Jeremy at Danwei reviews two very different China-focused cover stories from Time and Newsweek and notes, the revolution will not be blogged.

While Western commentators, including yours truly, love to get excited about censorship and freedom of expression in China, the future happiness of a fifth of the world’s population is likely to depend on a much more basic right: the definition and protection of private property, and especially the when it comes to usage and ownership of land in rural areas.

In which light it is worth comparing recent cover stories of the Asian editions of Time and Newsweek.

The Newsweek cover story about bloggers, by Sarah Schafer, is not bad: Blogger Nation: A proliferation of voices is slowly dismantling the status quo in China.

The cover is reproduced above; note the cover lines: Beijing vs. bloggers.

It’s a shame that whoever wrote and designed that cover decided to go for such sensationalistism.

When you consider that Massage Milk, the star blogger of the piece, continues to says that the recent shutdown of his blog was a joke directed against Western media, you realize that it’s not exactly Beijing vs. bloggers here.

It seems that very, very few people are blogging for revolution or radical change in China.



The real revolution?

Time’s China zeitgeist cover tackles a different issue: the problems of the rural poor. The story, by Hannah Beech, is titled Seeds of fury.

The basic premise is stated in the last line:

    "The entire village is doomed anyway. We have no money, no job, no land. There’s nothing left to be scared of." If angry farmers truly lose their sense of fear, it may ultimately be Beijing that is running scared.

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, coruption, east asia, economy, northeast asia

As noted earlier, China’s bogging foreign correspondents are having tremendous fun at the National People’s Congress. But while AsiaPundit, Running Dog and Lalaoshi are in hell, AP is pleased to note not only that local reporters feel essentially the same about the event, but also that the local reporter behind Non-Violent Resistance has managed to escape the assignment.:

Been pretty busy lately. I was in a gym on the jogging machine one afternoon a couple of days ago and watching the Foreign Minister’s press conference on TV. Saw quite some familiar journalistic faces in there, and I wondered at my own luck not having to cover this. To me, the NPC/CPPCC annual affair is the most tiresome, boring stuff to cover for a journalist. Fortunately I never really have to do much about it. When I saw economist Justin Lin Yifu mobbed by what looked like a hundred journalists waving recorders and shotgun microphones with that look on their faces that said “whatever you say is news to me!”, I knew it would be exactly the same old s***. OK, I know I am being extreme — there is extremely valuable information one can get from these conferences, but I am just incapable of extracting it from all the sound and fury. One very important journalistic skill missing.

Technorati Tags: asia, china, east asia, media, northeast asia

In China private-sector initiatives are often put out of business by other local projects that have tighter connections with authorities - especially state-owned enterprises. Could the same be happening to blogs? Lets hope not.

Danwei reports that three of the top Chinese-language blogs vanished today.

Let’s start with a quote from Liu Zhengrong, deputy chief of the Internet Affairs Bureau of the State Council Information Office, recently published in the China Daily:

Liu … also said Chinese people can access the Web freely, except when blocked from “a very few” foreign websites whose contents mostly involve pornography or terrorism.

This morning, three of China’s best blogs, obviously written by terrorists and pornographers, were deleted.

Two of the disappeared blogs are Massage Milk and Milk Pig, hosted on Yculblog.com. Both blogs currently display the following message:

Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed.

However, blogs by state-approved NPC delegates have been launched and will surely replace the biting commentary of the now-deleted sites. Here’s an excerpt from an NPC delegate’s blog, it’s not for the faint of heart:

I’m very happy to be able to communicate with internet users through the People’s Daily ‘Strengthen the Country’ blogging platform. As a CPPCC committee member, one must always remember one’s historical responsibility to reflect the interests of the people, to enlighten the people, and to try one’s utmost to promote economic development, fairness and rectitude, and societal harmony.

AsiaPundit is also noticing that China Digital Times is currently unavailable.

Technorati Tags: censorship, china, east asia, northeast asia

Two of AsiaPundit’s daily reads are having a blogwar* over whether or not Japan is set to ban the sale of used electronic equipment.
Cory of Boing Boing notes:

As of April 2006, it will be illegal to sell used electronics that are 5 years old or older in Japan. Akihabara News says that this is part of a pattern of restriction of the sale of used goods that prevails in Japan, where manufacturers have been able to convince the government to sweeten their profit-lines by banning re-sale of goods.

Mutantfrog retorts:

So foreign sales will not be restricted at all. This is no surprise, considering how common sales of used Japanese vehicles are overseas. For example, in the Philippines all of the buses seem to be bought used from Japan. The very first bus I rode as I stepped out of the airport had a plate mounted above the windshield saying that it had been a Kyoto city bus that was refurbished by the Keihan Bus Company in around 1980. Second, companies can use what seems to amount to fake leases to get around the sales restrictions.

But there is more to it. Domestic non-lease sales are not being flat-out banned anyway, they are simply requiring an inspection.

Corey deflects:

Lots of you have written in to point out this site, which purports to debunk this article. However, if you read it, you’ll see that in the guise of "protecting consumers," this Japanese law will limit the resale of used goods to giant retailers that presently make all their money from new goods, while shutting out user-to-user sales of electronics, pawn shops, market stalls, charity shops, etc. In other words: the sale of used goods will be at the discretion of the companies that stand to lose the most from the sale of used goods.

