Battle of Bach Dang River
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I heard they also set up the "50 Cent Party" in the Internet (!?)
50 Cent Party Crashers
I spend a lot of time reading about China on the Internet. It's my job, but even before it was my job it was a very serious hobby. I also like to look through readers' comments. Articles on China often hit a nerve with readers, Chinese and American (or otherwise) alike, and generate fierce debates, sometimes hundreds of comments even on a relatively brief article. But in the past few years these debates have been hijacked by the 五毛党(wu mao dang), or 50 Cent Party. They are the legion of young Chinese Internet users (some estimate there are 280,000 of them) who are paid 50 mao (roughly 7 cents) to post comments on blogs, news articles, bulletin boards, etc. that are pro-Communist Party, essentially to drown out critical voices. While they are most active on Chinese-language sites, the 50 Cent Party has found its way onto message boards, blogs and other forums in Western media, too, even spearheading the campaign against CNN's Jack Cafferty for calling the leadership in Beijing a bunch of "goons and thugs." David Bandurski wrote a great article in the Far Eastern Economic Review last year about this phenomenon.
http://www.laogai.org/blog/50-cent-party-crashers
50 Cent Party
The 50 Cent Party are Internet commentators (网络评论员, 網絡評論員, wǎnglù pínglùn yuán) hired by the government of the People's Republic of China (both local and central) or the Communist Party to post comments favorable towards party policies in an attempt to shape and sway public opinion on various Internet message boards.[1][2] The commentators are said to be paid for every post that either steers a discussion away from anti-party or sensitive content on domestic websites, bulletin board systems, and chatrooms,[3] or that advances the Communist party line.[4][5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
China’s 50-Cent Feud Leads to a Rumble
By Adam Minter Jul 13, 2012 12:28 AM GMT+0700
At 1 p.m. on July 6, two well-known Chinese microbloggers arrived at the south gate of Beijing’s Chaoyang Park to settle their differences. The encounter was publicly pre-arranged on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblog.
No (uniformed) police arrived, despite the fact that in the 48 hours after the challenge was issued and accepted, the event's details were re-tweeted thousands of times on Chinese microblogs.
It was an inevitable clash, with the parties representing either side of China’s deepest online partisan divide: those who allegedly blog on behalf of the government and those who allegedly debate free of any taint. The former group is known pejoratively as “the 50-Cent Party,” or 50-Centers, an Anglicization of the .5 yuan ($0.08) fee they are rumored to receive for each pro-government post or tweet. (Though the name has stuck, several government agencies have denied that this is their actual salary.) One doesn’t need to be in the employ of the government to be a 50-Center -- it’s enough to simply act like it. Of those who act like it, few are more reviled than Wu Danhong, a 33-year-old professor at Beijing University of Political Science and Law, who blogs under the handle Wu Fa Tian and denies he's paid by the government. Even the pro-government Global Times newspaper publishes the sneering occasional nickname China’s microbloggers have given Wu: “chief representative" of the 50-Cent Party.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-12/china-s-50-cent-feud-leads-to-a-rumble.html
