Called The Curious Case of Jia Junpeng, or The Power of Symbolic Appropriation in Chinese Cyberspace, the essay is taken from a talk given by Guobin at a conference earlier this month on how memes spread in China.

As Leonard summarizes:

Yang tells the story of how a single 12-character message — “Jia Junpeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat” — posted to an online forum frequented mainly by bored gamers frustrated with delays in the rollout of World of Warcraft in China, became a viral sensation — attracting 7 million hits and 300,000 comments in one day — that received widespread coverage from Chinese media.

Both are worth the read.

Guobin’s piece is here.

Leonard’s is here.

As the Times highlights, one notable aspect about Zhao’s film is that it was created illegally:

The Chinese government has decreed that all films must be approved by government censors before being distributed and screened, including in overseas film festivals.

Mr. Zhao, 39, said getting the approval of the censors was never a consideration. “It’s like asking to be raped,” he said this month in an interview here. “The government certainly has its own agenda. They want us to stop. But at the same time we know we’re doing something meaningful.”

This is a political example of what we have seen over the past decade in the commercial world: the rise of relatively inexpensive digital devices has decentralized the means of all communication, be it political, cultural or otherwise. One isn’t tethered to a formal entity that has the capital to afford equipment and the channels to distribute a final product. Production values will differ, of course, so too access to and ease of distribution. But we are in an age where anyone with the talent and perseverance can create significant works on relatively inexpensive digital devices and desktop editing suites.

The cameras, recording devices and equipment we have access to today are “good enough,” as Robert Capps explains in “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.” While Capps writes specifically about consumer acceptance of gadgets and formats that are “good enough,” as we see from Zhao’s work, it applies to overall production as well.

“Ghost Town” premieres today at the New York Film Festival.

Schools in Beijing are quietly removing the Green Dam filter, which was required for all school computers in July, due to complaints over problems with the software.

China last month formally backed down on a plan to preinstall the Internet filter software on all new computers sold in the country after July 1 after an international and domestic outcry.

A June WSJ article provides a good backgrounder on the issue:

…it would be naïve to think that scrapping the Green Dam mandate means the end of headaches for computer- and device-makers world-wide. More and more governments — including democracies like Britain, Australia and Germany — are trying to control public behavior online, especially by exerting pressure on Internet service providers. Green Dam has only exposed the next frontier in these efforts: the personal computer.