Results tagged “censorship”

Xinjiang has been through a lot of political and social trauma in the last couple of months, what with the riots in July, syringe attacks in September, the executions that followed, continuous H1N1 scares, and an internet blackout throughout the province.

The number of China's Internet users have reached 360 million, says ChinaTechNews - a pretty darn sizable market that has attracted considerable attention (and you know, a thousand internet-addiction camp proprietors).

Did you know there used to be an erotic audio book website based out of Shanghai that was immensely popular? We didn’t until we heard about its court case - where the site was shut down and the main female voice actress was sentenced to two years in prison - and we feel all the worse for it. The service, “Night Talk,” attracted 2 million hits, recorded 260,000 downloads and had sales of around 40,000RMB on its 953 episodes of erotic fiction before it was finally brought down. But the shutting up of “Night Talk” has just stirred the fervor for the audio books, with Chinese netizens aplenty desperately searching for remaining traces of its digital files.

When invited to post thoughts about "which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place!" on a website dedicated to celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chinese twitterers replied en mass. In fact, looking on the site right now, it seems that there's barely anyone else besides Chinese twitterers commenting on how much they hate the GFW.

• Party Elder Still Jousts With China’s Censors [NYTimes] "For nearly two decades, the Communist Party strove to wipe out the national memory of Zhao Ziyang, the reform-minded party secretary who opposed the use of force against pro-democracy protesters in 1989. So when a former aide of Mr. Zhao’s, Du Daozheng, disclosed in May that he had helped secretly record Mr. Zhao’s memoir for posthumous publication, Mr. Du’s daughter refused to let him walk outside alone for fear of possible repercussions. She need not have worried. On June 25, a top official in charge of propaganda showed up at Mr. Du’s western Beijing apartment with a reassuring message from Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the Communist Party and the government. Mr. Du said he was told that, as an old friend of Mr. Zhao’s, “Zhongnanhai and party central can understand why you did this.”"
• Olympic chief in ‘secret China deal’ [Times Online] "China made a secret deal with International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge to support his election to the post in return for Rogge's lobbying for Beijing to win the 2008 Olympics, according to an explosive new book by China's sports minister at the time, Yuan Weimin. The former minister says Rogge explicitly bargained with him to win Chinese votes at the Moscow meeting of the IOC in 2001, which awarded the games to Beijing and three days later elected Rogge as president."
• China corruption trial exposes capital of graft [Telegraph] "Huang Guobi lost her husband four years ago to gangsters who brutally dismembered him with machetes before beating her senseless. When she took the case to her local police station, she found it was run by the nephew of the gang-leader. As she worked her way up the Chinese justice system, pleading for someone to bring the killers to account, she found each level riddled with corruption. This week, however, 47-year-old Mrs Huang stood outside the Number Five Intermediate People's Court in downtown Chongqing, filled with anger and satisfaction. Around her, 300 other people, many with similar stories, stood waiting for justice to be done. Inside, the first trial of China's largest-ever criminal investigation was under way, the culmination of five months of police work that has turned the city of Chongqing upside down."

• Learning to drink like a local in Qingdao, China [CNN] "Another round of toasts and exclamations of "hajiu" sounded out around me. I took a sip and set down my small glass of Tsingtao beer as my new friends downed theirs and refilled. Our seafood dinner, perched on the single cluttered table of a tiny antique shop, was punctuated regularly by such moments. I joined in happily, although somewhat bemused, at each increasingly beery celebration of our host, the worldly Captain Jau. My company, a gathering from four regions of China, was engaging me in Chinese drinking etiquette, in the city of Qingdao."
• At Frankfurt book fair, only official China can show its face [NRC Handelsblad] "Censorship in China is the theme Dai Qing chose for her lecture in the margin of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, which opens on Wednesday. She was supposed to have been an official guest of the book fair, which this year has chosen literary China as its main theme. But Dai Qing, who is well-known outside China for her campaigns against political repression and costly projects like the Three Gorges Dam, is not welcome at the official event."
• Xinhua vs Financial Times [Danwei] "Two headlines from the home pages of The Financial Times and Xinhua, two ways of looking at the world. The Financial Times: US hardens stance on renminbi rigidity; Xinhua: China not currency manipulator: U.S. government"

Is it just us, or does it seem like China's just blocking websites for fun now? Just when we thought that the National Day security crackdown had passed us by without (much) damage, we wake up today to find our favorite video sharing website that isn't blocked in China, Vimeo, is now...blocked. O, China, how will we find viral videos that aren't on Youku or Tudou now? At least you've got some good options for leaping over the GFW.