(*n.b. blogwar is an acceptable term for anything from a vicious flamewar to a polite debate.)

Technorati Tags: asia, blogwar, east asia, japan, northeast asia

Via Peking Duck, who has helpfully republished an un-linkble New York Times item, Nicholas Kristof weighs in on the four best-known companies that are assisting in the censorship of the internet in China, who are now unfortunately being referred to as the ‘Gang of Four.’

Yahoo sold its soul and is a national disgrace. It is still dissembling, and nobody should touch Yahoo until it provides financially for the families of the three men (ed: Three!?! AsiaPundit was still counting two.) it helped lock up and establishes annual fellowships in their names to bring Web journalists to America on study programs.

Microsoft has also been cowardly, but nothing like Yahoo. Microsoft responded to a Chinese request by recently shutting down the outspoken blog of Michael Anti (who now works for the New York Times Beijing bureau). Microsoft also censors sensitive words in the Chinese version of its blog-hosting software; the blogger Rebecca MacKinnon found that it rejected as "prohibited language" the title "I Love Freedom of Speech, Human Rights and Democracy."

Cisco sells equipment to China that is used to maintain censorship controls, but as far as I can tell similar equipment is widely available, including from Chinese companies like Huawei. Cisco also enthusiastically peddles its equipment to the Chinese police. In short, Cisco in China is a bit sleazy but nothing like Yahoo.

Google strikes me as innocent of wrongdoing. True, Google has offered a censored version of its Chinese search engine, which will turn out the kind of results that the Communist Party would like (and thus will not be slowed down by filters and other impediments that now make it unattractive to Chinese users). But Google also kept its unexpurgated (and thus frustratingly slow) Chinese-language search engine available, so in effect its decision gave Chinese Web users more choices rather than fewer.

Kristof is very close to AsiaPundit’s own thinking on this. Google’s move into the China market has received the most attention - in no small part due to the "don’t be evil" target it has tattooed on its forehead. But its actions were the least objectionable. In the context of moves by its predecessors, Google could even be seen as progressive.

Google’s main portal does not redirect to the censored China service and it is more transparent than anyone else in the market about the fact that it censors its China site. Google did not damage freedom of speech or information in China - all it did was damage its brand.

While Yahoo may have been unaware of the implications of its co-operation with Chinese authorities, after Shi Tao and Li Zhi ‘incidents’ it can no longer defend itself by claiming ignorance. It can properly claim that it has no legal liability when future incidents occur due to Alibaba’s ownership of its China operations. As distasteful as that may seem, that is as things should be. Opening a minority shareholder to legal actions would set a dangerous precedent.
But morally, as Yahoo does have a 40 percent holding in Alibaba, in AsiaPundit’s view Yahoo will be 40 percent complicit should journalists or dissidents be jailed in the future.

Michael Anti, translation via ESWN, pens a critique of Congress and defense of Microsoft and Google. However, he does save some venom for Yahoo.:

At the end of my statement, I must state once again that I have mentioned only Microsoft and Google as the American companies, but it is definitely not Yahoo!  A company such as Yahoo! which gives up information is unforgivable.  It would be for the good of the Chinese netizens if such a company could be shut down or get out of China forever.

(images via Boing Boing)

(UPDATE: Would China better off without the censored Google? For a hint read Google vs Baidu. AsiaPundit thinks  ‘Would Google be better off without China?’ is a better question.)

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, cisco, east asia, , microsoft, northeast asia, yahoo

A promising new group blog has been founded:

From the authors of The Asianist, Guns and Butter, DPRK Studies, and OneFreeKorea.

Technorati Tags: asia, blogs, east asia, korea, north korea, northeast asia, south korea

China Digital News linked to this Chinese journalist’s blog only a couple of days ago. I could log on it yesterday, but today I see this.  Apparently it’s only blocked in China, as MSN has promised.

Things are getting crazier by the day.

I wonder if language is my only layer of protection right now. Maybe I’ll be taken offline soon too.

This is how MSN’s new policy on censoring blogs is being practiced. The company will no longer erase a blog, as it did with Michael Anti’s site. It will only block it in the country where the government has requested a block. This is a step up, as users can still see the site through a proxy and as postings can be retrieved and placed elsewhere. AsiaPundit does hope that MSN will not be collecting the IP address and user details if the author chooses to do so.

Still, it would have been nice if Microsoft displayed the above notice in Chinese. That keeps the company still a few notches below Google, which does display its censorship notice in the local language.
(UPDATE: MSN does display a notice in Chinese.).
As AsiaPundit has mentioned earlier, the cooperation of internet companies in China’s censorship is only marginally upsetting. Users can still access the ‘real’ Google and more importantly the real simplified-Chinese Google, MSN Spaces still provides room for expression - even if the company did delete and now blocks blogs by the request of the state.

The thing that upsets AsiaPundit is that these moves are assisting in a greater evil, that which is the Chinese government’s attempt to muzzle an emerging critical press. With the shutdown of Michael Anti’s site, the block on the above site and the jailing of Shi Tao — something that is completely unforgivable — the targets were the domestic press.

