“According to information, because of long-term overwork, vice mayor Wang Lijun is highly stressed and in poor health. He is now accepting vacation-style treatment,” Chongqing’s information office posted in a message on its microblog account on Wednesday.

Statements of that kind are extremely rare in China. This one – retweeted tens of thousands of times by microblog users – came hours after large numbers of police surrounded the US consulate in Chengdu on Tuesday evening, blocking off roads around the building.

Chinese microblog users began to circulate pictures of the scene and rumours of a high-profile attempted defection. They claimed a car with what appeared to be official number plates was seen outside the building but was subsequently removed by Chinese police.

Both the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and local Chengdu officials declined to comment on the events at the consulate, but the situation reinforces recent speculation that Wang had fallen out of favor with Bo. Last week, the Chongqing government announced that it had moved Wang from his public security post to take charge of certain economic, political and other affairs. Netizens jeered at the official statement on Sina Weibo today and speculated that Wang had faced a corruption probe, according to Reuters, a situation which could potentially embarrass Bo Xilai and threaten his political aspirations:

“This will be a big blow to Bo Xilai, because Wang was instrumental in his anti-organized crime campaign, and that was instrumental in building Bo’s appeal in public opinion and even among officials,” said Chen Ziming, an independent scholar who studies party politics.

“Now the hero of that campaign has turned into a scandal, so at the least that’s a blow to Bo’s public prestige,” said Chen, a former political prisoner who lives in Beijing.

ChinaGeeks’ Charles Custer wrote that Sina has been censoring searches for “Wang Lijun” on and off today, adding later that some versions of the story claim Wang “may have divulged significant amounts of privileged information to US diplomats,” and discussed the political implications of the situation:

On the international side, the implications of a high-level official defecting or attempting to defect just before soon-to-be-president Xi Jinping makes his visit to the US could be huge. If the US were to grant Wang asylum, that would be….well, awkward probably doesn’t even begin to cover it.

On the domestic side, with China’s leadership transition fast approaching and Wang being high in Bo Xilai’s Chongqing administration, a defection or even just a rumored defection on Wang’s part could seriously damage Bo’s position. Certainly, there are forces within the Party who are very opposed to Bo’s rise, and it’s hard to think of what better ammunition they could have against him than something like this. On Twitter, @niubi theorized that Sina could be allowing some of the posts about Wang Lijun to go through on purpose to damage Bo Xilai’s reputation, and that certainly seems possible.

Assessing the likelihood that any of this (beyond the facts) is real is very difficult. On the one hand, the US generally doesn’t grant asylum from in-country embassies, precisely because those embassies are easy to surround with police. A year or so ago, I was asked by a Chinese friend to research this process, and found that generally speaking, it’s much easier to be granted political asylum if you’re outside the country you want asylum from. It strikes me that if Wang Lijun really did flee to the Chengdu embassy to request asylum, he must have been in a rather desperate situation. Otherwise, presumably, he could have waited for an opportunity to travel abroad and had a much greater chance of success.

See also previous CDT coverage of Wang Lijun’s role in Bo Xilai’s 2009 anti-corruption campaign, including reports late last year on the possibility of a new mafia movie based on Wang’s story.

Update: Shanghaiist has posted pictures from Sina Weibo of police surrounding the U.S. consulate in Chengdu last night, adding that the unsubstantiated rumors of Wang’s defection were largely spread by overseas Chinese news site Boxun. The Wednesday morning post on Chongqing’s official microblog quickly attracted a wave of comments about the “vacation-style treatment” (休假式治疗) it prescribed for Wang, according to The Wall Street Journal:

As if often the case when rumors about top officials begin to circulate, Sina’s censors went a bit schizophrenic with the Wang case. Mr. Wang’s name was blocked and then unblocked in searches on the site and appeared briefly on Sina Weibo’s list of trending topics before disappearing. Likewise, the original Chongqing government announcement of Mr. Wang’s vacation was taken down and then reposted in the early afternoon, erasing all comments that had amassed to that point.

Still, the Chinese Internet meme machine powered on. Among those rolling with the vacation theme Wednesday afternoon was the automotive section of the Chengdu Business Daily newspaper, which asked Weibo users which car they would choose if forced to take treatment similar to Mr. Wang’s.

“I’d take a Lamborghini,” responded one reader. “That way if you crash and die at least you die with face.”

The New York Times has more on the rumors surfacing about Wang’s fate:

A Chinese reporter with the newspaper Southern Metropolis said that he had learned from police sources that Mr. Wang had tried to enter the consulate, but had been arrested and that he had since been flown to Beijing for questioning. The post was later deleted from the Sina Weibo microblog.

…

Given the secretive nature of Chinese politics, the fact that the rumors were so widespread suggested that something was amiss. Because Chinese leaders put such a priority on presenting a united front, at least in public, the rumors are seen as hurting Mr. Bo.

“For Bo Xilai it’s not good news,” said Jin Zhong, chief editor of the China-watching magazine Kaifang in Hong Kong. “The Communist Party has always had a lot of internal factions. We don’t know what most of them are but when things like this come up to the top it shows that something is going on.”

