Is America becoming more like China, a country that has long subjected its citizens to surveillance?

The revelations came in a week when President Barack Obama met with Xi Jinping in California — and cybersecurity was a major point of discussion, with the U.S. saying China has been stealing secrets.

“It is striking how the west and China are moving incrementally towards each other, especially in the practice of mass surveillance,” wrote Henry Porter, a journalist and novelist and the London editor of Vanity Fair magazine, in the commentary in The Observer.

“But unlike the Chinese, for the moment at least, we have the option to oppose what’s happening,” he concluded. [Source]

For artist and activist Ai Weiwei, the answer is more clearcut. He expresses his disappointment in the U.S. in an op-ed for the Guardian:

I lived in the United States for 12 years. This abuse of state power goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilised society, and it will be shocking for me if American citizens allow this to continue. The US has a great tradition of individualism and privacy and has long been a centre for free thinking and creativity as a result.

In our experience in China, basically there is no privacy at all – that is why China is far behind the world in important respects: even though it has become so rich, it trails behind in terms of passion, imagination and creativity.

Of course, we live under different kinds of legal conditions – in the west and in developed nations there are other laws that can balance or restrain the use of information if the government has it. That is not the case in China, and individuals are completely naked as a result. Intrusions can completely ruin a person’s life, and I don’t think that could happen in western nations.

But still, if we talk about abusive interference in individuals’ rights, Prism does the same. It puts individuals in a very vulnerable position. Privacy is a basic human right, one of the very core values. There is no guarantee that China, the US or any other government will not use the information falsely or wrongly. I think especially that a nation like the US, which is technically advanced, should not take advantage of its power. It encourages other nations. [Source]

While activists throughout Asia have expressed concerns that their personal details will be shared with authorities through the National Security Agency’s Prism surveillance program, some dissidents in China, including Hu Jia, did not share those fears. Some activists, however, expressed worries that the U.S. had lost leverage in calling for Internet freedom from countries like China. From Reuters:

“I’ve never considered abandoning Twitter, YouTube, Google, Gmail or Gchat,” said Hu Jia, a prominent Chinese dissident. [...] “These are the only weapons we have to get our message out and the only safe way to do so. The U.S. would never monitor us. They are using it to fight terrorism. It’s totally different to what the Chinese government does to listen in on us,” he said by telephone.

[...] Nathan Freitas, a New York-based activist who helps Tibetans defend against Chinese cyber-surveillance, said the reports on Prism were nevertheless troubling.

“I’m concerned that from a Western perspective, or at least a U.S. perspective, we are losing some of that moral high ground from which we can pressure China,” he said.

“It’s just going to be harder to say what they are doing is fundamentally wrong, when maybe it’s just becoming statecraft.” [Source]

Other Chinese Internet users have said they are in fact now more hesitant to use U.S. Internet services such as those provided by Google. Tea Leaf Nation translated a range of netizen responses to the news:

Weibo user @SugarCHH expressed his disappointment in Google’s internet services:

I am no longer that fond of Google, especially after PRISM, if the FBI and NSA’s notice about ‘inspecting users other than Americans’ is true. Think about how much of our private information has been sold by Google. America only has around 300 million people, but even if Google’s China search service only amounts to a few percent points, that would be a lot of netizens. Furthermore, some people use all of the services Google provides. I have been betrayed. [Source]

Another Tea Leaf Nation post provides examples to show that, while the NSA leaks are still not a big story on Chinese social media sites, Chinese people who follow the story are developing a more nuanced and critical view of the U.S.:

This does not mean that the U.S. is always at the top of the Chinese collective mind. While there was certainly some revealing chatter about Snowden and PRISM on the Chinese Internet, even the most popular posts garnered only a few hundred retweets, and at no point did any related keyword or post trend.

