ChinaVine member Nan Yang at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
The most surprising thing for ChinaVine member Nan Yang was just how much she learned about her native China. A city girl, from the Chaoyang District of Beijing, Yang is currently leading ChinaVine’s efforts to create a presence on China’s three major social networks. Since December of 2011 she has been busy posting to Renren and Sina Microblog, and transferring video to Tudou. In the process, the 25-year-old has learned about many of the treasures her country holds outside Beijing.
Yang is currently studying Arts and Administration at the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts. The master’s student joined the UO ChinaVine team this winter as the group’s social media liaison to China. Yang has set up ChinaVine accounts on Renren, China’s version of Facebook, Sina Microblog, similar to Twitter, as well as Tudou, a video-posting site similar to Vimeo or YouTube.
The Chinese government has banned Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube in China, blocking these sites from Chinese users behind a large firewall, sometimes called “The Great Firewall of China.” But for companies like Renren and Tudou—both of which began as small start-ups—not having competition from Facebook and Twitter has allowed them to corner the market on China’s social networks. According to FastCompany, Renren might even go public, with an initial public offering sometime this year.
Since the fall of 2010, ChinaVine has worked hard to create its presence on social media networks. While the group has connected with liked-minded individuals and organizations in the English-speaking world—as well as interested parties in Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai through Flickr, which is not banned in China—Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo are inaccessible to users in China. Couple this with the language barrier and it’s easy to see the mostly English-speaking ChinaVine team had a problem: How to spread the message about the group in China? That’s when the ChinaVine team found Nan Yang.
It was orientation for new Arts and Administration students at the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, and long-time ChinaVine member Tomas Valladares, a second-year student in Arts and Administration, was mingling with the newcomers. That’s when he met Yang. “I instantly new she would be great to work with,” says Valladares. He told her about the program, and the following school quarter Yang was on the team.
“We now have a good presence on the Chinese social networks,” says Yang about her campaign. According to the social media liaison, ChineVine’s followers are growing steadily. Yang has also started receiving feedback from users interested in her Tudou posts. Yang says, informing the public and interacting with people like this has been very exciting.
What’s in the future of Nan Yang?
Yang says she plans on joining the ChinaVine field school this summer in her hometown, Beijing. In the meantime she will post updates, and transfer video from Vimeo to Todou, in the process learning more about her native country.