ChinaGeeks’ Charles Custer relayed a report from the Oriental Daily News which claims that rumors of Wang’s attempt at asylum are true. He also notes that McClatchy Newspapers’ Tom Lasseter is in Chengdu and Tweeting that “there’s nothing apparently out of the ordinary in front of the Consulate.” Lasseter reported from Chengdu on Wednesday:

Interviews with shopkeepers in the area suggested the police presence there Tuesday evening might have been less overwhelming than presented by Internet reports. A clerk at a nearby drug store, who did not want her name published because it wasn’t clear what had happened, said that while there were police cars parked on the street outside the consulate, the road was not closed to traffic.

A saleswoman at a clothing shop a few doors down gave a similar account.

It wasn’t possible to verify their version of events, however.

Translation: The building sign says: American Consulate, Chengdu
Sign with arrow pointing left says, “Vacation-style Treatment Center”
The figure on the left (Wang Lijun) says: “Boss, my stress is too great!”
The figure on the right (Bo Xilai): “Bastard! Let the leaders escape first!”

Update 3: The United States has confirmed that Wang Lijun visited the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, but did not speak to rumors that he requested asylum, according to Voice of America:

A spokeswoman for the State Department, Victoria Nuland, told reporters Wednesday that Deputy Mayor of Chongqing Wang Lijun had a scheduled meeting at the U.S. consulate in the city of Chengdu. She said the meeting probably took place Monday and that Wang left the consulate of his own volition.

She did not provide information on what the meeting was about.

“Well, I think you’re referring to reports about the vice mayor of Chongqing – right – City. So his name is Wang Lijun. Wang Lijun did request a meeting at the U.S. Consulate General in Chengdu earlier this week in his capacity as vice mayor. The meeting was scheduled, our folks met with him, he did visit the consulate and he later left the consulate of his own volition. So – and obviously, we don’t talk about issues having to do with refugee status, asylum, et cetera.”

See also a video of Wednesday’s State Department Press Briefing (beginning at 3:22), in which Nuland addresses questions about Wang Lijun. China’s Vice Foreign Minister called Wang’s visit to the consulate an “isolated incident” and said it would not affect Xi Jinping’s upcoming visit to the United States next week, according to Reuters. But the Sydney Morning Herald’s John Garnaut writes that several of Wang Lijun’s close associates in Dalian have also been taken into custody, according to Chongqing sources, and adds fuel to the rumor mill surrounding a potential corruption probe against Chongqing’s leadership:

Speculation was swirling last night that Mr Bo himself was a target of the central investigation, after he had unsettled senior figures in the Party, and that Mr Wang sought refuge in the US consulate after turning witness against him.

…

Two close political watchers, with connections with Party and military investigators respectively, speculated that the Chongqing corruption probe might involve a degree of payback from a separate probe initiated by Mr Bo’s close friend and “princeling” ally, Liu Yuan, inside the People’s Liberation Army.

On January 19 the Herald/Age first reported that General Liu Yuan had staked his career on a “do-or-die” corruption campaign.

He told officers he would pursue his investigation to the end regardless of “how high one’s position is or how powerful the background”.

The official Chongqing Daily ran a front page article heralding “Peaceful Chongqing” on Thursday, though China Media Project’s David Bandurski writes that “all is not well on Chongqing’s political scene” ahead of this year’s CCP leadership transition:

In light of the breaking Wang Lijun story, the front-page article in Chongqing Daily looks like a concerted effort — even possibly a desperate one — to burnish and defend Bo Xilai’s legacy. Chongqing’s fight against crime from 2008 to 2010 is probably the most important feather in Bo Xilai’s cap as he pushes ahead with his bid for promotion to the Politburo Standing Committee.

Given Wang Lijun’s status as a crime-busting bigshot, his name nearly synonymous with Chongqing’s anti-vice campaign, questions that encircle Wang are questions that encircle Bo Xilai.

Update 4: ChinaGeeks’ Charles Custer has the latest on the censorship – or lack thereof – of certain discussions about Wang Lijun and his “vacation-style medical treatment” on Sina Weibo as of early Thursday evening:

At the moment, Wang is back on the Sina Weibo trending topics list twice. “王力军” (an intentional mistyping of his name is #2 on the trending topics list, and the phrase “vacation-style medical treatment” is #7. Searches for “Wang Lijun” (typed correctly) remain uncensored. It’s quite clear that Sina is not trying to suppress this story at all, which begs the question: is someone at Sina trying to damage Bo Xilai?

Meanwhile, Reuters reported on Thursday that any conclusions about the fate of Bo Xilai may be premature:

“I think Bo Xilai is a bit like the Chinese version of Newt Gingrich — he’s so battle-scarred that does this really add or take away from a guy who is controversial?” said Kerry Brown, head of the Asia Programme at Chatham House, a London foreign policy institute, referring to the Republican aspirant to the White House.

“If he’s known for being a controversial character, I don’t think these things have a big impact,” Brown said of Bo. “It may just as well work to his advantage.”

…

Chinese citizens can’t vote for their leaders. But an informal poll on the city’s steep streets suggested it was too early to count out Bo, whose ill-concealed ambition and privileged background have attracted naysayers.

“From almost every perspective, Chongqing is better since Bo came,” said Wu Jun, 25, when asked about Bo, a previous mayor of Dalian, a port city in eastern China.

“Look at Dalian too. When Bo was there, they also were developing well. So there is something to the man. I think a lot of people my age like him because he seems real,” he said, adding that he wasn’t concerned about the rumors swirling around Wang.

