Highlights from the last week of China business news: Lenovo is badly outmaneuvered by rival Acer; German Chancellor Angela Merkel beats the human rights drum on a visit to China.
I accidentally typed in a Livejournal URL without feeding it through a web proxy just now, and, miraculously, the page loaded! Livejournal, an easy-to-use blog system popular with non-geeks, was blocked in China in March. It’s still unclear why it was targeted, after all, no known political activists or dissidents had Livejournal pages (maybe it lowered their street cred? It wouldn’t do to have cutesy mood icons on a post demanding democracy, after all) and the service was mainly popular with foreigners. In any case, now that it appears to be unblocked, LJ users can log on and read those ‘friends-only’ posts they couldn’t access through a proxy. Get going!
The Chinese journalism renaissance seems to have been a hot topic a few years back. A recent talk by Michael Anti at the University of Hong Kong, however, raises some salient new points about Chinese journalism and the internet.
He notes that traditional Chinese journalism usually follows the more subjective European mode. Chinese journalism’s best hope is to adopt American-style objective journalism, he argues, as rigorous fact-checking and a detached viewpoint will create stories that are easier to defend against censors and officials. A good example of this has been Hu Shuli’s Caijing magazine, which has an English-language website (found here).
This is where blogs play a part. Chinese journalists are increasingly splitting their stories between the online and offline worlds. Objective, factual reporting goes in print, while opinions are blogged online.
According to Anti, blogs have also widened the media space, allowing journalists greater freedom even in a more restrictive media environment under Hu Jintao.
But, a new Chinese journalism will not create a new China. “Journalists won’t be the founders of a New China,” he said.
It is one of those strange things that keeps happening despite flying in the face of common sense. Movies that will be seen on pirated DVDs across the nation are banned by Chinese censors for obscure reasons that cannot possibly be true.
The latest is the third installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which was originally based on a ride at a Disney theme park - an obvious threat to the stability of the nation.
The good folks at the blog Danwei report that the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television may ban the movie from Chinese cinemas because Chow Yun-fat, who plays a Chinese pirate in the movie, has unsightly scars and, well, plays a pirate. According to a poll carried out by the International Herald Leader - which is owned by the Xinhua, the state news agency - Chinese people fall on both sides of the debate. On the whole, 60% or so don’t really feel insulted.
Censors around the world tend to be a flaky lot. An interesting webpage provides an unchecked list of books that have been banned at one point or another. Classics like Ulysses, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have all gone under the axe at some point and in some place. They are joined by both the Bible and the Quran. And of course US Senator Joseph McCarthy (not exactly a national hero) did his best to keep Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience out of sight.
Chinese sensors are, in many ways, in a class of their own given the wideth and depth of their activities. Pirates does not represent the first time Hollywood has found itself on the barred list. It is unknown whether the movie will, in fact, be banned and, if it is, whether the reason will, in fact, be some made-up scars.
It would be a shame.
Shanghaiist reports this juicy tidbit on the city police closing a tea shop because of its double-entendre name. The hypocrisy of the move is well covered by Shanghaiist, so I’ll just let it speak for itself:
The name of the restaurant, 青蛙包二奶 (qing wa bao er nai), could indeed mean “Frog Keeps a Mistress” or “Frog Has a Concubine.” You can also replace “frog” with “ugly guy” as qing wa can mean either in Chinese. However a Xinhua story (in Chinese) quotes a worker at the shop who said er nai refers to the “two kinds of milk” they use in their tea
“How do you explain that to the kids?” one interviewee asked
Last Friday I announced I was off to the pub. This Friday, the airport appears a safer option.
According to this article, the latest census from the Committee to Protect Journalists has put China in the top spot for the eighth year in a row for jailing journalists, with a total of 31 imprisoned as of December 1.
But I better be careful where I go. The New York-based committee found the practice is catching on around the world. A record 134 journalists were in jail on December 1 - up nine from the 2005 tally - in 24 countries.
Cuba, Eritrea and Ethiopia joined China among the top four, and Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Iran, Maldives, Mexico, Russia, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Turkey, United States, Uzbekistan and Vietnam rounded out the list of nations to imprison media peoples.
Jimmy Wales built it and they came… eventually.
Wales founded Wikipedia – for those who live under an information rock www.wikipedia.org is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” – and refused to remove articles on controversial subjects in China like the Tiananmen Square events in 1989. The big American internet companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all compromised and self-censored content to get into the market.
Wales stood firm.
Granted, the stakes for Wikipedia are less. The site is run by a non-profit organization that has the luxury of being able to shrug its shoulders at China’s rules. Profit-driven companies – particularly those with shareholders – can’t do that.
The Chinese government has denied censoring the internet but Wikipedia, among other sites, have often been impossible to access. A little more than a year ago, authorities began putting blocks to Wikipedia. These blocks were spotty and some people in some places had some access but generally residents of China could not get on.
Last month, the English version was reportedly unblocked and Chinese users reported access last week. Although some articles in Chinese – Wikipedia has more than 100,000 Chinese articles, the New York Times reported – on sensitive subjects like high-level politics were reportedly still blocked.
“The community in mainland China is basically telling us that they’re able to access,” Wales told the Boston Globe.
Sources to the paper theorized that maybe the officials figure Wikipedia’s modus operandi would allow them to present their spin.
Maybe. Hopefully. That’s what openness is all about.
Bloggers of the world united in a common “say what?” last week when a Chinese official at a UN-sponsored conference on Internet governance proudly proclaimed that in his country the Internet was so free that governance was not an issue.
His comments were faithfully recorded by Internet journal C-Net:
…There are millions of Chinese that have no access to the Internet. We are here because we would like to promote openness. But we have not really raised the issue of how we could participate more fully and how we could have better access to the Internet…
In China, we don’t have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that’s a different problem. I know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their offices from the Webcast. And I’ve heard people say that the BBC is not available in China or that it’s blocked. I’m sure I don’t know why people say this kind of thing. We do not have restrictions at all.
Of course not.
The people at Harvard who found more than 19,000 sites inaccessible in China were probably just working with outdated machines. And this editor, who could not access the BBC for years (and occasionally Google as well) was probably also just mistyping the Internet addresses.
The whole hoopla over Internet blocking in China is probably a gimmick by providers of proxy servers to boost sales.
The poor official, apparently surprised at the suggestion of the famed Great Chinese Firewall, was asked to elaborate on his answer: “How can I elaborate on it if we don’t have any restrictions? Some people say that there are journalists in China that have been arrested. We have hundreds of journalists in China, and some of them have legal problems. It has nothing to do with freedom of expression.”
Sure. The Chinese problem of mafia-style gangs of reporters terrorizing the countryside is a well-documented problem. The UN had better set up another committee to investigate and prevent it from spreading to neighboring nations. After all, as everybody knows, pens are mighty dangerous little artifacts.
We mentioned earlier that Wikipedia is now accessible from the mainland without the aid of a proxy server. Yes! But not so fast. China’s Internet censorship machine must have finally figured out a way to block out only “sensitive” articles while allowing others to work, since, as the New York Times’ Noam Cohen tells us in this article,
Days after word first spread on the Internet
about the change in access, Wikipedia contributors and administrators in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong said they were trying to determine whether any English-language articles were still being blocked.
Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American in Beijing researching a book about Wikipedia, reported on his blog, www.andrewlih.com/blog, that he could get access to many controversial subjects but could not read the English-language article about the suppression of the pro- democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Oh joy of joys. Wikipedia is back.
