BEIJING: Floozie or role model, attention monger or free spirit? For months, China has been debating what to make of its latest Internet-born star, a young woman known nationwide as Furong Jiejie, aka Sister Furong.
She is seen as a pioneer pushing the boundaries of traditional media controls but in the process has become a target of government censors in the tightly controlled country.
Sister Furong started the craze by posting pictures of herself on Internet bulletin boards of two top Beijing universities to which she had tried but failed to gain entrance.
The shots, and accompanying captions and passages she wrote proclaiming her own beauty and talent, became a campus sensation.
But when her cult status began to sweep the whole country, Beijing stepped in.
“They’ve cracked down on me,” Sister Furong, a 28-year-old girl whose real name is Shi Hengxia, told Reuters.
In late July, authorities told the country’s top blog host to move Furong-related content to low-profile parts of the site. Her pictures can still be found online, but links to them and chatrooms about her have disappeared from the front pages of major Web portals.
And after blanket coverage earlier this year, newspapers, magazines and television have recently given almost no time to Sister Furong.
“When I first heard about it I was really disappointed,” she said. “My friends all said the government should be encouraging a positive, helpful girl like me,” said Sister Furong.
Beijing has worked hard but struggled to extend its heavy-handed control of domestic media to the country’s booming Internet, which is forecast to have 120 million users.
The government has created a special Internet police force believed responsible for shutting down domestic sites posting politically unacceptable content, blocking some foreign news sites and jailing several people for their online postings.
Bulletin boards operated by some of China’s most prestigious universities have been barred to outside users, while a number of Internet cafes and online game companies have been shut for allowing users to access pornographic, violent or otherwise off-limits content.—Reuters