Update 4 (Feb. 9, 1:30 PST):

Through a brief Xinhua dispatch, the Chinese government today acknowledged that Wang had spent time at the U.S. Consulate and said he was under investigation. From the Guardian:

The terse, one-line statement about Wang Lijun from official news agency Xinhua – issued at around 11pm Beijing time on Thursday– came one day after the announcement that he was receiving “vacation-style treatment” owing to stress.

The fall from grace of Chongqing’s vice-mayor and former police boss has triggered intense speculation of a political struggle because of his close ties to the city’s ambitious party secretary, Bo Xilai, who had been tipped for promotion when a new generation of leaders takes power this year.

Wang’s transfer to non-police duties last week led to suggestions that the two men had fallen out amid a possible corruption investigation.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP 5th generation, censorship, Chengdu, Chongqing, corruption, defection, microblog, netizens, online public opinion, Politburo, sina weibo, u.s.-china relations, Wang Lijun, Xi Jinping
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Against a backdrop of rapid socio-economic change and modernization, China continues to be an authoritarian one-party state that imposes sharp curbs on freedom of expression, association, and religion; openly rejects judicial independence and press freedom; and arbitrarily restricts and suppresses human rights defenders and organizations, often through extra-judicial measures.

The government also censors the internet; maintains highly repressive policies in ethnic minority areas such as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia; systematically condones—with rare exceptions—abuses of power in the name of “social stability” ; and rejects domestic and international scrutiny of its human rights record as attempts to destabilize and impose “Western values” on the country. The security apparatus—hostile to liberalization and legal reform—seems to have steadily increased its power since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China’s “social stability maintenance” expenses are now larger than its defense budget.

At the same time Chinese citizens are increasingly rights-conscious and challenging the authorities over livelihood issues, land seizures, forced evictions, abuses of power by corrupt cadres, discrimination, and economic inequalities. Official and scholarly statistics estimate that 250-500 protests occur per day; participants number from ten to tens of thousands. Internet users and reform-oriented media are aggressively pushing the boundaries of censorship, despite the risks of doing so, by advocating for the rule of law and transparency, exposing official wrong-doing, and calling for reforms.

China’s state media has responded to the report with a flurry of indignation, as HRW’s Nicholas Bequelin noted:

此地无银三百两： People’s Daily and China Daily have published a total of 10 (!) articles on Human Rights Watch (@hrw) in one week.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) January 31, 2012

(“此地无银三百两”: “No 300 taels of silver here”; to draw attention to something by denying it.)

People’s Daily, for example, suggested that criticism of China’s rights record arose from Western insecurity:

It seems that some Western countries and NGOs have set out to attack China over its human rights issues. They first assume that human rights are being ignored, then seek evidence from rumors, and make speculations to blindly accuse China of violating human rights with the real purpose of distorting China’s international image ….

Why does the West still hold a prejudice against China’s human rights? The only reason is that the Cold War mentality and ideological hegemony still prevails. As long as China is a socialist country, the West will insist on distorting its image and see China as a threat to the Western system.

Since the end of the Cold War, the West has been too boastful of its political system, believing it is the only system that has universal value in the world.

China’s significant economic progress has stirred Western anxieties. Distorting China’s human rights becomes the only political choice.

Elsewhere, People’s Daily also criticised the report for failing to acknowledge China’s progress in legal reform. From Xinhua:

The World Report “gave no word on the great progress in terms of China’s judicial reforms that have been demonstrated in the Criminal Procedural Law draft amendment,” the article said.

Legal experts say the draft amendment will help improve the protection of criminal suspects’ human rights, by preventing judges from accepting confessions from tortured suspects and giving these suspects more defense options.

In fact, the report does acknowledge the amendment, but reiterates concern at the prospect of legalised enforced disappearances:

In August 2011, in an effort to … improve the administration of justice, the government published new rules to eliminate unlawfully obtained evidence and strengthened the procedural rights of the defense in its draft revisions to the Criminal Procedure Law. It is likely it will be adopted in March 2012.

However, the draft revisions also introduced an alarming provision that would effectively legalize enforced disappearances by allowing police to secretly detain suspects for up to six months at a location of their choice in “state security, terrorism and major corruption cases.” The measure would put suspects at great risk of torture while giving the government justification for the “disappearance” of dissidents and activists in the future. Adoption of this measure—which is hotly criticized in Chinese media by human rights lawyers, activists, and part of the legal community—would significantly deviate from China’s previous stance of gradual convergence with international norms on administering justice, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China signed in 1997 but has yet to ratify.

See more on CDT.

People’s Daily also objected to the report’s claim that “the government continues to build a ‘new socialist countryside’ [in Tibet] by relocating and rehousing up to 80 percent of the TAR population, including all pastoralists and nomads.” From Xinhua:

The People’s Daily article, jointly published by two Tibet experts, said the HRW’s conclusion was groundless and contradictory to basic facts.

The two authors, Zhang Ming, or Lorong Dramadul, with the China Tibetology Research Center, and Professor Yang Minghong with Sichuan University, hoped that their experiences and observations from over 20 years of field research in Tibet could help clarify the misunderstandings.

They cited official statistics and said that in 2011, 1.85 million Tibetans, or 61 percent of the total population, had settled in permanent residences.

“No more than 150,000 people, or less than 5 percent of the Tibetan population, had left their original residence,” the experts wrote.