The local press is where positive change will come from in China. A vibrant domestic press is more important than an unfiltered Google, or Microsoft, or Yahoo, although that would be welcome. The domestic press is what is read in China, and change will not come because of news articles by the BBC, NYT or my own agency, although these too are welcome. Change will certainly not come from US bloggers who seem more interested in picking on Google than they are in talking about the actual situation of the press in China. But AsiaPundit imagines that the CCP is less of a threat to Pajamas Media advertising revenue than AdSense is.

That internet portals are censoring themselves is bad, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. This is the true Evil!

Announcement of Beijing Municipal Administration Office of Internet Propaganda

All,

The media listed below are frequently chosen as sources for internet website, but they are currently not legally allowed to be copied. Please do not copy current news and politics from those media. Please especially keep away from copying them in the front page or headline areas.

We understand that the current limits on copying news are not easy to implement, but before we find better solutions, please cooperate with us. We will also keep guard for you, and penalize each of those sites that we find fail to follow the rules.

The Huashang Daily, The Chinese Business Morning View (Hua Shang Chen Bao), The Jiefang Daily Online–Shanghai Morning Post (Xin Wen Chen Bao), The Jin Chu Online-Chu Tian Metropolitan News (Chu Tian Du Shi Bao), The Bei Guo Online—Ban Dao Chen Bao, The Star Daily (Bei Jing Yu Le Xin Bao), The International Herald Leader (Guo Ji Xian Qu Dao Bao), The China Business News (Di Yi Cai Jing Ri Bao), The Hua Xia Jing Wei Online, The China Taiwan Online, Chongqing Morning News (Chongqing Chen Bao), The Oriental Morning Post (Dong Fang Zao Bao), Chongqing Business News (Chong Qing Shang Bao ), The First (Jing Bao), YNET.com (Bei Qing Wang), The Legal Evening News (Fa Zhi Wan Bao), The Today Morning News (Jin Ri Zao Bao), The Southern Metropolitan News (Nan Fang Du Shi Bao), Chengdu Evening News, Lanzhou Morning News, Haixia Dushi Bao.

There was indication that this was imminent in yesterday’s South China Morning Post:

Mainland internet companies are expecting new controls over their content that would prevent them from posting political and current affairs articles published by metropolitan newspapers on their websites, sources said.

But articles from magazines and party newspapers would be exempt from the soon-to-be-announced directives, the sources said, adding that metropolitan newspapers were targeted probably because they ran more negative news.

"Sohu will be the most affected because it focuses on domestic news, while Sina will be affected to a lesser extent because it carries more international news. Netease will also be affected because it needs local content to fill its news packages," one source said, referring to three of the mainland’s most popular news portals.

An outspoken journalism professor, who had been warned not to speak to foreign reporters, said he was not aware of the new policy, but described it as "beyond comprehension" and against the trend of the mainland’s economic openness.

"Portals cannot help but respect the rule, but in the longer term, such controls will not work because they go against the trend of economic opening-up," he said.

"We have to work for greater openness otherwise [the whole system] will break down."

AsiaPundit is thankful that, for the moment, the newspapers have been blocked from reproduction by the portals rather than shut. And Interfax notes an upside, both from the local press and from the internet.:

Most news published on the country’s top portals consists of republished reports from Chinese newspapers, not news written by the portals own staffers. By republishing stories on the Internet a report published in a regional newspaper can receive national attention.

The circular was originally leaked by a popular Chinese journalist blogger. Chinese journalists are increasingly turning to blogs and email to publish news that would otherwise not be published. It is likely that this new rule will only strengthen this trend, and will increase blog traffic to the detriment of China’s top portals, many of which are listed abroad.

Technorati Tags: asia, blogs, censorship, china, east asia, media, microsoft, northeast asia

China has shown a sharp downward trend in press freedoms last year, while the Philippines remains dangerous and North Korea abysmal.:

While some countries in Asia have remained stable with regard to media freedom, there have been sharp downward trends in several Asian countries, particularly China, Nepal, the Philippines and Thailand.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and Freedom House, a non-governmental organization that monitors press freedoms around the world, assessed the levels of press freedom in countries based on the prevailing legal environment, political and economic situation and the overall attitudes of authorities towards the media.

The surveys were generally concordant in their results, with China, Nepal, North Korea and the Philippines remaining the biggest causes of concern for journalists in Asia.

"Compared to last year, there really aren’t many positives in Asia," said Karin Karlekar, Managing Editor of the Freedom House survey. "While some countries have remained steady [Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong], we can see downward trends in many countries in the region."

North Korea was found to be the worst country in all surveys, showing no signs of improvement over the past couple of years. All media in North Korea continue to remain tools of Kim Jong-il’s state, while all foreign media are repeatedly portrayed by the regime as "liars" seeking to destabilize the government, according to the Freedom House report. However, the report also suggests that an increase in international trade has resulted in greater contact with foreigners, which might allow for greater access to international news reports in the near future.

China has also shown a sharp downward trend in 2005, said Karlekar, which can be attributed to increased censorship of newspapers and radio stations, and greater Internet surveillance.

According to RSF, the so-called "broadcasting Great Wall" in China has been growing over the past year: The Voice of Tibet, the BBC and Radio Free Asia are among the radio stations jammed by the government in 2005. 

