Weibo Secretary: Dear netizens, in order to maintain order in the Weibo community, we are establishing open and transparent mechanisms to deal with violators of our regulations. Today we are issuing the “Sina Weibo Community Convention (Trial)”, along with the “Community Management Regulations (Trial)” and the “Community Committee System (Trial).” The above regulations will take effect on May 28th, 2012, at which time corresponding features will go live. Order is something that we all must work together to maintain. Read the new policies in their entirety at http://t.cn/zO8hGBj

Since this tweet went up on May 8th at 3pm Beijing time, there have been over 30,000 comments. The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Chin surveys public reaction to the announcement:

Among the thousands of users who responded to the draft document, many said they approved, with some arguing that the proposed set of rules would help manage what they said was an increasing proliferation of rumors and obscene content on the website. “Preserving the good atmosphere on Sina Weibo requires everyone to work hard together,” wrote angel investor Cai Wensheng, who boasts more than 3.5 million followers.

Sina Weibo celebrity and former head of Google’s China operations Kai-Fu Lee also put himself in the approval camp, responding with a simple: “Agree, support!”

Others weren’t so sure. Among those who appeared to hedge was real estate mogul Pan Shiyi, who said it was good to have rules to refer to but added a question: “Does this mean there won’t be any more arbitrary take-downs?”

Still others actively attacked Sina’s new regulations for aping the deliberately vague officialese found in government legal documents, arguing that the definitions of disallowed content are broad enough to legitimize almost any act of censorship. “All this does is provide an excuse for arbitrary take-downs,” real estate executive Sun Xuguang wrote in response to Mr. Pan.

[...]Another user, meanwhile, had a suggestion for a much simpler solution: “Isn’t there a list of sensitive words you can give to everyone so they can consult it before posting?”

After Sina’s failed attempt to fully implement the state regulated “real-name registration“ policy, these conventions are the latest step to codify and control sensitive online content in an effort to thwart a government crackdown on the site. Caijing English has translated and published the entire mandate for self-censorship, paying special attention to Article 13, the section hazily defining sensitive content:

In Article 13, the contract lists nearly ten kinds of information users are not allowed to publish on Weibo, including that “harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation” and that “spreads rumors, disrupts social order, and destroys societal stability.”

[...]Article 13) Users have the right to publish information, but may not publish any information that:

1.Opposes the basic principles established by the constitution
2.Harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation
3.Reveals national secrets, endangers national security, or threatens the the honor or interests of the nation
4.Incites ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination, undermines ethnic unity, or harms ethnic traditions and customs
5.Promotes evil teachings and superstitions
6.Spreads rumors, disrupts social order, and destroys societal stability
7.Promotes illicit activity, gambling, violence, or calls for the committing of crimes
8.Calls for disruption of social order through illegal gatherings, formation of organizations, protests, demonstrations, mass gatherings and assemblies
9.Has other content which is forbidden by laws, administrative regulations and national regulations.

This is not the first time that Sina has altered its operating policy to satisfy the state. When recent rumors of a coup in Beijing began spreading after the sacking of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, Sina temporarily disabled their comment feature upon state orders. While cyberspace may always be seen as a breeding ground for rumors and sensitive content, government paranoia is mounting in an atmosphere of political instability and as the (possibly postponed) once-in-a-decade leadership transition approaches.

Also see prior CDT coverage of censorship, self-censorship, and Sina Weibo. For more on sensitive content, see CDT’s “Sensitive Words” series.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Internet regulation, microblogging, self-censorship, sina weibo
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Commenters have borrowed Ma Jian in writing vigorous — sometimes caustic — attacks on the Chinese government. And even those inclined to feel sympathytoward Chinese authors seem disappointed that they’re not pushing harder. Everyone seems to be waiting for the writers to speak with the kind of courage and moral clarity displayed by political dissidents like Liu Xiaobo and Chen Guangcheng. What’s holding them back? Asked directly, most will say that they have perfect freedom to write but imperfect freedom to publish — namely, that self-censorship is not an issue.

I don’t believe this for an instant.

