China Digital Times

CHINA NEWS SECTION: Politics

• Beijing To Hire Army Of Internet Censors

  

  From Financial Times:

  The city of Beijing is planning to hire thousands of internet censors in a fresh sign of the authorities’ attempts to tighten their grip on cyberspace.

  The city will seek to employ at least 10,000 “internet volunteers” before the end of this year to monitor “harmful” websites and content, said an official at the municipal authority’s information office.

  Chinese local governments and Communist party branches often pay web commentators to influence online opinion. But it is unusual for officials to admit the practice and the big recruitment drive gives a rare view of the resources China uses to try to control the internet.

  Read also Beijing to recruit tens of thousands of “Internet supervision volunteers” from Xinhua.

  » Read more
  • June 21, 2009 12:31 AM

• U.S., Chinese Military Officials To Meet Next Week

  

  From Reuters:

  Top U.S. and Chinese military officials will meet next week to discuss North Korea and maritime conflicts with the aim of improving cooperation between Beijing and Washington, the Pentagon said on Friday.

  Pentagon policy chief Michele Flournoy will meet with Lieutenant General Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of general staff of the People’s Liberation Army, in Beijing on June 23 and 24, a senior Pentagon official said.

  “North Korea will factor in very strongly,” the official said. “We’ve learned that there’s a lot of common interest here in international consensus to moderate North Korean behavior.”

  » Read more
  • June 20, 2009 8:10 PM

• Tibetan Monks Tell Tale of Escape From China

  

  The New York Times follows up with monks who staged a public protest during a visit to their monastery by foreign journalists in April 2008, following widespread protests throughout Tibetan areas:

  That daring protest, in April 2008, was transmitted around the world by the journalists on the government tour, putting a dramatic face on Tibetan defiance. Chinese officials had brought the journalists to the sprawling Labrang Monastery, in the town of Xiahe to show that Tibetans were content under Chinese rule, despite the widespread Tibetan uprising the previous month. The enraged monks, about 15 in all, punctured the official narrative.

  “If we monks hadn’t seized the opportunity to express our feelings, which are feelings in all Tibetan monks, then we would have missed a chance to tell the world,” said Lobsang, 24, a squat man with a thin goatee who now lives in India. Following Tibetan custom, he goes by his given name.

  The journalists left later that afternoon without knowing the names or the fates of the protesters. Some would be arrested and beaten, Lobsang said. For him and two other monks, it was the start of a harrowing year of flight from the Chinese authorities that ended only last month, when they arrived in this Himalayan hill town where the Dalai Lama lives in exile.

  » Read more
  • June 20, 2009 7:28 PM

• Video: Riots in Shishou, Central China over Death (Updated)

  

  Violent riots are being reported in Shishou, Hubei Province. Reuters reports:

  Police in central China’s Hubei province have been called in to quash protests over the mysterious death of a man in a government-owned hotel, eyewitnesses told Reuters on Saturday.

  “There are still a lot of armed police around,” a local resident surnamed Chen told Reuters. “But they haven’t convinced (the protestors) to go home yet.”

  On June 17, Xu Yuangao, a 24-year-old chef, was found dead at the Yonglong Hotel in the city of Shishou, and while the police say they found a suicide note, Xu’s family continue to allege foul play.

  And from AFP:

  “There were at least 10,000 people gathered near the hotel yesterday (Friday). Police were being chased away by residents, who were hitting the police,” a woman employee at a nearby hotel told AFP by phone.

  The woman, who would not give her name, said she also saw police vehicles that were damaged or overturned.

  She added that large crowds were still present on Saturday near the Yonglong hotel where the man was a chef.

  The official Xinhua news agency reported that more than one thousand people crowded outside the hotel at 5pm (0900 GMT) Saturday, with hotel walls “blackened by fire,” it said.

  See also a Xinhua report. The following photos are from this blog, although it is currently inaccessible.
  

  Amateur video of the incident is up on YouTube:
  
  
  

  Update: Reuters reports on Sunday that calm has been restored to Shishou:

  Crowds that clashed with paramilitary police in a small town in central China on Saturday have dispersed, leaving police in control, local residents and state media said on Sunday.

  Unusually, the protestors in Shishou, Hubei province, appear to have included local government employees, showing the depth of dissatisfaction in the city of 620,000.

