by Shel Israel

There are an estimated 1.3 billion people in China. I got to speak to only one of them when I was con­ducting my SAP Global Survey. As I wrote last month, I have interviewed 45 people in 24 countries about social media in their cultures. But I found Isaac Mao — a serial entrepreneur, software architect, researcher, social media pioneer, venture capitalist, and free-speech advocate — to be both the most enlightening and most inspiring of all the interviews I conducted.

I interviewed Isaac the first time back in 2005 in research for Naked Conversa­tions. Government was already nervous about bloggers back then. In fact, at about that time, he realized they were monitoring his calls. He could hear them breathing when he talked on the phone.

A short while later, a car started fol­lowing him around Shanghai. He knew it was a government car. Government cars over there, like here, pretty much look alike. This irked Isaac. One day, he made an abrupt U-turn. He bee-lined toward the car and rapped on its window. The window rolled down and he demanded to know why he was being followed. The window rolled up and the car sped off.

Next came the two government men knocking on his door asking to come in for a chat. They told Isaac that while they had no evidence he was doing anything illegal, they did want more information on anyone Isaac knew, who were conducting activities “risky to our government.”

Isaac stood his ground. “I don’t know anyone like that. That is not my inter­est. I don’t want to improve our govern­ment. I just don’t want you to harass me,” he told them. They said they would back off, but politely suggested he not leave the country. He had been sched­uled to speak at Les Blogs 2 in Paris in December 2005, but decided that it would be prudent to comply.

That was then. The story was far dif­ferent when I met Isaac in a San Francisco café in September 2007. The Isaac Mao I met was confident that he need not fear his government. Not that his government wasn’t still capable of doing fearsome things, but because the numbers were on his side and because Chinese bloggers have consistently demonstrated they are faster and smarter than the government enforcement bureaucrats.

Besides, Isaac is good for busi­ness, and China, according to Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, needs to create 17 million jobs a year to stay even. Isaac is a spearhead in China’s ef­fort to join the global tech community, something China wants desperately. Also, his VC activity brings foreign dol­lars into China, creating jobs for young, bright Chinese. He may cause officials some discomfort, but one would think China wants Isaac to keep on doing what he is doing.

The numbers are with Isaac and the bloggers: back in 2005, there were 1.2 million bloggers; two years later there are at least 20 million, Isaac told me. They are diverse in age, economics, and business, although there remains a pau­city of middle-age business bloggers.

Twitter is the rage and it makes government nervous, but because of the way it works, government simply can’t monitor it. The government keeps trying to curtail the free speech and mount­ing government criticism on blogs and in social media. You can go to Flickr in China, but instead of pictures, you’ll see only black squares. That’s because a while back a Chinese blogger posted something about Tiananmen Square and it embarrassed the government.

The government wants all bloggers to register their IP addresses and to publish with their full names, so they can be tracked. But nearly no blogger complies. The government sees all the content posted on Chinese servers.

But most Chinese bloggers now un­derstand how to simply post from MIME servers located elsewhere in the world. It is legal to do this and government can­not stop or censor it. Chinese people also know how to access Six Apart or CNN or Google from remote servers.

In China, Google voluntarily censors content, and Isaac thinks less of them for it. But it doesn’t matter. He gets to Google via a server based in Seattle, or Berlin, or wherever.

Back in 2005, Isaac was one of a very small handful of Chinese bloggers and therefore the government could watch him closely — or delude themselves into thinking that was the case. Now there are thousands of popular Chinese bloggers, producing tons of content on blogs and in IM and on Twitter and even Facebook.

Government efforts to command and control it are about as effective as trying to bail out a sinking boat with a lawn rake.

Shel Israel writes and consults on so­cial media issues for business audiences. He is coauthor with Robert Scoble of Naked Conversa­tions: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers (Wiley, 2006). Send email to shel@bloggerandpodcaster.com.