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Pan Xizhe’s op-ed at China Daily accused Human Rights Watch of sloppy methodology and political motivations:

At first glance, Human Rights Watch appears to be keen on the protection of international human rights. But it actually carries out its work with double standards and bias. Its observations lack political neutrality and its research methods are questionable. The organization’s employment of unqualified workers has also hurt the credibility of its report. Human Rights Watch should reflect inward before passing on judgment to others.

The media and international observers have long criticized Human Rights Watch for passing judgment of human rights conditions of a country or region through tinted lens. It turns a blind eye to human rights issues in some countries while criticizing others vehemently. The Sunday Times quoted a human rights insider in the United States as saying that the organization caters its reports to the US government, which greatly affects its objectivity ….

In the China portion of its report, Human Rights Watch used expressions such as “estimate”, “possibly”, and “probably”. It criticized China’s judiciary system, religious institutions, regional autonomy by ethnic groups, family planning policy as well as foreign and economic policies.

The US section of the report, which criticises the Obama White House’s failure to pursue Bush administration officials for approving the use of torture and decries America’s “abusive” counterterrorism policies, growing poverty and world-leading prison population, can be read here.

While the World Report looked back at 2011, at The Diplomat, HRW’s Phelim Kine looks ahead to 2012:

These cases represent more than the Chinese government’s well-documented contempt for freedom of expression explicitly guaranteed in Article 35 of the Constitution. They are also clear efforts to breed fear and sow silence among China’s beleaguered community of human rights defenders and civil society activists. The aim: to ensure that the 12-month senior Communist Party leadership transition this year proceeds without public challenges to the Party’s 61-year monopoly on power. China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are preparing to step aside for a new generation of leaders, widely touted to be Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, in a secretive political succession that won’t be complete until in March 2013 ….

The government’s overriding obsession with maintaining its monopoly on power make it likely that these abuses will continue under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Foreign governments could help reverse this trend and give support to Chinese who want a more accountable government by more vigorously engaging the government on such violations. Thirty years since the launch of China’s economic reform and opening, a decade after China entered the World Trade Organization, and five years since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the deterioration in respect for human rights and rule of law in China should be of serious concern for all countries seeking long-term, sustainable and mutually-beneficial bilateral relations with China.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, criminal procedure law, disabled, human rights watch, industrial pollution, leadership transition, legal reform, Li Keqiang, migrants, minorities, press freedom, religious freedom, Tibet, women, Xi Jinping
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推若审查，我即停推。 RT @wenyunchao: @aiww 商人在商言商，道这东东，能像谷歌那样最好，不能也不能强求。

— 艾未未Ai Weiwei (@aiww) January 27, 2012

The new policy has been widely read as a concession to allow Twitter to enter China, in a similar vein to Google’s aborted censorship of search results on Google.cn. The speculation has been fuelled by co-founder Jack Dorsey’s recent visit to Shanghai, though that trip may have had more to do with Dorsey’s e-payment company, Square. Speaking to The Associated Press, Google’s chief legal officer played down the focus on China:

“I think what they (Twitter officials) are wrestling with is what all of us wrestle with — and everyone wants to focus on China, but it is actually a global issue — which is laws in these different countries vary,” Drummond said.

“Americans tend to think copyright is a real bad problem, so we have to regulate that on the Internet. In France and Germany, they care about Nazis’ issues and so forth,” he added. “In China, there are other issues that we call censorship. And so how you respect all the laws or follow all the laws to the extent you think they should be followed while still allowing people to get the content elsewhere …?”

“It’s a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there,” said Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices Online, an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists. “We’ll have to see how it plays out — how it is and isn’t used.”

It remains to be seen, for example, how high Twitter will set the bar for “what we believe to be a valid and applicable legal request” for blocking, and where the policy will apply: while the change is intended to allow expansion into countries with “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression”, the company added that “some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there.” Takedown requests are to be catalogued online at chillingeffects.org/twitter, alongside the current list of copyright infringement notices. See more on Twitter’s claimed commitment to transparency at Ars Technica.

Ai would be sorely missed by many Chinese Twitterers. A recent post on the Sinophone twittersphere by Yaxue Cao at Seeing Red in China described his presence there:

You can’t write about Twitter Chinese without talking about Ai Weiwei. Needless to say, he was among the first people I followed. But within 24 hours I unfollowed him, because when I came back on Twitter the next day, OMG, all I saw was @aiww, nothing but @aiww, screen after screen. I figured that I will hear news about him and interesting things he said anyway from retweets ….

Soon enough, I re-followed him, this time feeling the need for a figure like him: he brings to Twitter Chinese warmth, a sense of confidence (although not certainty), street smartness, and he makes you feel a tad stronger, even though he is under surveillance of 9 cameras and multiple police cars permanently parked outside his gate.

See more on Cao’s post via CDT.

In a recent interview with The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, Ai suggested that the government saw Twitter as a threat akin to Christianity as a potential source of independent community. The comparison arose with reference to the recent departure of writer Yu Jie.

“Internally, since they don’t have a way to discuss issues or communicate, it’s really a deadlock for them, and that keeps creating pressure. They had beaten him—Yu Jie—terribly, because he is related to Christianity, and that is what they hate the most or are scared of the most. They are scared of any form of unity. They wouldn’t be scared of me if I don’t get on Twitter, because on Twitter I can form a community. But, as individuals, they don’t care about you. So they crash down on people quite terribly, and subject people to abuse. I don’t think Yu Jie could stay any longer. In that kind of situation, you just have to say, ‘This is not possible,’” Ai said.