  Crowds set fire to the Yonglong Hotel on Friday night after the death of 24-year-old chef Tu Yuangao. The man’s family had refused to accept the hotel management’s explanation that Tu had committed suicide by jumping out a window.

  By Saturday, the confrontation had escalated into one of the most serious “mass incidents” in China since the alleged rape of a teenage girl found dead in Weng’an, Guizhou province, sparked riots last year involving 30,000 angry locals.

  More photos of the protests can be found here.

  » Read more
  • June 20, 2009 6:42 PM

• Regulators Target Google for Pornographic Content, CCTV Airs Fake Interview, Netizens React

  

  As previously reported on CDT, Chinese government regulators have ordered Google to suspend some of its search functions due to the pornographic content available through its search engine.  More details from the New York Times:

  The Chinese government disabled some search functions on the Chinese-language Web site of Google on Friday, saying the site was linking too often to pornographic and vulgar content.

  Government officials met with managers of the Chinese operations of Google on Thursday afternoon to warn them that the company would be punished if it did not remove the offending material from the Web site, according to a report on Friday by Xinhua, the state news agency.

  [...]On Friday evening, the associative-word feature of the Web site appeared to have been disabled. That is the function that displays a drop-down menu of words related to a search word that is typed into the search engine. The previous evening, reporters on China Central Television, the state television network, showed how typing in the Chinese word for son, erzi, could pull up associated terms that have lewd connotations.

  Additionally, the government has ordered Google to block links to foreign websites from search results on its China Google page.  From the Dow Jones Newswires via Total Telecom:

  Chinese regulators have ordered Google Inc. to suspend search services for foreign Web sites via its Chinese Web site, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday, a day after the company was warned over pornographic content available through its search engine.

  It wasn’t immediately clear if the order applies to all foreign Web sites or just certain sites. Currently, foreign Web sites are still searchable and accessible from Google’s Chinese home page.

  Google was also ordered to suspend searches for certain key words when summoned by unspecified regulators Thursday afternoon, the report said.

  On June 18, CCTV aired a report on Google’s pornographic content which has drawn swift criticism from Chinese netizens, particularly for a false interview with a supposed ‘college student’ named Gao Ye.  (Watch the full CCTV segment, including the Gao Ye interview, on Sina.com.)  EastSouthNorthWest translates a post by Xiao Tian at Oxn.in (Chinese) summarizing netizen skepticism:

  On the same day, netizens began to question quickly.  Search engines frequently offer likely search terms because these are popular with other users.  As such, the search engines are not responsible because they are only reporting what users are “voting” on with their searches.  Thus, when Google.cn proposes certain relevant search terms, they are merely informing you what other netizens are most commonly searching for.  They are reflecting the facts of life, and it shows that Google.cn is being fair and objective.  Rather than blaming the search engines, we should be blaming people for wanting to look up pornography which proliferate on the Chinese Internet.

  Similarly, other search engines such as Baidu and Bing contain the same kinds of pornographic information, but CCTV completely ignores them.  Netizens made screen captures to show that Baidu is no less vulgar than Google.cn …

  

  Soon after this CCTV segment aired, the Southern Metropolis Daily (Chinese) reported that the interviewed university student Gao Ye was in fact a CCTV intern.  Netizens have launched the human flesh search engine.  Again translated by EastSouthNorthWest:

  Yesterday morning, a netizen discovered that there was a user named “Gao Ye” at the social networking site Xiaonei.  Based upon the photos, this is the same Gao Ye who appeared the day before on <Focus Interview>.  According to a conversation with a friend on June 17, Gao Ye is presently an intern with the CCTV program <Focus Interview>.  Also, other netizens found Gao Ye and his friends’ Sina.com blogs which said that he was going to become an intern at CCTV.  This information was later posted at Cat898 Forum, Tianya Form and other websites.  The reporter confirmed with a worker at CCTV’s <Focus Interview> program group that Gao Ye is indeed an intern there.

  The human flesh search quickly located and published Gao Ye’s school, QQ number, mobile phone number and other personal information.  His Xiaonei page was flooded with scornful comments.  Not satisfied with direct personal attacks, some netizens began a human flesh search on his girlfriend.  Her blog, Xiaonei page, QQ number and other information were published.  Her photos with Gao Ye were posted all over the place alongside personal attacks.

