Nude bloggers upset China beauty contest

Chinese blog company refuses to remove 'immoral' photos

A recent 'beauty contest' for female bloggers has attracted huge attention and aroused fierce controversy in China.

The contest has been criticised as "sexist" and "immoral" after some contestants posted nude photographs on their blogs.

In the first stage of BlogChina's Beautiful Blogger contest, which was held earlier this month, several million Chinese web users voted for female bloggers whose online diaries are hosted on the BlogChina site. 

The 20 highest scoring finalists were brought to Beijing to compete in a more traditional beauty contest, for which BlogChina provided free hair styling, make up and beauty treatments.

As well as physical appearance, the contestants were ranked on a variety of other criteria, including the quality of their blog postings and the popularity of their blogs.

The winner, who blogs under the name Yi Lan, is a business student from Beijing. She received a $2,500 prize.

Additional prizes of $1,250 each were awarded in four runner-up categories including 'most talented blogger' and 'sexiest blogger'.

BlogChina announced that more than two million people voted to choose the finalists. However, the contest attracted harsh criticism in some quarters, with accusations of sexism and sensationalism from the media and other bloggers.

One finalist, blogging under the unlikely name 'Hedgehog Mumu', posted several semi-nude photographs of herself on her blog. She received the most votes in the public voting, but won none of the prizes in the finals.

Opinion columnists attacked her for "offending the dignity of women", but Bo kee refused to remove the photographs because they "do not break state laws", according to Chinese news portal AnHui Hotline.

Others claimed that the woman in some of the photos was not in fact the blogger, although 'Hedgehog Mumu' denied these accusations, the news portal reported.

The publicity seeking nature of the contestants and organisers was also criticised. BlogChina has been accused of cooking up a "news stir fry", a Chinese phrase which implies frantic attempts to hype a small news story into a big event.

"I like beautiful women and I like BlogChina. But to combine the two together, I don't see the reason for it," wrote one male blogger, who uses the name 'Idai'.

"To use the beautiful women as a kind of bait, how meaningful is that? Basically it's just a 'news stir fry'. This is the essential character of China: nobody really cares about the result, they only care about the process."

BlogChina, which is better known inside China as Bokee.com, was accused earlier this year of attempting to artificially boost its standings in the website traffic rankings measured by Alexa.com. 

Alexa's data is often used by advertisers and investors in China to judge the popularity of websites. Bokee.com suffered an abrupt fall in the rankings after Alexa apparently wiped dubious visitor data from its records.

BlogChina executives have said that the company's short-term goal is to list its stock on the US Nasdaq market later this year.

There were more than 33 million bloggers in China by the end of the third quarter of 2005, according to local research firm Analysys.