If Chinese reaction to Snowden’s leak is significant, it is because it contributes in a small way to an increasingly nuanced view of America and its politics. Debates about the U.S. drone program, for example, take place among followers of international politics on China’s Weibo just as they do on Twitter. While some Chinese have lauded what they call Snowden’s “heroism” as an example of American citizens’ “civil awareness,“ others in Chinese cyberspace have begun to ask whether Meiguo [America] is still deserving of its erstwhile status as a benchmark. [Source]

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Post tags: cybersecurity, Edward Snowden, Great Firewall, Internet surveillance, views of U.S.
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Efforts to strictly control communication in the digital age — what Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon has called “networked authoritarianism” — have been assumed to influence the way that Chinese netizens interact with the Internet (a theory easily given weight by the emergence of subversive web phenomena such as e-gao). However, a new study by two graduate students at Northwestern University argues that cultural factors have more impact on web usage than does censorship. Below is the abstract for “How Does the Great Firewall of China Affect Online User Behavior,” by PhD candidates Harsh Taneja and Angela Xiao Wu:

Internet access blockage is widely understood to isolate Chinese Internet users and “balkanize”
the Internet. Drawing from the literature on global cultural consumption, we question this
assumption and argue that online user behavior is structured by cultural factors. We develop a
framework that integrates access blockage with other structural factors to explain web users’
choices. Analyzing online audience traffic among the 1000 most visited websites globally, we
find that websites cluster according to language and geography. Chinese websites constitute one
cluster, which resembles other such geo-linguistic clusters in terms of both its composition and
degree of isolation. Our study demonstrates that cultural proximity has a greater role than access blockage in shaping people’s web usage. It also calls for sociological investigation of the impact of Internet blockage.

[Source]

MIT Technology Review summarizes the new study’s findings and its methodology, before drawing attention to its faults and siding with the counter-argument:

[...]And herein lies the biggest problem with the study by Taneja and Xiao Wu—it fails to take proper account of the behaviour of Chinese-speaking people who are outside of the Great Firewall of China but able to access content within it. It is easy to imagine that this relatively small group acts as the glue that links the Chinese cluster to the rest of the world.

If that’s the case, then the cultural fault lines created by the Great Firewall are hidden in this data.

It may well be that cultural factors are an important influence on people’s surfing habits, possibly the most important influence. But the argument that censorship is somehow less significant because of this is insidious and dangerous. On this matter, Hillary Clinton was correct.

[Source]

Update: The authors of the Northwestern study have brought more recent coverage of their work to the attention of CDT. While the authors have “many reservations” with the MIT Technology Review’s summary of their study, they feel that coverage from the Washington Post “represents [their] main findings and arguments properly”:

[...]Taneja and Wu make a compelling point that state censorship of messages within the Chinese Internet, such as government filtering on Weibo, could ultimately impact freedom of speech far more than the highly-hyped content blocking. Basically, Chinese Internet users would be more likely to encounter that material, so its absence is more conspicuous. Considering the volume of Chinese censorship, it would be conspicuous anyway: A recent study found the government takes down 12 percent of all messages sent on Weibo, with an eye for political subjects.

“Compared to removing the [Great Firewall] of China, on which most policy, popular, and scholarly discourse tends to concentrate, battling against content censorship over domestic websites may bring about much more substantial changes in what Chinese people make use of on the Internet,” they write. [Source]

Click through to read the Washington Post’s look at Taneja and Wu’s new study in its entirety.

Also see prior CDT coverage of Internet censorship and the Great Firewall, and The Economist’s in-depth special report “China’s Internet: A Giant Cage“.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: academic resources, censorship, Great Firewall, Internet, Internet censorship, Internet culture
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THIRTEEN YEARS AGO Bill Clinton, then America’s president, said that trying to control the internet in China would be like trying to “nail Jell-O to the wall”. At the time he seemed to be stating the obvious. By its nature the web was widely dispersed, using so many channels that it could not possibly be blocked. Rather, it seemed to have the capacity to open up the world to its users even in shut-in places. Just as earlier communications technologies may have helped topple dictatorships in the past (for example, the telegraph in Russia’s Bolshevik revolutions in 1917 and short-wave radio in the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991), the internet would surely erode China’s authoritarian state. Vastly increased access to information and the ability to communicate easily with like-minded people round the globe would endow its users with asymmetric power, diluting the might of the state and acting as a force for democracy.

Those expectations have been confounded. Not only has Chinese authoritarian rule survived the internet, but the state has shown great skill in bending the technology to its own purposes, enabling it to exercise better control of its own society and setting an example for other repressive regimes. China’s party-state has deployed an army of cyber-police, hardware engineers, software developers, web monitors and paid online propagandists to watch, filter, censor and guide Chinese internet users. Chinese private internet companies, many of them clones of Western ones, have been allowed to flourish so long as they do not deviate from the party line.

