Michael Anti: Behind the Great Firewall of China

Michael Anti (aka Jing Zhao) has been blogging from China for 12 years. Despite the control the central government has over the Internet -- "All the servers are in Beijing" -- he says that hundreds of millions of microbloggers are in fact creating the first national public sphere in the country's history, and shifting the balance of power in unexpected ways.

Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), a key figure in China's new journalism, explores the growing power of the Chinese internet. Full bio »
http://www.ted.com/speakers/michael_a...

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• Category

  News & Politics

[Jing Yang]

I met this guy. He's a piece of self-promoting crap, complacent, arrogant, disrepectful. In a room of six people he and I were the only Chinese. He totally ignored me, didn't even bother to say hello and only talked to my laowai bosses. TED is really blinded in this pick.A lot of his knowledge on contemporary China is stolen from the Internet, hardly original or insightful. What he's only good at is branding himself, largely through mingling with foreign journalists in China.

[Clarence Chang]

Oh so i see some ppl say his english sucks. You speak mandarin? Idiots ;D

[Sam Lau]

fuck the shit crap....full of trash in your mouth....don't have respect for your country and don't have respect for yourself .....arrogant guy and mislead the foreign to the wrong way

[Clement Sun]

he is crap

[Zhencun Liu]

Why did he yell?!

[Aaron Trust]

57 ppl go to hell!

[zenjaya101]

Since he's now the 'enemy' of Chinese government, He's afraid of you. He's afraid that you're from china, perhaps you're a secret police or spy. He's afraid he will hurt your nationalism. As a person who talked bad about his country, especially he's from china, it's a taboo right? that's why he "avoid" people he thought from china because most of them are a nationalist and they may feel intimidated.

[sakuramana91]

I had no problem understanding, but that is because I live in a place where I am exposed to a lot of immigrants (Esp. Chinese), so I'm used to the accent. I didn't think he was terrible at presenting, though. Although definitely not my favourite talk by any means. I did learn new things about the Chinese internet censorship.

[louisshengliu]

terrible presenter, terrible pronunciation. I wonder who wrote the transcript for him.

[scanningallvidzs]

Beijingers as a species are up themselves. You should see them walking the streets of Hong Kong - they think they own the whole city.

[Gomer Pyle]

it takes a while to get used to understanding accents

[snipurr117]

How has this guy not been arrested by the chinese government yet he speaks pretty badly about china and the "china net" and how speaks out about their government he says that if they talk about their leaders that they will be arrested and he talks about the enporer or whatever how does he not get arrested?