• Reporters Withouth Borders - Wordlwide Press Freedom Index 2005 
• International Federation of Journalists - Targeting and Tragedy 
• Freedom House - Freedom of the Press 2005

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, east asia, north korea, northeast asia, south asia, thailand, burma

At We Make Money Not Art, excerpts from a discussion of the internet and social networking in China.:

There’s over 100 million users of internet in China, making it the country with the most internet users in the world. The typical net surfer used to be male, urban, high-educated, in his 20-30. It’s becoming less so. Active bottom up. Now more women and less educated people are catching up.

How people use the internet: in China there’s a very lively amateur culture. What’s different in China from other parts of the world is the huge sense of humour when writing about daily life and world/national events.

Many people make and exchange flash movies, swap lots of files. Commercial portal are thriving (big portals dealing with celebrities for example) but e-commerce hasn’t taken off yet.

The Middle Landscape. The internet has become a middle landscape between the public sphere and the commercial sphere. These two separate realms merge on the internet. On blogs and bulletin boards that mostly discuss commercial matters, someone might start a discussion on a recent event (like a murder hidden by the authorities) and a long discussion will start.

The Middle Landscape in another sense: the internet as a middle landscape between the private and the public sphere. Bloggers and wikipedians against the governement. Governement is loosing control over the private domain (in the past, employees had to get an authorisation to get married, it’s no longer the case.) The internet is very hard to control although there are rules to restrict what people can write. If you want to open a blog you have to give your name and address. Companies like Google, Microsoft or Cisco, help the governement to shut up the voices and restrict the new freedom.

On the other hand, Chinese have now a service they didn’t have before. For each new rules imposed by the government, bloggers and wikipedians make a counter attack.

The Social Brain Foundation is inviting people in the West to adopt a Chinese blog on their personal web server to make it harder to control or block the blogs (only i found).

Are public sphere and civil society emerging? De Waal asked several actors whom have different perspectives.

Jack Qiu: no, we’re not seeing this promised new freedom. In China, internet is given as a toy to people to play with, not to provide them with more possibilities of expression.

Michael Anti (who had his weblog shut down by the governement): yes, there’s a gradual development. People are willing to see things change even if the governement doesn’t agree.

Technorati Tags: asia, blogs, censorship, china, east asia, northeast asia

East meets west. Mutantfrog reviews the top-10 blogs in Japan and the United States.:

..what do other East Asian blogs look like? What about, just for example, the highest ranked Japanese blogs on Technorati?

(Note about Technorati from their About section: “Technorati displays what’s important in the blogosphere — which bloggers are commanding attention, what ideas are rising in prominence, and the speed at which these conversations are taking place.” Hence, these rankings are a measure of what people with blogs are linking to, not the number of page views, influence, revenue, or any other factor (as far as I can tell))

For starters, let’s see what’s out there. Here’s a quick rundown of the top ten blogs in Japan and the US/English-speaking world (for comparison)….

(Japan Number 5) Kaori Manabe is a popular (not to mention beautiful) model/actress/all-around talent, perhaps best known outside Japan for her role in the 2001 film Waterboys. Her blog has gained fame for its frequent updates, endless blathering on trivial topics, and plentiful photos of Manabe-chan.

Latest post: A Friendly Fire Festival

Inanity abounds:

There’s a very strange person called Mr. A that I see all the time on location. 

Is he an airhead? Well, he’s more of a socially inept ‘go my own way’ type of guy. H

His special feature is to make statements that surprise people without meaning to at all.

His hobbies are playing the horses and movies (mostly thrillers).

His private life is shrouded in mystery (but he absolutely does not have a girlfriend).

[snip]

After that, we started talking about taking baths that only come up to one’s lower chest, something that he has been into recently, and he once again started in on his particulars regarding half-body-bathingI am also quite particular about my bathing habits, and have bath powders, candles, germanium, a bathroom television, plenty of bath goods, but Mr. A said “First I buy bath powders at a convenience store…”

“they sell them, you know? Something water, some such thing…”I see…… （￣～￣)

Mr. A: “And then, I fill the bathtub all the way with hot water…”Ooohhhhhh… (ー∇ー;)

Mr. A: “Then I put in the bath powder that I bought, and mix it in with my hands….”

Yes, yes? （＿´ω｀）

Mr. A: “And then….”

And then?!?？？？？？？(’▽‘;;） (heart pounding)

Mr. A: “Then I get in”

………？？？？？？？？？？？
….

I was stupid for listening with anticipation…

No more!

Looks like Mr. A might be an airhead after all…

And people read this! Reminds me a lot of Xia Xue

After the sudden of burst of activity last week, when every second post here was about internet companies in China, AsiaPundit was not going to touch the topic today. However, Tom Zeller Jr today said something in the New York Times that struck a nerve.:

What if Chinese law required Internet companies to reveal the identities of all users who forwarded really bad e-mail jokes, lame chain letters or any messages containing the terms “free speech,” “Tiananmen Square” or “Super Freak,” because such activities carried a 10-year prison term?

“With all due respect to the memory of Rick James, the king of funk,” an executive might say, “we must abide by the laws of the countries in which we operate.”

And what if — as a mark of good faith for being permitted to do business in what any rational observer has to admit is now the most tantalizing Internet and technology market on the planet — an executive from each company were required to assist, mano a mano, in the beating of an imprisoned blogger?