If this special report were about the internet in any Western country, it would have little to say about the role of the government; instead, it would focus on the companies thriving on the internet, speculate about which industries would be disrupted next and look at the way the web is changing individuals’ lives. Such things are of interest in China too, but this report concentrates on the part played by the government because that is the most extraordinary thing about the internet there. The Chinese government has spent a huge amount of effort on making sure that its internet is different, not just that freedom of expression is limited but also that the industry that is built around it serves national goals as well as commercial ones.

The report’s contents:

• The machinery of control: Cat and mouse — How China makes sure its internet abides by the rules, including CDT’s ‘Directives from the Ministry of Truth‘.
• Microblogs: Small beginnings — Microblogs are a potentially powerful force for change, but they have to tread carefully.
• The Great Firewall: The art of concealment — Chinese screening of online material from abroad is becoming ever more sophisticated.
• E-commerce: Ours, all ours — A wealth of internet businesses with Chinese characteristics. (See also recent Economist cover story ‘Alibaba: China’s king of e-commerce.’)
• Cyber-hacking: Masters of the cyber-universe — China’s state-sponsored hackers are ubiquitous—and totally unabashed. The Economist is also hosting a debate, set to conclude next week, on the motion “Is industrial cyber-espionage the biggest threat to relations between America and China?” BDA China chairman and founder Duncan Clark is arguing for, and Claremont McKenna College’s Minxin Pei against, with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Adam Segal also contributing.
• Internet controls in other countries: To each their own — China’s model for controlling the internet is being adopted elsewhere.
• Assessing the effects: A curse disguised as a blessing? — The internet may be delaying the radical changes China needs.
• Shutting down the internet: Thou shalt not kill — Turning off the entire internet is a nuclear option best not exercised.

Epstein discusses the report in a short audio podcast:

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Post tags: cyberespionage, democracy, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, e-commerce, golden shield, Great Firewall, hackers, hacking, Internet, Internet censorship, microblogs, weibo
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Censorship in China is usually discussed as a political issue, which of course it is, but there are business and productivity costs as well. For the past two years the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Beijing has included questions about Internet and cybersecurity concerns in its annual survey of firms operating in China, alongside questions about market access, intellectual property rights, and labor costs. The 2013 Business Climate Survey (PDF), released on March 29, sheds light on how U.S. firms feel about the Great Firewall.

Of the 325 respondents, 55 percent see China’s Internet restrictions as negatively or somewhat negatively affecting their capacity to do business there. Some 62 percent said the disruption of search engines such as Google (GOOG) make it more difficult to obtain real-time market data, share time-sensitive information, or collaborate with colleagues based outside China. And 72 percent said that slow and unstable Internet speeds impede their ability to efficiently conduct business in China.

See more on the effects of Internet censorship on foreign and domestic businesses via CDT.

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Post tags: cybersecurity, foreign businesses, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, United States
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Not only could they search for a range of Chinese leaders on the microblogging network, they were free to write criticism.

One comment called Mr Xi a “hypocrite” for suggesting that Communist Party officials should not enter politics for wealth or prestige. “Hasn’t he won wealth and prestige through politics?” asked the poster. Elsewhere, Li Keqiang, the incoming prime minister, was accused of covering up an Aids outbreak linked to infected blood in Henan province for five years. “Now he makes speeches [about Aids], but he is just making a show,” the comment said. The names of some leaders were still blocked. Wen Jiabao, the outgoing prime minister, was unsearchable.

The name of Ling Jihua, the former close aide to Hu Jintao whose son died in a Ferrari crash in March, was also blocked.

Bo Xilai, the disgraced former Politburo member, showed up in searches, as did Zhou Yongkang, the outgoing security tsar.

Moore notes that not everything turned up in a search, as Liu Xiaobo, the Dalai Lama and Tiananmen Square searches remained blocked by China’s Internet censors.

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Post tags: Dalai Lama, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, Li Keqiang, Liu Xiaobo, microblogs, netizens, sina weibo, Tiananmen Square, Wen Jiabao
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The most frequently asked question by China’s netizens is: why is Xinhua allowed to use Twitter, but not us?

