As in the West, the most prolific and influential bloggers in China are those who pioneer the Internet application, including computer enthusiasts and media pundits, who are termed “intellectual bloggers.”

Hong Bo, or “Keso,” is an idol-like person in the information technology industry whose blog called Playing With IT receives about 10,000 page views a day. Keso, who writes mainly about the latest IT advances, works as chief editor of Donews, the most popular online community in China. Wang Xiaofeng, an entertainment writer for Life Weekly who keeps a blog called Massage Milk, is often on lists of favored bloggers on many websites because of his sarcastic style.

Due to the aftereffect of actions by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft that many Westerners view as abetting censorship in China, “freedom of speech,” “human rights” and “democracy” have become key words for Western coverage of China’s blogosphere recently.

“Actually, [these issues] are not priority considerations for grassroots Chinese, who are now seizing every chance to make life better, with higher salaries and bigger apartments,” said Ma Demin, a postgraduate with the Shanghai Institute of Technological Physics who will be seeking a job next spring. “Anyway, politics has never played a major role in ordinary people’s lives.”

Chinese bloggers, as TV reporter-turned-blogger Rebecca MacKinnon observed, “feel that blogs and other forms of online social media have given them a great deal more freedom of expression than they ever had before.”

“I don’t think we have anything to sacrifice,” said Liu Dengpan, a senior engineer with Internet security solutions provider Fortinet. “Since we already have plenty to say and complain about with regard to life, society and even the system now. ”

At the first annual China Web 2.0 Conference held April 8 in Beijing, most Web entrepreneurs said the Chinese Web 2.0 must remain as apolitical as possible in order to develop, spread and innovate.

On March 8, the International Women’s Day, Wang Xiaofeng and another famous entertainment reporter, Yuan Lei, with her blog called Milkpig, played a trick on Western media that have been eager for any news about China’s censorship these days. Their blogs turned blank, with one sentence saying, “This blog is temporarily closed because of well-known irresistible reasons.”

Assuming that Chinese Internet monitoring authorities blocked the two blogs, Reuters delivered it as breaking news and the BBC, Voice of America and Newsweek soon followed. Later that afternoon, Wang and Yuan explained the truth and apologized to readers on their blogs.

In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Wang emphasized, “The reporter with Reuters never tried to confirm it with me.”