China Watch Blog

China Watch Blog has learnt that internet users in China are continuing their online muckraking campaign against a luxuriously-accessorized work safety official seen with a broad smile on his face at the site of a fatal bus crash last week.

Web user “chenxiweibo” has posted four recent photos of Yang Dacai, head of the work safety administration of northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, wearing several different pairs of designer glasses, Xinhua reports.

The photos, posted Thursday at Weibo.com, China’s Twitter equivalent, show Yang in a pair of German-made LOTOS, one of the world’s most expensive eyewear brands.

At Puyi Optical, a leading Hong Kong-based eyewear dealer that has outlets in several cities including Beijing and Dalian, LOTOS frames alone sell for at least 138,000 yuan.

In another two photos, Yang was spotted wearing glasses from the less-expensive Oakley brand.

Yang first came into the spotlight and infuriated the public by grinning at the scene of a deadly collision between a double-decker sleeper coach and a methanol tanker that left 36 dead.

His apparent lack of sympathy kicked off the muckraking storm that is still swirling around him, as Chinese web users have taken to scrutinizing his luxury wristwatches, designer belts and high-end suits.

Photos taken on different occasions show Yang wearing 11 different upscale watches, the most expensive of which was valued at 400,000 yuan, according to netizens.

Yang claims he bought the watches with his own salary, but web users refuse to believe him, arguing that a government employee could not afford such luxuries.

China Watch Blog has learnt that China aims to make its Internet services accessible to more people in the coming years and bring its total number of Internet users to 800 million by 2015, according to a national development plan.

China Daily reported that the number, which accounts for around 57 percent of the total population, includes 200 million netizens in rural areas, according to an Internet development plan for the 2011-2015 period unveiled Friday by the Ministry of Information and Information Technology (MIIT).

The plan said revenues for the online service industry will grow at an annual rate of 25 percent during the period, helping to provide jobs for 2.3 million people by 2015.

Meanwhile, the transaction value of the country’s booming e-commerce businesses is expected to hit 18 trillion yuan in 2015, according to the plan.

The MIIT also announced Friday another development plan for the communications sector.

The plan says that by 2015, China’s telecommunication businesses will reap combined revenues of 1.5 trillion yuan, while the total number of 3G subscribers will exceed 450 million.

As of the end of last year, China’s online population totalled 513 million. More Chinese have been going online to voice their opinions and participate in public affairs in recent years.

China Watch Blog has learnt that some angry customers have, after failing to get sightseeing trips for 1 yuan (16 cents) as offered by 360buy website – one of China’s biggest Internet retailers, taken their case to court.

The lawyers have submitted their case to Shanghai Jinshan District People’s Court on behalf of dozens of customers demanding that 360buy, one of China’s largest online traders, honor its contract and offer compensation, said Chen Cheng, a lawyer with Shanghai-based Co-career Law Firm, on Wednesday.

Disputes started when 360buy advertised several sightseeing packages, including one to Shaoxing, a historic city in East China’s Zhejiang province, at a cost of 1 yuan per customer on March 19.

The Shaoxing trip included breakfast, a one-night stay in a hotel and entrance fees for some scenic spots, according to the website. About 1,700 people had purchased that trip, and 10,412 had ordered a 1 yuan trip to a scenic spot in Mianyang, Sichuan province.

However, customers found the trips were canceled and their money returned to their accounts. 360buy said that the webpage containing the promotion was only a “test page”, and was not meant to be displayed on the website. The company apologized for the “technical failure”.

Tian Xiaoci, a public relations manager with 360buy, said the page with the promotion appeared due to mistakes made by technical personnel. She said the company is communicating with the customers involved.

But lawyer Chen did not accept the explanation. “The business should honor its contract once the customers have paid for the product,” he said.

Sun Xiaoxiang, a Shanghai resident, placed 16 orders on the website at 1 yuan each on March 19 , as he was planning to go to Shaoxing for sightseeing with friends.”I was furious after I saw ‘refund applied’ on the website, when I did not apply for a refund.” According to media reports, 360buy agreed to offer a 20 yuan voucher for every customer in compensation.

“I have spent a lot of time and money because I phoned the company repeatedly, so I’m not accepting the voucher, which I could only use at its online store,” said a customer surnamed Chen who also ordered the Shaoxing trip.

China Watch Blog has learnt that the number of social networking service website users jumped 34 percent in 2010 from a year earlier, and they made up more than half of the web users in China.

There were 235 million SNS website users in China at the end of last year, said a report by Knet, a Chinese Internet service provider. About 150 million of the registered users were active.

The Shanghai Daily reported that data compiled by the China Internet Network Information Center showed there were 457 million web users in China at the end of last year. Of them, 51.4 percent used SNS sites, 5.6 percentage points higher than 2009, according to Knet.

Of the SNS users, 16.1 percent had a bachelor’s degree or above and 38.3 percent were high school graduates.

“The social networking service websites are getting more popular among people with lower education degrees, compared with 2009,” the report said.

More than one-fifth of SNS website users, especially those between 10 to 19 years old, used microblog, or Weibo, a twitter-like service in China, according to the report. Nearly half of Weibo users were students.

China Watch Blog has learnt that Netizens, according to a report released by the State Language Commission, have become the biggest grassroots group of language creators of popular new Chinese words.

“We live in the era of We-Media, which means everyone can create new words and make them popular through BBS or micro blogs,” said Li Yuming, the director of the department of language information administration under the Ministry of Education and vice-president of the commission.

For example, you will be out of date if you do not know what yanggao ti, or lamb style, means, he said at the launch of the 2010 report Language Situation in China in Beijing on Thursday.

Used to describe something overly simplistic, the phrase was coined after the poet Che Yangao, who netizens have criticized for his colloquial style.

Fashion beggar, or xili ge (Brother Sharp), is also among the 500 popular new words in 2010, according to the report.

Brother Sharp was a homeless man who spent his days and nights wandering the streets of Ningbo, Zhejiang province. People began to notice him in March 2010, when a photo showed his “good looks and sharp sense of dressing”, despite the fact that he got all his clothes from garbage cans.

He was nicknamed Brother Sharp by his fans and dubbed the “most handsome underdog of the century”, Internet users enthused about “the glint in his eyes” and his “cool dude” attitude while begging for money from passers-by on the streets of Ningbo.

“These cyber words shock, amaze, and amuse us. This is an age of grassroots entertainment,” said Dai Ran, a 28-year-old Beijinger.

The words might be a weird and haphazard combination of sounds for people who never surf the Internet, but to a country with 420 million netizens, they were meaningful, he said.

The report also said the “frequent use of popular cyber language” and “foreign language studies” have caused a decline in people’s Chinese spelling ability.

China Watch Blog has learnt that as of the end of November 2010, Chinese netizens total 450 million and the Internet popularization rate has reached 33.9 percent, which exceeds the world average of 30 percent, said Wang Chen, head of China’s State Council Information Office.

China Daily has reported Wang as saying that the Internet is an important indicator of advanced productivity. The Chinese government attaches great importance, and it actively promotes the development and use of the Internet.

The government considers the development of the Internet an important means of promoting national information construction, achieving the scientific development of economic society, improving technological innovation and improving quality of life

Wang said that the Internet has grown in popularity since 1994, when China connected to the Internet, and China has the biggest online population in the world. By the end of November 2010, the total number of Chinese netizens had reached 450 million, with an annual growth rate of 20.3 percent. This data also shows that the environment of China’s Internet development is good.