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POST TIME: 22 January, 2016 00:00 00 AM / LAST MODIFIED: 21 January, 2016 11:16:19 PM
Jansen: A Dutchman running a website in Kunmin
DUAN XIAORUI and LIU YANQIN

Jansen: A Dutchman running a website in Kunmin

Yansen receives an interview from Yunnan TV during the 2015 Best of Kunming Awarding Ceremony held by Gokunming.com a few days ago. Photo by He Xinwen

Speaking both Mandarin and Kunming dialect, adept with chopsticks, this foreigner is from the Netherlands and his name is Yereth Jansen.

Jansen has been living in Kunming for more than six years and knows this city inside out. He likes collecting intriguing information and tasting various foods. He runs the English website GoKunming.com, hoping that more foreigners can learn about Kunming through his eyes. Today, GoKunming.com has become an important guide for foreigners touring Kunming. At present, the site registers 300,000 page views per month, 34 percent of which are from overseas.

According to Jansen, GoKunming.com is run by a team of five people from different countries: an editor who updates the website content on a daily basis; a forum administrator in charge of the forum’s daily maintenance; an event promoter who collects and posts information about various events in Kunming; and a micro-blog and WeChat administrator. As CEO, Jansen is mainly responsible for the website design and operational management. Every day, GoKunming.com publishes information collected from main media, micro-blogs and WeChat on all sorts of events in Yunnan. It also provides a free platform on which users can publish their own ideas. Today, many foreigners in Kunming regard the site as their “online home.”

Jansen already had a plan for the future development of GoKunming.com. “We will ‘encircle cities from rural areas’. The Art of War tells me that a website also needs a strategy.” He hopes to expand from small and medium cities to big cities and set up similar sites in Nanjing, Hangzhou and other places.

Jansen is concerned about Kunming’s development including the progress of metro construction. Jansen is already an “Old Kunminger”, but he still likes walking around the city. He hopes to learn more about Kunming and better understand its people and culture.