• China's class ceiling [LA Times] "China is the only ancient civilization in human history to have reemerged as a major force in the world. And Chinese are rightly proud of this. So why rock the boat? It is better to be ruled by boring technocrats like Hu who will keep things nice and steady. This is not the story one might hear from unemployed workers in the rust belts of northeastern China, or from rioting farmers in Guangdong province who have been pushed off the land by greedy developers working in tandem with corrupt party officials. Nor is this view necessarily shared by the brave lawyers willing to take on some of those corrupt officials, or intellectual dissidents who still get arrested for arguing that Chinese should be entitled to basic democratic rights. But it is the common line taken by people who benefit most from the current wave of fun, fashion and prosperity — the new urban elite, some of whom are pampered children of Communist Party bosses."
• What If China Had a Second Political Party Tomorrow? [The New Yorker] "On the prospects for multi-party democracy: If you had a second party alternative in China now, I think it would be an anti-foreign party. What else could you see as a platform to challenge the Communist Party, but to oppose the foreigners who are “buying up Chinese resources”?… There has to be a period of generally unfolding democracy. Not bang, all at once. And I think that will happen. I think it’s happening much too slowly."
• Editorial Dispute Threatens Caijing, a Chinese Magazine [NYTimes] "The owners of the magazine have recently come under pressure from some within the government to tone down or drastically alter Caijing’s aggressive journalism, people at the magazine say. Caijing’s managers have told staff members that they have been fighting to maintain the magazine’s editorial integrity. Caijing’s managers have been seeking to create a more independent publication by changing the magazine’s shareholding structure, seeking outside investors and pressing the owners to allow some employees to own a stake in the magazine. They also want a larger share of the magazine’s profits to be invested in new operations, including an English-language Web site."

The latest Facebook Global Monitor report released by Inside Facebook has revealed, rather unsurprisingly, that China heads the pack of three countries that actually lost more active users than it gained for the month of September (the other two being Iceland and Cyprus). When Facebook was banned in July, the social network had one million monthly active users. That figure collapsed to half a million in August, before shrinking further to 41,000 in early September, and now as of the beginning of this month, only a measly 14,000 remain. Totally authoritative anecdotal reports suggest that these 14,000 diehard Facebook users comprised mostly of smart Shanghaiist readers who know where to get their VPN and other desperate expats who just miss their friends back home.

• Tony Blair: China's New Cultural Revolution [WSJ] "Yesterday, just a week after the 60th anniversary celebrations of the People's Republic, China kicked off its first World Media Summit. It shows how far China has come—and how far it has to go. First, understand the problem. We all know China is a nation of 1.3 billion people, but that is just a statistic. Think of how we regard the United States—how different California is from Ohio, for example. Then quadruple it. Think of trying to meld China's 56 native ethnic groupings into one cohesive state. Think of the disaster, not just to the Chinese, but to ourselves, if it fractured."
• It's China's world. (We just live in it) [Fortune] "You wouldn't think the men who run the oil-rich country of Nigeria would have much spring in their step these days. The nation is plagued by a never-ending guerrilla war, one that has trimmed the country's oil production to two-thirds of its potential capacity. But now Nigeria is in the process of renewing production licenses for some of its most prolific offshore fields, and there's a new player in town making the traditional oil powers from the West (Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, Total) very nervous — and the Nigerian government very happy… CNOOC."
• How To Deal With Corruption In China [Forbes] "It happened to Coca-Cola on Sept. 14, to Rio Tinto a month before. Even the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. has been hit. The Chinese government has now investigated employees at all three of those companies in high-profile corruption cases. At Coke, a bottling plant employee was accused of taking $1.5 million in bribes. When your company is charged with corruption in China, you have to worry about not only bad publicity but also running afoul of America's Foreign Corruption Practices Act and a Chinese government that is increasingly clamping down on the corrupt activities of foreigners."

• Prepare to fight China, Qaeda figure tells Uighurs [Washington Post] "A prominent al Qaeda militant urged Uighurs in Xianjiang to make serious preparations for a holy war against "oppressive" China and called on fellow Muslims to offer support. Abu Yahya al-Libi, in a video posted on an Islamist website on Wednesday, warned China of a fate similar to that of former communist superpower, the Soviet Union, which disintegrated some two decades ago."
• Inside the Ring [Washington Times] "China's most senior military intelligence official, a veteran of spy operations in Europe and cyberspace, recently made a secret visit to the United States and complained to the Pentagon about the press leak on the Chinese submarine that secretly shadowed the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier in 2006. Maj. Gen. Yang Hui said senior Chinese leaders suspected the Pentagon deliberately disclosed the encounter as part of a U.S. effort to send a political message of displeasure to China's military."
• A Beautiful Life: Mean Streets and Meaner People [NYTimes] "It takes nerve to award Bai Ling a singing role in a serious drama, but nerve may be the one thing “A Beautiful Life” does not lack. Set among the mean streets and meaner people of downtown Los Angeles, this laughably clichéd dive into sexual masochism and hardscrabble survival replaces story with outline and characters with place holders. No wonder Ms. Ling’s breasts are the most animated objects on screen."

