Almost nonstop, the uncensored opinions of Chinese citizens are popping up online, sent by text and instant letter across a country shaken by its worst earthquake in three decades.

“Why were most of those killed in the earthquake children?” one post asked Thursday on FanFou, a microblogging site.

“How many donations will really reach the catastrophe area? that is doubtful,” read another.

China is now home to the world’s largest number of Net and mobile phone users, and their starvation for quake news is forcing the government to let knowledge flow in ways it hasn’t before.

A fast-moving network of text messages, instant messages and blogs has been a dominant source of firsthand accounts of the catastrophe, as well as pleas for help and even passionate criticism of rescue efforts.

“I don’t want to use the word transparent, but it’s less censored, an nearly free flow of discussion,” said Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and

director of the China World Wide Web Project, which monitors and translates Chinese Web sites.

China is well known for controlling the flow of info.

“We didn’t know that hundreds of thousands of lives passed away during the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 until many years after the catastrophe took place,” sociologist Zheng Yefu said in a commentary last week in the Southern Metropolis News.

But word about Monday’s magnitude 7.9 quake spread quickly on Web sites and microblogging services, in which users share short bursts of data through text and instant messages. The services plus publish the messages online.

“It all depends on the users; we don’t edit it,” FanFou founder Wang Xin said. “We just gather their words together.”

A string of crises by the last few months — including crippling snowstorms and Tibetan protests — has taught the government a few lessons, Berkeley’s Xiao said.

Government officials held a rare,…

Orginal post by Top Tech News