Wednesday, March 10, 2010

50 Cent Party

五毛党(wu mao dang) 50 Cent Party

Sometimes, translation is an art. By the name of 50 Cent Party, you might think it’s an organization of U.S.A., but they are actually from China. As everyone knows that in China, people have limited access to the internet, some famous websites are blocked, such as YouTube, Facebook ,twitter etc.. But besides the censorship, there is a force working in secret, not known by the majority. They are called 50 Cent Party.


The dollar is the official unit of currency of United States. Each dollar consists of 100 cents. Even though dimes are also used as a subunit, it is used solely as the name of the coin with the value of 10 cents. So only cents are in everyday use as divisions of the dollar.

In China, yuan is the official unit for the RMB. One yuan is divided into 10 角(jiao)or colloquially called 毛 (mao). One 角 (jiao) equals to 10分 (fen).

五毛 = half yuan =5 角(jiao)=50分(fen)

五毛党 refers to paid astroturfing internet commentators operating working for the People’s Republic of China, whose role is posting comments favorable towards the government policies to skew the public opinion on various Internet message boards. They are named after the 50 Chinese cents, or 5 mao, they are paid per such post, other names are red vests, red vanguard and the Five Mao Party. (Wikipedia)
In Jan of this year, there was once a news report on gscn.com.cn saying that When I am writing this post, I try to be objective but I am afraid I can’t. The content blew is my personal view of 50 Cent Party.

Gansu Province was going to recruit a team of 650 commentators to skew the public opinion to the correct direction. The report was quoted by many other websites, but none of the links was available soon. This is considered to be the proof of the existence of the so-called 50 Cent Party.

While Google was going to pull out of China, there seemed to be a very fierce debate about whether it was a good thing to Chinese people in China. No wonder why patritism was used against Google by many.

Trace back to an earlier time, after Facebook got blocked in China, the People’s Daily, which is a daily newspaper of the Chinese official press agency, released that 80 pct of netizens agree China should punish Facebook.

I think it should be as 100 pct of the 50 Cent Party agree China should punish the websites contains materials against Chinese gov.

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