Links » Cream » Reverse Engineering Weibo Censorship

Links » Cream » Reverse Engineering Weibo Censorship

Reverse Engineering Weibo Censorship

Posted: 30 May 2012 10:06 PM PDT

Nieman Journalism Lab's Andrew Phelps describes a new analysis of censorship on Sina Weibo by Chi-Chu Tschang. Tschang's work explores when, why and how quickly posts are removed, and offers a potentially useful tip for catching the censors off guard.

"We know that certain topics are censored from blogs hosted in China, Chinese search engines and Weibos," Tschang writes in his paper. "But we don't know where the line lies. Part of the reason is because the line is constantly moving …."

Using the data visualization software Tableau, Tschang plotted … deleted weibos on a timeline, then superimposed politically sensitive events to provide context ….

And the best time to weibo something politically sensitive in China? After 11 o'clock on a Friday night, according to the data.

"Interestingly, deletion of messages tend to hit a low on Saturdays," Tschang wrote. "I'm not too sure why that is, except that maybe censors want to take time off on weekends as well."

Another recent study of weibo deletions from Carnegie Mellon University found that geography also played a significant role: the deletion rate in —53%—was several times higher than in (12%) or (11%).

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , , , , , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Ai Weiwei: “I Am Fighting Someone I Will Never Know”

Posted: 30 May 2012 09:56 PM PDT

In one of a number of recent interviews, Ai Weiwei talks to The Telegraph's Malcolm Moore about his childhood, fatherhood, why he is determined to stay in China, and an encounter with plain-clothed policemen in a local park:

"Neither of them would admit that they were police. They just said they were people walking in the park. But I could tell. I grabbed one of their cameras. They were police, and they can be very tough, of course. But I can be tougher sometimes."

After grappling with the policeman, he managed to get a memory card out of the camera. "When I got back to my home, I put the card in my computer and I saw something shocking. There were images of my assistants in the park, shot from far away, of the restaurant where I eat, of different young guys and students, in different locations. You know they do this all the time, but it is shocking to see it," he says.

… By the end of the encounter, Ai and his two officers had visited the local police station, and the younger policeman was on the verge of tears.

"I said to him he should admit he had done something wrong," recalls Ai. "He said: 'Please understand it is not easy to do this job'. I told him I would not reveal his name on the internet, but he should think about the 81 days I was put in jail, when my mother and my wife and child did not know where I was. I asked him if he thought that was right. He was speechless. He was an ordinary person, but part of this system. I do not have a problem with him. I am fighting against someone I will never know."

Ai also discusses his constant surveillance in a pair of videos at Slate, and talks about his short-lived response to it in the form of live webcam feeds from his studio-home at WeiweiCam.com.

Click through for part two.

At The Telegraph, Moore writes that, on the way to the interview, his taxi driver confused with "that blind guy in sunglasses", . Ai, amused, acknowledged that the two share some values and experiences. He talked more about Chen Guangcheng in an interview with Reuters' Sui-Lee Wee on Tuesday.

"Through his efforts, his strong spirit and incisiveness have made it so that other Chinese people have no excuse to still be living in fear because their situations will never be worse than his," Ai said on Tuesday in his most extensive comments on Chen's case since his escape.

"The most unfair things that could have happened in a society fell upon a blind man," Ai said. "This is something that no one can accept or explain away with any excuse. Everyone will ask: 'Do we actually have to exist in a society like this …?'"

Ai does not know Chen personally and said he was "extremely surprised" when he received a call from him in New York on Saturday.

"I like you very much," Chen told Ai, to which Ai replied: "I've liked you all along too."

See other recent pieces on Ai Weiwei by Edward Wong at The New York Times and Mark MacKinnon at The Globe and Mail, via CDT, and also our current Word of the Week post, 'Love the Future'.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

China’s Game of Thrones

Posted: 30 May 2012 08:24 PM PDT

Since the beginning of this year, in the Chinese system has been the global glare of publicity – an uncommon occurrence due to the secretive lives of China's top brass. In his latest piece for Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish profiles four Chinese leaders who illustrate "just how corrupt the system has become"- , , , and :

Chinese leaders enjoy a level of privacy unheard of in the West; the often vast business and political dealings of their families are shrouded in mystery by design. Only when Chongqing party boss fell from grace in March did he expose himself to scrutiny from the outside world, illuminating the web of connections that bound him and his family to global business and political interests.