• Taiwan and China [NYTimes] "Taiwan’s position as a de facto independent state seems to be morphing very slowly toward the “one country, two systems” status of Hong Kong. The process is not irreversible but the sentiments of those of mainland origin in the governing Nationalist Party, along with the self-interest of business groups and a widespread sense of economic vulnerability are all pushing the island toward accommodation with Beijing. The trend could mean an erosion in the support Taiwan gets, albeit erratically, from the United States and Japan."
• North Korea ready for six-party talks - with caveat [Christian Science Monitor] "North Korea's new readiness to return to stalled international talks about its nuclear program - if prior negotiations with the United States go well - puts the diplomatic ball in Washington's court. "This is a test for the Obama administration's policy on North Korea," says Ryoo Kihl-jae, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. Initial signs suggested that the US was prepared to pick the ball up. "We, of course, encourage any kind of dialogue that would help us lead to … the complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula," said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly."
• Internet Blackout in Xinjiang? What blackout? [Xinjiang: Far West China] "Greetings world. If you’re reading this note, then my message in a bottle has somehow made it from this secluded island I live on to the shores of your country. Xinjiang is still under complete blackout and there is no end in sight. As a result, my knowledge of world events has vanished and my sanity has suffered primarily due to the fact that we are the only westerners in our city and I can’t contact my friends at home."

And several of the other GFW-themed shirts available at their store.

• Recession be damned! Shanghai shoppers spent more than 1.2 billion yuan over the past 3 days of the holiday weekend. This represents a 23.6% increase over last year. It seems none of us were able to resist the lure of deals, promotions, and other bargains that chased us around over the holiday. [Shanghai Daily]
• Although it might be a mess at the moment, some of that construction on the Bund is finally panning out - the new Pennisula Shanghai hotel is scheduled to open by mid-October. The hotel with combine Art Deco architecture characteristic of the area with modern luxuries. [Urbanatomy]
• Walking down the street with all of the traffic noise from the cars, buses, mopeds, old women yelling, and bicycles always manages to give us a headache. Shanghai is trying to clamp down on its bus drivers who are honking excessively by installing "horn-monitoring" devices that fine drivers if they are honking in a non-emergency situation. Although part of us is relieved to hear there will less noise, the other part now worries about getting hit by a bus even more. [Shanghai Daily]

Coming hot on the heels of previous reports, more info has been released regarding the recent emails sent to journalists in China containing malware. It seems whoever is sending the emails has been targeting Chinese employees of major media organizations, hooking the reader’s interest by detailing a possible trip to China to research China’s role in the global economy.

• China's censorship arms race escalates [RConversation] "Last week the China Digital Times reported that the photo above (click here to view full size original) has been making the rounds in Chinese blogs and chatrooms. It is an image of a "computer science float" for Thursday's National Day parade, onto which somebody has photoshopped a screenshot of the Internet Explorer error message familiar to anybody who has ever tried to access a blocked website in China: "This page cannot be displayed." As the 60th birthday of the People's Republic of China approaches, Internet users in China are complaining that the Internet has become even more difficult to use than ever before. Not only has the number of blocked websites increased, but the most popular censorship circumvention techniques and technologies have come under attack."
• 'City of Life and Death' wins Spanish film award [AP] "Chinese director Lu Chuan's film "City of Life and Death" has won the top prize at Spain's San Sebastian Film Festival. The movie, a sensitive and balanced depiction of a traumatic moment in China's history known as the Nanking Massacre, or the Rape of Nanking, deals with a six-week period in 1937-38 following the Japanese capture of the Chinese city of Nanking."
• Mao's revolution at 60: He wouldn't recognize it [The Globe and Mail] "This Thursday, as tanks and missiles roll through Tiananmen Square in Beijing and fireworks explode overhead to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China, a retired factory worker will gather with her children and grandchildren in this historic city on China's booming east coast, and sigh a little - regret mixed with relief - at what those six decades have brought them."

