Censorship, Culture & Chinese Netizens

The speed of change in the Chinese digital media scape is not just revolutionary: it is explosive. With a quarter of a billion Internet users and half a billion mobile phone subscribers, the numbers alone make China extraordinarily tempting to western entrepreneurs and investors

A distinct but, in the west, poorly understood Chinese Internet culture is emerging. A familiarity with this culture is crucial to anyone trying to make their fortune or to understand the often contradictory messages coming out of China as it takes its place among the world's digital powers

Even as China emerges as a hothouse of disruptive innovation, Beijing's often heavy-handed control of the Internet confounds western observers and presents western Internet companies with difficult ethical choices

Kaiser, who has seen China's Internet censorship regime up close from many different angles, will add shades of grey to an issue often painted in black and white. He will challenge western assumptions and explain why Chinese Netizens are less worried about censorship than Westerners think they are
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By day, Kaiser is the mild-mannered group director of digital strategy for Ogilvy, China, where he scouts promising technology companies for good strategic fits with Ogilvy/WPP and ponders the future of digital marketing in China in his Digital Watch blog

By night, he is the unrepentant lead guitarist for the Chinese Heavy Metal band Chunqiu. At other times, he's the father of two very young headbangers, a satirist for a local expatriate magazine with a long-running column called Ich Bin Ein Beijinger - soon to be published as an anthology of the same name - and a very competent Sichuanese food chef

Kaiser was born in upstate New York, raised in Tucson, Arizona, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and has a mostly worthless MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona. In 1989, he co-founded China's first and still most successful Heavy Metal band, Tang Dynasty. He's apocryphally credited with introducing distortion pedals and headbanging to mainland China