"If you only read one language then you're missing something". The Statistician Blogger, Roland Soong.

My interest in the changing nature of Chinese journalism on the web takes me to Hong Kong.

In a shopping mall called Times Square in flashy Causeway Bay, I meet the blogger whose daily habits bring the Chinese web's darkest haunts to the world's attention.

For a man who exists for thousands in the immaterial pixel, we've met in the most material of places. It's weird. Fashionable Hong Kong shoppers, most behind big shades, laze in and out of brand shops, stopping only for cappuccinos. Such a generic location to meet a man so unusually influential, it feels like I'm undercover.

His sheepishness from a distance, the baseball cap, the scant eye-contact, makes him all the more the Noir informant. What are bloggers meant to look like? He slips into the chair opposite.

I thought he'd be young. I had come from the Mainland where nearly 40 per cent of netizens were aged 18-24. But this was Hong Kong, a different beast. The man behind EastSouthWestNorth, a site essential to any media junky in China, is a statistician in his mid-50s with a high-pitched voice that talks constantly about numbers. He fidgets and giggles. He tells me early that the purchase of diet soft drinks is proven, by numbers, to coincide directly with income. More and more diet drinks are therefore being bought in China, a growth market. I find him alarming then charming and nervously camp.

He tells me at length about the Japanese disaster film he just saw. "Look, you have a distaster!" he says, irritated, "something’s about to blow up, and then you stop everything in order to discuss whether you want to get married? Stop! It’s going to blow up!” It doesn't take long to tune into his running staccato. His conversation flips back and forth between numbers and pop, pop and numbers. An obsessive love of numbers and media culture makes this man a powerful force on the Chinese blogosphere.

Roland Soong lives in Kowloon, Hong Kong, looking after his sick mother with the help of a nurse. After 30 years abroad, Soong is here permanently now, working for his New York-based holdings company at odd hours throughout the night while he blogs during the day.

Hard to believe is his flippancy about blogging. "I don’t think about it", he says. "If I have time, I do it. If I don’t feel like doing it I don't". Hard to believe because for most, this level of work would be suicide. He has a name anyone on the Chinese Internet knows for its sheer industriousness.

He updates ESWN sometimes three times a day with translations and interpretations of articles posted by China's most influential bloggers, links to interesting articles in both Chinese and English, and a wry commentary pointing out the oft-erroneous coverage of China in the West. It is truly exhaustive and exhausting to look through. For his efforts, he has very respectable statistics.

Based on his figures for the entirety of 2005, here are the daily rates. Number of hits, 41,638. Number of page views, 9,866. Number of unique sessions, 8,064.

Less tangibly, he breaks stories that inform the world's broadsheets and helps build a transnational understanding of China's media culture. With those figures he could be raking in advertising money. But he doesn't derive any income from the blog. He also doesn't believe in cookies. So he doesn't really know where all his readers are.

Forty per cent are unknown. Thirty per cent are from the US, though most proxy servers route through the US, so that could mask a good deal of Chinese users who view entire web sessions for convenience through a proxy. Soong is not blocked on the Mainland. But China sees no real need to detail where IPs are registered, so it's difficult to know what impact, in real numbers, he makes in the Mainland.

The site's first incarnation was a bookmarking system, an index of interesting sites. Some time-sensitive sites he cached for preservation. His focus at the start was international, with posts about the Iraq War.

Then in April 2004, one page took off. "It was one of those avalanches", he says. Metafilter, a community aggregator of weblogs, picked up ESWN for a series of tellingly Chinese photos he collected from Chinese bulletin boards (people at bus stops, masses on bicycles, that sort of thing, he says). He got so much traffic he couldn't afford to host the website anymore. He deleted the entire thing, and started again with his new idea, which launched in December 2004.

"If you only read one language then you're missing something", says Roland about the new site, a daily review of Chinese media. "I'm specifically thinking about people who only read in English but not in Chinese. So my perspective in terms of selecting something for translation is going to be, 'Would the English-only reader be reading this?'"

