Chinese environmentalists see greater online freedom

China, which exercises internet censorship under a wide variety, of laws has become the unexpected place of a new wave of online activism meant to increase public awareness to environmental threats. According to Businessweek, several notable examples could be spotted in Chinese cyberspace such as health hazards related to Beijing’s toxic air, blogs on how environmental contamination affects food safety and water quality. Ma Jun, the Beijing-based environmentalist and founder of the Institute for Public & Environmental Affairs estimates that well more than 1,000 Weibo sites focus on environmental issues. Weibo is a Chinese microblogging website, a hybrid of sorts between Twitter and Facebook. "In China there is a significant lack of tools to disseminate information. Before, we were almost fully dependent on the official media, but sometimes they were very hard to rely on," Ma told the newspaper. "Now Weibo has become almost like a self-media. It provides another way for the message to be disseminated to the public. And it has created a kind of forum for people to have debate and discussion over hot issues." Chinese activists have used the Internet to raise awareness to various projects on the past, and in 2011 an online-backed campaign that swept more than 12,000 people, was able to bring about the closing of a hazardous paraxylene (PX) plant. PX is considered extremely hazardous to humans and is a known carcinogenic. China, he said, is new to the power of online protests. Recent statistics by the China Internet Network Information Center show that China now has 538 million Internet users – meaning that 39.9% of the population exercises online activity. Since the beginning of 2012 25 million Chinese have joined online activity. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter