in 2002 when Isaac Mao, an Intel scientist in Shanghai, was surfing the US Web site blogger.com, and found Zheng Yunsheng, a teacher at a technical school in Fujian province:

He left a message on Zheng’s blog, and two weeks later Mao and Zheng started CNBlog.org, China’s first online discussion forum about blogging technology and culture. They soon gathered a small but devoted group of participants, many of whom went on to develop the technology that makes blogging possible for China’s half-a-million bloggers.

Technology writer Fang Xingdong in Beijing, author of BlogChina.com, which covers the development of China’s IT industry, coined the Chinese term for blogger: bo ke, which loosely translates to “abundant traveler” in English. China’s first bloggers used Google’s Blogger and hosted their blogs on Blogspot, a U.S.-based blog hosting service. In January 2003, the Chinese government blocked all access to blogspot and essentially shut down the nascent Chinese blogging revolution. Not to be deterred, Chinese bloggers jumped onto three new start-ups hosted behind China’s great firewall, “which protects the nine gateways connecting China to the global internet. Its main function is to prevent surfers in China from accessing ‘undesirable’ web content.”

Blogging in China has grown rapidly and today there are over 45 large blog hosting services in China, including Isaac Mao’s CNblog.org. According to New Scientist, China’s over 500,000 bloggers are heavily censored:

Whether in China or elsewhere, such sites are usually moderated by editors who keep them relevant and readable. In China, the moderators also keep their sites’ content acceptable to the censor, so when users try to post a “forbidden” comment they receive a warning message such as “your post contains sensitive and indecent contents”. Posts on politically sensitive topics, such as Falun Gong, human rights, democracy, and Taiwan independence, are routinely filtered by this means. A list recently obtained by the China Internet Project in Berkeley found that over 1000 words, including “dictatorship”, “truth”, and “riot police” are automatically banned in China’s online forums.

RSS, as a platform for disseminating information, is just finding its first applications in China and Taiwan. Isaac Mao cites local news agencies in China, such as XinHua, using RSS feeds. In Taiwan, e-commerce Web sites are starting to use RSS for disseminating information about things like house rentals. Andy Yin, CEO of Kantianxia told me that his company “recently finished an RSS project for one of the major media companies in China, to help them build a system to disseminate fee-based info to their subscribers via RSS.” Given the advantages of RSS for business and government in the US, it is likely that organizations in both China and Taiwan will rapidly discover and implement RSS applications.

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