  Faced with the pressure from the powerful human flesh search, Gao Ye and his girlfriend deleted their blogs.  Gao Ye’s Xiaonei space now only has the message: “Account canceled by the user.”

  ChinaSMACK has translations of netizen reactions to the CCTV report and also a translation of a sarcastic letter to the ‘university student’ Gao Ye from Hudong Baike (Chinese):

  A Letter To Gao Ye

  Schoolmate Gao Ye, hello: You probably do not know me, but I know you from Focus Interview. I attentively listened to you talk about the “Google China using yellow pictures [pornography] and vulgar content to poison your schoolmate” thing, and was deeply touched and learned a lot. Whether or not that schoolmate is really yourself is not important, but I hope to give you some sincere advice.

  One, you must not look at pornography and vulgar content too much, Schoolmate Gao Ye. I do not know if you with your schoolmate have reached pornography and vulgar content through links on Google China, but as a big brother who has matured from youth, let me say to you that normally you must not watch too much A片 and avoid vulgar content. These are bad for your skin. These past two days, did you stay up all night going online to find 毛片 ["hand films", pornography films] look at pornography doing your homework in preparation for the CCTV interview? Look at yourself, just two days and you no longer look human: slackened eyes; wrinkles on your forward; gaping mouth. That’s why big brother is offering you a piece of advice: look at less porn and go outside more, wouldn’t that be good? Another thing, there are always at least a few girls in your classes, right? Occasionally molesting them a little is definitely more exciting than porn.

  Two, you must not accept interviews from CCTV about vulgar content, Schoolmate Gao Ye. It is not that I am jealous of you getting on CCTV, really. It is because after 60 years of studying CCTV’s programs I have discovered that every schoolmate that has gone on CCTV to interview about vulgar content always eventually has a bad fate. Let us use schoolmate Zhang Shufan from the year before last as an example. Just days before Teacher Edison Chen’s photo exhibition, CCTV’s “Xin Wen Lian Bo” broadcast “Schoolmate Zhang Shufan’s interview about pornography and vulgar content”. At the time, Schoolmate Zhang Shufan only said “very yellow, very violent” these few words, but do you know what happened to her? There were even more wretched/perverted pictures but I will not post them here. You as a good young lad currently studying in university should know what accepting this kind of interview will do for your future prospects.

  » Read more
  • June 20, 2009 2:31 PM

• The Six Why’s (六个为什么)

  

  China Media Project translates a new initiative by the Hu Jintao administration to answer everyone’s nagging questions about China’s political system:

  We introduce to you . . . the “Six Why’s.” That’s right, Hu Jintao and his army of CCP theorists have worked out a simple political primer for us all, a kind of FAQ of market-Leninism.

  The “Six Why’s,” which could be read as an indirect response to the 20th anniversary of the 1989 student movement, and perhaps the CCP’s answer to Charter 08 and the published journals of former premier Zhao Ziyang, seek to answer basic political questions like, “Why should Marxism be our guiding ideology?”

  Launched with great party media fanfare back on June 5, they have gotten precious little attention in the Western media. Why? Most likely because the “Six Why’s” formula, for all of its cozy paternalism, is still mostly an impenetrable mess of dogma.

  Below is a CCTV report (in Chinese) about the Six Why’s:
  

  » Read more
  • June 19, 2009 6:24 AM

• Chinese TV Employees Suspended For Tiananmen Broadcast

  

  From Reuters:

  Several staff at a Chinese television station were suspended from their jobs after footage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests slipped past censors and was broadcast to the public, a human rights group said on Friday.

  Chinese media outlets are barred from mentioning the crackdown around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that killed hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators. But a cable television operator in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou allowed around 10 seconds of sensitive footage from a Hong Kong broadcaster to slip into a Chinese public broadcast on the evening of June 5.

  A local journalist who watched the broadcast said the image of a lone man blocking a line of tanks just off Tiananmen Square in 1989 was shown, as well as footage of 150,000 people at a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong on the evening of June 4 this year to mark the 20th anniversary of the crackdown.

  » Read more
  • June 19, 2009 5:01 AM

• China Orders Google to Suspend Some Search Services

  

  From Wall Street Journal:

  Chinese regulators have ordered Google Inc. to suspend search services for foreign Web sites via its Chinese Web site, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday, a day after the company was warned over the pornographic content available through its search engine.