Wow. According to Thomas Crampton and the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents' Club, somebody out there is targeting journalists with emails containing malicious viruses.

• Google Earth Used By Netizens To Discuss Urban Planning [chinaSMACK] "For those of you who lived in or been to any major city in China, you must have at one point gotten stuck for hours during the morning commute or being lost within the maze of side streets and intersections. Things apparently don’t look that much better from the bird’s eye view, as curious Chinese netizens shockingly discovered (thanks to Google Earth) that even cities in Africa have seemingly better city planning and layouts than Chinese ones. The crux of the arguments boils down to whether it was truly poor city planning or because that most Chinese cities, like Rome, were not built in one day."
• The Akamai Of The East [Forbes] "In the first seven months of this year, 40 million users plugged into China's Internet for the first time, about 7 million more than the entire population of Canada. For China's Web sites and telecoms, that's a server-straining, broadband-bending rate of growth. For a privately held Beijing company known as ChinaCache and its investors, it's the kind of statistic that opens champagne corks. As the top content delivery network (CDN) in mainland China, ChinaCache holds a near monopoly on the lucrative business of selling Internet-based companies a fast track through the country's congested cyberspace."
• Taiwan film festival pressured to drop film about Chinese dissident [Monsters and Critics] "After Chinese protests, the organizer of the Kaohsiung Film Festival came under pressure Thursday to cancel a showing of a film about the life of a Chinese dissident. The Kaohsiung Film Archive announced earlier this month that it planned to show the Ten Conditions of Love, a documentary about exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, during its October 16-29 film festival in Taiwan's second-largest city."

The saga of problems and setbacks that China has faced in attempting to implement the controversial Green Dam internet censorship software just keeps on going. After postponing the software's release indefinitely this summer, the government has attempted to find ways to censor the 'net without provoking massive public outrage. Which is funny, because the government is sneaking around trying to do things on the internet without anyone noticing, just like us!

These days it seems like violence on TV should be the least of a parent's worries - rather the threat is allegedly much greater online. According to Shanghai Daily, Zun Long Ming She, translated as 'Dragon Society', is one of a growing number of online communities that are encouraging or inciting Chinese youths to commit crimes and dole out violence. Formed in June 2008, Dragon Society has recruited 169 members, consisting of “local natives who lacked a caring family and children of migrant workers.” Like any online social networking site, members of Dragon Society were able to share pictures and information, “showing off their tattoos and knives and organizing robberies and attacks” just as a group of Facebook friends would tag each others pics and drum up interest in club parties. The government began cracking down on them after a boy in Luwan District was beaten and stabbed by five other boys, allegedly ordered to do so by one of the site's leaders. Since then, the victim has helped the police to identify members of Dragon Society as well as provide more information on the functions of similar websites. Photo from aranarth@flickr.com

Woah, we guess this is a risk you take with any internet start up, but who knew our new favorite VPN would flame out this fast? Less than a month after we interviewed the team behind Freedur, it seems that it's been shut down. And before you get your hackles raised about China and its net police again, this time, it seems like it was an inside job.

We all knew it, but it's still nice to hear it coming from the top. Li Yizhong, Minister of industry and information technology, has admitted that the failed launch of that widely protested Green Dam Youth Escort was kind of a mistake. Li said that the order that went out sounded too much like the ministry was bullying people to install the program, but that had never been the government's intention. He then followed this up by saying that schools and internet cafes would still be required to install Green Dam on all computers... once the developers had improved the software's performance and closed all its security loopholes. Okay, so the fight isn't over yet, apparently. The one question we have: why are they bringing all this up again now? Source: SCMP

Peter Guo (郭宝峰), a self-described "troublemaker in Amoy (Xiamen)" experienced what everyone who Twitters or blogs in China is not-so-secretly afraid of - one of his blog posts got him in trouble with the police, who threw him in jail. He was one of as many as seven bloggers who were detained after writing about a 25-year-old woman, Yan Xiaoling, who had allegedly been gang-raped and murdered by someone connected to local authorities in Fujian. Guo's crime: reposting something that had already been put on a BBS in Fujian Province, titled "Yan Xiaoling (嚴曉玲) much more miserable than Deng Yujiao (鄧玉嬌)." Deng Yujiao is a waitress turned national heroine who became famous for stabbing an official who may have sexually assaulted her. He then posted a video he had found, completely unedited, in which Yan Xiaoling's mother accused local authorities of trying to cover up the case.