Since 2005 or so I’ve worked as a translator and promoter of Chinese literature, and — to borrow the grand language of the London Book Fair — I’ve generally adopted a “strategy of engagement” toward Chinese writers. What this means is that for several years I tried coaxing writers into confessing to me how oppressed they felt, perhaps with the aim of encouraging them to buck up somehow.

This went over poorly. While a few agreed boisterously with my arguments, usually over beer or baijiu, most just squinted at me or let their eyes wander, then changed the subject. Others, even though I was sure they shared my point of view, would lean back and smile Sphinx-like at the ceiling. Eventually I embarrassed myself enough to give it up.

As Abrahamsen notes, Ma Jian appeared last month at the London Book Fair and smeared red paint across his face in protest of the choice of China as the “Market Focus” country. A video of Ma’s demonstration is on YouTube (he breaks out the red paint about 5 minute into the clip):

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Post tags: censorship, Chen Guangcheng, freedom of expression, Lio Xiaobo, ma jian, self-censhorship
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[...]Clearly, China is no longer a classic Cold War-style authoritarian state. I call its new style of information-oriented governance “networked authoritarianism.” Thanks to the Internet in general and social media in particular, the Chinese people now have a mechanism to hold authorities accountable for wrongdoing — at least sometimes — without any actual political or legal reforms having taken place. Major political power struggles and scandals are no longer kept within elite circles. In the case of the Bo-Gu-Heywood scandal, social media “is forcing a level of transparency in how the government handles this case that never used to exist,” explains media entrepreneur and blogger Jeremy Goldkorn, who has been living in China since the 1990s. China’s political system may not have changed, yet the public has become both a constituency and a pawn in the nation’s political battles.

If anything, weibo may even help the Communist Party re-centralize its political power at the expense of local officials and regional governments, which over the past three decades of economic reform have gained greater autonomy from Beijing. The weibo companies are all headquartered in the capital and required to take orders from the central government. (“For a local government to have content blocked or deleted requires getting on a plane to Beijing,” [Chinese blogger Michael] Anti explains.) The advent of weibo has created a cycle in which the public is increasingly emboldened to use social media to report on localized abuses by individual officials, with some reason to hope that once the central government is alerted to the problem justice will prevail.

At the same time, the consequences of any efforts to organize protests, meetings, or movements focused on criticizing or changing the central government remain the same as they been for more than two decades, since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Liu Xiaobo, who circulated the “Charter 08″ treatise calling for multi-party democracy and who won a Nobel Peace Price in 2010, is serving a 10-year jail sentence. Many signatories of his charter received visits from the police. In early 2011, dozens of people who re-tweeted calls for “jasmine protests” inspired by Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” were questioned or arrested. Weibo postings by intellectuals calling for political reform are quickly removed, and have not been allowed to go viral as the Bo Xilai rumor postings managed to do. Chinese journalists are being muzzled more tightly than ever to prevent them from conducting investigative reporting that might damage the central government’s power.[...]

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Post tags: censorship, Great Firewall, Rebecca MacKinnon, sina weibo
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… In 1997, the scene where Jack draws the nude portrait of Rose was completely uncut and displayed on a wide screen in China, which was deeply registered in the memory of Chinese. 15 years later, when Titanic sails into the cinema again, the nude scene was removed by Chinese censors.

Many moviegoers find censoring of the nude painting scene unacceptable and ridiculous, “It wasn’t deleted 15 years ago. Why delete it now?” “I didn’t wait 15 years to see a three-dimensional iceberg!” Net user “Cambrian” wrote, “I just want to use a cliché that so many people in their school days love to use, the wheel of the history is spinning, however, it turns out it is only backpedalling ….”

Some even lampooned the state watchdog with a satirical news story, “The State Administration of Radio, Film and Broadcast finally gave an explanation of its decision to remove the nude scene it OK’d 15 years ago: ‘In light of the specialness of 3D movies, we are concerned that viewers may extend their hands for a touch during the scene and hit heads of viewers sitting in their front, which may result in disputes. In consideration for building a society with spiritual civilization, we decide to remove the scene.’”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, cinema, film censorship, hollywood, SARFT
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It’s 4am. Children’s footsteps patter outside, water pours from a faucet, pots are pulled out. I overhear Li Jie. “We barely have enough to buy meat for tonight’s dinner. I hope we have return customers today.”

