Bill Gates and Chinese President Hu Jintao had a lovely dinner yesterday. And China has pledged to help combat the piracy of the firms products. AsiaPundit wonders, however, what China is doing for the company’s on-line ventures — especially the popular MSN Spaces.

The service, at the moment, is largely inaccessible in Shanghai and Beijing. Trace route tests from Shanghai indicate that access is being lost at the level of the Great Firewall. (click for larger image).

Tests on the Beijing side, however,indicate that the loss of data is occurring at the Microsoft side.:

As well as trace route and ‘ping’ testing, attempts to access through browsers in Beijing and Shanghai — including one by Microsoft’s China spokesman — failed. Access also seems to be unavailable in Haining, said the Unabrewer.

However, AsiaPundit was just told that Microsoft’s engineers could access the site at the China headquarters. If so, this would unlikely be a state-ordered block. If it was, the irony would have been rich.

Hu Jintao and Bill Gates just had a lovely dinner together on Tuesday and apparently struck an amicable friendship.:

While expressing admiration for what Gates has achieved at Microsoft, Hu also added jovially that, “Because you, Mr. Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I’m a friend of Microsoft," according to The Seattle Times.

As well as the friendship with Hu, MSN China is a joint venture between Microsoft and Shanghai Alliance Entertainment, a firm owned by a son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. On the face of it, one would think that Microsoft is too well connected to be the target of a Firewall-level block.

Besides, Microsoft will block websites as requested, so there really wouldn’t be a need for any state action against the MSN Spaces service. 

AsiaPundit has been told that the company’s technicians are looking into the problem, although clear answers will not likely be available until people start waking up in Redmond. Accidental blocks often occur when website changes are made by content providers, as had happened with the New York Times recently. Sites are also accidently unblocked when changes are made, as happened to TypePad when it changed servers last year.

For now, AP is inclined to believe that the MSN Spaces problem is of a technical nature. That’s a shame. While a Firewall-level block would no doubt be a great disappointment to local users of MSN Spaces, it would also have been a great news story.

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

Following the almost universally damned launch of Google’s censored Chinese service, AOL in February received praise from some quarters for launching a Chinese language portal that would offer uncensored content. However, it said the service would be Chinese speakers living outside of the mainland.

It was announced yesterday that Shanghai Media Group (SMG) had reached a deal to provide content to the AOL Chinese portal. Reuters reports on the deal here and Xinhua reports on it here.

While it had gone largely unnoticed in initial news reports that the original Google Chinese language site () remained available in China alongside the censored , it has gone completely unnoticed that the AOL service has been rendered inaccessible in mainland China.

A SMG spokeswoman said that the company was aware that the service was unavailable in Mainland China and restated that the AOL portal is intended for overseas Chinese.

Essentially, Google is still providing uncensored search results in China while AOL now is buying Chinese content from a state-linked media group to broadcast outside of China.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. AsiaPundit just finds it funny.

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

CCTV, the Chinese state-owned broadcaster, has launched a new website in collaboration with Rupert Murdoch’s FOX news.:

CCTV International and CCTV.com formally launched an updated and revamped English website on Tuesday, at English.cctv.com. The newly designed website is expected to better serve Internet surfers, and also to help boost viewing figures for CCTV International’s TV programs.

Three partners are jointly announcing the launch of CCTV International’s new website. Collaborating with Fox Cable network and CCTV.COM, CCTV International hopes joint efforts will strengthen its image among current and potential viewers. And also to increase viewers for TV programs on CCTV International — through the www.cctv.com website…

…FOX Cable Networks offered help with the design of the new web-page. The company says this is only the beginning of cooperation between Fox and CCTV International. Fox says the new webpage provides a source for the world to get to know about China.

Perhaps all of those who were damning Google for the censored China site will now damn FOX for assisting CCTV, which has much more aggressive censorship policies than any US search engine.

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

Via bhojman’s Meanderings, a Myanmar state-owned newspaper has accused a US journalism education program of poisioning “young Myanmar brains.”

A US government centre in Burma is spreading “poison” among local reporters through its English for Journalism courses, a state-owned newspaper said today.