“I am going to report this to the police: Xinhua is obviously breaching our internet laws,” said a netizen on Sina Weibo, China’s micro-blogging service.

“Xinhua has proved itself a traitor who has chosen an evil path,” said another Weibo user in an ironic tone, referring to a speech given by President Hu Jintao.

James Griffiths at the Shanghaiist points out that The Global Times and China Daily also have Twitter handles, and The Atlantic’s Dashiell Bennett has more on Xinhua’s account:

Xinhua’s account is written in English and has posted about 3,000 times, but is not following any other accounts and has ever @ replied to anyone. (They’ve also dished out 10 rare retweets.) There are two older, now defunct accounts that may or may not have been “official.” They reportedly once followed more than 400 people as recently as October, but slowly unfollowed everyone over the last several weeks. The fact that anyone living in China is not allowed to read it, almost make @XHNews the purest form of propaganda: It talks to no one who knows better and listens to no one who talks back.

Beijing Cream’s Anthony Tao thought @XHNews was a joke the first time he saw it, and he writes that “it did itself no favors” with posts in all-caps and screenshots of English articles:

But no, rest assured, @XHNews is not a spoof account. We’d love to meet the person who operates it (probably someone very senior on the copydesk). Short of that, we’ll just say that the feed is actually very clean, free of typos, sometimes rather informative. Xinhua currently has 6,611 followers while following no one back, which is probably a good thing — we’d hate to see it pull a China Daily.

However, it does seem slightly ironic for a government agency to be using Twitter when none of its people, technically, are allowed to. Twitter has been blocked by the Great Firewall since July 2009, and with recent upgrades to said firewall, several VPN services have been crippled as well. (Note to everyone: use Witopia; it still works.)

See also an interview from PRI’s The World with Weiliang Nie, a senior producer with the BBC’s China Service, about the issue.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Great Firewall, Internet, online public opinion, Twitter, Xinhua
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Warning

Recently, it has been discovered that at night in some rooms, staff have been privately logging on to prohibited websites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.). Upon discovering such activity, the violator’s Internet access will be directly cut off and the police will be notified. In cooperation with police policy of Internet access through real-name registration, starting today, we will begin the trial implementation of PPPoE* real-name registration for Internet access.

Jinan Zhi Jia Rui He Business Center
Jinan City Internet Monitoring Team
2012-11-19

* PPPoE: Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet

Warning

In order to eliminate access to prohibited websites through use of VPN software by internal staff, starting today, the VPN function will now be disabled. For those who must use a VPN to access the Internet, after preparing your file, go to D1 (88885681) and ask a technician to help set up your connection.

Jinan Zhi Jia Rui He Business Center
Jinan City Internet Monitoring Team
2012-11-19

Read more about the travails of VPNs, Google, and the free Internet in China from CDT.

Via CDT Chinese. Translation by Little Bluegill.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, Jinan, Shandong, VPN
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In this contradiction—between Singles Day and illegal tweets, between needing the middle class to sustain the Party’s rule, and punishing the middle class for passing jokes around—lies the Communist Party’s essential problem. For years, the Party, and many observers abroad, believed that the middle class would be the Party’s greatest ally, that it had gained so much during the boom years that it would never risk the trappings of prosperity for fuzzy notions of political freedom. It was an idea that reached all the way back to the ancient sage Mencius, who declared that “Those who have property are also inclined to preserve social stability.” In modern China, that turned into the belief that the middle class would become the xiaofei qianwei, zhengzhi houwei: “the consumer avant-garde and political rear guard.”

[…] The arrest of Zhai Xiaobing, which has inspired a petition calling for his release, stirred a particular kind of dread among China’s self-made liberals because it reached into the privileged domain beyond the Great Firewall, the electronic dinner table where members of China’s new knowledge class were supposed to be able to joke freely, as long as they kept shopping. Day by day, it seems, the Party is confronting the fact that prosperity alone—the politics of goods—is no match for the politics of information.

Yasheng Huang questioned the nature of the link between stability and prosperity in a recent essay at Foreign Policy, featured on CDT earlier this week. “Some analysts believe that the Chinese people tolerate corruption in exchange for fast growth,” he wrote. “This is a bit like saying that New Yorkers tolerated Hurricane Sandy. Fast growth maintains a façade of stability not because it has secured tacit complicity from the Chinese people, but because it has funded the instruments of repression.”