[...]In recent years, only the Bo clan has had its affairs ingloriously paraded in front of the international media — the business ties of top leaders like President Hu Jintao and his successor Xi Jinping remain mostly unknown. But here are four senior Chinese leaders whose web of connections have already been probed, and whose full exposure would most increase the outside world's understanding of how the system works. [...]

In a post for China Realtime Report, Stanley Lubman explains how internal is dealt with in China. As can be seen by Liu Zhijun's recent expulsion from the CCP, and by the ongoing investigation of Bo Xilai, party members are subject to their own separate legal system:

There are two parallel systems in China to punish criminal conduct, one for Communist Party members and the other, the formal criminal process. When a party member is suspected of a crime, it is the party's own investigation that comes first.

[...]In theory, CCP members who commit crimes will be turned over to the procuracy or police and the courts for criminal prosecution after initially being punished internally by the party's own Commissions for Discipline Inspection (CDI). In practice, this happens in only a small minority of cases, and Party officials have the final say over the courts' dispositions of those cases – a stark illustration of the Party's influence over the criminal justice system.

[...]China's leadership has consistently proclaimed that Chinese law must have "Chinese characteristics," but that is a contradiction: Legal institutions remain subject to party control despite the ideal of the that is stated in the Chinese constitution.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Photo: Sunglasses, by Avi Paz

Posted: 30 May 2012 08:18 PM PDT

Tibetan Woman Torches Herself

Posted: 30 May 2012 06:40 PM PDT

Yet another Tibetan has set fire to herself in Aba county, Sichuan. According to Radio Free Asia's count, the young woman is the 38th Tibetan to self-immolate in protest of Beijing's Tibet policies:

Rikyo, a 33-year-old mother of three children, torched herself on Wednesday afternoon near a monastery in Dzamthang (in Chinese, Rangtang) county in the Ngaba (Aba) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, the epicenter of the burnings which began in February 2009.

Her brings to 38 the number of burnings so far protesting Chinese rule in Tibetan-populated areas and calling for the return of 's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

[...]Nearly all the so far have taken place in Sichuan and in two other Tibetan-populated provinces in western China—Qinghai and Gansu—as Tibetans question Chinese policies which they say are discriminatory and have robbed them of their rights.

This most recent case comes just three days after Lhasa witnessed its first self-immolation. Another article from Radio Free Asia reports on heightened security in the Tibetan capital:

Chinese security forces in Lhasa have rounded up hundreds of residents and pilgrims in the wake of a fiery weekend self-immolation protest in Tibet's capital, as the Tibetan burnings in protest against Chinese rule rage on, sources said.

Locals detained are being held in detention centers in and around Lhasa while many of those from outside the Tibet Autonomous Region have been expelled, sources said, with one estimating that about 600 Tibetans had been detained so far.

[...]On May 27, foreign tourists found at the self-immolation site were taken quickly back to their hotels and their cameras were thoroughly searched, and some were told to leave Tibet, he said.

Radio Free Asia also has news of a petition that an anonymous Tibetan monastic has sent to the EU:

A Tibetan monk living in western China has sent a petition to the European Parliament defending a recent wave of self-immolation protests against Chinese rule and appealing for Europe's help in restoring Tibetan freedoms and securing the return of exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

The 21-page document, a copy of which was obtained by RFA, quotes extensively from an unpublished book, The Black Annals, written by a Tibetan monk and schoolteacher, Atsun Tsondru Gyatso, who disappeared in Chinese custody more than a year ago.

The petition, written as though sent on Gyatso's behalf, was dated May 18 and was sent anonymously from inside the Yulshul Tibetan prefecture of China's Qinghai province, passing through several hands before arriving in Switzerland for delivery to officials.

Also see prior CDT coverage of Tibet protests and the ongoing wave of self-immolation in Tibetan regions of China.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Debates on the Future of China’s Economy

Posted: 30 May 2012 02:18 PM PDT

In an article titled Pedalling Prosperity, The Economist correspondents use an elaborate metaphor of penny-farthing to disagree with China bears. They point out a common misconception among observers that China is an export-led economy:

The contribution of foreign demand to China's growth has always been exaggerated, and it is now shrinking. It is , not , that leads China's economy. Spending on plant, machinery, buildings and accounted for about 48% of China's GDP in 2011. Household consumption, supposedly the sole end and purpose of economic activity, accounts for only about a third of GDP.

The state's influence over the allocation of capital is the source of much waste, but it helps keep investment up when private confidence is down. And although China's repressed banking system is inefficient, it is also resilient because most of its vast pool of depositors have nowhere else to go.