While Tom makes a few interesting points, AsiaPundit is going to be “irrational” and suggest that China’s internet market is far from the most tantalizing on the planet. Off the top of the head, AsiaPundit would suggest that the most-tantalizing internet markets are — in descending order — the wealthy and tech-savvy United States, followed by the EU, e-commerce friendly Japan and possibly then the well-wired South Korea. China would certainly be in the top-10, and maybe even the top five, but it’s not the most tantalizing by a longshot.

Here’s a note from a MarketWatch item on Google’s prospects in China, issued after the China censorship issue was announced but ahead of the company’s earnings announcement. ():

One Wall Street analyst wrote in a report that Google’s China decision could cost more than it’s worth in the short term.

“We do not see meaningful revenue” in China for Google in the near term, UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter told clients Wednesday.

“We are concerned that the inevitable negative PR will damage Google’s brand,” wrote Schachter, who has a buy rating on Google shares.

Schachter downgraded Google to neutral after the earnings announcement, via Dow Jones:

UBS cut Google Inc. (GOOG) to neutral from buy, due to concerns over international revenue growth and the rising investment needed to potentially improve performance in key international markets.

The analysts said that while it agrees with Google that these markets provide important potential opportunities, it may take “longer than expected to effectively monetize them.”

UBS’ China analyst was bearish on the company’s prospects here ahead of the formal launch of the China portal:

Eric Wen, the UBS Internet analyst based in Asia, sums up what he believes are some of the prevailing issues in China for Google in a research report published this month.

Mr. Wen believes that Google is still testing the waters, and does not yet have a clear China strategy. Google has partnered with NetEase and Sina uses Google for some of its technology, but Google.com is facing a dilemma in China. The company recently began conforming to Chinese censorship standards, but Mr. Wen believes that Chinese users chose Google precisely because it was not censored. By conforming to the government standards, Google is trying to enable itself to enter the market in terms of attracting local businesses to advertise. However, by conforming, Google loses its differentiator. This is a dilemma for Google and the reason Mr. Wen believes that Google will not dominate the Chinese search market.

As Bill Bishop noted, China is not an essential market for Google to be in financially:

I am guessing that Google will be happy if they can generate $30M in revenue in China in 2006. Baidu, the market leader, is projected to generate somewhere between $65-70M in revenue in 2006. I believe Google is expected to generate over $8B in revenue worldwide in 2006. If my math is anywhere in the ballpark, China will account for LESS THAN 2 DAYS of Google’s 2006 revenue. And given the economics of the keyword value chain in China, that revenue should be significantly lower margin revenue than is US revenue. So if the China business went away, would investors care?

Perry Wu, in an exceptionally bearish item, says bluntly that Google will have about as much success as its Western rivals who are also getting lambasted on blogs, in the press and Congress. Basically, very little.:

Yahoo (YHOO) tried many times to adapt. As far back as 1998 (or Web 0.98 Beta) when its then-VP, Heather Killen, made high-profile visits to China, the Western Internet company tried to sit at the Chinese banquet table. But Yahoo finally gave up last year when it bought a billion dollar stake in China’s Alibaba.com and then gave Alibaba the rights to run Yahoo! China. There was not even a whimper from the company as its Chinese portal was torn down and replaced with a simple search engine. Sohu (SOHU), Sina (SINA), and Netease (NTES) had finally beaten the foreign interloper.

Lycos tried too. It bought firms like Myrice.com. Netscape tried, via AOL. MSN has also been bobbling along with a few victories here and a few setbacks there–nothing much to be proud of.

All of these companies have one thing in common: they entered China to win, but left only remnants of their power after a few years’ struggle. Chinese history is filled with tales of foreigners coming to the Middle Kingdom with money, but leaving the country poor, confused and embarrassed. Ask Chris Patten.

While the UBS boys, Wu, Bishop and others may be a touch , none are irrational. China’s internet penetration rate is still growing at an impressive pace, but the rate is slowing and the average user is still not deep-pocketed.

There’s a great deal of cash to be made in providing infrastructure for the build out of third-generation networks and broadband capacity, but there’s not a lot yet there for search- or advertising-based business models; certainly not when compared to Western markets.

Zeller is not the first pundit to hype the China market, most commentary seems to assume that the companies that are active here are putting principle at risk over in order to get massive returns. That’s far from true.

Technorati Tags: asia, blogs, censorship, china, cisco, east asia, economy, , japan, korea, media, microsoft, northeast asia, yahoo

Via the Taipei Times, Rebecca MacKinnon analyzes the role of search engines in China’s broader repression of the media.:

Writing in Shanghai in the 1930s, China’s great essayist Lu Xun(魯迅) once observed: "Today there are all kinds of weeklies. Although their distribution is not very wide, they are shining in the darkness like daggers, letting their comrades know who is attacking the old, strong castles."

Muckraking broadsheets in the first half of the last century played cat-and-mouse games with Chinese government censors, ultimately helping to expose the corruption and moral bankruptcy of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government and contributing to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) victory in 1949.

If this sounds familiar, it is because the CCP never forgets its history — and is determined to prevent history from repeating itself. Thus, China’s rulers acted in character last December, when they cracked down on news organizations that were getting a bit too assertive.