The petition for @stariver can be found here.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, CCP, consumer class, consumerism, Evan Osnos, Great Firewall, mencius, middle class, singles day, social stability, stability, Twitter, Yasheng Huang
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Starting earlier this year, Web police units directed the companies, which included joint ventures involving American corporations, to buy and install hardware to log the traffic of hundreds or thousands of computers, block selected Web sites, and connect with local police servers, according to industry executives and official directives obtained by The New York Times. Companies faced the threat of fines and suspended Internet service if they did not comply by prescribed deadlines.

The initiative was one in a range of shadowy tactics authorities deployed in the months leading up to the 18th Party Congress, which is scheduled to end on Wednesday, in an escalating campaign against information deemed threatening to party rule. The effort, while spottily executed, was alarming enough to spur one foreign industry association to lodge a complaint with the government. Several foreign companies quietly resisted the orders, which posed risks to communications and trade secrets that they take pains to secure.

…

This past summer, the Internet police in the provinces of Hebei and Shandong ordered three American companies to install the monitoring systems at local joint ventures, according to a spokesman for the Quality Brands Protection Committee, a foreign industry group representing more than 200 major corporations operating in China.

Elsewhere, American, Japanese and Korean companies received similar orders, executives said. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for their companies and feared compromising local business relationships.

The report adds color to the connection issues experienced by many within China last week, where netizens reportedly lost access to all Google services on Friday and Twitter warned users that efforts had been made to compromise their accounts. The Wall Street Journal noted that the Google outage highlighted the dangers Beijing’s information war poses to global businesses operating in China:

Beijing risks a backlash if it were to block Google outright on a long-term basis, said Mr. Wolf, of Wolf Group Asia. Many corporate users rely on Gmail and other Google services, and a blockage could make China a less-attractive place to do business. In addition, disruptions are increasingly unappealing to businesses that rely on cloud services, which are offered by Google and others and in which data are stored remotely.

“If China insists in the medium and long term of creating another Great Firewall between the China cloud and the rest of the world, China will be an increasingly untenable place to do business,” Mr. Wolf said.

Such a move also could put Beijing in violation of its free-trade commitment under the World Trade Organization, which China joined in 2001. China has said it complies with WTO requirements.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, cybersecurity, Google, Great Firewall, information control, online public opinion, Twitter
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All Google services, including its search engine, Gmail and Maps, were inaccessible in China on Friday night and into Saturday, the company confirmed. The block comes as the 18th Communist Party Congress, the once-in-a-decade meeting to appoint new government leadership, gets under way.

Traffic to Google sites fell off Friday evening in China, according to Google’s Transparency Report, which provides information about traffic worldwide.

The company said it was not having any technical problems, but did not say whether it believed its sites had been blocked by the government or were the victims of hacking.

“We’ve checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end,” said Christine Chen, a Google spokeswoman.

GreatFire.org provided technical details and advice on workarounds, claiming that “never before have so many people been affected by a decision to block a website.”

Here’s what we know:

• The subdomains www.google.com, mail.google.com, google-analytics.com, docs.google.com, drive.google.com, maps.google.com, play.google.com and perhaps many more are all currently DNS poisoned in China. Instead of the real IP addresses, any lookups from China to any of these domains result in the following IP: 59.24.3.173. That IP address is located in Korea and doesn’t serve any website at all.
• This means that none of these websites, including Google Search, currently work in China, unless you have a VPN or other cirumvention tool.
• Using a DNS server outside of China doesn’t help. A lookup of www.google.com to 8.8.8.8 is also distorted, by the Great Firewall.
• So far you can still access other country versions of Google such as www.google.co.uk.

Even before Friday, users in China had experienced more than usually severe problems, even when using VPNs to tunnel under the Great Firewall. From Paul Mozur at China Real Time on Wednesday:

Chinese authorities routinely move to exert more control over the Internet around big meetings and politically sensitive dates, including by disrupting traffic to foreign websites outside the country’s censorship system, commonly referred to as the Great Firewall. But a number of users have complained of unusually frequent disruptions in the run-up to the 18th Party Congress, with some saying they had all but given up trying to use Google’s search engine and email service.