The Kyemon newspaper said apart from teaching journalistic ethics and writing, foreign instructors at the American Centre in Burma, known as Myanmar by its military rulers, have gathered information about the country’s education, health and social conditions from the students.

“The ‘English for Journalism’ course attended by young journalists from various Myanmar media groups is like poison, because the course is nothing but sugar-coated bitter medicine,” the newspaper wrote.

The article went on to indicate that the centre, through courses like the one on journalism, was spreading American propaganda and harming “young Myanmar brains”.

Thomas Pierce, who heads the centre, declined immediate comment since he had not read the article.

“We are working to improve journalism in Burma, working with journalists to both improve their English and reporting skill,” he said.

The centre, operated by the US Embassy in Yangon, offers educational courses, a library, films and other facilities that are open to all Burmese citizens.

AsiaPundit thinks that far more Burmese brains have been damaged by beatings by SPDC thugs or the drugs that the junta helps traffic. Still, he will admit that journalism school can cause brain damage.

Technorati Tags: asia, burma, censorship, corruption, east asia, myammar, southeast asia

Frequent readers will note that AsiaPundit has a love of maps and a fascination with internet censorship. It shouldn’t be any surprise that this grabs his attention. The Atlantic has created a map of the globe color coding countries that censor the internet.:

The Atlantic has created a censorship map based on ONI data. (I’ve archived a local mirror of the map and the accompanying article).

The accompanying article is a bit overzealous in its description of China but I liked that fact that the article specifically highlighted that Internet filtering is not exclusive to China but is spreading — essentially becoming the “norm” — worldwide. In terms of targetted content, porn is defintely targetted but the numbers are skewed by the fact that the use of commercial lists (there are open source lists too) allow countries to block a lot of porn easily. But in terms of significance porn is, in my opinion, of rather low importance. the blocking of several key sources of local language alternative information or an social movement group is much more important. The sgnificance of the content rather than the total number of sites blocked in category seems, to me, to be of more importance but is much harder to measure.

Map and text via Internet Censorship Explorer.

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

AsiaPundit has spoken with Yahoo staff who believed that the transfer of the company’s China operations to Alibaba would prevent the company being implicated in any further unsavory behavior and would limit further bad publicity.

That may have been naive.

Via Glutter, Marketwatch reports on a .:

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — The family of a Chinese journalist jailed for leaking state secrets is considering legal action against U.S. Internet portal Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) for its alleged role in providing information to authorities that led to his conviction, a Hong Kong lawyer said Monday.

"We are looking at taking legal action against Yahoo for providing information on Shi Tao to the Chinese government," said Albert Ho, who is representing the jailed journalist as his Hong Kong-based attorney. Ho also is a pro-democracy legislator and frequent critic of China’s communist government.

Ho said he is working with Shi’s mainland China lawyer to collect evidence in determining whether civil charges can be pressed against Yahoo at its headquarters in California or in Hong Kong.

As well, a Hong Kong legislator is going after the company for allegedly violating basic law.:

According to the AP, a Hong Kong lesislator has evidence that it was Yahoo’s Hong Kong branch that provided the information to convict a reporter, not the China branch. The Hong Kong branch does not have the same legal relationship with the government that Yahoo has insisted its Chinese operation does.

AsiaPundit has heard from people at or close to the company that no warrants were served on the Hong Kong office - which had remained ignorant of the situation on the mainland in regards to warrants or requests from Chinese authorities. The company said something similar before Congress.  So it seems unlikely that the company violated any Hong Kong law.

As well, AsiaPundit questions whether the company can be sued by Shi Tao’s family in Hong Kong for abiding by Mainland law. It seems very unlikely.

Still, given the bad press that this could cause the company, AsiaPundit would advise Yahoo! that the matter be settled quietly.

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

Oh dear, and in a country that ordered the domestic press not to cover riots related to cartoons depicting Mohammad.:

Chinese models wear bikinis with the World Cup soccer designs on during a swimsuit design contest as part of the China Fashion Week in Beijing, China, Saturday, April 1, 2006. A week long fashion extravaganza to showcase local and foreign talents ends Sunday. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

AsiaPundit does not find the above image offensive in the slightest. However, as Glenzo points out, the model to the immediate left of the German-flag wearing model in the center is wearing an Iranian flag. That could cause offense to some of Islam’s more puritanical followers.

