Chinese Special Internet Spin Doctor

The"Fifty Cents Party" (五毛党) was first proposed on some official documents. They are professional internet commentators mainly working for provincial and local governments. Nowadays they have become one useful power to help government leading online public opinion and eliminating criticism.
When local governments found the difficulty of controlling public opinion online, they started hiring internet commentators several years ago. The reason of using professional commentators was local governments couldnot rely on central office to monitor and block every single piece of news about their own areas, therefore they need to figure out some useful solutions.

In the year of 2006 the Propaganda Department of Anhui Province first revealed the existence of internet commentators in their report: "Inspection of Propaganda and Cultural Work in Nanchang, Changsha, Zhengzhou" that "since October 2004, the Changsha Municipal CCP Committee Foreign Propaganda Office submitted to the principal leaders the publication". In order to serve their task, the organisations mentioned above and other similar units have already set up a special team and hired many professional internet commentators. At that time the salary for them was RMB 600 every month. Their major job is closely monitoring Chinese netizens' opinions, providing government information and guiding internet opinions. Normally they will focus on one topic every week and put posts on some biggest Chinese News web such as the People's Web, Xinhua Net and 20 other popular domestic sites. Commentators will be paid extra fee for each post besides from the basic monthly salary, which is counted as RMB 50 cents. And that's where "Fifty Cents Party" comes from.
Hunan Province (where I came from) is standing in the leading position of "Fifty Cents Party" for ages. In the early of 2006 they reached the goal of publishing 800 messages every month on the provincial webs. Additionally, in the same year, in order to hire more full-time commentators, the Propaganda Department of Hunan Province launched a campaign which advocated that "everyone can make 50cents". This piece of work greatly enlarged Hunan's "Fifty Cents" team, and made the foundation to create an invisible unique network landscape.
According to the newest report, internet commentators are becoming more and more popular now. Some experts even estimate that there are at least tens of thousands of them. Furthermore, there are special organisations set up to train these internet spin doctors as their job is more important than it would be in any country else in the world.
"Politically, the internet is more important in China than in other societies because it's the only public space where people can express themselves," said Professor Xiao from Beijing University.

For more information click here:
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/