Joel Martinsen at the always informative Danwei.org has posted a few translated comments recently made by Kou Xiaowei, vice-director of the A/V and internet division of GAPP (General Administration of Press and Publications), taking back an earlier statement that there would be a “real-name” system imposed on online gaming, similar to other mandatory registration systems on the way for blogs, message boards, and online music and video sites. Actually, he didn’t so much take it back as outright deny that any such statement had ever been made. Danwei has more:

At last year’s conference, Kou Xiaowei had this to say:

A “real-name system” has three sub-systems: One, a registration system that discriminates according to ID information; Two, an inquiry system that is open to the community and can allow parents to check whether their children are playing games; Three, a confirmation system that has the cooperation of the PSB to confirm the registered information.
…
A “real-name system” will definitely be written into law.

When it was floated last year, the “real name” system encountered resistance from adult gamers who resented being subject to the same rules and fatigue systems as minors. But with a few age-related changes, the identification portion of the anti-addiction system that Kou expects to be implemented industry-wide in April or May is basically identical to the one he spoke of last year.

As it turns out, the real denial isn’t that there will be a system requiring online gamers to submit their real names and identity numbers — that’s definitely going through — it’s that it won’t be called a “real name system” (实名制). You really have to admire the sheer chutzpah here, but while the government has shown an increased effort to inject PR into its message, it is light years behind its net-savvy citizens.

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.

So, Google has snaffled up popular video sharing website YouTube for US$1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock deal.

My big concern is does this mean that YouTube now counts as Google Video, and if so will it also be blocked/made not available/insert your censor-approved term here in China.

Looks like its back to CCTV 5 for me for Friday night fun, or perhaps the banned-but-still-widely-available-on-pirate-satellite-TV BBC.

This is refreshing: Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, who founded the popular online user-edited encyclopedia Wikipedia, has flatly announced that he will not censor his site for the sake of being unblocked in China. Wales said in an article in the South China Morning Post that he would not do as Google did (or Yahoo!) in February when it began to censor web searches from China:

“One of the things deeply important to me, and to the entire Wikipedia community, is that whatever we do to become accessible in China, it not be viewed as what Google has done in compromising censorship.

“If there are subtle changes to policy that we can make which are acceptable anyway because … we do it already in Germany or it’s about quality, then it’s fine.

“But it is not acceptable for us to do something to make sure the Chinese government authorises every edition of everything that comes out.”

Good news for free information in most of the world, bad news for those of us in China, as Wikipedia has been blocked on the mainland since October of last year. Other options include top Chinese web portal Baidu, which has its own Chinese-language wiki-style encyclopedia, Baike, whose entries are both growing rapidly and, apparently, politically acceptable, the yet to be closed Answers.com, which includes Wikipedia entries in full on its pages (though users cannot edit) or, if one really wants to stick it to the censors, simply accessing Wikipedia via one’s favorite proxy server.