Analysts say the longer Facebook takes to enter China, the harder it will become for the firm to crack the market.

“The point is that they have already missed out on it,” Michael Clendenin of Red Tech Advisors in Beijing tells the BBC.

“They will be naive to think that just because they are Facebook they will be able to come in and capture the market.”

China already has a thriving and fast-growing social networking market and the sector is controlled by domestic players.

Even the official China Daily is asking the question:

While Facebook faces concerns about the durability of its business model, which relies heavily on advertising, some analysts believe the social networking behemoth will seek to enter China, where its services are not yet available, to grow revenue.

In its original prospectus filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in February, China was mentioned nine times, clearing indicating “the country is under serious consideration as a new market for the social network”, said Jon Russell, Asia editor of NextWeb, a technology site.

“It’s very likely that Facebook’s goal is to expand very rapidly. It is looking at China because it’s the only field left open for them,” said Jeffrey Barlow, director of the Berglund Center for Internet Studies at Pacific University in Oregon.

While China Daily acknowledges that Facebook services “are not available” in China, it does not explain the reasons: The site has been blocked by the Great Firewall of China since 2009. As a result, in an infographic on Facebook use in Asia, China is missing.

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Post tags: Facebook, foreign IT companies, Great Firewall
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The US and China have been discreetly engaging in “war games” amid rising anger in Washington over the scale and audacity of Beijing-co-ordinated cyber attacks on western governments and big business, the Guardian has learned.

State department and Pentagon officials, along with their Chinese counterparts, were involved in two war games last year that were designed to help prevent a sudden military escalation between the sides if either felt they were being targeted. Another session is planned for May.

[...]During the first exercise, both sides had to describe what they would do if they were attacked by a sophisticated computer virus, such as Stuxnet, which disabled centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear programme. In the second, they had to describe their reaction if the attack was known to have been launched from the other side.

A report in China Daily responded to The Guardian’s coverage, denying military participation and stressing the informality of the games.

Michigan Republican Representative Mike Rogers, author of the controversial CISPA bill that passed in the House of Representatives yesterday (and has, like SOPA/PIPA before it, been compared to China’s Great Firewall), fashioned his rhetoric for garnering the bill support around China. From a post he co-authored on Politico:

Every morning in China, thousands of highly trained computer spies now wake up with one mission: Steal U.S. intellectual property that the Chinese can use to further their economic growth. American companies are hemorrhaging research and development on products ranging from fighter engines, to pesticides, to cutting-edge information technology.

The scope of this effort is massive and the rampant theft is breathtaking. What is now happening to U.S. businesses may be the largest transfer of wealth in world history.

In the past few years, China has stolen from U.S. companies the amount of intellectual property equal to 50 times the current print collection of the Library of Congress. This activity can no longer just be a cost of doing business in China. China is literally trying to steal our prosperity and our way of life. Other nation-states like Russia and Iran also are getting in on the act, rapidly becoming insatiable cyber predators.

An article from Sky News outlines a recent meeting between the US and Australia, in which the mandate for the ANZUS security treaty is extended to cyberspace, likely with the intent to send China a message:

Under these new arrangements, Australia and the US will consult and determine appropriate options to address the threat of any cyber-attack that threatened the territorial integrity, political independence or security of either nation.

[..]‘In the ANZUS case, the intended recipient of any intended message is presumably China, and the message is that cyberattacks, while perhaps falling short of the seriousness of armed attack, are unacceptable and may attract a serious response,’ [Andrew Davies, Australian policy analyst] said.

China is considered to have a significant capability to mount cyber attacks and is regularly blamed for cyber espionage aimed at Western military computer systems.

Dr Davies said a cyber attack would probably need to cause death or destruction to be used as justification for a military response.

In other news from the cyber-battlefield, Anonymous China, who launched a series of attacks on Chinese websites earlier this month, tweeted of a new strike today:

enghunan.gov.cn (ac.eng…) hacked by Anonymous China. Leak: pastebay.net/682697 @YourAnonNews #AnonymousChina #Anonymous

— Anonymous China (@AnonymousChina) April 27, 2012

Minutes after their announcement, the English language government website was back up and running.

