But when people in China want to share news or commentary that government censors would likely squelch, they turn to a U.S.-based Web site run by Watson Meng of Durham, N.C.
The site, Boxun.com, relies on a host of bloggers and citizen journalists — mostly in China — to break stories, often faster than state-controlled Chinese media or foreign news services. The site is banned in China, but Chinese people can skirt that Internet censorship through proxy servers hosted in the United States.
Posting on Boxun (pronounced “bow shwin”) is not without risks.
Numerous contributors, including three in the past several weeks, have been jailed in China.
“It’s really aggravated the (Chinese) government because it takes stuff outside and puts it on display internationally,” said Bob Dietz, of the New York nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists.
“For us, the site is required reading.”
The 2005 graduate of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business edits others’ stories and videos, but rarely writes his own bylined articles.
Boxun has garnered high-level attention. A U.S. congressional committee on China frequently refers to the site in its reports. And a famous Chinese civil-rights lawyer once told Meng that Beijing assigns someone to keep an eye on Boxun 24 hours a day. Boxun’s servers were attacked as recently as December, temporarily erasing the site’s more than 2,000 blogs, Meng said.
The beginnings of Boxun trace back almost 15 years ago, when Weican
“Watson” Meng was in his late 20s, working for Motorola in China as an accountant.
Meng, now 42, had grown up during the Cultural Revolution, living in rural Hebei, a province that surrounds the capital, Beijing.
“I worked like a cow,” he said, pointing to hands calloused from tough farm labor.
By 1993, the electrical-engineering university graduate was one of only a few thousand people in China with e-mail. He subscribed to e-mail lists with news that Chinese students overseas compiled from various sources, and he printed stories out to give friends. He was excited when a friend forwarded him chapters of a book banned in China, “The Private Life of Chairman Mao.”
Fast forward about five years. He decided to create his own weekly news e-mail bulletin, compiling stories about China from various sources. About 5,000 people subscribed.
Meng realized some people were spending several hours a day to research and write articles online. He thought it would be a good idea to organize their work on a common platform.
In 2000, Meng, then chief software architect at a New York company, founded Boxun. A friend coined the name — “bo” means “wide-ranging, comprehensive” in Chinese, and “xun” means “information” or “news.”
The site gets more than 500,000 page views per day, Meng said.
Boxun has flourished in China in part by necessity. China holds the dubious distinction of being the nation with the largest number of jailed journalists or Internet dissidents. Mainstream Chinese media outlets still receive directives from China’s propaganda department about what they may and may not report.
But Boxun’s model has its caveats.
“The problem with this coming up from the grass roots ... is you have angry people on one side of the argument presenting their argument,” said Dietz, a former NBC News bureau chief and CNN journalist. “It’s a source of information. It’s not the whole story.”
To be more reliable, information needs to be investigated and verified. But that doesn’t always happen, Dietz said.
Another potential pitfall: The site protects people’s identity if they don’t want to use their real names.
“It works as long as citizens are responsible,” said Anna Brettell of the National Endowment for Democracy. “But it leaves the possibility for fake stories.”
Meng acknowledges such shortcomings. But contributors are increasingly trying to include video or photos with their reports or phone numbers so that a small cadre of editors and reporters can check facts, he said. And editors over time have come to know which contributors are more credible.
For many years, Meng has kept a low profile. But recently he has spoken up more at conferences around the globe, including one last month in Paris on press freedom in the run-up to this year’s Beijing Olympics.