I’ve been living with Li Jie and her family for a few days. She is one of the 200-300 million rural people who have made their way to cities in the hope… I don’t know how to finish that sentence. Usually newspapers finish it with “in the hope of a better life” or “in the hope of securing a job.” Maybe I can finish it by the time I tell you about a day in Li Jie’s life ….

I met Li Jie four years ago. She is 43 and belongs to the Miao ethnic group. She was always outside the same subway stop selling hand-sewn clothes and purses made in her village. She had her 2-year-old son tied to her back and all her wares were laid out on a large sheet she could roll up at any second if she needed to run. In between selling, she had to breast feed her son and take him to pee and poop in a garbage can nearby.

Despite the grim picture painted by the article, only a relatively short section was removed by the State Council Information Office. Wang posted the censored passage separately on her blog:

Officially know as City Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau (城市管理行政执法局), it is not really clear what the chengguan are supposed to do. But what they are known for doing is making migrants’ live miserable in cities across China. There are many stories of chengguan beating vendors, smashing their products or food, and taking bribes. It is also common to hear about chengguan killing street vendors …. [contd.]

In another post at That’s Shanghai, Wang explains her work on the use—and non-use—of technology in China and Mexico. For more examples, see ‘Sleeping in Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Chinese Users‘ and ‘How I Was Treated on the Subway While Doing Fieldwork as a Migrant Worker‘, via CDT.

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Post tags: censorship, chengguan, hukou, Miao, street vendors, urban rural divide
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[...]As China gears up for the 18th Party Congress, debate is apparent throughout the Chinese communication system, from official party organs, People’s Daily and CCTV, to micro blogs, personal email lists, and mass SMS messages via cell phone.

Covert and overt debates on the future of China in the media are not new. It was a highly philosophical debate on “truth criteria” that helped to dethrone Mao and legitimize Deng’s economic reforms over 30 years ago.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, media debates, often triggered by sensational media coverage of scandals, have played an instrumental role in shaping China’s reform path. With the explosion of the Internet and social media, the scope, ferocity, and stakes of these debates have intensified, creating intricate dynamics between elite, intellectual, and popular politics. Western media portrayals of Chinese media and Internet as plagued by “censorship” still ring true, and we will see more crackdowns. But one-dimensional portrayals miss much of what is going on inside China’s increasingly diverse, dynamic, and perhaps even decisive, media and cyberspace.

A visually-charged and multi-dimensional post on Al Jazeera’s The Stream describes the state of internet censorship in China. The post quotes official justification for censorship policies like real name registration, translates netizen responses to such policies, provides examples of activist campaigns, and illustrates the use of satire (or e’gao 恶搞) in getting information past censors:

Users of Sina Weibo, China’s most popular micro-blogging website, will soon have to register under their real names. Critics of the law say this is further increasing the government’s control over online freedom. Yet despite pouring more and more resources into policing the web, the country’s netizens are finding ways to beat the system.

In this episode of The Stream, we speak to Eva Galperin (@evacide), an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Michael Anti (@mranti), a journalist and blogger.

For more recent CDT coverage of censorship in China, see Bitter Jokes About Censorship and How to Control the Culture of 1.4 Billion People.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activism, censorship, E'gao, ideology
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Translated by Deng Bolun.

Yuzhe Ziyu: Tell everyone a bitter joke about censorship.

@Full-Scale Release: I’ll tell everyone a bitter joke about software usage censorship… For a while, my company wanted to use Google Earth to make promotional videos, so we downloaded the software. There was a period when Google Earth was set on Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City (胡志明市 Hu Zhiming shi). I spent half the day trying to get it to work but kept getting notices that the connection had problems. I searched Baidu for more than an hour and found an explanation from someone in the same business: the search contained the character hu 胡 (President Hu Jintao’s surname). I was taken aback.