Ai and Osnos also discuss the artist’s iconic and widely coveted Sunflower Seeds, now on display in New York, and the “legal burlesque” of the tax evasion charges which followed his detention last year:

Before I left his house, I asked him he thinks he’ll win his tax case. “No,” he said flatly. “We’re only winning by revealing the truth. We can win in a sense of so many people beginning to understand. They will understand that you cannot win a case, but at least you can say, ‘I have to fight because it’s related to at least thirty thousand supporters.’”

Update: At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Eva Galperin asks “what does Twitter’s country-by-country takedown system mean for freedom of expression?”

… Right now, we can expect Twitter to comply with court orders from countries where they have offices and employees, a list that includes the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, and soon Germany.

… For now, the overall effect is less censorship rather than more censorship, since they used to take things down for all users. But people have voiced concerns that “if you build it, they will come,”–if you build a tool for state-by-state censorship, states will start to use it. We should remain vigilant against this outcome ….

So what should Twitter users do? Keep Twitter honest. First, pay attention to the notices that Twitter sends and to the archive being created on Chilling Effects. If Twitter starts honoring court orders from India to take down tweets that are offensive to the Hindu gods, or tweets that criticize the king in Thailand, we want to know immediately. Furthermore, transparency projects such as Chilling Effects allow activists to track censorship all over the world, which is the first step to putting pressure on countries to stand up for freedom of expression and put a stop to government censorship.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, censorship, Christianity, google.cn, Rebecca MacKinnon, Twitter, yu jie
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A number of Chinese dissidents have already left homegrown social media sites, choosing to create a community on Twitter that is beyond the reach of government censorship. The artist Ai Weiwei posts prolifically on Twitter.

On her Seeing Red in China blog, the writer Yaxue Cao on Monday described spending a month following posts by members of that vocal dissident Chinese-language community on Twitter. She writes that some dissidents also post to weibos, where the audiences are much larger, though less intimate.

Because Twitter is blocked in China, its small number of mainland users tend to be those with enough technological know-how to get around the Great Firewall, she observes, creating a debate-filled conversation that she likens to a vibrant tea house. Some of the accounts followed by Ms. Yaxue belong to former student organizers who took part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and others who were forced to leave the country for political reasons:

When one of them (@wurenhua) tweeted about his recent conversation with his 80-year-old mother over the phone and why the mother and son had avoided video chatting (so that they can hide sadness from each other), you get a glimpse of what this exile entails.

While the 140-character limit constrains writing to one or two thoughts in alphabetic languages, Ms. Yaxue says, whole paragraphs are possible in China’s character-based language. The same could also be said of Sina Weibo and other China-based social networks. But on Twitter there is not the same risk that posts will be censored — or “harmonized,” according to the official term of art — and a dissident user’s account terminated.

One of the bloggers in question, Yaxue Cao, writes that the Chinese Twitter universe offers certain freedoms but nothing goes unnoticed:

But that nobody deletes your message doesn’t mean nobody is watching over what you say. Somewhere over a dim table, state security police are scanning every word. In November 2010, Wang Yi (@wangyi09), a well-known rights activist, was sentenced to one-year “reeducation through labor” for jokingly challenging angry “patriots” demonstrating against Japan to storm the Japanese Hall of the Shanghai Expo. She was the first person punished for a tweet, a tweet that consisted of 5 characters.

Even I, a newcomer and an outsider to this community, am beginning to have inklings. For example, who is that ID that signed on to follow me the day before yesterday that has a dozen or so tweets in a language I can’t identify but follows a hundred or so Chinese dissidents and intellectuals? How come those a couple of IDs, very vocal and widely known, always have “inside news” that happens to help deescalate pressure for the government? Who are they really?

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, information control, Internet freedom, microblogging, netizens, sina weibo, Twitter
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Charles Custer, meanwhile, reported for Danwei from the heated kang of a courtyard house in the far north-east of China, where he spent the holiday with his in-laws:

The Li family home is in Kedong, a small town that’s more or less halfway between Harbin and the Russian border. It was once a collection of pingfang – traditional Chinese one-storey houses – but those are increasingly being replaced with modern apartment buildings. Nowadays, if you stood in the center of Kedong, you might even feel like you were in a city. But it’s just an illusion; the apartment buildings give way to farmland within a few blocks in any direction.

The Lis take Spring Festival traditions more seriously than most, or so Mr. Li – my father-in-law – tells me …. In the Li family, the most important is the tradition of paying respect to the family’s (male) ancestors. On the morning of the day before Spring Festival, as his son glued a red and gold Spring Festival couplet to the door of the house and then the gate of the courtyard, Mr. Li washed his hands carefully and pulled scrolls out of a corner. These scrolls, it turns out, are likely at least 200 years old – they go back ten generations – and have been inscribed with the names of every one of Mr. Li’s male ancestors. After affixing them to the wall, Li taped on a 100 RMB note and then, reflecting on my presence perhaps, added a US $100 note above it.