[…] Foreigners and a savvy minority of Chinese Internet users have typically gotten around blocks of Western sites like Facebook and Youtube with VPNs, which form an encrypted link to a server outside of the country, thereby directing traffic around China’s Internet filters. But in recent weeks VPNs as well have been targeted, with two separate VPN companies telling China Real Time that they have noticed an uptick in blockages and interferences.

A spokesman for Witopia said the recent disruption is “one of the most severe” the company had ever seen.

[…] “China, with their globalized economy and growth rate, obviously cannot completely isolate themselves from the global Internet or it would exact a significant cost on their economy. It likely already is. They just seem to like to remind everyone that they are the boss of their corner of the Internet and they will integrate with the rest of us at their own pace,” he said.

On top of these other problems, Twitter warned many users on Thursday that efforts had been made to compromise their accounts. It quickly became apparent that these warnings were not limited to users with links to China, and that most had been sent out by mistake, but the company has given no indication of how many or which warnings were genuine.

Updated on November 10th at 1:36 PST: GreatFire.org has published a follow-up post speculating on reasons for the Google blocking and its rapid reversal:

1. Was it a mistake?

The blocking of the worlds number one (and Chinas number two) search engine took place on a Friday night. It’s possible that someone simply pressed the wrong button and accidentally DNS poisoned the wrong website. Perhaps they only meant to block mail.google.com. If it was a mistake, that would explain why it was seemingly reversed this morning. […]

2. Were the authorities testing the public opinion?

We’ve argued before that the authorites have stayed away from blocking access to GMail only because they are afraid of the reaction if they would cut it off completely. However, they have taken actions to make it slow and unstable. In March, 2011, it seemed like they were going to block GMail but then they backed down. Could it be that this quick decision to reverse the blocking of Google was a similar test of the publics reaction? […]

3. Were the authorities testing the “block Google” button?

Another possibility is that this was a test of a new “block Google” button. The authorities may want to know that, if they so wish, they can easily order the blocking of all Google services in China. If this was indeed such a test, the timing seems convenient (Friday night, when international businesses are closed).

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, Google, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, Twitter, VPN
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Dissident artist Ai Weiwei served as guest editor and appears on cover of the latest issue of British magazine New Statesman, in which he leads with a challenge for China to re-evaluate and recognize its position in the world as it seeks answers to the many problems it faces:

The future of China is uncertain. I believe that the world is becoming a better place, largely thanks to advances in technology which help us to address so many of the problems that we face. The expanding use of social media and the internet will help China become a more conscious and intelligent country, but the future remains uncertain. There are problems ahead which we can’t even identify yet, and it is vital to be prepared and to meet these challenges in every way we can.

Whatever the future problems are, I believe that, both as an in­ternational society and as an individual, you have to see the human problem as one. We share this planet and we have been divided for too long, for ridiculous reasons. Now, we have to come together and say, as one, that we share the same values, that we can respect differences and that, together, we can create the best possible solutions.

If I have one message for you, the readers of the New Statesman magazine, whether you are reading this in English or in Mandarin, on the page or online, it is this: the only way we can be successful, in China and in life, is through greater communication and wider awareness, in constantly questioning our standards and our conditions. You, as readers, are part of this, you are active members of this family, and you can be proud of that.

Ai, who placed third in ArtReview’s 2012 ranking of the most powerful figures in the art world, becomes the eighth guest to edit the New Statesman. The magazine’s features editor, Sophie Elmhirst, details the story behind Ai Weiwei’s role:

Ai Weiwei agreed to guest edit the New Statesman in April this year. We had sent the invitation to him six months earlier via his London representatives, the Lisson Gallery, but, understandably, it took him a little while to respond. Last year, Ai spent 81 days in detention. An artist already renowned for his work and fearless irreverence towards the Chinese authorities became a global cause when he was arrested at Beijing Capital Airport and detained in a secret location. Given the level of international attention and the ongoing pressure on Ai even after he was released (he was quickly filed with a £1.5m fine for tax evasion), it seemed unlikely that we would hear back from him. But then, suddenly, he said yes.

Looking back, that out-of-nowhere yes makes more sense than it did at the time. After spending a week with Ai at his studio in Beijing, I learned that he likes to do things on instinct. The more unexpected an opportunity, the more attractive it is to him, especially if it offers a platform for challenging the Chinese government. And when he says yes, he means yes.