Yet this Economist article is not exactly bullish on China's future economic progress either. It indicated that China's growth could slow down due to its aging demography. China's working-age percentage of the population fell. The article voiced concerns over China's investment-led economy:

A disproportionate share of China's investment is made by state-owned enterprises and, in recent years, by infrastructure ventures under the control of provincial or municipal authorities but not on their balance sheets. This investment has often been clumsy.

Hong Kong bureau chief of The New York Times Keith Bradsher reports on the same debate with the case study of Xi'an, a city in northwestern China. Bradsher writes that productive state investments are increasingly scarce:

…with the country having finished building much of its infrastructure, it is having a harder time finding further projects that can pass cost-benefit analyses.

Still, one of his sources argued that investment-led economy has its advantages for growth:

"When you've got state banks lending to state enterprises to implement the state's five-year plan, you don't have a lot of downside to investment," said Paul Gruenwald, a former International Monetary Fund official in Hong Kong who is now the chief Asia economist at ANZ, one of Australia's biggest banks.

© Wendy Qian for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Sensitive Words: The Yunnan Cannibal

Posted: 30 May 2012 01:49 PM PDT

As of May 29, the following search terms are blocked on (not including the "search for user" function):

Related to the case of Yunnan serial killer Zhang Yongming: Several sources have reported that when couldn't finish eating the flesh of his victims, he sold it in the market as ostrich meat. On April 25, 19-year-old Han Yao of Jinning, Yunnan suddenly went missing. His case has been the key to the mystery of missing children in the area.

  • salted meat (腌肉)
  • ostrich meat (鸵鸟肉)
  • thigh meat (大腿肉)
  • strip the flesh and bury the bones (剔肉埋骨)
  • skeleton (尸骨)
  • eat + victim (吃+受害者)
  • eat + juvenile (吃+少年)
  • Han Yao (韩耀)
  • chain of missing people (连环失踪案)

See more related to the Zhang Yongming case from May 25 here.

Note: All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results. CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on search.

CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese's latest sensitive words post.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Book Review: They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?

Posted: 30 May 2012 12:16 PM PDT

In his tenth novel They Eat Puppies, Don't They?, Christopher Buckley plays off of stereotypes of China to create a satirical portrait of U.S-China relations. Buckley explores the worst case scenario with inspiration from the satire movie Dr. Strangelove:

It was hard, really, to put any kind of definite face on China. The old Soviet Union, with its squat, warty leaders banging their shoes on the U.N. podium and threatening thermonuclear extinction, all those vodka-swollen, porcine faces squinting from under sable hats atop Lenin's Tomb as nuclear missiles rolled by like floats in a parade from hell — those Commies at least looked scary. But on the rare occasion when the nine members of China's Politburo Standing Committee, the men who ruled 1.3 billion people — one-fifth of the world's population — lined up for a group photo, they looked like a delegation of identical, overpaid dentists.

Janet Maslin of the New York Times found the Chinese aspects of the novel disappointing: "Mr. Buckley's satirical insights about American-Chinese relations were worth looking forward to, but they will have to stay that way." She still recommends the book for Buckley fans:

To be fair, Mr. Buckley's vocabularic gifts remain consummate, especially when it comes to elegant Latin versions of less elegant English lingo. So perhaps the problem lies with his decision to depict Sino-American relations as creakily hostile. There are characters in "They Eat Puppies, Don't They?" who regret the winning of the cold war, and they don't entirely seem to be joking.

Jess Walter of the Washington Post also did not see the book on par with Buckley's past works of satire:

Unlike 'Thank You for Smoking,' which managed the neat trick of pulling us closer to the lobbyists it satirized, "They Eat Puppies, Don't They?" begins to lag as it drifts further from Bird, bouncing from to Washington, from meeting to television chat-fest to one-sided phone conversation.

New York Times Book Review editor Alida Becker wrote a positive review and introduced one of the main characters with glee:

Assisting in — and quickly commandeering — this [China-targeting] effort is Angel Templeton, "tall, blond, buff, leggy, miniskirted" and the very public face of a Washington think tank called the Institute for Continuing Conflict. ("We're not," she coyly explains, "really into deterrence at ICC.")

In the book, an Indian Web site, the "Delhi Beast," at one point explains that the Chinese government poisoned the Dalai Lama. In a fun interview by the (actual) Daily Beast, Buckley jokes, "Maybe I'm the new Nostradamus, or if you will, the new Faith Popcorn." With the Dalai Lama claiming that a Chinese female secret agent attempted to poison him, he may have a point.