@Little Lightening Monkey: I’ll tell everyone a bitter joke about interview censorship… CCAV brought back footage from the Yushu Earthquake. It was submitted for inspection several times in one hour but always rejected. (Among the footage was a classic scene where a 70-year-old Tibetan woman had been buried for ages. Soldiers finally lifted her from a pile of rubble.) I finally figured out why the clip had been shot down. It was because we hadn’t gotten rid of the original sound. As the old woman was being saved, she said in Tibetan, “Thank you, Dalai Lama.”

@Wound-Up Zongzi: I’ll tell everyone a bitter joke about magazine censorship… There was a period of time when we were doing a special report. We called it “Questioning China.” We were told, “What problems does China have? Why question?” So we changed it to “Ask China.” We were told: “What qualifications do you have to ask?” Finally a title came out: “In question.”

@Black Box Chen Liaoyu: I’ll tell everyone a bitter joke about cartoon censorship. Because the name and images in the young children’s cartoon project that we spent half a year planning and designing included a chicken, the entire thing was trashed by leaders at the TV station! The reason was… a chicken¹… That’s not so great, right? In the end we had to redesign the entire thing with another animal… If you mention inspection… our tears pour down…

@Child’s Triumphant Thoughts: I’ll tell everyone a bitter joke about television censorship… Around the year 2000, on a China Central Television family program, two young parents mentioned giving their baby a grabbing test.² When the episode was being inspected, it came back with criticism from the leader. The reason was that while the father was talking, he made a circular gesture, something that could easily make people think of a certain qigong organization that has a circle as their emblem.

@Xu Lei: (I’ll continue and tell everyone a bitter joke about music censorship.) Zhu Hua put out an album that year called What’s Wrong with Me. Just when the 17th Party Congress wrapped up, the censorship office said, “We just started a meeting to dictate the direction [of the country] and then you ask what’s wrong with me. What vicious motives are you harboring?” So he changed the name of the album to Focused Like This.

@Shanmudi: I’ll continue and tell everyone a bitter joke about censorship… One night past 10 p.m., the sports editor in our microblogging group shouted in frustration that he couldn’t publish his post. He kept recieving notices of a “sensitive word” and asked us to help him to figure out. He was writing about the sports lottery. After searching for a long time, I finally discovered it was because among those lottery numbers were two which “seperated are okay, together no way.”³

¹ “Chicken” is slang for prostitute.

² On a child’s first birthday, objects are spread out before him or her to pick up. The item the child chooses is suppose to indicate his future inclinations. For instance, a child who pick’s up a book will be intellectual and scholarly.

³ 89 and 64.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Google, humor, jokes
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This has been a very interesting series to be part of — on a cultural level and on a production level. Each article has posed new challenges in storytelling and as the collection builds I hope we have helped shed light on a complicated situation.

There are two parts to this story. One might be looked at as external, while the other is more internal. The external part of the story is about China’s cultural exports. What art, culture and media do people outside the Middle Kingdom see and how do they reflect upon China via that cultural product? The other part is internal: How does the art created in China, shape China’s internal population’s culture? Or more bluntly: How is TV, literature, movies, art and other forms of communication working to shape modern Chinese society?

In many ways, I might describe this complicated situation as a bit of a tug-a-war. On one hand, China wants its cultural products to be exported all over the world. On the other hand, they want to make sure the right products are exported. Therefore, they are trying to control culture from within China and hope that it will both influence its own population positively and be exported to the global stage. But if you ask most artists — controlled creativity is suffocating.

A recent blog post for the New York Times looks to the ongoing and meme-creating story of rumors surrounding Wang Lijun’s trip to a U.S. consulate. The post draws from English language commentaries on the story, asking how effective censorship is in the Chinese blogosphere:

China changes its top officials at party meetings held once a decade, and this year will see the first such session since the widespread adoption of the microblogs, known as weibo, where rumors spread among tens of millions of users with a speed that the Chinese authorities have struggled to control.

In the noise of rumor about Mr. Wang, some English-language bloggers and China observers have sought to find signs of broader political meaning in an unusual way — by watching how the Chinese authorities have, or have not, censored social media posts on the subject.

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Post tags: censorship, culture industry, online public opinion, soft power
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“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 | One 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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