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Post tags: Asia Pacific Policy, cyber espionage, cyber security, cyber warfare, cyberattacks, cybersecurity, cyberwar, Great Firewall, u.s.-china relations
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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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International attention tends to focus on the Great Firewall, which stops Chinese citizens from reading sensitive content overseas, and constraints put on familiar western brands – the blocking of social media services such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, or the Chinese government’s clash with Google, which saw the internet giant relocate search services to Hong Kong rather than continue to censor results.

But the world’s largest internet population is far more interested in what happens on domestic sites – and particularly the “weibo” or microblog services, which boast about 300 million registered users. Microblogs, particularly Sina’s Weibo, are where the clash of political controls, commercial interests and the urge of millions to share their thoughts on official scandals, or just last night’s TV, play out.

“Weibo plays a much more important role in China than Twitter in the west, because of the heavy censorship imposed by the regime on the other media,” said Beijing-based scholar Michel Bonnin. “Weibo is also censored and cannot be considered a free public sphere but it is still the place where exchange of information is the most developed in China, and even traditional and official media are forced to go through it to have a real impact on the public. It is also the only place where the receptors of information can react and influence the circulation of information.”

Official anxiety about the repercussions has become increasingly evident. Some think the authorities might have shut down microblogs entirely if they did not fear the backlash. Others suggest they see them as both threat and opportunity.

Also in the series, artist, activist and microblogger extraordinaire Ai Weiwei writes an opinion piece, “China’s censorship can never defeat the internet“:

Even though we had reform and opening, “opening” didn’t mean “openness”; it meant opening the door to the west. It was more practical than ideological. At the very beginning, nobody – even in the west – could predict the internet would have so much to do with freedom of speech and that social media would develop in the way it has. They just understood it was a more efficient, fast and powerful means of communication.

But since we got the net and could write blogs – and now microblogs – people have started to share ideas, and a new sense of freedom has arisen. Of course, it varies from silly posts about what you’ve had for breakfast to serious discussions of the news but, either way, people are learning how to exercise their own rights. It is a unique, treasured moment. People have started to feel the breeze. The internet is a wild land with its own games, languages and gestures through which we are starting to share common feelings.

But the government cannot give up control. It blocks major internet platforms – such as Twitter and Facebook – because it is afraid of free discussion. And it deletes information. The government computer has one button: delete.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, microblogs, sina weibo
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@YourAnonNews Anonymous China arrived, see the Government defaces

— Anonymous China (@AnonymousChina) March 30, 2012

The tweet sat above links to websites modified to host two messages - one catered to Chinese citizens, the other to their government. BBC News reports on the breadth and types of pages under fire, and on the Chinese government’s denial of the attacks:

The Anonymous hacking group claims to have defaced almost 500 websites in China.

Targets hit in the mass defacement included government sites, its official agencies, trade groups and many others. A message put on the hacked sites said the attack was carried out to protest against the Chinese government’s strict control of its citizens. It urged Chinese people to join Anonymous and stage their own protests against the regime.

[...]There has been no official confirmation of the defacements. News wires reported that government officials had denied any had taken place. However, many of the sites listed are now offline and a few others displayed a hacked page for a long time rather than their own homepage.

On March 31, after many of the defaced sites had been taken offline, @AnonymousChina warned that their crusade would continue:

Chinese Government, prepare yourself again.

— Anonymous China (@AnonymousChina) March 31, 2012

Al-Jazeera’s Melissa Chan has more to say about the nature of the attacks:

“This is just (Anonymous’) second attack (on Chinese websites),” Chan said. “The first one a few months ago had been a corporate attack against a Chinese company and it had exposed corporate fraud. This time, of course, the message was more general about online censorship in China.”

Chan also pointed out the attacks did not target national websites, but smaller sites for government bureaus and minor cities.

“The other interesting thing is that the messages they left were left in English, so then that begs the question of whether they wanted to try to reach out to the Chinese public or not,” Chan said.

