Reporting from Beijing — Cheng Lihua primped her hair, put on makeup and adjusted her gold-plated microphone. Then she got to work.To get more news about 39bet-đánh bài thua-cược đá gà-xì tố onl- xổ số cà mau-kết quả xổ số cà mau, you can visit official website.
“You hurt me so deep that I can’t forgive you,” she crooned into the microphone, nodding her head to the rhythm. “Already knew our love is gone.”

Cheng, a 22-year-old recent college graduate, is a professional “live streamer,” a booming business in China these days. She works four hours a day and earns nearly $3,000 a month chatting and singing songs for an online audience of thousands — all from her bedroom in China’s far-northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, where she lives with her parents.

Her income is nearly seven times the average for the region’s new college graduates.

China is home to more than 200 live-streaming platforms, which together constitute a $1.35-billion market, according to iiMedia Research, a Hong Kong-based mobile market research company. Almost half of China’s massive Internet-using population use live-streaming platforms — an estimated 235 million people.
Whereas Americans tend to use live-streaming platforms such as Facebook Live and Periscope to broadcast and watch events, similar platforms in China have emerged as a social-networking tool for millions of lonely hearts who are eager to seek comfort and digital companionship. Live streamers answer questions, offer advice, sing, dance, even eat their meals for all to watch.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, live streaming has emerged as a tool for social activism. At the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, Native Americans protesting the construction of a pipeline have used Facebook Live to broadcast standoffs with police, a safeguard against brutality. This summer, a Facebook Live user in Minnesota showed the graphic aftermath of a police shooting of an African American man, sparking a wave of protests. People in Ankara, Turkey, have used the platform and Twitter’s Periscope to live-stream a coup attempt.

But in China, where authorities strictly control the Internet, live streaming’s explosive popularity has elicited a raft of new censorship and monitoring regulations.

Authorities have cracked down on live streams involving provocative dancing, coarse language and revealing clothing. Since July, the Ministry of Culture has been conducting random checks on live streams to ensure that any violent or pornographic content is taken down, according to the People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece.In May, authorities banned “seductive” banana eating on live-streaming networks; whether one such performance went viral remains unclear.

In November, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued a heightened edict. Under the new regulations, users are prohibited from live-streaming any content that could “harm national security and undermine social stability.”

Chinese Internet firms have shown a willingness to play by the rules. Lei Tao, co-founder of the live-streaming platform Yizhibo, said the company recruited 300 censors to sit in an office in the northwestern city of Xian and check for unlawful content.

“The stricter the regulations are, the more benefits we’ll get,” Lei said. “We are good students in class; of course we welcome the teacher to manage naughty students more tightly. It will be better for the class as a whole.”Viewers open an app and find a stream that fits their interests. Then they can tap out messages to the live streamers. The messages appear at the app’s lower left corner, visible to all viewers. The live streamer can choose to respond.

If the viewer wishes, he or she can purchase a “virtual gift” using real money and send it to the live streamer. This is how live streamers and live-streaming platforms make their money. The cheapest virtual gifts — for example, a flower or cucumber — cost 3 cents on Yinke, China’s biggest mobile live-streaming platform. A more expensive gift such as a virtual yacht can cost about $270. On Yinke, the platform takes 70% of that money, and the live streamer gets the rest.

About two months ago, Zhao Zhenggang, a 22-year-old Chinese citizen living in New York, made about $300 by live-streaming himself talking about life in the city. Then he spent it all on virtual gifts for other live streamers. “It doesn’t matter if the live streamers are girls or boys,” he said. “As long as they are good-looking and talk genuinely, they deserve my money.”