The editor and deputy editors of Beijing News, a relatively new tabloid with a national reputation for exposing corruption and official abuse, were fired. In protest, more than 100 members of the newspaper’s staff walked out.

Most Chinese might not have known about the walkout if it hadn’t been for Chinese bloggers. An editorial assistant at the New York Times, Zhao Jing (趙京), writing under the pen name Michael Anti, broke the news on his widely read Chinese-language blog. He exposed details of behind-the-scenes politics and called for a public boycott of the newspaper, evoking strong public sympathy for the journalists, which was expressed online in chatrooms and blogs.

Zhao’s blog wasn’t under the direct control of the CCP’s propaganda department. It was published through a Chinese-language blog-hosting service run by Microsoft’s MSN Spaces. On Dec. 30, Zhao’s blog disappeared. Since then, Microsoft has confirmed that its staff removed the blog from an MSN Internet server, citing the need to respect Chinese law when doing business in China.

Microsoft’s contribution to Chinese political repression follows Yahoo’s role in the sentencing of a dissident reporter and Google’s decision not to display search results that are blocked by what has become known as the Great Chinese Firewall. Indeed, China has developed the world’s most sophisticated system of Internet censorship, thereby hiding information unfavorable to China’s rulers from all but the most technologically savvy. The system is bolstered by human surveillance carried out not only by government employees but also by private service providers.
(image stolen from here.)

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, east asia, , media, microsoft, yahoo

AsiaPundit is enjoying the holiday today and was not going to blog. However, – pointed out by Rebecca — is really fun to play with. You can search Google.cn and Google.com at the same time. From it, AsiaPundit discovered that Google.cn does not censor search results for ""

Click on the image for larger size. The search in both portals turn up 395 sites. AP was not too surprised that Google.cn hasn’t set its filters for British slang but he was a bit shocked that Michael Turton’s site showed up as the second-highest ranked result. Blogspot is blocked in China, so according to Google’s statement that it will remove ‘dead’ links, Michael’s site should not exist.
Could Google be fallible? Or does the party approve of the View from Taiwan? Is Michael actually a pro-CCP stooge?
We report, you decide!

(Updated below, click on "continue reading" )

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, east asia, , northeast asia

(more…)

Via we learn of a bold project to help us China-based Internet users.:

If you are a Chinese user of Google who has received notice that your search has been censored, let us know. We will search Google from the United States and post the results here.

While the thought behind this is appreciated it simply is a dumb idea. For starters, while Google.cn censors results, users in China can still access Google.com. It is still possible do searches in simplified Chinese script on the US-based platform. I doubt many Chinese people will bother to e-mail a presumably English-speaking American requesting that he do a search for them when it is completely unnecessary.

Beyond that, if Google.com were ever to be blocked in China, users would not want to wait for a US-based person to conduct a search for them. There is a 12-hour time difference between Shanghai and New York. If a search needs to be done at 15:00 hours Shanghai time, would the US-based person care enough to get out of bed?

If people in the US want to help people in China and elsewhere access information, they can do as Matthew notes:

If someone here in China really needs to gain access to information, the way to help him/her isn’t by copying and pasting search results into a blog, it’s by helping them to use a proxy. If Stephen and others want to help, they should volunteer assistance to make a bilingual network of websites that offer web proxies– easier, faster, advertising-free versions of Anonymouse — for net bar use and downloadable, easy-to-configure proxy clients for home use.

Offer some bandwidth to TOR or JAP.

Technorati Tags: asia, blogs, censorship, china, east asia, northeast asia

AsiaPundit’s initial take on Google’s foray into China was not that the company was committing a grave sin, nor that it was doing a good thing for Chinese users (see and ). Establishing the China portal was neither good nor evil, but it may yet prove to have been profoundly stupid. AsiaPundit believes that Google has diminished its brand to enter a market that is simply not (yet) lucrative.

That theme has now been picked up and argued elsewhere.

A Tech Central Station column by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds argues that Google has lost something that made it special.:

In taking this approach, Google doesn’t distinguish itself much from other big American companies — Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo!, etc. — that have cooperated with the Chinese. (Arguably, its behavior here is “less evil.”) It’s a big market, offering over a billion customers, and the Chinese government itself is a big purchaser. Why make them mad? How many people, besides a few human-rights types, will care that according to the Chinese Google, that And how much money do they spend on IT?

There’s also a not-entirely-bogus counterargument, that Chinese citizens with access to a censored Google are still more powerful, relative to their government, than Chinese citizens with no Google at all. Though this claim seems a bit, er, convenient, it may still have a grain of truth to it. The experience of empowerment that the Internet provides seems to affect people in ways that go beyond specific issues, and make them less tolerant of bossiness elsewhere; the more Chinese surf the Web, the more will have that experience. Maybe. It’s possible. After all, plenty of people made similar arguments in favor of “constructive engagement” with the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and against sanctions designed to force an end to its racist policies.

But it’s kind of odd to find Google in the position of making those sorts of arguments. There was always the sense — despite its ruffling a lot of feathers over what sources were included in Google News, or various complaints about the limited privacy afforded by Gmail — that Google was something different: Not just another big corporation.

