Word: zhou
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...Thus ended a nine-month adventure during which the onetime vegetable seller from a small village in Hunan province had vaulted to Internet stardom as a kind of digital knight errant; his blog, Zhou Shuguang's Golden Age, publicized the plight of the victims of China's frantic economic boom. At the peak of its fame, the blog drew 20,000 readers a day. Zhou, who called himself Zola after the 19th century French writer and activist, had hoped to inspire some of the country's 47 million other bloggers to join him in the good fight, roaming the country...
...From the beginning, Zhou knew he risked running up against the authorities, who aim to exercise as strict a control over China's rapidly expanding virtual universe as they do over their citizens' everyday lives in the real world. (Any day soon, China will surpass the U.S. as the nation with the largest number of people online.) But because so much of the Internet is ungovernable, it is the freest public space in the country, a place where individuals like Zhou constantly push the limits of permissible activity...
...Zhou's vault to Web stardom came last April, when he was visiting Chongqing, a municipality in central China. Intrigued by a dispute that pitted a property developer against a stubborn homeowner whose refusal to leave his property had blocked the launching of construction, Zhou began writing blog entries and posting video and still images on the Web. The incident caught the imagination of Chinese Netizens, and Zhou and the Chongqing "nail house" (named thus because it stood out in an otherwise leveled landscape) became an overnight sensation. Apparently embarrassed by the publicity, the city government and the developer soon...
...Zhou, it was a moment of revelation. He decided that, as a single, jobless Chinese citizen who "firmly believes in individual freedom," he was perfectly suited to devoting himself to "helping evicted and displaced persons." He also cheerfully declared his aim of "hyping" his way to fame so he would "never go back to selling vegetables." Traveling on a shoestring budget and relying on donations from admirers and the people to whose aid he came, Zhou preached the digital gospel, educating his pupils in the arts of establishing a blog, posting, taking digital photos and videos, using instant-messaging tools...
...surprisingly, Zhou soon found himself "GFW-ed," as Chinese Netizens call having their sites blocked (in reference to the Great Firewall). By then, though, he was familiar with the techniques Chinese bloggers use to evade the authorities and managed to have his blog reappear on the Internet almost immediately by using proxy servers and mirror sites outside China. But Zhou's luck ran out when he traveled to Shenyang to interview victims of a pyramid scheme involving a supposed aphrodisiac powder made from crushed ants. Victims handed over cash and were told they would get a guaranteed 30% annual return...