Student-made Chinese internet drama "Living Together" will soon be airing on Chinese TV, marking one of the first times that an all-student production has made the leap to prime time television. However, as Global Times reports in their feature on the program, the plot and other key elements of the ultra-popular show will be altered in order to meet Chinese television censorship standards.

• Bruce Lee's siblings authorize Chinese biopics [AP] "Bruce Lee's older sister and younger brother have authorized a Chinese company to make a series of biographical films about the late kung fu icon, saying they want to produce a historically accurate account of their brother's life. Phoebe Lee and Robert Lee appeared at a signing ceremony with J.A. Media in Beijing on Monday, 36 years to the day after Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong at age 32 from swelling of the brain."
• Chinese News Sites Go Down After Reports on Gov't Scandal [IDG News Service] "Two of China's most popular technology news Web sites went offline Tuesday after carrying news reports that linked the son of China's president to a corrupt African deal. The technology news sections disappeared for several hours from major Chinese portals Sina.com.cn and NetEase.com early Tuesday afternoon, when they started redirecting viewers to general news pages. Both tech sections had carried reports on a state-owned company accused of bribing Namibian officials in the last day, but those reports were missing when the Web pages reappeared."
• A Verdict in China Faces Court of Public Opinion [WSJ] "A local court Monday meted out a three-year prison sentence for Hu Bin, the 20-year-old Hangzhou college student whose reckless driving and reported lack of remorse incited outrage on Chinese Internet portals back in early May. Prosecutors elected to charge Mr. Hu with vehicular manslaughter... rather than “endangering public security,” a much more serious crime punishable by death. The three-year sentence was met by general cynicism (in Chinese) on one of China’s main Internet portals, with many anonymous postings claiming that justice had been bought rather than served."

Looks like someone in the censorship bureau has an itchy trigger finger and Andrew Sullivan's The Dish has become the latest casualty. Yep, the rest of The Atlantic is completely unbanned, including James Fallows' corner - which is where most of the publication's China-related content is stored. We've mulled over it, but we have no idea why this one got GFWed. The most recent post is about Balkanization, hardly something China feels strongly about. The last post on China was a discussion of Jim Crow-like laws which diverted into why white faces get hired as English teachers more. Its jump off point: James Fallows' (who, we repeat, is unblocked) picture of a "No Uyghurs should apply" sign at a Xinjiang restaurant. We guess it just goes to show that anything and nothing can get you blocked here.

• Will this stop the pandamonium? [Daily Mail] "It is a desperate cry - or rather a very loud trumpet - for attention. These elephants were painted black and white to look like the pandas who have stolen all their fans. The elephant is Thailand's national symbol, but the country has gone panda-crazy since the birth of a female panda cub to pandas Lin Hui and Xuang Xuang at Chiang Mai zoo in Bangkok."
• Who’s Who Among China’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Advisers [WSJ] "China Investment Corp., the country’s $200 billion sovereign wealth fund, has finally unveiled its long-planned International Advisory Council, which The Journal wrote about Monday (Call us petty, but we can’t help noting - given that that one of council’s stated missions (In Chinese here) is to advise CIC on “increasing transparency” - that it took four days from the group’s first meeting for CIC to disclose its membership)."
• Work resumes at Shaoguan toy factory [Danwei] "The fight at the Xuri toy factory in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province that has been called one of the causes of the current unrest in Xinjiang made the cover of today's New Express. A major fight broke out at the factory on June 26 between Han and Uighurs workers, leaving two men from Xinjiang dead, but according to today's paper, which features a big cover photo of smiling Uighur women working at the factory, production has resumed."

Hurrah! China has decided to delay indefinitely its plans to force manufacturers to include that Green Dam Youth Escort software on new computers, just hours before the policy was supposed to start. Their reasoning: "Some businesses pointed out the heavy amount of work, time pressures and lack of preparation." The news comes days after various international organizations petitioned the Party, begging for it to rethink the regulations, and PC makers have said that they can't make the deadline. The plan had also engendered threats of violence towards the company responsible for the Green Dam software and huge Chinese netizen backlash. Its indefinite postponement is not only a victory for free speech, but also a victory for anyone who doesn't really want malware on their brand new computer.

The crackdown on Google in China seems to have had little effect on its internet traffic. After dropping to 29th place on Friday, Google.cn returned to its original position of 21st place yesterday. While this is still much lower than Baidu (which has remained a stable position in the top 10), it's not bad for a site that's been consistently targeted by Chinese authorities - including campaigns complete with fallacious name-smearing interviews and fudged statistics, as well as a firewalling of several of its auxiliary services. Source: SCMP (paywalled)