See Also:

Will Staehle Discusses Designing 'They Eat Puppies, Don't They?' Book Cover

© Wendy Qian for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Word of the Week: Love the Future

Posted: 30 May 2012 12:00 PM PDT

Editor's Note: The comes from China Digital Space's Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and frequently encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China's online "resistance discourse," used to mock and subvert the official language around and political correctness.

If you are interested in participating in this project by submitting and/or translating terms, please contact the CDT editors at CDT [at] chinadigitaltimes [dot] net.

爱未来 (ài wèilái): Love the future

"" and "love the future" were blocked on in April 2011.

"Love the future" is a coded reference to Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei (艾未未) that came into use after Ai's detention in April 2011. Ai's surname sounds the same as the word "love" in Chinese, and his given name "Weiwei" (未未) can be converted into the word "future" (未来) by adding two small strokes to the second character. After the phrase "love the future" became a cipher for Ai, "future" was for a time a sensitive word on the Chinese Internet (see here).

One of the designers behind the iconic Bird's Nest Stadium, Ai was prominent in the art world long before he became a thorn in the Chinese government's side. He started to rankle the authorities in May 2008 when he lead a project to collect the names of children who died in the Sichuan earthquake. Active on Twitter, he commented there in February 2011 about the calls for a "jasmine revolution" in China modeled after Egypt's. Visits from the police and the destruction of his studio in late 2010, combined with the tension in brought by the , lead Ai to attempt to leave for Hong Kong on April 3. He was detained while boarding his flight and disappeared for 81 days. Once back home and under , he didn't stay silent for long.

New Yorker China correspondent Evan Osnos profiled Ai in 2010. Edward Wong of the New York Times wrote an account of Ai's detention on May 26, 2012.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Netizen Voices: U.S. Consulate Hong Kong “Acts Cute” with People’s Daily

Posted: 30 May 2012 10:45 AM PDT

On May 25, the official Weibo account of the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong published its "Thoughts on Reading the U.S. Human Rights Report in the Style of the People's Daily." The humorous and sarcastic tone of the comments caused large scale re-posting and commenting. One sentence that particularly garnered attention– "Why do you always delete me?"–earned the consulate the nickname "American Imperialist Acting Cute." Soon after, the official account of the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai joined the cuteness brigade:

@USConsulateShanghai: Yeah, One World, One Dream! //@usainhkmacau: Thoughts on Reading the Report in the Style of the People's Daily #1: "Developing and guaranteeing human rights have always been the goals and values of Chinese Communist Party members." (Huh! All this bickering and our goals are and human rights. There's no conflict!)

@usainhkmacau: Thoughts on Reading the U.S. Human Rights Report in the Style of the People's Daily #2: "We should actively participate in and promote democracy and human rights through political dialogue. Because of each individual country's different social structure, level of development and traditions, we understand the concepts of democracy and human rights differently. This is totally normal. The key is to seek common ground in spite of the differences." (Then why do you always delete me?)

@usainhkmacau: Thoughts on Reading the U.S. Human Rights Report in the Style of the People's Daily #3: "Democracy and human rights have long been pursued by all people. They are important qualities and signs by which the development of human civilization is measured." (Then what are we fighting over? We are all on the same page!)

Below is a selection of netizen comments on the consulate's thoughts. Read more from CDT Chinese here. by Little Bluegill.

Ambiguous_Yu: To be deleted you means you are in their hearts.
若即若离_豫：删你证明心里有你。

piggyogre_Jr: I strongly condemn the American imperialist attempt to interfere in my county's domestic affairs by acting cute.
piggyogre_Jr：强烈谴责美帝通过恶意卖萌来干扰我国内政~

DuduCola: Don't you know how to punctuate? Political dialogue means you can't speak unless your politics are correct ["dialogue" (duìhuà 对话) becomes "correct, speak" (duì, huà 对, 话)]. If your politics are not right to begin with, of course your comments will be deleted.
都都可乐：你不会断句了吧？政治对，话，意思是政治上正确的，才能说话。你从一开始就政治不正确，说的话当然被删掉了。

EscapeFish: I'd like the consulate in Hong Kong to add it up. How many of your posts have been harmonized in all?
漏网知渔：请驻港领事馆统计，到底被和谐了多少条围脖？？

BorntoBirth: A little deletion is good for your health.
生而为人生生人：删删更健康

PeopleWantJustice: Deleting Weibo posts is something a temporary worker would do. What has this to do with the glorious Party and government? …Anti-revolutionary rumor-mongering! Delete!
人欲即天理：删帖的事情，是临时工干的，和伟大的党，伟大的政府有什么关系？…反革命造谣犯！删！