The CIA World Factbook describes the flag as follows..:

…three equal horizontal bands of green (top), white, and red; the national emblem (a stylized representation of the word Allah in the shape of a tulip, a symbol of martyrdom) in red is centered in the white band; ALLAH AKBAR (God is Great) in white Arabic script is repeated 11 times along the bottom edge of the green band and 11 times along the top edge of the red band.

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

Political podcasting and streaming videos are prohibited in Singapore’s coming election.:

Podcasting will not be allowed during elections as it does not fall under the “positive list” which states what is allowed under election advertising.

Senior Minister of State for Information, Communications and the Arts Balaji Sadasivan added that streaming of videos during campaigning would also be prohibited.

He was addressing a question in Parliament on Monday about the use of new technologies on the internet during hustings.

Pictures of candidates, party histories and manifestos are on the “positive list” and are allowed to be used as election advertising on the internet.

Newer internet tools like podcasting do not fall within this “positive list”.

Dr Balaji said: “There are also some well-known local blogs run by private individuals who have ventured into podcasting. The content of some of these podcasts can be quite entertaining. However, the streaming of explicit political content by individuals during the election period is prohibited under the Election Advertising Regulations. A similar prohibition would apply to the videocasting or video streaming of explicitly political content.”

Bloggers can continue - but if they get too political they will have to register … and then shut up.:

Dr Balaji added that individual bloggers can discuss politics, but have to register with the Media Development Agency if they persistently promote political views.

When registered, they’re then not allowed to advertise during elections - something only political parties, candidates and election agents are allowed to do only.

Before any ‘free speech’ advocates gets in a huff about this - AsiaPundit will note that private citizens will likely be allowed to make political speeches at Speakers’ Corner after registering with police.:

As such, this ban on political blogging is not a ban on free speech. It is merely a means to bridge the digital divide. Singapore’s technology savvy bloggers will now have to queue with their digitally disabled fellow citizens for a chance to talk at the Lion City’s only authorized free speech zone.

The PAP are not oppressive, this is merely a means to bring all Singaporeans together.

()

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, singapore, southeast asia

There’s such a storm of bad publicity for Yahoo! across the net today that AsiaPundit is decreeing March 30th as official pick on Yahoo! day.

For starters, Rebecca has launched one of the most-biting attacks on the company and co-founder Jerry Yang that  I have yet read. Yahoo! Abomination:

Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang continues to spew excrement, echoing his shoulder-shrugging of earlier this month, which essentially amounts to saying: So sorry we assisted in human rights violations, but there’s nothing we can do if we’re going to bring the Internet to the Chinese people. One recent quote:

"You have to balance the risk of not participating," he said. "And people don’t realize that being in the market every day there, and being on the ground, we are seeing changes, on the whole, for the positive."

Tell that to the family of Shi Tao who is in jail for 10 years.  Jerry Yang should meet with them and tell them to their faces just how sorry he is, but that Shi is being sacrificed for a noble cause. I’m sure they’ll understand…

Yahoo! executives keep framing this issue as black and white: Either you’re in there and do everything the Chinese authorities tell you without question, or you can’t do business in China at all. That is false. Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to do certain kinds of business. Yahoo! has placed user e-mail data within legal jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China. Google and Microsoft have both chosen not to do so. Why did Yahoo! chose to do this?  Either they weren’t thinking through the consequences or they don’t care.

Meanwhile David Wolf at Silicon Hutong questions how well joint-venture partner Alibaba is doing with the management of Yahoo! China and what Jack Ma has done with the $1 billion the company had received from Yahoo!..:

Jack Ma told the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Nanjing last week that he has basically redefined the phrase "burn rate." Less than a year after Yahoo! handed over it’s China operations and a $1 billion check to Alibaba in return for 40% of the company’s stock, and he’s already spent $750 million of that.

Let’s call it 9 months since the deal was announced. That’s $250 million a quarter. $2.7 million a day, 7 days a week, for nine months. At this rate, the entire billion will be gone by the end of the summer.

