The topic may be Tibet, earthquakes or outbreaks of dengue fever. But when people in China want to share news or commentary that government censors would likely squelch, many turn to a U.S.-based Web site run by Watson Meng of Durham.

The site, Boxun.com, relies on a host of bloggers and citizen journalists -- mostly in China -- to break stories, often faster than state-controlled Chinese media or foreign news services. The site is banned in China, but Chinese people can skirt that Internet censorship through proxy servers hosted in the United States.

Posting on Boxun (pronounced "bow shwin") is not without risks. Numerous contributors, including three in the past several weeks, have been jailed in China.

"It's really aggravated the [Chinese] government because it takes stuff outside and puts it on display internationally," said Bob Dietz, of the New York nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists. "For us, the site is required reading."

Despite Boxun's long-standing connection to many Chinese activists, Meng said he doesn't call himself a political activist.

The 2005 graduate of Duke's Fuqua School of Business is the software brains behind Boxun's management. He edits others' stories and videos, but rarely writes his own bylined articles. Meng said he simply strives to carve out a different niche from other overseas Chinese news organizations, which seem to be either overwhelmingly favorable to China or affiliated with the banned religious movement Falun Gong and against the Chinese government.

"I want to be in the middle," Meng said. "To be independent -- there's a market, there's a value."

Boxun has garnered high-level attention. A U.S. congressional committee on China frequently refers to the site in its reports. And a famous Chinese civil rights lawyer once told Meng that Beijing assigns someone to keep an eye on Boxun 24 hours a day. Boxun's servers were attacked as recently as December, temporarily erasing the site's more than 2,000 blogs, Meng said.

Boxun's roots

The beginnings of Boxun trace back almost 15 years ago, when Weican "Watson" Meng was in his late 20s, working for Motorola in China as an accountant.

Meng, now 42, had grown up during the Cultural Revolution in rural Hebei, a province that surrounds the capital, Beijing.

"I worked like a cow," he said, pointing to hands calloused from tough farm labor.

By 1993, the electrical engineering university graduate was one of only a few thousand people in China with e-mail accounts. Meng wowed friends on university campuses by plugging his company laptop into public phones and showing them how e-mail worked. He subscribed to e-mail lists with news that Chinese students overseas compiled from various sources, and he printed stories out to give friends. He was excited when a friend forwarded him chapters of a book banned in China, "The Private Life of Chairman Mao."

Fast forward about five years. Meng had gone to Rochester, N.Y., to study management of information systems. He decided to create his own weekly news e-mail bulletin, compiling stories about China from various sources. About 5,000 people subscribed.

As he scoured the Internet for news, Meng realized some people were spending several hours a day to research and write articles online. He thought it would be a good idea to organize their work on a common platform.

In 2000, Meng, then chief software architect at a New York company, founded Boxun. A friend coined the name -- "bo" means "wide-ranging, comprehensive" in Chinese, and "xun" means "information" or "news."

The site, which gives Internet users an open forum with few restrictions, grew popular quickly. It gets more than 500,000 page views per day, Meng said.

Boxun has flourished in China in part by necessity. China holds the dubious distinction of being the nation with the largest number of jailed journalists or Internet dissidents. Mainstream Chinese media outlets still receive directives from China's propaganda department about what they may and may not report.

Some shortcomings

Boxun's model has its caveats.

"The problem with this coming up from the grass roots ... is you have angry people on one side of the argument presenting their argument," said Dietz, a former NBC News bureau chief and CNN journalist. "It's a source of information. It's not the whole story."

To be more reliable, information needs to be investigated and verified. But that doesn't always happen, Dietz said.

Another potential pitfall: The site protects people's identity if they don't want to use their real names.

"It works as long as citizens are responsible," said Anna Brettell of the National Endowment for Democracy. "But it leaves the possibility for fake stories."

Meng acknowledges such shortcomings. But contributors are increasingly trying to include video or photos with their reports or phone numbers so that a small cadre of editors and reporters can check facts, he said. And editors over time have come to know which contributors are more credible.

Meng has stayed in North Carolina after graduating from Duke because he thought it would be a good place to raise his family. He hopes to continue living here for a long time.

For many years, Meng has kept a low profile. But recently he has spoken up more at conferences around the globe, including one last month in Paris on press freedom in the run-up to this year's Beijing Olympics.

In August, Meng will head to California for a yearlong Knight journalism fellowship at Stanford University. He was among nine international fellows picked from a pool of 166 applicants. As someone with little journalism training, he said he is excited about the opportunity.

He's also interested in exploring business models for making citizen journalism more financially viable. Meng currently pays his living expenses running a nonprofit that hosts about a dozen banned Web sites in China.

Boxun itself takes very few resources to run, Meng said.

But it barely makes any income, either.

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