PasForty: …Let's just go ahead and delete this post as well…
PasForty：…再说把你这条也删了…

IAmLongSpear: The People's Daily Online has said, "That was deleted by Sina, it has nothing to do with us."
我是长矛：人民网说了:"那是新浪删的, 不关我的事。"

OldTiansField: If the consulate's posts are fanned [bèi shān (被搧) homonym for "deleted" (被删)], all it can do is act cute…
老田的田：领事馆被搧得只好卖萌了。。。

LiKedian: Quick, everyone come look! @usainhkmacau is facing off against @PeoplesDaily! @BeijingDaily @HuXijin @SimaNan hurry and join the fight!
李可点：大家快来看啊，@美國駐港總領事館 和@人民网 PK了，@北京日报 @胡锡进 @司马南 快来助阵

HuZhimingviking: Constant struggle without breakthrough is a long-held tradition of the Chinese Communist Party.
鬍綕眀viking: 一直在奋斗，从未有突破，中国共产党的优良传统。

"Netizen Voices" is an original CDT series. If you would like to reuse this content, please follow the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 agreement.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

U.S. Consulate H.K. “Acts Cute” with People’s Daily

Posted: 30 May 2012 10:18 AM PDT

On May 25, the official Weibo account of the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong published its "Thoughts on Reading the U.S. Human Rights Report in the Style of the People's Daily." The humorous and sarcastic tone of the comments caused large scale re-posting and commenting. One sentence that particularly garnered attention– "Why do you always delete me?"–earned the consulate the nickname "American Imperialist Acting Cute." Soon after, the official account of the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai joined the cuteness brigade:

@USConsulateShanghai: Yeah, One World, One Dream! //@usainhkmacau: Thoughts on Reading the U.S. Human Rights Report in the Style of the People's Daily #1: "Developing democracy and guaranteeing human rights have always been the goals and values of Chinese Communist Party members." (Huh! All this bickering and our goals are democracy and human rights. There's no conflict!)

@usainhkmacau: Thoughts on Reading the U.S. Human Rights Report in the Style of the People's Daily #2: "We should actively participate in and promote democracy and human rights through political dialogue. Because of each individual country's different social structure, level of development and traditions, we understand the concepts of democracy and human rights differently. This is totally normal. The key is to seek common ground in spite of the differences." (Then why do you always delete me?)

@usainhkmacau: Thoughts on Reading the U.S. Human Rights Report in the Style of the People's Daily #3: "Democracy and human rights have long been pursued by all people. They are important qualities and signs by which the development of human civilization is measured." (Then what are we fighting over? We are all on the same page!)

Below is a selection of netizen comments on the consulate's thoughts. Read more from CDT Chinese here. Translation by Little Bluegill.

Ambiguous_Yu: To be deleted you means you are in their hearts.
若即若离_豫：删你证明心里有你。

piggyogre_Jr: I strongly condemn the American imperialist attempt to interfere in my country's domestic affairs by acting cute.
piggyogre_Jr：强烈谴责美帝通过恶意卖萌来干扰我国内政~

DuduCola: Don't you know how to punctuate? Political dialogue means you can't speak unless your politics are correct ["dialogue" (duìhuà 对话) becomes "correct, speak" (duì, huà 对, 话)]. If your politics are not right to begin with, of course your comments will be deleted.
都都可乐：你不会断句了吧？政治对，话，意思是政治上正确的，才能说话。你从一开始就政治不正确，说的话当然被删掉了。

EscapeFish: I'd like the consulate in Hong Kong to add it up. How many of your posts have been harmonized in all?
漏网知渔：请驻港领事馆统计，到底被和谐了多少条围脖？？

BorntoBirth: A little deletion is good for your health.
生而为人生生人：删删更健康

PeopleWantJustice: Deleting Weibo posts is something a temporary worker would do. What has this to do with the glorious Party and government? …Anti-revolutionary rumor-mongering! Delete!
人欲即天理：删帖的事情，是临时工干的，和伟大的党，伟大的政府有什么关系？…反革命造谣犯！删！

PasForty: …Let's just go ahead and delete this post as well…
PasForty：…再说把你这条也删了…

IAmLongSpear: The People's Daily Online has said, "That was deleted by Sina, it has nothing to do with us."
我是长矛：人民网说了:"那是新浪删的, 不关我的事。"