Hey, Pizza and Jolt Cola are Expensive in China

Now granted, he says that it’s been spent on research and development and "other projects." But without casting any aspersions or making any accusations, nearly any CPA or tax lawyer you talk to will tell you that both of those categories can (in practice) be interpreted very broadly. And the company is looking at further investments.

The first question that leaps to the top of anyone’s mind is okay, where did the money go? I’m not sure the general public will ever get to know, that it is really any of our business, or that it really matters anyway. It is entirely likely that everything is above board, as we have been given no reason (except for a monstrous sucking sound) to think anything is amiss. Yahoo! and its shareholders are certainly satisfied that their money has been well spent. Because if they weren’t, they would be calling for a SWAT team of forensic accountants to drop in with their arsenal of tools and start following money trails. Frankly, as a minority shareholder, I’m not even sure what rights Yahoo! has to even do this much.

But again, this is a diversion (albeit a titillating one for corporate scandal fetishists) from the real question.

Some more details on the spending are available at China Stock Blog.

AsiaPundit enjoys Jack Ma’s media appearances, he is inclined to say provocative things and the local media treat him like a rockstar. But while AP thinks Ma has a strong chance of beating eBay with auctions, he is not so sure that he will be able to turn Yahoo! China’s fortunes around. Especially as competition may be getting a bit more heated - Shak points to a report suggesting that the rapid growth seen in China’s search engine market is slowing.:

"China’s search engine industry will face a sharp slowdown in the coming 18 months." said Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, at the Search Engine Symposium held in Nanjing, China, on March 17, 2006. "The actual performance of search engines is far from people’s high expectations. Poor user experience, unstable advertising effects, and some irregular channel operations make the small and midsize enterprise customers of search engines suspicious of this new kind of advertising, which will lead to a slowdown in the growth of the search engine industry." explained Yu.

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, east asia, northeast asia, yahoo!, yhoo

Shortly after launching Danwei TV (see episode one and two), Jeremy of Danwei has been invited to participate in a roundtable on PBS’s Frontline. The questions will likely revolve around censorship, although Bingfeng seems to be unable to post the list of questions without his blog service provider’s censorship software kicking in.:

a participant asked me if im interested. i am doing preparations for a vacation and my job keeps me very busy. sorry for light blogging and not being able to participate. i wlll write something on it and keep you updated about the panel discussion.

first round of questions as follows:

sorry, the following warnings repeated when i try to post the questions, which contain some "sensitive words", here, i failed to post the quesitons even after i modified all the "sensitive words".

i will try it later today.

fu*k the censorship system, see you soon.


Post operation failed. The error message related to this problem was as follows: Illegal Characters Found

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

Via Variety’s Asian film blog Kaiju Shakedown, a fascinating look at Malaysia’s censors at work.:

No one really plans on becoming a movie censor. Maggie (not her real name) left Malaysia to attend graduate school in the U.K. She returned to Malaysia to become a university professor but unable to find work she wound up at one of Malaysia’s few private television companies, sitting in a windowless room and watching movies. She’s not the official in-house censor, but her job is to make sure that Muslims in these films are not shown doing “haram” things: drinking, smoking, or encountering pork products. She has generated hundreds of pages of notes that read: “Scene in which the Koran is discussed in relation to belief in the supernatural needs to be further looked into.” When she started she was promised some training, but a year later none has materialized. It’s just her and a VCR locked away in a tiny office.

This is an entirely voluntary project by her television network, which wants to preemptively remove anything that might upset government agencies. This kind of self-imposed sensitivity is crucial in Muslim-majority, multi-ethnic Malaysia, but, at times, it can seem a bit over-zealous. If a movie shows a Muslim girl walking into a restaurant with roast pork hanging in the window the scene is cut in order to avoid offending Muslims.

