Through microblogging, there is a strong connection between Yang Lan and China’s next generation, since Sina.com owns Sina Weibo, a sort of Facebook-Twitter social network with more than 56% of China’s microblogging market. Sina Weibo adds 20 million new users monthly. Ten thousand are overseas Chinese in North America. It is estimated that the site has about three billion page views daily.
Yang Lan says, “My generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate in the historic transformation of China that has made so many changes in the past twenty to thirty years.”
In the video, she uses several examples of how microblogging is changing China. She says the public’s reaction shows a general distrust of government, which lacked transparency in the past. She explains how the younger generation, which calls itself a tribe of ants, is different. Most of this generation is well educated with a literacy rate better than 99% and 80% of city Chinese go to college.
In addition, social justice and government accountability is what these young people care most about, and the power of microblogging gets the word out — any accusation of corruption or backdoor dealings between authority or business arouses a social outcry and unrest.
“Fortunately,” Lang Yan says, “we see the government responding more timely and more frequently to the public’s concerns.” She closes her lecture with, “Our Younger generation is going to transform this country while at the same time being transformed themselves.”
Return to Reinventing China through Synergistic Cultural Innovation – Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
iLook China 