OldTiansField: If the consulate's posts are fanned [bèi shān (被搧) homonym for "deleted" (被删)], all it can do is act cute…
老田的田：领事馆被搧得只好卖萌了。。。

LiKedian: Quick, everyone come look! @usainhkmacau is facing off against @PeoplesDaily! @BeijingDaily @HuXijin @SimaNan hurry and join the fight!
李可点：大家快来看啊，@美國駐港總領事館 和@人民网 PK了，@北京日报 @胡锡进 @司马南 快来助阵

HuZhimingviking: Constant struggle without breakthrough is a long-held tradition of the Chinese Communist Party.
鬍綕眀viking: 一直在奋斗，从未有突破，中国共产党的优良传统。

"Netizen Voices" is an original CDT series. If you would like to reuse this content, please follow the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 agreement.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The Daily Twit (@chinahearsay Twitter feed) – 2012-05-30

Posted: 29 May 2012 08:59 PM PDT

© Stan for China Hearsay, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Chen Guangcheng: How China Flouts Its Law

Posted: 30 May 2012 07:12 AM PDT

Chen Guangcheng, the noted activist from Shandong, published an essay in the New York Times this Tuesday to give his opinions on the current legal conditions in China. He urges the CCP and Chinese government to look into the "lawless punishment inflicted on me and my family over the past seven years":

SINCE I arrived in the United States on May 19, people have asked me, "What do you want to do here?" I have come here to study temporarily, not to seek political asylum. And while I pursue my studies, I hope that the Chinese government and the Communist Party will conduct a thorough investigation of the lawless punishment inflicted on me and my family over the past seven years.

He mentions how his brother and nephew were tortured by an unidentified group of people after his escape. His nephew, Chen Kegui, is now facing charges of attempted homicide, which believes are absurdly fabricated. Chen wants the central government keep its promise to investigate the case and calls for supervision from the United States and other democratic countries:

I asked for such an investigation while I was hospitalized in Beijing, after I had left the refuge of the United States Embassy and American officials negotiated my reunification with my family. High officials from the Chinese government assured me that a thorough and public investigation would take place and that they would inform me of the results. I hope that this promise will be honored. But the government has often failed to fulfill similar commitments. I urge the government and people of the United States and other democratic countries to insist that the Chinese government make timely progress in this matter.

Read more about Chen Guangcheng, his escape from house arrest, and his journey to the U.S., where he now resides in Greenwich Village in New York while attending classes at New York University.

© mengyudong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The Next New Thing: China’s “Mini-stimulus”

Posted: 30 May 2012 05:30 AM PDT

Big economic news always comes with a label. First there was the "Grexit" and now the "mini-stimulus." It's not clear who was responsible for this one, possibly Joe McDonald at AP. Joe is a very thoughtful, intellectual type, though, so if this is his work, he must have been on a tight deadline or something. "Mini-stimulus" doesn't have a lot of zazz, certainly not like "Grexit," which admittedly has quickly become annoying as hell.

Then again, it seems as though "mini-stimulus" is exactly what we're going to get, so the term certainly is descriptive. You see, China last pushed through a stimulus package in 2008, and it was a big 'un, hundreds of billions of dollars. And it worked — economic growth was shored up while the rest of the world caught its breath from the Great Recession.

Unfortunately, the 2008 stimulus had its drawbacks. China isn't all that good at spending money efficiently, and not all that money that was poured into the economy, a lot of which was funneled through State-owned banks, was spent in a productive manner. The result? A lot of bad debt and unproductive projects, not to mention a real estate bubble and generalized inflation.

No one wants that again. But the economy is flagging, due in part to a drop-off in exports. So if a 2008 type of stimulus is not possible, the next best thing is . . . you guessed it, a mini stimulus.

And there was much rejoicing. Sort of. The markets actually seem rather confused by the messaging of all this. One day we're up, the next day we're down. First the government says there will be a stimulus, then it tries to lower expectations. It's making me dizzy.

And then there's the big picture. Should China use this opportunity to make some significant structural changes to the economy? Northwestern Professor Victor Shih says yes, while Citi's Shen Minggao says it ain't gonna happen. I think Victor was speaking in terms of what China "should" do, while Shen was a bit more firmly rooted in what was likely. Both articles are excellent.

By the way, we still don't know how mini the mini stimulus will be. If you tally up the initiatives announced so far, the amount seems kind of small given the size of China's economy. Perhaps the PBOC could fly Paul Krugman to Beijing to give a presentation on what happens when a government underestimates the magnitude of a demand slump.