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, east asia, malaysia, southeast asia

Via Google video, a talk on Google China with Rebecca MacKinnon and Tomothy Wu.:

There are no fireworks in the talk and both Rebecca and Tim agree, in the end, that Google did screw up with Google.cn

Bloggers are recalling personal observations of Hao Wu, the blogger and  filmmaker who was detained - without charge - by Beijing authorities. Yan at Glutter posts a partial transcript of her recent BBC appearance with Hao and writes.:

On Valentine’s Day UK time. I went on the BBC World Service Radio show "Have Your Say," to discuss Censorship in China. One of the participant named "Tian" was from China. He owns the blog "Beijing or Bust," He is also one of the Editors in the Harvard based Global Voices. His real name is Hao Wu. He was arrested a week later. On the show he said he was interviewing political dissidents, and that is why RSF thinks he was arrested.
I am totally in shock at the moment, so very upset. I thought he was very intelligent, and articulate. I even mused on the blog, that he might not be saying everything he believed in because he might not want the authorities after him… I think he was being careful already, he never said he believed in free speech, he didn’t say anything that was anti the communist government, but he did say something about the project he was working on. Which goes to show, under a totalitarian regime, you never know what one says may interest the authorities.
Please help him. Put up the banner. Write it on the blog. Just let people know.

Lisa at Paper Tiger Tale writes.:

I met Hao Wu a few years ago. At the time he was an aspiring screenwriter working for an internet company. From Sichuan via Beijing, Hao had been in the US for over a decade. He had a screenplay, his first, and needed a collaborator to reshape it into a more commercial structure.

Our collaboration didn’t last all that long. In spite of his inexperience at that time, already it was clear that Hao is a guy with his own vision and a unique way of looking at the world. My only real advice to him was, rather than trying to write something commercial, he should follow his passion, tell a personal story, something true and close to his heart. Mostly, he should keep writing. I was really impressed by the quality of his prose and his insights.

Hao followed his dream in spades. He decided to return to China, to Beijing, to see what had happened to the city he’d once known and experience China’s changes first-hand. He took a month long trip along the Silk Road and sent back regular dispatches. Then he produced his first film, Beijing Or Bust, a documentary about the lives of Chinese Americans trying to navigate contemporary Beijing. He then started a blog by the same title, in which he writes about his own navigations through today’s Beijing. There are some truly wonderful essays: evocative, original and informative, covering aspects of contemporary China that you will rarely find elsewhere….

t’s hard for me to know what to say, except that Hao is a great person, with talent and heart and vision, and that for the Chinese government to detain him is yet another sign of how the CCP still squanders the talent of its own people, how it is destroying China’s future in the name of "social harmony," which more than anything else seems to be a figleaf of ideological cover for the exercise of raw power and untrammeled authority. Hao never challenged the CCP. The only way in which his work could be considered "political" is that he does not censor his own observations, that he thinks freely and isn’t afraid to say what he thinks.

If these are the kinds of characteristics that the Chinese authorities find so threatening that they respond with detentions and repression, then I really do fear for China’s future.Tags: Hao Wu, asia, china, censorship

AsiaPundit had some harsh words for the BBC last month after the Financial Times reported on the launch of a parallel BBC Chinese website and alleged that the Beeb would be censoring their content.

The BBC denied the allegation and said that the site was not part of its news operations but was part of its language program. Further, it added that while it would mostly be offering British news of a cultural nature, which would unlikely offend the Chinese government, it would not be censoring its service.

The China Digital Times, via Howard French, has run an item from an Indian Financial journal republishing the original allegations, prompting AP to revisit the matter.

While AP was initially harsh on the BBC after reading the allegations in the FT, he would like to note the service was true to its word and did not censor its site.

Nick Wong earlier this month reported that the BBC’s allegedly censored site was briefly blocked on the Mainland after putting a report on its fromt page regarding the Tiananmen Mothers’ Group.

Nick’s site has relocated to here, but a Google cache of the original post is .Tags: bbc, china, censorship, asia, northeast asia

On March 22nd it will be one month since filmmaker and Global Voices Northeast Asia Editor Hao Wu was detained without charge. We appeal to the Chinese government for Hao Wu’s immediate release!

What happened to Hao?

Hao Wu (Chinese name: 吴皓), a Chinese documentary filmmaker who lived in the U.S. between 1992 and 2004, was detained by the Beijing division of China’s State Security Bureau on the afternoon of Wednesday, Febuary 22, 2006. On that afternoon, Hao had met in Beijing with a congregation of a Christian church not recognized by the Chinese government, as part of the filming of his next documentary.

