China’s constitution assures us that the country does have free speech. To maintain this illusion, the Party believe it essential to make the ad-hoc edicts that ban particular issues from discussion a ’state secret.’ Because of this twisted logic, AsiaPundit does not expect to hear much more from Microsoft on the reasons Michael Anti’s blog was shut down.

Microsoft is likely not just acting as a proxy for the ministry of propaganda by shutting Anti, by not saying why it shut Anti it is keeping ’state secrets’ of behalf of China.

AsiaPundit has been bothered by the shutdown of Michael Anti’s site, plus the complicity of Yahoo! in the jailing of Shi Tao, not just because these are large technology companies aiding in the shuttering of free speech online. More disturbing is how these self-proclaimed ‘new media’ companies have helped undermine China’s emerging critical press.

Shi Tao was arrested because he provided details on what Chinese media were ordered not to report, Anti was likely shut down because he was offering moral support to journalists and editors at the Beijing News tabloid.

As ESWN’s Roland noted, and as AsiaPundit has heard from well-placed staff at the company, Yahoo! did not likely know what data it was providing the state when it handed over details on Shi Tao. But Microsoft knew exactly what it was doing.

Working backward, from information in the press and on ‘the Internet,’ a likely chain-of-events that led to the censoring of Anti begins to form.

The New York Times reported that Microsoft spokeswoman Brooke Richardson gave the paper considerably more detail than the one-paragragh waste of bandwidth that it e-mailed other reporters:

A spokeswoman for Microsoft said the company had blocked "many sites" in China. The MSN Spaces sites are maintained on computer servers in the United States.

Ms. Richardson of Microsoft said Mr. Zhou’s site was taken down after Chinese authorities made a request through a Shanghai-based affiliate of the company.

The company did not give details on what the contents on the request were. It shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is almost certainly a ’state secret’. Roland cited on Thursday:

"…according to a Bejing News editor, the Beijing City Government News Office issued this notice on December 30, 2005: "1. Effectively immediately, all websites shall treat the words ‘Bejing News’ as a keyword to filter at all forums, news comments and blogs.

The NYT notes that Anti’s blog was the first to report on the purge at the Beijing News (having the story days before the actual sackings). But Anti’s blog was not the first one to be silenced on this, as noted at Danwei, leading portal Sina had shut the blog of an editor at Beijing news two days earlier.:

An editor at The Beijing News named Wang Xiaoshan responded to the hostile takeover on his blog with a post in large highlighted characters:

    There’s no way to retreat, so we won’t retreat. The butcher’s knife is already raised… We’re going to die so let’s make it a beautiful death.

The post was copied as an image by Massage Milk (reproduced above, links to Massage Milk below). But Wang Xiaoshan’s blog is hosted on Sina.com’s blogging service; less than 24 hours after he published his battle cry, Sina’s censors deleted it from his blog, together with all comments that readers had made to the post.

As mentioned in this Salon article reproduced by Howard French, Sina is also a portal and news provider. Because of this the company - along with Yahoo! - is privy to direct briefings from the Beijing’s Information Office, which passes on information on what to cannot be reported and what must be censored. MSN Spaces is just a blog host, one of more than 600, so it possibly didn’t get the memo until a bit later than Sina.

Still, Microsoft’s Shanghai joint-venture did eventually receive either a direct order to shut Anti’s blog specifically or a more general order to shut all blogs discussing Beijing News. As disclosing the content of such orders is revealing a ’state secret,’ I expect no comment from Microsoft on the matter at this end.

There are a couple of things to consider on this. As all MSN Spaces blogs are hosted in the US, would the company be obliged by Chinese law to shut down a site discussing the Beijing News walkout were it put on MSN Spaces by a blogger outside of China? Hypothetically, If the Dalai Lama were a blogger, would MSN shut his site upon receiving a request from Beijing? Or if MSN’s Tehran office received a request from the government, would it shut Salman Rushdie’s blog? (and would it issue a statement: "MSN is committed to ensuring that products and services comply with global and local laws, norms, and fatwas"). 

As a test, AsiaPundit has set up an MSN Spaces site with a collection of Anti’s posts taken from ESWN and Google’s cache of the now deleted site, 

This was done using a Singapore-registered MSN account and was not done through a Chinese IP address. The site is currently available within China. If MSN deletes it, then it should be assumed that Microsoft will accept the CCP’s orders in regards to sites that are neither hosted in or registered in China.

Like all Chinese blog service providers, Microsoft’s MSN Spaces have been shutting sites on behalf of the state since it established a presence in the country. What happened to Anti isn’t new - although it most certainly is of a higher profile.

AsiaPundit has been accused of making too much of a fuss of China’s censorship. There are bigger concerns to worry about, such as the elimination of poverty and corruption, critics say. That’s certainly true, but in AP’s view the censorship of papers like the Beijing News and bloggers like Anti allows the state to cover up corruption and the problems of rural peoples (including beatings by government authorities).

Again, while it may be only a handful of residents who are affected by a block on a single website, the control of information in China promotes ignorance, retards democratic and economic development and prevents the building of an educated civil society.

Further on the Beijing News and journalism in China, Running Dog offers his invaluable insights:

Being a journalist in China is never simple. Some westerners dismiss all Chinese reporters as Xinhua lackeys and lickspittles, as cynical hacks in the pay of the Party, and the only time they are given any praise at all is usually after they have been arrested by the government and sanctified by Reporters sans frontieres. Such critics rarely take time to question how they would behave under similar working conditions. The prison system is littered with reporters who strayed too far from the Party line, and Running Dog is often astonished by the talent, tenacity and courage shown by many of our Chinese counterparts. Since last week’s sackings, several journalists were still submitting coruscating accounts of the fiasco to the Xici journalist forum, and even as the moderators were deleting the threads, the reporters continued to defy them and post their pieces anew.

They are acutely aware of the risks. The 21st Century Global Herald was forced to close in 2003 after an interview with Mao Zedong’s secretary, Li Rui, who called for free elections. The Worker’s Daily spin-off, Beijing New Times, was also shut down in the same year after printing a provocative article that included the National People’s Congress in a list of the country’s ’seven disgusting things’. Since then, the authorities have decapitated the Southern Metropolis Daily and sentenced its chief editor to prison, while the ostensibly well-protected China Youth Daily was also subject to regime change last year.

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