© Stan for China Hearsay, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Zhang Ziyi Denies Bo Rumours

Posted: 30 May 2012 04:29 AM PDT

Actress Zhang Ziyi has denied rumours, originating online and spreading to some mainstream media, that she had been barred from leaving China pending investigation by the authorities.

Hong Kong's Apple Daily, as well as several other Chinese mainland and Taiwanese media publications, reported on May 29 that a wealthy associate of the former Chinese official has confessed he first paid Zhang 6 million yuan (US$944,244) in 2007, to have sex with her.

Reports said he later negotiated deals for the official to have sex with Zhang in Beijing at least 10 times between 2007 and 2011. The reports further claimed that Zhang's "sexual transactions" with various rich and powerful figures have made her the tidy sum of 700 million yuan (US$110 million) over the past decade ….

"Friends have advised us to release a short statement and not take this seriously," Zhang's team continued, "The more you argue, the more you will stir up. It would be better to step aside until people lose interest and the lies disappear. The innocent will always be innocent. "

"But this time we don't want to be silent. If we leave these lies to spread, what is completely untrue will be at risk of becoming a half-truth," the statement read, "This time, we are telling those rumor-makers that we will respond. We will prove our side of the story; we'll seek legal justice; we'll find you in the darkest corner and go after you."

Damien Ma, of Eurasia Group and The Atlantic, tweeted that he was standing behind Zhang in line at Hong Kong airport, "smashing" claims that the Beijing-based actress was subject to travel restrictions. She later confirmed that she was in Hong Kong to consult lawyers [zh].

Boxun, the apparent origin of the rumours, was included in Barbara Demick's survey of exile media sources at The Los Angeles Times earlier this month:

More objective [than the Falun Gong-backed media], though not always more accurate, is Boxun. Founder Watson Meng was a tech-savvy Chinese student in the U.S. in the early 1990s when he started compiling articles about China published abroad for his friends back home to read. In 2000, he turned his hobby into a proper business, establishing Boxun in Durham, N.C., where he had settled after attending Duke University's business school.

"I don't ally myself with any party or religion. Boxun carries voices from all groups," the 47-year-old Meng said by telephone ….

Boxun often re-posts articles that have appeared on Chinese microblog sites such as and takes anonymous contributions without verifying the content. Many of its "exclusives" are questionable, such as the accusation that Bo plotted a 2002 plane crash and reports in March that Zhou and Bo had attempted a coup.

Meng acknowledges that the site doesn't live up to professional journalistic standards: "Boxun has many things it needs to improve. We'd like to become more professional."

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , , , ,
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Study: China’s Female Bloggers Write About Useless Fluff

Posted: 30 May 2012 03:58 AM PDT

Hey, it's not me saying this, I'm just repeating it to get some attention. Seriously, someone apparently did a study last year:

Chinese men concern themselves mostly with politics and society when blogging online, while women tend to focus on love, life and entertainment, according to new research into Chinese language use in 2011.

The 10 nouns used most frequently by male bloggers included "society," "government," "politics" and "problem," while their female counterparts more commonly typed "men," "love," "friend," "children" and "star," according to a report released on Tuesday by the Ministry of Education.

The most popular names cited in blogs by men included Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek, Karl Marx and historical figures such as Confucius and Cao Cao, all of which are related to politics or the military, the report indicated.

Stars' names, such as Hong Kong actress Cecilia Cheung and microblog queen Yao Chen, were women's favorites.

Sexist? If someone merely restated these conclusions without supplying some sort of data, I'd probably say yes. And of course, this study/survey could, like a whole lot of online data mining endeavors, be quite flawed.

A couple of issues at the outset here. I don't know what "blogs" refers to in the study. Some people talk about microblogs like weibo and Twitter and use the term "blogs," which is confusing. So the study might include microblogs or it might not — no way of knowing.

Additionally, if women focus on "life" issues, it would be helpful to know what that means. Does this include food safety? Pollution? Or is this a fluffy category that includes shopping and fashion? Quite a big difference there.

So I'm a bit skeptical of this. On the other hand . . . it makes me think about the blogs I read and the bloggers I know. I tend to know more people who write about the same topics as me (i.e., China law, econ, business, politics). Of all the law blogs I read, the overwhelming majority of them are written by men, with only perhaps one or two out there who are women. Intellectual property law blogs in general, by the way, have more women authors, which probably just reflects that practice area — lots of women do trademark law for some reason. Economics and politics blogging also seems to be dominated by men for some reason, again with some notable exceptions.