Hao had also been in phone contact with Gao Zhisheng, a lawyer specializing in human rights cases. Gao confirmed to one of Hao’s friends that the two had been in phone contact and planned to meet on Feb. 22, but that their meeting never took place after Gao advised against it. On Friday, Feb. 24, Hao’s editing equipment and several videotapes were removed from the apartment where he had been staying. Hao has been in touch his family since Feb. 22, but judging from the tone of the conversations, he wasn’t able to speak freely. One of Hao’s friends has been interrogated twice since his detention. Beijing’s Public Security Bureau (the police) has confirmed that Hao has been detained, but have declined to specify the charges against him.

The reason for Hao’s detention is unknown. One of the possibilities is that the authorities who detained Hao want to use him and his video footage to prosecute members of

China’s underground Churches. Hao is an extremely principled individual, who his friends and family believe will resist such a plan. Therefore, we are very concerned about his mental and physical well-being.

More about Hao: From Scientist to Computer Guy to Filmmaker.

Hao began his filmmaking career in 2004, when he gave up his job as a senior product manager at Atlanta-based Earthlink Inc. and returned to China to film Beijing or Bust, a collage of interviews with U.S.-born ethnic Chinese who now live in China’s capital city. Before working for Earthlink, Hao worked as a product manager for Internet portal Excite from 2000 to 2001 in Redwood City, CA Before that, Hao had also worked as a strategic planning and product development director for Merchant Internet Group, an intern for American Express Co. and a molecular biologist with UCB Research Inc.

Hao earned an MBA degree from University of Michigan Business School in May 2000 and a Master of Science in molecular and cell biology in July, 1995 from Brandeis University, where he was awarded a full merit-based scholarship. Before studying in the U.S., Hao earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the China University of Science and Technology in Hefei, Anhui province in June, 1992.

Hao the Blogger.

Hao has also been an active blogger, writing as "Beijing Loafer" on his personal blog, Beijing or Bust, named after his film. Due to Chinese government internet blocking of his blog hosting service Blogger.com, he also has a mirror version of the site on MSN Spaces. In early February Hao began contributing as Northast Asia Editor to Global Voices Online, an international bloggers’ network hosted at Harvard Law  School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Writing under the pen name Tian Yi, Hao’s contributions aimed to bring citizens’ online voices from China and the rest of North  East Asia to readers in the English-speaking world.

Why didn’t we speak out about his detention earlier?

Hao’s family and friends in China have deflected questions about his detention for the past month, as authorities in contact with people close to Hao have urged them not to publicize the case. There had been hope that his detention was only for a short period of time, in which case publicity would not have been helpful.

For more information…

Hao’s family and friends inside China do not want to be interviewed directly by the media at this time, and thus we will not provide journalists with their contact information. We have set up a website dedicated to Hao’s release at: www.freehaowu.org. It will be updated regularly with new information that emerges about Hao’s situation.

All further queries can be e-mailed to: .

(above notice via Rebecca.)

Technorati Tags: asia, china, northeast asia, Free Hao Wu, censorship

Peter Dorsman at Peaktalk notes a proposal from the China’s legislative advisory body, the CPPCC, for a change to the nation’s banknotes that AsiaPundit would welcome.:

At the moment I am reading Mao : The Unknown Story which even after all that we’ve learned about communism and its depraved despots still is a revealing read. The question is how many copies have made it into mainland China and to what extent it will influence a rethink of the Chairman. Well, he may no longer find himself on Chinese banknotes:

Delegates to an advisory body to China’s parliament have proposed that Deng Xiaoping, architect of the nation’s economic reforms, and Sun Yat-sen, father of the revolution that toppled the last emperor in 1911, should grace the new bills, state media reported on Monday.

It may be a small gesture, but it is a siginificant move in the ongoing process of China rewriting its own history.

While AP is in agreement that the addition of Deng and Sun to the country’s banknotes would be good news, he doesn’t really see the proposal as one of great significance.

But more on that in a moment.