CCTV’s annual New Year Gala was not warmly received by the Li family. The variety marathon will mark its 30th anniversary next year, and somewhat questionably boasts an audience of well over a billion people. The government’s political sensitivity may be undermining the show’s entertainment value, however, with a number of participants dropping out this year amid rumours of censorship. Among them is Zhao Benshan, who was absent for the first time in over twenty years. From Barbara Demick and John Lee at The Los Angeles Times:

Although the 55-year-old actor cited exhaustion, there was widespread speculation in the television industry that the skit he submitted this year didn’t get approval.

“This is the most censored show on Chinese television,” said Wu Renchu, a film critic based in Shanghai. He said the gala acts must go through three rounds of approval.

“There is more and more ideology and less entertainment. It is all about praising the achievements of the party and the nation. With stand-up comedy, you can’t have anything that touches on the reality of life in China ….”

Jiang Kun, a master of the Chinese comic art known as crosstalk, is also off the program this year, with columnists speculating it’s because his skit touched on a train crash last year in Wenzhou.

Zhao and Jiang’s absences were surely balanced, though, by the inclusion of a year-old, borrowed clip of billionaire investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” with a ukulele.

Judge for yourself at CNTV.cn, where this and previous years’ shows are available to view online.

New Year fireworks threatened to cloud the government’s new PM2.5 air quality readings, whose accuracy has already come into question. From Jonathan Watts in The Guardian:

Wang Qiuxia, of the Darwin Nature Knowledge Society NGO, said the air quality in many Chinese cities deteriorated sharply every New Year’s Eve.

He joined other activists in launching an online campaign for a “green new year” that urges people to save the money they would spend on fireworks and donate it to civic groups so they can buy pollution-monitoring devices.

Others demand tougher actions. The author Zheng Yuanjie, has used his Sina Weibo microblog to press the Beijing government to resume a ban on fireworks inside the fifth ring road. Others suggest the city should stage a single spectacular display – as Hong Kong does – rather than allowing millions of individuals to fire off starbursts and fire showers ….

The explosives also create a mountain of rubbish. According to the city environmental sanitation department, 58 tonnes of used fireworks were picked off Beijing’s streets during the new year festival in 2011.

Looking beyond the holidays, couples in China and around the world are seeking fertility treatment in order to give their offspring an astrologically auspicious start in life. From The Wall Street Journal:

Assisted-reproduction clinics in the U.S., China and elsewhere are reporting a surge in demand tied to the year of the dragon. The Los Angeles-based Agency for Surrogacy Solutions and sister company Global IVF Inc. have seen a 250% increase in business from Chinese or Chinese-Americans so far in January, according to co-founders Kathryn Kaycoff-Manos and Lauri Berger de Brito.

They expect the trend to continue until mid-May, the time by which couples need to conceive in order to deliver a baby by Feb. 9, 2013. Any baby born after that will be a snake not a dragon.

Luxury brands also have high hopes for the year ahead, according to CNN:

Watchmaker Piaget created more than 20 pieces exclusively for its Dragon and Phoenix line, which honors the dragon and its mythical mate. Items from the collection range from $25,000 to north of $100,000 for its Altiplano Double Jeu, a 43 mm watch in 18-carat white gold set with 78 cut diamonds, with an enamel dial and a white alligator strap.

Shanghai Tang incorporates the dragon motif in its Nespresso Dragon Collection, which includes a shiny red coffee maker, a box to hold Nespresso coffee capsules and a cup-and-saucer set.

Instead of starting from scratch, Rolls Royce’s Bespoke Team incorporated imagery and colors of the year of the dragon to put a new spin on its classic Phantom automobile.

And looking in the opposite direction, the Smithsonian Institution’s Surprising Science blog wonders where the idea of dragons came from in the first place. Via Jeremiah Jenne:

Ancient people may have discovered dinosaur fossils and understandably misinterpreted them as the remains of dragons. Chang Qu, a Chinese historian from the 4th century B.C., mislabeled such a fossil in what is now Sichuan Province. Take a look at a fossilized stegosaurus, for example, and you might see why: The giant beasts averaged 30 feet in length, were typically 14 feet tall and were covered in armored plates and spikes for defense ….

The most fascinating explanation involves an unexpected animal: the human. In his book An Instinct for Dragons, anthropologist David E. Jones argues that belief in dragons is so widespread among ancient cultures because evolution embedded an innate fear of predators in the human mind. Just as monkeys have been shown to exhibit a fear of snakes and large cats, Jones hypothesizes that the trait of fearing large predators—such as pythons, birds of prey and elephants—has been selected for in hominids. In more recent times, he argues, these universal fears have been frequently combined in folklore and created the myth of the dragon.

For a taste of how Beijing rung in the new year, see this video produced by the New York Times:

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Post tags: air quality, CCTV gala, censorship, chinese new year, fertility clinics, fireworks, lunar new year, New Year's Gala, Spring Festival, Warren Buffett
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MSNBC’s Behind The Wall blog describes the scale of the migration:

It’s as if the entire population of the United States took to the road several times over. During China’s “chunyun” or Spring Festival travel season, the 40-day period that began earlier this month, more than 3.2 billion passenger-trips will tax the country’s transportation system in what is thought to be the world’s largest human migration ever ….

About a quarter billion travelers will load onto China’s over-burdened rail network. Despite a new online ticketing system and hotlines, many have complained of difficulties and delays in buying train tickets. Still, for many Chinese, the ticketing problems and prospect of long ride in crowded condition are small price to pay for the once-in-a-year family reunions.