…

Over a week in Beijing I met with Ai almost every day and his team – a group of highly talented and motivated photographers, organisers and writers in their own right – pitched a stream of ideas. We could have made a book: the challenge was to edit down the material into a series of pieces that could fit into a magazine. And there was another test too: language. The vast majority of this issue of the New Statesman – for the first time in its history – was written originally in Chinese by Chinese writers, activists, academics and artists. After I returned from Beijing and had firmed up with Ai and his team which article commissions, photography essays and interviews were going to be included, we started, slowly but surely, to receive the copy, which had to be translated into English and then edited in both languages. The plan from the start was to produce the issue in both Chinese and English (see deputy editor Helen Lewis’s account of distributing the Chinese version behind the “great firewall”). Usually we produce one magazine a week; this time it was two, with one version in a language that no one in the New Statesman office could speak, read or write. But with the help of translators, Chinese friends, Ai Weiwei and his team we got there in the end.

New Statesman also produced a digital PDF version of this week’s issue in Chinese, which it uploaded to file-sharing sites in order to circumvent a censorship regime that has “tried to obliterate the existence of Ai Weiwei from the internet”. From an essay about censorship by former newspaper editor and secret detainment victim Cheng Yizhong, to an interview Ai conducted with a paid internet troll charged with disrupting netizen debates, deputy editor Helen Lewis promises Chinese readers they will find “a story very different from the one they are told by the state-controlled press”.

See also previous CDT coverage of Ai Weiwei, including an interview he gave to German magazine Der Spiegel earlier this month.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, censorship, Cheng Yizhong, dissidents, Great Firewall, netizens, New Statesman, online public opinion
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Chinese micro-bloggers and overseas websites have come up with all kinds of speculation as to why the current vice president has gone unseen for more than a week. During that span, Xi canceled meetings with visiting foreign dignitaries including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. On Monday, it was the Danish prime minister’s turn.

Xi’s whereabouts during this sudden absence from the spotlight may never be known. One thing, however, is certain: China may now be a linchpin of the global economy and a force in international diplomacy, but the lives of its leaders remain an utter mystery to its 1.3 billion people, its politics an unfathomable black hole.

So when the presumptive head of that opaque leadership disappears from public view, rumor mills naturally go into a frenzy.

The New York Times reports that the situation is “conspicuous” given its proximity to China’s transfer of power, and is just the latest in a long line of disruptions to the Communist Party’s plans for a smooth transition. One source told Reuters last week that Xi had hurt his back while taking his daily swim, and The South China Morning Post noted that a Communist Party newspaper attempted to dispel rumors by publishing the text of a September 1st speech Xi gave at the Central Party School.

Still, netizens have seized on the mystery and put forth a number of speculative accounts. The overseas Chinese news site Boxun published and then retracted a report that Xi had been involved in a car crash with fellow high ranking official He Guoqiang, even implying that disgraced former Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai had a hand in the fictitious accident. The Wall Street Journal has more on the online rumor mill:

Despite government efforts to crack down on online commentary, Mr. Xi was the subject of speculation on fast-moving microblogs, which work like Twitter.

“Jinping, what’s the deal?” read one post on Sina Corp.’s popular Weibo microblogging service, which used Mr. Xi’s given name and had been left untouched by censors Monday evening. “The entire country from top to bottom is paying attention.”

As is often the case with China’s top leaders, Chinese and English language searches for Mr. Xi’s full name and surname were blocked on Weibo on Monday. But searches for “Jinping” weren’t blocked in Chinese, though periodic searches using those characters produced fewer results each time, suggesting censors were busy deleting posts about Mr. Xi.

One of the reporters, Josh Chin, tweeted that a link he had posted to this article on Sina Weibo was censored within ten minutes.

The Financial Times’ Jamil Anderlini writes that Xi’s disappearance “underscores the opacity” inherent in China’s authoritarian one-party political system:

“We know Xi Jinping is supposed to be the next leader [of China] but we have very little idea how he was chosen, which is quite amazing for such a significant position in world politics,” said David Zweig, a professor specialising in Chinese politics at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Perhaps he’s got some health problems, but they don’t want to let the public know about it because they feel it’s important to present the image of a strong healthy leader taking China into the future.”