The original message contained only one line in Chinese: 患难见真情 [a friend in need is a friend indeed].

@AnonymousChina has been tweeting about their continued defacement of websites, and leaking the personal information of site administrators. On April 4, they called out for a Chinese translator, and activist-blogger Wen Yunchao replied expressing his support (@wenyunchao: “匿名者”希望有人能帮他们翻译成中文 ["Anonymous," I hope someone will help them with their translations]). Today, an updated version of the message began appearing on defaced sites, this one in Chinese and set to new music: Guns N’ Roses “Chinese Democracy” (a reference likely lost on any Chinese citizen who may have viewed the page).

A researcher at an antivirus and personal security firm has warned that the actions taken by Anonymous could lead to a digital “turf war,” as China’s patriotic hackers may seek retaliation. From PC Mag’s Security Watch:

F-Secure researcher Sean Sullivan said Anonymous China could “start a turf war.”

“We know from our monitoring of targeted exploit attacks, many of which are aimed at human rights NGOs, that there are numerous pro-China hackers active on the Internet,” he said. “I would expect this action to generate efforts by Chinese hackers to dox Anons.” Doxing involves exposing the identities of people who wish to remain anonymous.

Anonymous “bit off more than it could chew” when it retreated from threats to unmask members of the Mexican drug cartel Zetas last fall, he added. ”Perhaps they’ve done so again.”

In a separate incident, someone not affiliated with the Anonymous collective has also put Chinese websites in his crosshairs. A hacktivist using the name “Hardcore Charlie” has reportedly leaked thousands of documents after breaking into the website of China National Import & Export Corp (CEIEC), a firm holding contracts with the Chinese military. From Reuters:

He posted documents ranging from purported U.S. military transport information to internal reports about business matters on several file-sharing sites, but the authenticity of the documents could not be independently confirmed.

The Beijing company, better known by the acronym, CEIEC, did not respond to a request for comment. U.S. intelligence and Department of Defense officials had no immediate comment.

[...]Hardcore Charlie described himself as a 40-year-old Hispanic man in a country close to the United States. He said he did not have strong political leanings, but was concerned the Chinese company had access to material about the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, as some of the documents suggest.

He said he planned to “explore” the computer networks of other Chinese companies.

Update: April 6, 2012 10:15AM PST

Since this post went up yesterday, the majority of defaced sites have been restored to their original content or are now offline, and the @AnonymousChina twitter feed has been largely inactive. While there has still been no major attention devoted to the attacks in official Chinese media, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Hong Lei acknowledged them in a briefing yesterday. From CNN:

“First of all, China’s Internet is open to all, users enjoy total freedom online. China has gained 500 million netizens and 300 million bloggers in a very short period of time, which shows the attraction and openness of China’s Internet,” Hong said.

“Secondly, the Chinese government manages the Internet according to law and regulations. Thirdly, certain reports prove again that China is a victim of internet hacker attacks.”

On Friday, searches for comments on hacking yielded re-posts of the MoFA statement: “we have an open, free cyberspace in China.’” One user on the Weibo micro-blogging site posted in response: “Open? How dare you brainwash your people that?”

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Post tags: anonymous, cyberattacks, cyberdissidents, Great Firewall, hacking, hacktivism
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Developers of software from China make up about 20 percent of Facebook’s partner network in Asia, David Lim, a partner engineer at the company’s mobile developer relations division, said in an interview in Hong Kong today. Chinese app developers are using Facebook (FB) to reach overseas users, Lim said, without providing figures.

Facebook is wooing software firms in China to help bolster its apps lineup for the more than 800 million people worldwide who use its social-networking service. The Menlo Park, California-based company last month said in its filing for a proposed $5 billion initial public offering that it is continuing to evaluate entering China, the world’s biggest Internet market.

“We now have Chinese-language help pages for developers, and we are working on giving them better support,” said Lim. “Developers in mainland China are important to us.”

Last year, Facebook set up an office in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, and said it may win business from Chinese advertisers.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, social networking
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Since Google+ was launched in 2011, software known informally as the Great Firewall had appeared to block it within China.