On Peter’s other question, AsiaPundit offers his assurances that there are absolutely no copies of the Chang-Halliday book in China.

And if there were they would certainly not be brought to the Great Hall of the People to be read by journalists ahead of boring press conferences.:

And the book would definitely not be brought anywhere near the Forbidden City.:

There is simply no way to get a copy of such a book in China.

Back to the currency matter. Unfortunately, the proposal on the new notes isn’t a proposal that is imminently likely to pass. Jeremy at Danwei notes some other CPPCC pitches that were made.:

• “Urban Shower” proposal: Promote the construction of low-cost bathhouses in cities to serve the people.
• “CCTV Anchor” proposal: Swap the current Evening News anchors, who are getting along in years, with younger, fresher faces.
• “Official Weight” proposal: To cut down on government officials wasting public money on lavish banquets, create an Administrative Ethical Code that includes a weight limit for public servants.
• “Peasant TV” proposal: Zhao Benshan thinks that the current national rural TV channel is not enough to satisfy the entertainment needs of China’s non-urban population.
• “College Admission” proposal: Sure, there’s good reason to reform the college entrance exam system. But Yin Hongfu has very specific suggestions: 60-70% from the exam, 20% from social service, 5-10% from creativity (which under special circumstances - champions, inventors, and such - may weigh as much as 50%).
• “Child Actor” proposal: Ban children from acting in commercials.
• “Beauty Economy” proposal: Regulate beauty contests to limit the value society places on outward appearance.

See also gay marriage, the one child policy and edible toothpicks.

Technorati Tags: asia, china, economy, northeast asia, money, puppy

In spite of complaints of redirection at Peking Duck and Boing Boing, Google has not started to redirect Mainland Chinese users to its censored service. Further, AsiaPundit has not noticed any redirection on the Great Firewall side.:

Both Google.com and the can be reached from various locations in Beijing. The above image shows search results, conducted from a Beijing IP address on the censored and uncensored versions.

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

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

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

China’s internet police are so scary they can cause a grown man to faint.:

In Chongqing, China, the police inspection team entered an Internet bar in the morning.  About seven or eight students were present.  One student was concentrating hard on pornographic websites and was totally unaware of the police officers behind him.  The officers stood there for a miute and then they asked him to cooperate.  The student stood up, his body wavered and he passed out.  The police gave him some water and he came to a few minutes later.  He said, "I was scared."  The student was brought back to the station when he apologized and was let off with a lecture and a warning.

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

Who censored Roger Rabbit? The Communist Party of China!

China’s ancient culture has outlasted famine, Mongol hordes, the British Empire, opium wars and Japanese militarism.

So why is Beijing scared of Tinky Wink?

That’s the member of U.K. kids’ favorite Teletubbies, which aroused the ire of televangelist Jerry Falwell. Now the animated gang has fallen afoul of Communist China–although not for the preacher’s reasons.

See, Teletubbies is a mixed media show, in that it blends cartoons with live action. And that melange is now officially banned by Beijing.

The People’s Republic of China has declared verboten TV shows and movies that blend hand or computer drawings with breathing human actors, in a drive to nurture home-grown animators–and perhaps wean the nation off of foreign cartoons.

AsiaPundit doesn’t care about Tinky Wink - but surely a regime is most wretched if it bans Jessica Rabbit.

This is what AsiaPundit means when he says content-related businesses in China are at risk from political and regulatory whims.

AP was out for dinner and drinks with some fellow hacks last weekend and the Google issue was discussed. AsiaPundit mentioned that he would question any attempt to set up a content business here, noting how poorly News Corp had fared in spite of abiding by requests from authorities that it censor the BBC and not publish a biography by former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten.

A colleague agreed and said: "that’s China!‘

For more on the cartoon ban, Imagethief has some comments on the banning of ""so-called cartoons."

GZ expat notes some of the toons’ that will be banned.
Simon reveals the real reason for the ban.

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

Google was accused by the Beijing News of having .:

Google.cn, launched during the Spring Festival, and is sharing an ICP license with Ganji.com, a Chinese information Website, the Beijing News reported today.