  It wasn’t immediately clear if the order applies to all foreign Web sites or just certain sites.

  Google was also ordered to suspend searches for certain key words when summoned by unspecified regulators on Thursday afternoon, the report said.

  » Read more
  • June 19, 2009 4:43 AM

• Tehran’s Tiananmen Square?

  

  As protests escalate in Iran, voices in the international media are comparing the scene there to China in 1989 and wondering if Iran is headed toward another June 4th. In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof worries about government efforts to block websites and to expel foreign journalists:

  The push to remove witnesses may be the prelude to a Tehran Tiananmen. Yet a secret Internet lifeline remains, and it’s a tribute to the crazy, globalized world we live in. The lifeline was designed by Chinese computer engineers in America to evade Communist Party censorship of a repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong.

  Today, it is these Chinese supporters of Falun Gong who are the best hope for Iranians trying to reach blocked sites.

  “We don’t have the heart to cut off the Iranians,” said Shiyu Zhou, a computer scientist and leader in the Chinese effort, called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. “But if our servers overload too much, we may have to cut down the traffic.”

  Mr. Zhou said that usage of the consortium’s software has tripled in the last week. It set a record on Wednesday of more than 200 million hits from Iran, representing more than 400,000 people.

  On his blog, Sam Crane outlines what he sees as the similarities between Iran 2009 and China 1989, while a commentator on MSNBC’s blog asks if we are witnessing Iran’s Tiananmen Square.

  » Read more
  • June 18, 2009 6:54 PM

• Flaws in China’s Digital Dissidents

  

  Alice Liu writes her opinion for Asia Times:

  Despite having a reputation in the West as trailblazing citizen journalists, many of China’s young bloggers are seen by Chinese as egocentric, showy and self-serving. Most come from the “me generation”, a derisive term for youths born after the nation began its strictly enforced one-child policy in 1979.

  [...]Many bloggers from the “me generation” are just like Zola. They may appear rebellious, and committed to exposing scandals, but they do this mainly for self-satisfaction or fame. The majority of these bloggers are not politically adventurous, and most, like Zola, won’t criticize the communist authorities. In short, they are apolitical.

  [...] A new craze among young Chinese bloggers is T-Shirts with “democracy” written across the top in bold red and white letters, but it is only for fun. These digital boys and girls are not really serious about their pursuit of so-called “democracy” in China. Otherwise, they might have thought of some better way of doing it. Some, probably from the slightly older generation, stay low key on the Internet, so it is meaningful when they do stand up and say something. But none of the “me generation” has experienced any of the recent traumas in Chinese history, so perhaps it is difficult for them to understand the feelings of people who have gone through those tragic events.

  » Read more
  • June 18, 2009 12:54 PM

• China Holds Firm on Software Filter, U.S. Firms Say

  

  Despite earlier reports that the government had responded to widespread outrage over the Green Dam software by making its installation optional, the New York Times reports today that in fact there has been no apparent change in policy:

  Four trade groups based in the United States have sent a statement to the Chinese government asking it to “to reconsider implementing its new mandatory filtering software requirement.”

  On Wednesday, the major American computer makers said they had yet to hear anything concrete from China regarding making installation of Green Dam optional. Company representatives said the computer makers would refrain from taking a stand until they are presented with a clear position from the Chinese government.

  [...] Confusion about the Green Dam mandate was sown on Monday when China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, quoted an unnamed official in the software department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology saying that the government was requiring the software to be offered on a CD packaged with new computers or be placed on hard drives as set-up files only.

  But it soon became clear that the unnamed official was not speaking in an authoritative role. When The New York Times called the ministry’s software department to clarify the government’s position, employees there refused to give a statement. No government official has given any statement this week indicating that the policy has been changed.

  For more on the history of the Green Dam software and the role of the Internet Society of China in promoting it, see this China Media Project piece:

  The controversy over “Green Dam” may have blown up in just the last week, but coverage of the software itself can in fact be traced back months earlier, to a piece appearing in Guangdong’s Southern Metropolis Daily on January 14, 2009. Though the “Green Dam” software is not the focus of the news report, the story does raise some interesting questions about how the software was conceived and promoted.