So when it comes to business, law and politics, yeah, I can see that gender difference. If you put aside the institutional/company/major media blogs and just focus on solo bloggers like myself, there are some women out there, but many more men.

I just did a quick in-house survey of my Google Reader feed. For what it's worth, at the moment I have about 160 subscriptions, maybe a few of which aren't very active. Of those, there are roughly 50 independent blogs, most of them with single authors. Of those solo, or non-professional blogs, only five of them are written by women. There are a few more who are part of multi-author non-professional blogs.

Keep in mind that there are a lot of women who write for multi-author blogs at law firms, media organizations, NGOs, etc. That's part of their job, though, so to me that's sort of a different category. And even if we include all of those folks, you still have a huge gender disparity in favor of men.

Hmm. Is this a selection bias on my part? Am I missing out on all those great female China bloggers out there? (If so, their posts are not popping up on search engines and Twitter, so it's not all my fault.) I also wonder if there is a cultural difference between China and other countries.

As to the issue of topics in that study. Do men prefer to write about politics and women about entertainment? By the way, I assume men are the ones writing most of the sports blogs out there (definitely useless fluff), and I'm not sure why that wasn't mentioned. I suppose if you want to lump together sports, politics, and business into a single category that is all about confrontation and competition, then I can see why that would be dominated by male authors.

Anyone want to take a crack at this one? And don't just say "What about Female Blogger X?"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blogs » Politics » In Defense of China’s Golden Week

Image
Blogs » Politics » In Defense of China’s Golden Week In Defense of China’s Golden Week The Xi Administration Introduces the “Eight Musts” In China, Slowdown Is a Bigger Danger Than Growth Article 73 Detainee Allowed to See Wife Outspoken Critic Attacked at Book Promotion in China Landslide Survivors Demand Investigation of Mine’s Role (Updated) Photo: Fridge Transport, by Svend Erik Hansen Ministry of Truth: Heat and Orphans China: Dirty Air, Dirtier Water? Li Chengpeng’s Silent Book Signing Word of the Week: Primary Stage of Socialism A Chinese Official Realizes the Dream of Home Ownership — 31 Times China's Transparent Reporting on Air Pollution “Avoid Outdoor Activities”: Record-Breaking Air Pollution in Beijing When Two Chinese Women Found the Courage to Report Abuse, They Were Ignored In Defense of China’s Golden Week Posted: 16 Jan 201
Keep reading

Blogs » Politics » Xu Zhiyong: An Account of My Recent Disappearance

Image
Blogs » Politics » Xu Zhiyong: An Account of My Recent Disappearance Xu Zhiyong: An Account of My Recent Disappearance Ai Weiwei's lawyer was missing as the tax hearing approaches Businessman Hailed for Buying Imaginary Bank [GRAPHIC] Weibo: Homage to Li Wangyang Democratic elections can’t do miracles The Chinese State and Soccer Credibility Dangerous Liaisons: Zhang Ziyi sues Boxun in California Xu Zhiyong (许志永): An Account of My Recent Disappearance A Woman Devoted to Harmony A Strange Apology on a Certain Day Controversy Continues over Confucius Institutes South China Morning Post Accused of Self-Censorship Word of the Week: Drink Tea For Better Air, Don’t Pin Your Hopes on Embassies Something in the Chinese Air: Pollution, But Hints of Transparency Global Times: China Has Long Been a Type of Democracy The Daily Twit (@chinahearsay links) – 6/20/1
Keep reading

Blogs » Politics » Chen Guangcheng’s Former Prison Evaporates

Image
Blogs » Politics » Chen Guangcheng’s Former Prison Evaporates Chen Guangcheng’s Former Prison Evaporates Wang Lijun to get less than 10 years: Boxun Another Year, Another Wild Gaokao Baidu Map speaks some truth Pu Zhiqiang: How to Handle the Police Photo: Suzhou Creek, Shanghai, by Remko Tanis What to Make of China’s New Internet Law Li Wangyang: I Won’t Retreat Even if I am Beheaded Mongolian Election: Bumpy Road, but Heading in the Right Direction You Really Can Criticize the Government on Social Media Catfight Between China and the US Over Air Quality China: Gmail Users Warned of State-Sponsored Attacks The Daily Twit (@chinahearsay Twitter feed) – 2012-06-07 PBOC Cuts Interest Rates as Economy Continues Slide How Will The CCP Finish Off Bo Xilai? Foxconn: A Very Quiet Riot China Issues Draft Revision to Internet Law Foreigners In China Chin
Keep reading