Without the internet Pan Shiyi would be just another Chinese billionaire property mogul. But online he has become one of China's most famous microbloggers, with nearly 15m followers on Sina Weibo, the country's main Twitter-like service. He has played a big part in a battle to force the authorities to clean up China's filthy air. In January that battle at last began to turn in the public's favour. Millions of people tweeted in outrage at a dense blanket of pollution that smothered Beijing and many other Chinese cities for days (see chart 2, next page). Chinese newspapers were allowed to give the smog unprecedented coverage. Officials tightened up car-emissions standards in Beijing and ordered an expensive nationwide upgrade of refineries by 2014. But was this a foretaste of the growing power of microblogs or a special case?
展开▼