  The Southern Metropolis Daily article, run on page A32 that day, deals with a January 2009 government campaign against so-called indecent Web columns and content.

  By all accounts, the campaign was an aggressive one, resulting in the shutdown and purging of many Web columns and chat forums. But the chief driver behind that campaign was not, in fact, the government — not directly, anyway.

  While the government was most certainly calling the shots, the ostensibly non-government Internet Society of China (ISC) was actually wielding the truncheon, beating down Web offerings that were “indecent” or otherwise illegal (Read also: politically and/or socially sensitive).

  » Read more
  • June 18, 2009 6:27 AM

• Dog Killings in China Spur Outrage

  

  From Wall Street Journal:

  Animal-welfare advocates complained about a campaign in which a local government has killed 37,000 dogs to fight a rabies outbreak, highlighting a divide in attitudes toward animals as China grows wealthier.

  The city of Hanzhong, in China’s central Shaanxi province, has ordered the killing of all dogs found outside homes in areas hit hardest by the outbreak. Authorities have ordered “dog-beating teams” to canvass the area and beat dogs to death on the spot — including those that have been registered by their owners, said Shi Ruihua, head of the livestock department in Hanzhong’s agriculture bureau.

  Rabies outbreaks are common in rural China. This year, Hanzhong saw a spike in the number of cases. Thirteen people have died there since the outbreak started in early March.

  » Read more
  • June 18, 2009 1:43 AM

• China Backs Down over Controversial Censorship Software

  

  The Guardian reports that the government is loosening requirements that all computers produced in or imported to China must have keyword filtering software installed on their hard drives, following concerns over a host of technical, legal, and other problems:

  The Green Dam Youth Escort program, which restricts access to pornography and politically sensitive websites, was due to be compulsorily incorporated in the hard drives of all new machines sold after 1 July, but the state-run media announced today that it would instead be an optional package.

  The softening of tone appears designed to head off a wave of criticism about the program, which has brought the government culture of information control into an unusually harsh domestic spotlight.

  But it is unlikely to allay suspicions about the developer, Jinhui – a military-backed software firm – and about Green Dam, which tightens government control of the internet at the level of individual computers.

  Secret documents published online and investigations by hackers have revealed an embedded blacklist of politically sensitive words in the program, a hole in the system that potentially allows remote users to take control of an individual’s computer and a defective pornography algorithm.

  According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, a group of 19 trade organizations representing tech companies wrote a letter to the Chinese government, stating that the plan for the Green Dam software, “raises significant questions of security, privacy, system reliability, the free flow of information and user choice.”

  » Read more
  • June 17, 2009 6:16 PM

• China Fires Top Official For Key Industrial Zone

  

  From AP:

  The top Communist Party official responsible for a key industrial zone in northern China has been fired and expelled from the party over graft allegations, state media reported Wednesday.

  Pi Qiansheng had been the subject of an investigation prior to his firing for “serious discipline violations,” the official Xinhua News Agency said, using the party’s standard term for corruption.

  No other details were given and Xinhua didn’t say when the action had been taken.

  Expulsion from the party indicates that the party’s internal probe has been completed and the case will be forwarded to the courts for prosecution. Convictions in such cases are virtually guaranteed and sentences can range up to death.

  » Read more
  • June 17, 2009 5:45 AM

• Why The Case For China’s Lawyers Doesn’t Look Good

  

  From Time:

  On May 13, Beijing lawyer Li Chunfu went to the southwestern city of Chongqing with a colleague to meet with the family of a man who died in a labor camp. While meeting with the family, Li and lawyer Zhang Kai were detained by police. Li was chained to a chair and punched, while Zhang, also roughed up during their arrest, was locked in a cage. Their transgression? They were representing the family of Jiang Xiqing, a man who belonged to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. After a few hours of questioning, the Jiangjin district police released them around midnight. “We were scared, but the people [we represented] were even more scared,” says Li. “So we went back the next day.”

  Violence has not stopped Li and his fellow human rights lawyers from doing their jobs, but bureaucracy might. On June 1, the law licenses for Li and more than a dozen other prominent rights lawyers expired. The annual renewal is generally considered a formality — a matter of filing out forms and paying a fee. But this year Li and other top rights lawyers were shut out. They say they are being punished for simply doing their jobs.

  » Read more
  • June 17, 2009 5:35 AM

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