The matter has aroused "concerns" from the Ministry of Information Industry. The regulator who will be probing the issue, the newspaper said.

The search engine operator told the newspaper that their practice is not the first of its kind in China. Yahoo in China is also using the same ICP license as 3721.com.

However, the News said, citing an unnamed source in the ministry, Yahoo and Google are different entities. Yahoo wholly owns 3721.com, but Ganji.com is not one of Google’s partners in China.

According to China’s rules, to operate an internet service without an ICP license is illegal. A foreign company must hand over its operation in China to a Chinese partner, or set up a China-based subsidiary to run the business. 

Google has said that it is doing nothing abnormal and is that its China operations are legal.

BEIJING (AFX) - Google Inc has rejected news reports that it is operating without a valid Internet content provider (ICP) license in China, saying its partnership with a Chinese information website means it has gone through the proper channels.

‘Google has a partnership with Ganji.com, through which we have the required license to operate the Google.cn service in China,’ said a Google spokeswoman who asked to remain unnamed.

Instead of its own ICP license, Google.cn is using the same one as that of Ganji.com, it said.

Regulations covering the internet and media in China are formed by more than a dozen ministries and regulators. It’s entirely possible that Google is in violation of one ministry’s rule and fully approved by another. It’s common to launch a service prior to receiving full approval from all official regulators - this holds true for a number of industries. Google is possibly following the normal process and has received necessary regulatory approval, but it could still be in violation of a law or regulation - which would likely be one that its competitors also violated without anyone noticing.

PayPal China was not fully licensed at launch, and even brick-and-mortar ventures such as auto finance companies operate under conflicting regulations. Waiting for regulatory clarity in China can mean never entering the market (which may not be a bad thing for some companies).

It’s also worth noting that the servers for Google.cn are still in Mountain View, California. So, Google could be operating the China portal without a license but is doing it from the US. How that could that be in violation of Chinese law escapes me.

Bill Bishop : "It is quite possible (the Beijing News item) is a hatchet job planted by one of Google’s competitors. News reports in many publications, even some very well-known ones, are fairly easy and cheap to buy in China."

Bill also points to a venomous article in the China Business Times, , accusing Google of being a rude party crasher.:

"But the China Business Times, a business paper with a sometimes nationalist slant, blasted Google for even telling users that links are censored.

"Does a business operating in China need to constantly tell customers that it’s abiding by the laws of the land?" it said, adding that Google had "incited" a debate about censorship.

The paper likened Google to "an uninvited guest" telling a dinner host "the dishes don’t suit his taste, but he’s willing to eat them as a show of respect to the host.""

Damn that Google, how dare it come to China and incite debate!

As amusing as that article is, after the treatment Google has received in recent weeks from the Western press, Congress and Wall Street, the company surely can’t be enjoying the prospect of the Chinese press joining in the chorus (no matter how different the perspective).

Slightly better news for Google, Becker and have joined the company’s defenders.

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

Thank you Roland! As an Asia-focused blog this site has been one of the few sites in the ’sphere’ not to have had fun with the Dick Cheney hunting accident. However, AsiaPundit now asks, how many lawyers has Wen Jiabao shot?

Q1. If Chinese premier Wen Jiabao shot someone, we would never hear about it. It never happened. If someone committed the indiscretion of disclosing the fact, there would be complete denial and then the entire state apparatus would be turned on the leaker of state secrets. Nothing will show up in the Chinese press. All Internet forums and blogs will be censored, so there will be no GPS coordinate analyses. Everything that appears in the foreign media will be denounced as propaganda by hostile forces.

Q2. The Chinese government officials have no sense of humor. There would be no jokes in the manner of Scott McClellan. But the Chinese people have a great sense of humor, because they don’t have much else left. Humor in such cases is bad, because the whole thing turned ugly and obscene the moment that the news came about the heart attack episode. Every comedian should feel some sense of remorse.

AsiaPundit is not aware of China’s premier shooting any lawyers, although quite a few property and human-rights lawyers have been jailed. Still, AsiaPundit does not anticipate any humorous Aerosmith songs to be ever written about Wen Jiabao. (link Cheney’s got a Gun)

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

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