The accompanying video report describes frustration at a train booking site overwhelmed by over a billion hits per day in early January:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Online ticket sales have also plucked the increasingly raw nerve of China’s deepening economic inequality. Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz reports from Shanghai, where he attracted an agitated crowd of would-be travellers:

… They’re mad it’s becoming more difficult to buy tickets. This year the government thought it would make buying train tickets easier by making tickets available online. Bad idea.

… Because there are hundreds of millions of people in China, like these guys, who live on less than a few dollars a day. They just don’t have the means or the know-how to hope online and buy tickets. Here’s some tape from one man I spoke to about this, Zhang Weishang …. Zhang’s simply saying it’s not fair. He’s poor and uneducated and he has no access to a computer, much less the internet. As he’s telling me this, a swelling crowd of people watch us and start chiming in-so many people that the police finally are called in.

… [W]hat’s clear is it’s a bigger issue than just train tickets. It’s a reminder that the wealth gap is widening in China. And this train ticket fiasco really hits a chord because train travel has always been within the means of many working migrants in China. Now you’ve got these luxurious bullet trains, online ticketing — it’s becoming a system that favors the rich.

For some, impatient parents are a greater problem than lack of money. The Guardian’s Tania Branigan explains one way for single Chinese to deflect family pressure to get married:

Taking a boyfriend or girlfriend home is a fast way to curb the speculation, which is why Li, like other twentysomethings, has hired a fake partner through an online agency ….

Li will pay him between 500 and 700 yuan (£51-£72) a day – they are still haggling – to accompany her from Beijing to Hunan to meet her parents.

“I don’t need him to stay long, just one night, New Year’s Eve, and he can just say work is busy and he has to go back the next day, like [the guy I hired] last year,” she said.

She is keeping the meeting deliberately short to prevent her parents learning too much about him. Although she has vetted him over a coffee, she does not really know him and worries he might turn out to be a thief and steal from her home.

See a photo and video montage of the long journey home for many in China, by Jordan Pouille and Lei Yang:

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Post tags: CCTV, censorship, chinese new year, e-commerce, income inequality, marriage, migrant workers, New Year's Gala, online, railways, SARFT, Spring Festival, television, trains, transportation
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China, infamous for its methods of controlling online activity and guiding online opinion, has served as ammunition in the battle against SOPA/PIPA. Commentators the world over are pointing to it as an example of the future that SOPA and PIPA might usher in. In a Global Voices post, Weiping Li translates some comments from Mainland China and Taiwan:

“Now they’re copying us to build up a wall. It’s like after climbing over the wall, we then bump into another one. It’s crazy!! (現在等於他們自己也照著我們這樣造個牆，於是我們以後翻牆出去，又被他們的牆牆住[，]這簡直瘋了嗎！)”

On China’s Sina Weibo microblogging service a Chinese Internet user with nickname “gap foreseeable (落差可見)” expresses concern over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which expected to [be] brought to a vote in U.S. House of Representatives before the end of the year. The Chinese government has long been criticized by Americans for obstructing the free flow of information through a filtering system popularly known as the Great Firewall. Now it is Chinese neitzens’ turn to sneer at proposals for a Made-in-America Great Firewall.

An article at Wired.com, one of the websites involved in the blackout campaign, also likens these bills to the situation in China:

We’ve blacked out the headlines on our website homepage today as part of a global internet protest against two radical anti-piracy bills pending in Congress — legislation that threatens to usher in a chilling internet censorship regime here in the U.S. comparable in some ways to China’s “Great Firewall.”

The Dyn.com page explaining why they oppose SOPA also uses the Great Firewall as a warning:

Are you familiar with the Great Firewall Of China? Sometimes referred to as the Golden Shield project, it’s a Chinese government censorship and Internet surveillance project kicked off in 1998 and put into action in 2003. Simply put, it enables the government to restrict what content its citizens can read and view via IP blocking and DNS filtering. If they don’t like a site request a user makes, it won’t get viewed.

Many dismiss what’s happening in China and chalk to up to their communist political system. That could never happen in a free speech-driven, rights for all society like we have in the United States, right?

If the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) introduced this week gets enacted into law, things could change negatively for Americans which is why Dyn opposes the bill.

But is the Great Firewall an accurate parallel to draw in the campaign against these bills? In a sobering blogpost for Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish points to today’s blackout campaign itself to illustrate the disconnect in using China to warn of the future:

American websites have the right to protest and protect their content because they exist in a country that respect the rule of law. America couldn’t create a “Great Firewall” comparable to China’s, because it wouldn’t be backed by a Chinese-style system where the Communist Party hovers above the law. Comparing the Chinese and American internet is akin to saying that a kitten that scratches furniture and a lion that eats people are both members of the cat family. True, yes, but it completely misses the point.

Update: Echoing comments made by Foreign Policy Isaac Stone Fish, The Los Angeles Times notes that bloggers in China scoff at comparisons between SOPA/PIPA and the Chinese web censorship regime:

“Only an American company could protest the way Wikipedia or Google has to the government,” said Zhao Jing, a closely followed blogger in Beijing who uses the pen name Michael Anti. “A Chinese company would never get away with that.”