But on 20 February 2012 internet-users in many parts of China found they could gain access to the site – prompting some to suggest occupying it, in a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Occupy Wall Street campaign.

On 24 and 25 February, to the consternation of American readers, every current topic on President Obama’s 2012 election campaign page attracted hundreds of comments, apparently from China.

Their exact provenance cannot be verified, but the expressions contributors used were in the style of mainland China and in simplified Chinese.

chinaSMACK has translated several of the comments and also posted those written in English by Americans baffled by the Chinese comments they cannot read:

Terry Schmidt:

Dear President Obama, when will you send troops to liberate China?

张勉:

Mr. President, we long for America’s freedom.

Dylan Bozarth (American writing in English):

I need to learn Chinese.

秋山晴子:

Are you all not losing face? I cannot feel embarrassed more.

Joepo Ding:

Is this what freedom tastes like?

吴佳斌 (In English):

Obama, you do not contribute to world peace, but earlier get the Nobel peace prize, do not you feel ridiculous?

You to attack terrorists without the permission of a sovereign state without authorization to send troops into the country, and the manslaughter of a few 60 people in this country, and finally, only say “We regret that”. Please tell me what is your human rights?

Check out Obama’s Google+ page for more.

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Post tags: Barack Obama, Google, Great Firewall
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Facebook said last week it was contemplating re-entering China, the world’s second biggest economy, after being blocked nearly three years ago.

But its offering would likely face intense competition, political meddling and little commercial success.

Few foreign internet companies have succeeded in China. EBay Inc, Google Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Yahoo Inc and most recently Groupon Inc form the list of notable online players who have failed to gain traction in the fast-growing nation of 1.3 billion people.

“It’s actually a bit late for Facebook,” said Hong Kong-based CLSA analyst Elinor Leung, who added that the market was already quite saturated with local players such as Sina Corp, Renren Inc, Kaixinwang001 and Tencent Holdings.

Read more about Facebook in China, via CDT.

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Post tags: Facebook, foreign IT companies, Great Firewall
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China’s censorship system is complex and multilayered. The outer layer is generally known as the “great firewall” of China, through which hundreds of thousands of websites are blocked from view on the Chinese Internet. What this system means in practice is that when one goes online from an ordinary commercial Internet connection inside China and tries to visit a website such as hrw.org, the website belonging to Human Rights Watch, the web browser shows an error message saying, “This page cannot be found.” This blocking is easily accomplished because the global Internet connects to the Chinese Internet through only eight “gateways,” which are easily “filtered.” At each gateway, as well as among all the different Internet service providers within China, Internet routers — the devices that move the data back and forth between different computer networks — are all configured to block long lists of website addresses and politically sensitive keywords.

These blocks can be circumvented by people who know how to use anti-censorship software tools. It is impossible to conduct accurate usage surveys, but it is believed likely that hundreds of thousands of Chinese Internet users deploy these tools to access Twitter and Facebook every day. Yet researchers estimate that out of China’s 500 million Internet users, only about 1% or so (a number somewhere in the single-digit millions — still a large number of people but not enough percentage-wise to shape majority public opinion) use these tools to get around censorship, either because most do not know how or because they lack sufficient interest in, or awareness of, what exists on the other side of the “great firewall.”

Fortunately for the government, there are plenty of social networking platforms and other delightfully entertaining and useful services on the Chinese Internet to keep people occupied, without much need to access sites and services based overseas — assuming they have no interest in politics, religion or human rights issues. Baidu, the homegrown search engine, enables people to locate all the content on the Chinese-language Internet that their government permits. The social networking platforms RenRen and Kaixinwang substitute for Facebook. People can blog on platforms run by Chinese companies like Sohu and Sina, which also runs a wildly popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo. QQ, run by the company Tencent, offers instant messaging, gaming and all kinds of interactive services that work seamlessly across both PCs and mobile phones.

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Post tags: Great Firewall, Internet censorship, IT industry, online culture
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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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