By Wang Weilan

Talk about tempting fate. One of the last things Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder of the Danwei.org website, told the Global Times before heading off on his three-week vacation to Italy was: “Finally, everything is on track.”

He was celebrating the fact his site had finally registered with the Beijing Administration for Industry and Commerce in December to become a work unit. That’s right, Danwei.org was now a danwei.

On the sixth day of his vacation, the site was blocked. It came just two days after the abortive launch of the Chinese government’s Green Dam project, a hot-button issue among Danwei’s savvy and dedicated readership.

As Danwei staff had received no official notification about the blocking, the Global Times called the the Ministry of Public Security, ultimately the highest agency responsible for Internet security, but the ministry did not respond by presstime. It would seem that Danwei had fallen victim to China’s “Great Firewall”, an issue close to the heart of its readership.

The Global Times next called the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), who, despite their apparent role as an Internet information center, had absolutely no idea who blocks websites or how to find out who had blocked Danwei.

“I don’t know why it happened, so there is no way to proceed,” Danwei’s Joel Martinsen told the Global Times. However, the site remains accessible outside the Chinese mainland and available through proxies within the country.

The pinyin for the Chinese word “work unit”, Danwei is an English language blog featuring selections of Chinese media, blogs and Western media reports on China.

Popular with foreign correspondents, Chinese intellectuals and people interested in the Chinese mainland in general, Danwei has been monitoring reports on China and Chinese blogs since 2003. Goldkorn registered the website in 1999. As a member of TypePad, Danwei was blocked in 2004 when the whole service was blocked.

But since then, the website has persisted where others have been blocked. This was the first time Danwei was blocked on its own, said Martinsen, a colleague of Goldkorn.

Before it was blocked, Goldkorn seemed unusually upset over the suspension of Google service and wrote “Nothing could break the friendship between netizens and Google.”

The post before that featured Goldkorn selling Danwei T-shirts with Mao Zedong’s portrait to celebrate the founding anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party.

Jin yumi or “gold corn” is the familiar nickname for Chinese when talking about this energetic founder, publisher and editor of Danwei.org. Aged 37, Goldkorn identified himself as a half-Jewish white African who has spent almost his entire adult life in China.

Group of four

Goldkorn started recruiting his multinational group in 2005. The American Martinsen, a graduate of Chinese literature from Beijing Normal University, joined Danwei after working as an English teacher in Jilin of Northeast China.

Chinese Alice Liu Xin had worked as researcher for the Guardian newspaper and resided in England for 15 years. Eric Mu is a graduate from Shandong Province in East China. Their daily task involves translating articles and blog posts by Chinese writers. Everybody selects and writes the story on his or her own, and they discuss among themselves.

Their office, a two-room unit located in a down-to-earth building in Dongdan, Beijing, which used to be Goldkorn’s home, was a sight to behold in the hot summer.

The door of the office was wide open to get fresh air. A noisy electric fan was blowing while the three full-time workers tapped on computers in the living room. Newspapers they had bought at their own expense were piled on desks.

A graduate of English literature from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, Goldkorn has lived in China since 1995. For the first eight years, he did odd jobs like teaching English, freelancing and running magazines, both legal and underground. In between jobs, he started companies and experienced interesting ups and downs.

Goldkorn was inspired to register the domain name danwei, but did not know what to do with it until in 2003 he caught the blogging bug during the SARS breakout.

“I read blogs on SARS and noticed that they were in fact more comprehensive sources of disease information than the WHO release or news reports,” he said.

Jeremy Goldkorn Founder of the Danwei.org

So he launched Danwei, initially as a one-man show.

The first item he posted was a story about the death of Soong Mei-ling, wife of the late Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek. He translated a small story from Sohu.com, “I put it on the blog and soon it was getting noticed,” he said.

Sex blog

Goldkorn also did interviews in Beijing and posted videos on the blog, wearing his trademark yellow safety helmet. He has since retired the helmet and dismissed it as a bit too showy. But he got famous during the helmet period, especially after interviewing Muzimei, a Chinese woman who kept a sex blog recording her affairs with various men. People commented that he was intimidated by Muzimei and appeared ill at ease.

Goldkorn saw Muzimei as “smart, brave, not mainstream and a good writer.

“It is exactly because of stuff like this going on in China that made it fascinating to follow the news,” he said.

“The society is changing and people have a lot more personal freedom. But that has not been reflected well in the English-language media. Western people still have very outdated ideas about China.”

Goldkorn noted that some foreign correspondents focus only on the bad news, while the Chinese media has the economic boom. As a result, readers from foreign countries lack a context to find out what Chinese people are talking about.

He hopes to present Chinese society in a humane tone that makes China look better. Opinionated writings like those of Ai Weiwei and Unhappy China are selected to reflect dynamic images of China, he said.

Since 2005, Danwei started selecting English language bloggers on China as annual model workers.

“No prize, only honor,” he said. The honor was mainly to encourage more people to write English language blogs on China. Now there are so many blogs that they should be a little stricter about the selection criteria, he said.

After five years’ persistence, Danwei has forged its own unique style, mainly translating important stories in Chinese newspapers, interesting blogs on issues of broad concern and watching changes in the Chinese media with regard to business, government regulation and content.

The website also includes its own video shows featuring cultural issues expats in China might find interesting.

“If you follow Danwei, you will stay on top of developments in the Chinese media and the Internet, and that is what draws most of our readers,” Goldkorn said.

Goldkorn thinks now is an exciting time to observe changes in the Chinese media and Internet and to follow the changes closely on a daily basis has a particular charm.

Changing Chinese media

“In the West, the media industry is going through a radical change. But the Chinese media is getting more interesting.

“It has become a different media environment since 2003. The give and take between restrictions and freedoms has been fascinating and made it a vibrant culture,” he said.

It is also exciting to watch the Internet in China, he said.

“The Internet has made significant contributions to the vitality of China, giving citizens a place to voice their opinions and more space to participate in decision making in China.”

The average readership of Danwei is 10,000 a day, with traffic evenly split between China and the US, according to Goldkorn.

With 800 yuan ($117) for each job advertisement, the Danwei website is not earning a whole lot of money, he said.

“I don’t want Danwei to be too commercial, but keep its own style,” Goldkorn said.

It’s the research work and website content services that provide revenue. Foreign companies interested in the Chinese market are their main clients. Danwei is cooperating with Betty’s Kitchen, for example, on targeting promotions to the Chinese market.

After starting research for foreign companies three years ago, Goldkorn now splits his time between working for Danwei and consultancy services. He is also examining the possibility of providing
English-language media content service to the media.

Goldkorn is very much attached to the country where he grew up as a young adult.

“I am doing great things that couldn’t have been done in other places and I feel pretty much at home here.

“Surrounded by the forward-looking and enthusiastic spirit, I am addicted to the pace of change and the excitement here,” he said.

Asked whether he thinks Danwei would influence or change anything on the Chinese media landscape, Goldkorn was modest and shy.

“I am just a little lao wai (foreign guest). Who am I to change things in such a huge country?”