Indeed, China’s Internet sector has no choice but to submit to government pressure -– be it by censoring its own users or implementing whatever happens to be the state initiative of the moment (the latest may require the real-ID registration of 250 million micro-blog accounts despite threats to privacy and the cost burden on Web firms).

Another distinction Chinese activists note is that the proposed legislation in Washington is being debated openly in public and ultimately has to adhere to U.S. law. Chinese censorship, on the other hand, operates in an opaque space where no one really knows what’s banned, what isn’t and who is calling the shots.

Similarly, The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos highlights the discussion that has emerged on the Chinese Internet:

After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marvelled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.

There was little expectation that Chinese Web sites would ever band together to express their opposition to censorship: “Baidu, would you dare do something like this?” one asked.

The most eloquent response to the controversy, perhaps, was one that nobody saw at all. Commentator Shi Han wrote about trying to post a comment to Tencent, the giant Chinese portal. “I’ve written a short article about SOPA. But when I tried to put it up, Tencent replied with a message: ‘Your content has not passed review.’”

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activism, censorship, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, Pipa, protest, SOPA
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The manuscript of a book usually needs to be reviewed at least three times by the publishing house. Depending on the subject matter the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP), various propaganda departments and other government agencies may also be involved in the approval process. Television and movie productions require the approval of the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) ….

“I stay away from sensitive topics, because I don’t want my work to go to waste, nor do I want to be forced to say what I don’t intend,” said Qiu.

Qiu said he has turned down requests to write about China’s civil war. His father was on the side of the communists, while his in-laws supported the nationalists. “I know quite a bit about both sides, but I can’t write about it in a way I would approve of myself,” he said.

“It’s not possible to comply with the rules and stay true to yourself,” said Shi Kang, whose novel Fendou (Struggle), about the post-1980s generation, was made into a popular TV series. “We are the mouth and throat of the government, have to be,” he said fatefully.

See also Murong Xuecun on the “absurdities” of Chinese censorship, and another Global Times article on censorship of imported materials, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, film censorship, history, SARFT, television, writers
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In over forty years of writing about China, I have been subjected to many forms of pressure. But this has never happened to me. What had I said this time that attracted the attention of the official shredder? The article, titled “China: Richer but Repressed,” mentioned Ai Weiwei, the outspoken artist and designer of the Beijing Olympics’ Bird’s Nest stadium, who was detained last year for 81 days; Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, now serving eleven years; the blind civil rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, long under house arrest and prohibited contact with all visitors; and Wang Yi, who published exposes of tainted milk and enforced abortions, and spent a year in detention. I included quotes from books by Harvard scholars. Surely everything I wrote is well known in China, especially to the tiny number of English-reading urban people who buy Newsweek.

Then I learned that a few months earlier, on August 28, 2011, Ai Weiwei had also published a piece in Newsweek that the Chinese censors cut out. In it he called Beijing a “nightmare,” a city of “desperation” in which those who don’t have money or connections “hold no hope.” As for the authorities’ methods of suppressing information about those who are detained or made to disappear, he wrote:

They see you or they don’t see you, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There are thousands of spots like that. Only your family is crying out that you’re missing. But you can’t get answers from the street communities or officials, or even at the highest levels, the court or the police or the head of the nation. My wife has been writing these kinds of petitions every day, making phone calls to the police station every day. Where is my husband? Just tell me where my husband is. There is no paper, no information.

Of course, as a Chinese citizen, Ai Weiwei risks another round of detention by saying such things. But what is the worst that can happen to a foreign writer who displeases the Party? In China, he can be threatened, even when walking in the street, or his phone can be tapped, deliberately audibly. He can be banned; this is very rare. (It has happened to Perry Link and to me.) Or, if he lives and writes abroad, as I do now, what he publishes in China can be expunged. There are two messages here: we don’t like your ideas, and nothing like this is going to be published in China if we can prevent it.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, censorship, freedom of expression, jonathan mirsky, Liu Xiaobo, media censorship
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… China has more users of the internet than any other country, yet its censors battle the medium, convinced that they can win. The foreign press is the easy part. There are ways around the blockage of websites that the censors do not like. But relatively few people have the will, time or money to bother finding them.

The domestic internet poses more of a challenge, however. Deleted postings on social-networking sites immediately pop up elsewhere; banned internet-search terms morph into bizarre homonyms; small incidents such as hit-and-run road accidents become national scandals. And national scandals, such as the high-speed train crash on July 23rd, news of which the authorities would have liked quietly to bury along with the wreckage, suddenly become enormous political problems.

The battle between the Chinese Communist Party and the internet seems fairly evenly matched. When Urumqi, in the western region of Xinjiang, was racked by ethnic violence in 2009, the authorities simply switched the internet off in Xinjiang for ten months. A strange new phenomenon, the internet-café border town, sprang up along the railway line to the east to cater for Xinjiang residents who wanted to get online. China, further alarmed by the alleged role of social networks in the recent riots in Britain, might well counter renewed regional unrest with another local internet shutdown.

But this is hardly an option for China as a whole. Not only might Hong Kong struggle to cope with an influx of more than 450m Chinese internet users needing to check their e-mails; China cannot, in effect, resign from the global economy. Asian governments are stuck with the internet which, worryingly for the dictatorships among them, seems as integral to the future as black blotches on newsprint seem to the past.

Source: Against the tide – The Economist

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Internet censorship, social networking, wenzhou, Xinjiang protests 2009
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