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: boxun, CCP, CCP 5th generation, censorship, Great Firewall, leadership transition, microblogs, rumors, sina weibo, transparency, Xi Jinping
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Below are comments collected from Weibo:

XuXiaoping: Some countries are busy opening up, while others are busy shutting up.

徐小平: 有的国家忙着开放，有的国家忙着封闭。

WangLifen: Some are both open and closed.

王利芬:有的一边开放一边封闭。

shootthesun: Iran should dig a super big hole and move the whole country into it. They can dispatch Cerberus and the Revolutionary Guard to watch the entrance, use fifty centers to wash everyone’s brains out and kill off the rebels with butcher knives. That way they can really defeat the American imperialist conspiracy of peaceful evolution.

射日邪弓：伊朗应该挖个超级大地洞，然后举国迁进去，派三头犬和革命卫队守住洞口，用五毛愚民洗脑，用屠刀杀戮反叛，应该就能挫败美帝和平演变的阴谋。

sails&clouds: Our leaders should study this. The Internet is full of disharmony. If we build an intranet, we can save all that money we’re spending on the Great Firewall.

千帆逐云：建议我们的领导学习之，国际互联网充满了不和谐，搞成内联网连GFW的钱都省了。

gravePlatform: We can totally lend “Kung Fu Net Master” Fang to them. It’s best they don’t return him…

古墓月台：完全可以把咱的“功夫网之父”方校长借给他们，最好不用还了。。。

lizeWatermonster: I strongly support this. I’m copying @CCPPropagandaDept @MinofIndandIT @SARFT so they can learn…

麗澤水怪：强烈支持，抄送@中宣部 @工信部 @广电总局 等部委学习…

yanxiang_pterosaur: Weak, Baidu took care of this great enterprise long ago.

严祥_飞龙切：弱爆了，百度早已完成这一伟业。

LazyMansiPad: So we aren’t the luckiest ones after all! Do you think we can overtake Iran and North Korea?

懒人支架iPad：原来我们还不是最幸福的！你说我们有可能赶超伊朗和北朝鲜吗？

YellowChina: The student has outdone his master.

黄天宇：小弟真是青出于蓝而胜于蓝啊

Via CDT Chinese.

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

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Baidu, chinternet, Great Firewall, Internet, intranet, Iran, Netizen Voices, netizens, North Korea, sina weibo, weibo
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Today’s Hot Topics:

• intranet (内联网): Iran has announced a program to move away from the Internet towards establishing a state intranet that will adhere to Islamic law.
• Great Firewall (防火长城): Netizens are comparing Iran’s planned intranet to China’s Great Firewall.
• prostitution (卖淫): The daughter of Tang Hui was kidnapped and prostituted in 2006.
• Economic Observer + seize (经济观察报+查封): Beijing denies that copies of the Economic Observer were seized because of its reporting on the Beijing flood.

Other:

• Celestial Empire (兲朝): Alternate writing of Celestial Empire (天朝). The original word (i.e. without the character 兲) has not been blocked.
• evil spirit (邪灵)

Note: All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results.

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

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, beijing flood 2012, censorship, economic observer, filtered keywords, Great Firewall, intranet, Iran, netizens, prostitution, Sensitive Words Series, sina weibo, Tang Hui, weibo
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“I believe that ultimately censorship fails,” said Schmidt, when asked about whether the Chinese government’s censorship of the Internet can be sustained. “China’s the only government that’s engaged in active, dynamic censorship. They’re not shy about it.”

When the Chinese Internet censorship regime fails, the penetration of information throughout China will also cause political and social liberalization that will fundamentally change the nature of the Chinese government’s relationship to its citizenry, Schmidt believes.

[…] The push for information freedom in China goes hand in hand with the push for economic modernization, according to Schmidt, and government-sponsored censorship hampers both.

“We argue strongly that you can’t build a high-end, very sophisticated economy… with this kind of active censorship. That is our view,” he said.

Schmidt’s other comments may not persuade Beijing that relaxed controls would be in its best interests. On Iran, for example, he says that “before they overthrow the current leader, [citizens] have to have the information to do that.”

In May, Google started revealing Beijing’s censorship of sensitive search terms. Soon afterwards, some Gmail users received warnings of possible intrusion attempts by unspecified “state-sponsored attackers”, believed in many cases to be Chinese.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, Iran
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