A Wall Street Journal column by Andy Kessler argues that Google is no longer cool.:

Americans have a long history of selling out - think Warren Beatty and “Ishtar” or politicians and Indian casinos. The public is trusting until proven otherwise, then turns on icons like rats on garbage. Never more so with culture: Being “cool,” “tight” or “wicked excellent” is a hard image to keep and one boneheaded move can send you to tomorrow’s cut-out bin. Ask Michael Jackson. Or Madonna.

Which brings us to Google. As a company, even more so than Ian Schrager’s hotels, it reeks of cool—Google Maps and Google Earth and gmail bring a kind of geek chic to the dull old media world. Plus, there are those lofty ideals like “organizing the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It’s why we all use them. Google should do everything to stay cool. GM is spending millions on ads that say “Just Google Pontiac” to get in on the zeitgeist.

And now, poof.

a billion soon-to-be-online Chinese will forever associate Google with lame and censored search results

One of the ways urbandictionary.com defines “sellout” is to alienate core fans by changing one’s style to appeal to a broader audience—and becoming what one’s fans were rebelling against in the first place. The U.S. government wanted search history to help fight child porn and Google said no way, to cheers from their Big Brother-hating constituency. But for its search service in China, Google caved to the communists, removing offending results for “Human Rights” and “Things that are Democratic.”

And Nicholas Carr writes that Google simply did something stupid.:

I think the reason Google is getting its feet held to the fire is simple: It asked for it. As soon as the company broadcast its “Don’t Be Evil” pledge, it guaranteed that any time it stepped into ethically ambiguous territory it was going to touch off a firestorm in the press - and, in turn, draw the attention of the public and the public’s media-hungry elected representatives. It’s the old Gary Hart effect. Plenty of Senators get a little on the side without finding their dalliances on Page One, but as soon as Hart claimed to be pure, he guaranteed that reporters and cameramen would come knocking on the door of his lovenest. Whether it was hubris or just naivete that led Google to proclaim its moral purity can be debated, but from a business standpoint it was a surpassingly dumb thing to do - and the consequences were entirely predictable.

Support Bloggers’ Rights!

Among its many activities, EFF promotes one of the best proxy server packages available - allowing users in China to access any number of blocked sites. In lieu of a donation, users in the West can volunteer time or bandwidth to help improve the service.

AP picked EFF for support because of it’s blogging focus, because of its proxy tool and because he gets a really cool t-shirt.

As EFF may not be to everyone’s liking, there are other organizations that can be supported, either financially, through volunteering or by aiding publicity. They may or may not have cool shirts.

Technorati Tags: asia, blogs, censorship, china, cisco, east asia, EFF, , media, microsoft, northeast asia, yahoo

Election cycles are generally the most active periods for bloggers in the West. In Singapore, the most Western country in Asia, expect something different.:

My guess is that most bloggers do not know that certain laws restricting what can be said over the internet kick in once a parliamentary election is called. Some bloggers will be surprised that some of the things they say about Singapore politics may expose them to prosecution.

The last time there was a parliamentary election (also called a general election) in Singapore, which was on 3 Nov 2001, blogging was not yet a household word. Some of today’s most prolific bloggers were probably not yet out of school.

In 2001, websites offering political content were relatively few, and news about the amendments to the Parliamentary Elections Act, amendments which specifically dealt with internet communications, were still fresh in webmasters’ minds, having been passed only in August of the same year.

Today, blogging has exploded, and unlike webmasters in the early days of the internet, most bloggers are writing without looking over their shoulders at Big Brother. While the Sedition Act is no doubt well known among bloggers due to the publicity about the 3 guys recently charged and sentenced, their offences related to foul language stirring up race and religious hate, not political news or commentary.

Technorati Tags: beer, east asia, singapore, southeast asia

Miss Singapore recently paid a visit to the People’s Republic. Like everyone else in Singapore, she blogs. Her photo album is here.

This is one of the few photos without the sash.

Technorati Tags: asia, china, east asia, northeast asia, singapore, southeast asia

AsiaPundit has been tied up with year-end activities, meetings and company events, so he has been a touch remiss in his coverage of Asian Internet issues. Thankfully state-news agency Xinhua has been keeping up with things. Google has just launched a special service for China.

China already has more than 100 million Web surfers and the audience is expected to swell substantially — an alluring prospect for Google as it tries to boost its already rapidly rising profits.

Baidu.com Inc., a Beijing-based company in which Google owns a 2.6 percent stake, currently runs China’s most popular search engine. But a recent Keynote Systems survey of China’s Internet preferences concluded that Baidu remains vulnerable to challenges from Google and Yahoo Inc.

"We firmly believe, with our culture of innovation, Google can make meaningful and positive contributions to the already impressive pace of development in China," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel.

Initially, Google’s Chinese service will be limited to searching Web pages and images. The company also will provide local search results and a special edition of its news service.

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, , media, northeast asia

AsiaPundit honestly did not expect the shutdown of Michael Anti’s blog to cause as much of a global outrage as it did. Blogs are deleted regularly in China. Papers are censored. Magazines are pulled off the shelves. Satellite television signals are blocked. Journalists are arrested, detained and jailed. This is all quite normal. (There’s nothing new to see here, move along.)

