a picture of a teacup and saucer with the handwritten message attached "not this kind of china"

Hello, China

Posted on by Josephine Corcoran

“Happy Anniversary with WordPress.com!” read my recent notification. “You registered on WordPress.com 14 years ago. Thanks for flying with us. Keep up the good blogging.”

These days, I’m not doing much flying or blogging.

I’m trying to remember why I started this blog in 2011. I’m pretty sure it was because of meeting Ian Pindar, a poet, at the Bridport Poetry Festival in 2010 when one of my poems was given a prize (runner-up) by Michael Laskey and was published in that year’s anthology. Ian was the person who recommended having some sort of online ‘home’, although I can’t remember the exact reasons for this recommendation – perhaps to create an online presence and a means of showcasing work. Anyway, with my one published poem and a desire to engage with other writers online, I set about creating my own blog. WordPress’ interface seemed delightful to use in those days.

(Do I mean ‘interface’ or should it be ‘software?’ Is that the correct tech term? Don’t ask me, I was already thirty when the internet was invented. Everything I do and have ever done online is a mishmash of trial and error while rampaging through all the search engines for advice – with more than occasional consulting with my younger husband and our two, now grown-up, children).

Them was the old days, folks. Blogging was fun and interactive. I shared posts on social media and people read my posts and chatted to me about what I’d written. Social media was sociable in those days, and more than a means to promote a book, reading or workshop. But most of us know the adage about all good things coming to an end – and I’m probably only peering at the past through rose-tinted specs, in any case. Eventually, I ran out of blogging steam. And now I’m once again trying to write prose, rather than poetry, and I’ve become older. Time is running out! I’m trying to put my writing energy into something other than blogposts.

So, why this post?

For the past year, this blog is receiving many, many, MANY visitors, even though my blogging days have more or less ceased to be. By far the biggest number of hits to this blog this year have come from China, followed by US, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong, UAE, and Nigeria. Hits from the United Kingdom are few and far between. What to make of this? Who in China is reading my blog? I’d love to think it’s other middle-aged people, or people of all ages dabbling with poetry writing and reading, or people juggling family, paid work and writing, or people with a growing family – all topics I’ve written about over the years. I have no way of knowing *who* my visitors are because nobody leaves any ‘likes’ or comments. The most probable visitors, of course, are AI ghosts haunting this blog with their invisible spookiness and (I assume) sucking up my posts with vampire-like enthusiasm. Are my posts part of their AI training programme? This seems likely. Maybe I should do a test-run on the AI chatbots with the search term ‘please write me a long-winded, not entirely grammatically correct blog post about …..’ and see if anything looks familiar.

Anyway, Hello China, hello Chatbots, hello you ghostly suckers up of my hours of work.

a picture of a teacup and saucer with the handwritten message attached "not this kind of china"

And Hello to you if you’re actually human. Who knows what the future holds, eh?

22 thoughts on “Hello, China”

  1. Non-bot here Josephine and we have connected on other platforms, it almost felt like in-person. I read this post with interest and it makes complete sense to my own journey out of blogging. I too was advised when first putting work out there to write a blog, and go on the old bird site (since recently abandoned, though yet to retrieve my data and close the account). I too have leant more towards prose the last two or three years, though this is a return as that is predominantly how I began with more serious, i.e. focussed, writing. One way or the other I look forward to seeing more of your writings, and musings.

    Happy New Year!

    Liked by 1 person

  2. I fall blogging flat at times, too.
    I discovered I could link to YouTube musics which gave more freedom. But that’s blocked now: error 153. There are ways around it but, like you, tech is more of a mither than an aid.
    THis is all just a way saying I’m Real too
    and, Best Wishes for next year.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. Also human. And recently returned to WP after a long break. Hadn’t been aware that AI parasitism was a thing (ignorance, bliss) but yours is the second post I’ve read in the last wee while about this. Thanks for being so candid about the issue and your motivations behind blogging. Not sure what the answers are (going back to ink and paper often feels appealing) but it helps to be aware and have the conversation.
    Enjoy your writing and have a great 2026.

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Hi Josephine and a happy new year to you and yours. The China hits have been happening to my blog too. Wholly disproportionate. I don’t what is happening. Not especially what I intended though. Who knows. But best of luck with yours prose writing

    Liked by 1 person

  6. I’m over on Blogger. Most of my traffic comes from the US, Singapore and India! The UK is 6th on the list with China below. It’s always strange to see where people are coming from. Like you I get very few comments, mainly none, yet I keep going and posting to social media. Sometimes it feels like chatting to yourself! I always read your blog. Good luck with the writing and Happy New Year.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. Happy New Year & may it be one of peace, poetry, prose, pals and whatever else keeps you going. I too have had an influx in the more international readership! And links to my work are frequently downloaded these days. I’m trying to move over to substack. But writing any ‘post’ seems hard to get to. Perhaps that uncomfortable feeling of being mined, of prepping fresh ingredients for robot soup! Solidarity anyway.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. Happy New Year, Josephine! I have a similar experience with my blogs and often get sudden spikes. In my naivety I imagined lots of people enjoying my writing. My posts these days are all poems. I decided to follow Roger Robinson’s Manifesto: ‘Your poems aren’t finished until you present them to an audience. It’s unfinished if it’s stuck in a drawer somewhere.’ I get likes and the odd comment, but most views don’t result in either. To interact, you have to sign in, so I guess lots of people don’t want to do this. I’m rambling. The thought of being mined by bots is depressing isn’t it. Anyway I have liked your blog post and will interact with your BlueSky post which led me here.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Hi Heather
      To be honest, I’ve always enjoyed a healthy rate of engagement with my posts. The new development is a massive (thousands) increase of hits, mainly from China and, currently, Singapore. This seems likely to be non-human and I suspect my posts are being scraped for AI use. As Sophie Herxheimer commented, it doesn’t inspire me to keep on producing content.. Anyway, thanks for commenting yourself and very best wishes for 2026 and beyond x

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Level of engagement on my blogs is small compared to yours, but I have also recently started getting hits from Singapore. I too am not inspired to write blogs only for them to be nicked. I enjoy reading others like yours though. Thanks for the good wishes. Hoping for a healthy, more caring world for all humans and may the bots be booted out x

        Liked by 1 person

  9. Apparently Google made a major change to its search algorithm to try to send searches toward human-generated content, perceiving that many users were getting disgusted with the AI slop everywhere. The initial roll-out was in September. In October I noticed an uptick in visitors to all my blogs, and by November, the difference was dramatic. Via Negativa seems to be back to its 2012 levels of visitors now, before the search algorithm first turned against blogs with all our dead links and other features thought (erroneously) to be signifiers of spammy sites at the time.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. They’re from all over. I honestly don’t spend a lot of time puzzling over stats. Who knows who might be doing a search for what on any given day? And sometimes when a particular post is getting losts of traffic, you have to assume that’s because someone shared the link with a friends group somewhere, or on Reddit, etc. Given that a quarter of the world’s population lives in China, it makes sense that a lot of our web traffic should be coming from there, even if only a minority know English. Since you’re on WordPress.com, I presume most bots are getting blocked.

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