With that in mind, Soong has been translating the dark, unknown parts of the Chinese media that the rest of the world can't or won't see. He has created an alternative to the foreign correspondents who operate out of China's big cities, the traditional gate-keepers of anything Chinese for the outside world. He keeps them honest by filling in the blanks.

Rebecca MacKinnon writes praise of ESWN, calling him an essential voice for understanding the complex developments in domestic Chinese stories. "Roland and ESWN is "exhibit A" for why blogs enhance the world's "information ecosystem," she writes.

Like Beijing Loafer - my other favourite Chinese blogger - Roland takes Western journalism to task. The main problem he sees is naturally with numbers. Journalists quote figures once, he says, then the number is repeated forever without question. "The problem is like a runaway train. Once you're on it, you can't get off it".

His prime example was about Chinese "Mass Incidents", a bureaucratic way to refer to social unrest in China. China faces an ever increasing number of mass incidents, the story goes, indicating a China spiraling out of control; the Party is about to crumble like we said it would, says the West; it's time, China, to give your people freedom; insert generic attack against China here then justify it with this statistic.

Soong sees flaws in this approach. "My first objection is you seem to think all mass incidents fall into the same category, and you're completely ignoring some of the subtle differences", he tells me. But he doesn't apologise for China. Like Beijing Loafer, he wants objectivity. "Since I am a statistician by profession", he writes on his blog, "I get very sensitive and sensitised about numbers and their exact meanings".

87,000 is the number most cited by journalists of protests, uprisings, resistances across the country "...which then gets spun into (365 days) x (24 hours per day) x (60 minutes per hour) / (87,000 incidents) = 6 minutes per incident -- every six minutes, another mass resistance against human rights violation occurs in China! How shocking!" smirks Soong on his blog. "And how could a nation stay together at this rate!" In typical Soong fashion he then extensively breaks down the numbers and the facts of a "mass incident" so the phrase ceases to make any sense. He writes that a mass incident can basically include... anything. Anything from, yes, riots and street protests, but also delaying the delivery of mail.

He knows he will continue to read this number, "knowing full well that we may be talking about disco brawls or gambling den raids".

Statistics, he reminds the reader again, "are never ever totally objective but they are necessarily socio-politico-economic artifacts".

One satisfying thing about Soong - at least for my own Western tendency to fetishise people who love "democracy" - is that he is writing this blog to keep people honest, a civic contribution to widening the pursuit of the truth in the public sphere. That might sound grand, how I write it here. But he says it himself to me in the shopping mall. There is an objective truth about numbers, he says, and this contributes to a political truth.

"If you had any common sense, you would say if you’re for democracy then you’re for freedom then you must be for truth. This is not about populism and rousing people. It’s about truth. If you’re not for the truth then you have no business being running a democracy or being free. Because you are abusing it!" He's the classic watch dog, the patient auditor.

While an argument can be mounted that his blog is changing the face of Chinese journalism too - more voices, more accountability and so on - Soong doesn't include himself in this movement. "I don't do journalism", he says. "I don't call people up and say I'd like to interview you. I don't. I'm just some guy pounding on his keyboard in his pajamas in his bedroom".

In comparison to a journalist with the resources of an organisation, "a blogger can only be mostly opportunistic", he says.

He does observe however a trend on the Mainland that sees more and more journalists blogging, outside the contraints of their own publications. A journalist on base-salary in China, says Soong, will essentially shop his or her article to bosses, be rated and based on the grade be paid accordingly for the work. If the article remains unpublished, it is owned by the writer, not the organisation. The reporter on base salary for that week "can dispose the article as he sees fit", says Soong.

"So, in a way, the journalist has a way to get the story out", says Soong. "They become bloggers".

But the statistician bloggers goal for now is more specific than changing the role of journalism in China. For now, it's about incremental social change, based on numbers.

"If you can't be honest with numbers, I can't accept it", Soong says.

In the flood of commuters entering the Causeway Bay underground station, Soong slips away like a fish.
credit | banner image from ESWN.