The outrage from Reporters Without Borders could be expected. It’s also normal for the New York Times and Washington Post to run outraged editorials. But it’s fairly new to see a top columnist for business newswire Bloomberg call for a boycott:

Would a Hong Kong-based economist publishing a report suggesting China understates GDP be committing a crime against the state? How about a journalist or a blogger getting leaked information about a politician or a company doing dodgy things? No one knows for sure.

Censorship is a sign of weakness, not strength. It’s also a reminder that China lacks a key economic ingredient: self- confidence.

Along with being one of the world’s oldest civilizations, China is the most populous nation and remains the fastest-growing major economy. And yet China expends so much energy controlling what’s said about it.

Technology companies claim they need to follow local laws where they operate and they’re in a tough spot in China. Western companies need to bend over backward to get a foothold in capitalism’s latest frontier. Yet in their giddiness over future profits, they can go too far. Corporate America may be doing just that in China.

Let’s Boycott

Why, with all his wealth and global prestige, isn’t Microsoft founder Bill Gates standing up to Beijing? Why isn’t Google taking that $467 share price out for a spin and challenging China? Why is a global household name like Yahoo bowing to a repressive regime? Companies seem to think their mere presence will help open China. That’s just bunk.

“Microsoft, Yahoo and others are helping to institutionalize and legitimize the integration of censorship into the global IT business model,'’ said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Beijing bureau chief for CNN now specializing in Web censorship.

It’s all futile, though. China will find it harder and harder to police fast-changing technologies and fast-learning bloggers. All Chinese consumers may remember years from now is how the biggest names in technology once helped keep them down. Along with a Chinese firewall, they may be creating barriers between themselves and future users.

I’d like to see the country’s consumers boycott Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others. It’s just not clear that the message would reach many in China.

Pesek’s views, as the Bloomberg site states, are his own.

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, east asia, media, northeast asia

(more…)

Oranckay says the South Korean president has three blogs:

It’ll probably be in the English press by morning but president Roh Moo Hyun has got his own blog.

Or two.

Or three.

One at Naver, one at Daum, and one at Paran.

Some have said one of Roh’s biggest problems is that he’s got his head buried in the internet. You know, instead of just governing without constantly trying to be best buddies with The Netizens all the time. I wonder if he is going to be able to sleep at night without wondering what kind of comments he’s been getting. (He’s been known to leave a few himself here and there.)

Hopefully these will be more active than the three blogs of his northern counterpart. Kim Jong-il has let two of them slide. Speaking of that, we should have all checked the infrequently updated Beloved Leader site for details of his China trip. It would have spared us a lot of speculation:

Screw those Beijing Clowns

I am going Shopping!
Damn! Is today a holiday? I had some of my Overseas Bureau lads put me ashore this morning so I could shop for some hard-to-get items. Are those little LG things the same as iPods?

Technorati Tags: asia, east asia, korea, north korea, northeast asia, south korea

Can anyone explain why this site is getting so many hits from the Netherlands today?:

That’s just based on the past 100 visitors. While there was an unusually heavy flow of Dutch traffic earlier today, it has turned into a flood in recent hours. Almost all of the visitors have been arriving without a referring link.

Technorati Tags: netherlands, blogs

There’s a war going on in the local blogosphere between Team A (Xiaxue, Sillycelly and Sandra) and Team B (Blinkymummy and Xialanxue). Go read their blogs to find out what happened. Tomorrow has links to some blogs following the story. (Picture and words from IZ)

Young Asian girls, slander, a bikini photo shoot gone bad and catfights. This should be even bigger than the Dawn Yang plastic surgery controversy (if you don’t know, don’t ask).

As AsiaPundit understands, the story is that Asia’s ‘Best’ blogger XiaXue, along with friends Sillycelly and Sandra, were seemingly upset at Blinkymummy, possibly for posts related to a lad mag photo shoot that the three did.

At a restaurant encounter a somewhat drunk Blinkymummy had words with the girls.

Shortly after a Blinkymummy hate site appeared with the author baring the moniker "Xialanxue," the author of an anonymous anti-Xiaxue site.

Allegedly, bloglines screen grabs demonstrated that Xiaxue was impersonating Xialanxue in an effort to slander Blinkymummy. Ironically, one of the incriminating posts was one in which XiaXue was insulting anonymous hate-site owners and fast-food chain mascots,

This was followed a post on the ’scandal’ being put on aggregator site Tomorrow.sg, and then taken down - and then being replaced by a new post. Followed by a deletion of all trackbacks by a Tomorrow editor who may or may not have been XiaXue. Undermining the editorial stance of Tomorrow.

Got it? I didn’t think so.

Thankfully Shaolin Tiger has a generally readable review of the matter. Tomorrow has about 35 linked trackbacks to its post.

Funnily enough, in one of the gazillion comments on this in the S’poreblogosphere it was said that "Blinkymummy started it." That’s a classic schoolyard comment and, with it, AsiaPundit is willing to call this blogwar now.

The winner is… Steven. He wasn’t actually involved but no one else comes out of this looking very good and the whole incident adds immeasurable support for his controversial thesis.

Technorati Tags: asia, blogs, east asia, singapore, southeast asia

The 2005 results for the indibloggies are out visit the results here. Congratulations to Amit Varma for taking the top spot, and to DesiPundit and all of the other winners.

Technorati Tags: asia, blogs, india, south asia