In character

The mainland's internet universe is a closed book to nearly all Westerners - few know even the most rudimentary basics of spoken Putonghua, let alone have a grasp of the written language. Yet an explosion of interest in mainland microblogging sites, known as weibos (" weibo" loosely translates as "micro-blog"), has lured even resolutely monolingual foreigners to take the plunge. (It helps that they can post in English and rely on the services of facilitators, assistants or translators to make themselves heard in China.)

Some of these foreign weibo users are celebrities, hoping to increase their fan base in the world's biggest market. Some are academics, with a nose for the largely unplumbed riches of hundreds of millions of Chinese voices. Some are politicians and some are entrepreneurs who no doubt believe a hotline to China will do them no harm.

The Putonghua-speaking former prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd has accounts on two weibo sites. His popularity on the biggest one, Sina Weibo, doesn't compare with the interest generated by actor Tom Cruise (who can't speak Putonghua, but who has garnered more than 4.7 million followers) or the philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates (more than 3.2 million). Even so, a staggering 700,000 account-holders on the two sites - the other is Tencent Weibo - have decided to tag along with Rudd, who speaks, reads and writes Chinese courtesy of his studies and a stint working as a diplomat in Beijing. It's a skill that differentiates him from nearly all of his Western counterparts.

In Australia, Rudd has more than a million followers on Twitter and is well aware of the power of social media. And, as a politician who regularly visits the mainland, he is accustomed to the rigours of censorship and the power of the internet blockade known as the Great Firewall of China, which prevents ordinary citizens from accessing swaths of the web.

On Sina Weibo, Rudd has more than 339,000 followers, but he himself follows just six account-holders.

"I find that with my weibo postings, there's usually a large number of reactions, some positive and some negative, and it's plenty for me to read," he tells Post Magazine. "There's a limit to how much time you can dedicate to this. I spend about three-quarters of an hour a day tapping out a message and then reading the responses."

He declines to discuss the stringent censorship of the mainland's internet - "that's a matter for the Chinese" - but, he says, his weibo accounts provide him with a window on the shifts underway in Chinese society. Although they are routinely and heavily censored, weibo services provide perhaps the first semi-open, semi-free and semi-democratic forums on the mainland; voices are heard, ideas are exchanged and complaints are amplified - sometimes prompting official action. Rudd says he is "learning something new every day" courtesy of his weibo accounts.