Right now, the Chinese name of the outspoken magazine caught up in a tense struggle of willswith the government – Southern Weekend in English, 南方周末 (nan fang zhou mo) in Chinese – is censored in Chinese on WeChat. But it’s not just restricted to users in China (where the app is called Weixin), and typing that name in the Chinese language is now blocked globally. The restriction notice says (pictured):

The message “南方周末” you sent contains restricted words. Please check it again.

We’ve tested it out going from users in China to Thailand (blocked), Thailand to China (blocked), and even Thailand to Singapore (blocked); the prohibited words are not sent at all. The name of the magazine can be sent in English.

TechInAsia contacted Tencent for a comment, and a newer post quotes the company writing off the restricted characters as a “technical glitch”. The post goes on to offer “incriminating evidence” that the restrictions were more deliberate:

Referring to the case as a “glitch”, the full statement given to us reads:

A small number of WeChat international users were not able to send certain messages due to a technical glitch this Thursday. Immediate actions have been taken to rectify it. We apologize for any inconvenience it has caused to our users. We will continue to improve the product features and technological support to provide better user experience.

Indeed, testing out the offending phrase today, it does now work within WeChat.

[...]But what about that warning that many saw? It’s as clear as day in many screenshots. “The message “南方周末” you sent contains restricted words. Please check it again.”

Yes: Restricted words. That’s no error message. It’s very far from being: Ooops, our servers are a bit busy right now, please try again a few minutes later.[...]

TechInAsia has previously reported on Tencent’s (largely successful) efforts to go global with their popular new product. A post from PandoDaily.com describes the new opportunities to globalize offered by the mobile market, and suggests that internationalizing the self-censorship required for a media company to sustain in China would impede Tencent’s quest for global presence:

In the past, Chinese social networks have only had to worry about censorship in regards to users inside the country – because, proportionately speaking, so few users of China’s Internet properties access the sites from overseas – but WeChat, which has the potential to be more international, presents a new challenge.

The advent of the mobile age has opened up the possibility for China to compete on a global stage and develop Internet products in parallel with the rest of the world. In particular, many entrepreneurs, investors, and businesses within China consider themselves to have an advantage over their Western counterparts when it comes to expanding into developing countries, such as India, Brazil, and those in Southeast Asia.

[...]Until now, WeChat has been allowed to spread beyond China without having to deal with a big censorship blowup. Now it’s being put to the ultimate test. For users in China, it’s business as usual. For everyone else, it’s time to reassess.

For more on Tencent and WeChat, see “WeChat, a Threat to All?” Also see CDT’s ongoing coverage of censorship, strike and lingering concern surrounding the notoriously candid Southern Weekly (also known as Southern Weekend) – the newspaper whose name was reportedly restricted for international WeChat users.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Internet companies, social media, Southern Weekly, tencent, WeChat, Weixin
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Wang Xiaoning’s wife Yu Ling said in a phone interview that the Beijing No. 2 Prison told her of his release Friday morning and that she should meet him at the prison gate.

[…] Rights groups said that passages from writings cited at his trial in 2003 included: “Without a multiparty system, free elections and separation of powers, any political reform is fraudulent.” Others called China an “authoritarian dictatorship,” and complained of continuing widespread corruption, poverty and workers exploitation.

A lawsuit Wang and others filed in the United States showed that Yahoo’s wholly owned subsidiary based in Hong Kong gave police information linking Wang to his anonymous e-mails and other political writings he posted online.

Yahoo could not immediately be reached for comment.

Yu told AFP that Wang’s political rights will be suspended for another two years, and that he has been mistreated in prison but remains in reasonable health.

Yahoo was also involved in the prosecution of journalist Shi Tao, who is still serving a ten-year sentence passed in 2005 for leaking state secrets. Wang and others later sued the US company, which settled in 2007 for an undisclosed amount. Yahoo founder and then-CEO Jerry Yang later urged the Bush administration to demand Wang and Shi’s release.

These cases illustrate the legal entanglements that come with a physical business presence in China. Google avoided storing sensitive user information on Chinese servers in order to avoid any similar predicament, but was still forced to filter search results and eventually left the Chinese mainland. Twitter alarmed users in January with an announcement that the service would selectively block posts in accordance with local laws, a move widely suspected of being a concession to allow entry to the Chinese market. CEO Dick Costolo quickly clarified, however, that “I don’t think the current environment in China is one in which we can operate“.

See also a 2007 Wired article on Wang’s case (via Isolda Morillo), and more on Wang and Yahoo via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: freedom of expression, Google, Internet companies, Jerry Yang, Shi Tao, Twitter, Wang Xiaoning, Yahoo
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The share price of Tencent Holdings Ltd., 0700.HK +1.47% China’s leading Internet company—with businesses from online gaming to instant messaging—has soared 48% this year in Hong Kong. Analysts expect that its results for the quarter ended June 30, to be released Wednesday, will show healthy growth, despite slowing online advertising outlays as the Chinese economy softens.

China is the world’s biggest market for online businesses, home to about a quarter of the world’s Internet users, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency. The country’s online market is dominated by Chinese companies, in part because government barriers restrict the likes of Google and Facebook.

“Not only does Tencent have a cash cow in its strong gaming business, but the company is also best-positioned in high-potential markets like social media and mobile Internet services,” said Jefferies analyst Cynthia Meng, who has a buy rating on Tencent’s stock.

For more on China’s Internet development, see Four Trends on China’s Internet, via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet companies, online games, tencent
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When it comes to Internet and mobile application development, it is often said that the most popular model is called C2C, which stands for “copy to China.” In simple terms, this boils down to copying a successful application in the west, such as YouTube (Chinese versions include Tudou, Youku and Ku6), Facebook (whose Chinese versions include Kaixin and Renren), Twitter, which has become a hit application for Sina.com in the form of Sina Weibo (which means mini-broadcast) and for copycats of Foursquare, the hit location-tagging site for mobile phones.

But there is another aspect to the C2C model which accounts for its success: Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare were blocked by the Chinese government’s Great Firewall of China (#GFW) first. Before they were blocked, all of these applications had large numbers of users in China. In the case of Facebook, there were a large number of users in China before it was blocked, starting with westerners in China, but then spreading to local Chinese users. After it was blocked, Chinese local user numbers fell off precipitously; this helped the new Chinese copycat applications to grow in numbers, while the original western applications retained users who were mainly from the west who preferred using English and had access to a VPN which gave them access through proxy servers.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet companies, tudou, Twitter, Youku, youtube
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…The recent case brought by The Beijing News against Zhejiang Online in the Hangzhou Intermediate Court should make people turn their heads. Two years after The Beijing News brought its case, the Hangzhou court has still not rendered a verdict, but instead demands that The Beijing News bring a separate lawsuit for each of the 7,706 articles [for which copyright was allegedly violated]. The Beijing News has said it cannot agree to this, and so the Hangzhou Intermediate Court has rejected the suit outright.

Commentators have already pointed out that in this case the Hangzhou court has stepped way beyond the maximum trial period of one year. As to the Hangzhou Intermediate Court breaking this case into 7,706 separate cases, the former head of the intellectual property office of the Supreme Court, Jiang Zhipei (蒋志培), has said that “judicial organs should not commit such errors of common sense.” For Zhejiang Online’s part, their grounds of opposition have run as follows: all of the articles were “reasonably used,” and they are part of the “national team” (国家队), [in other words, state media], and “an important priority website of Zhejiang Province.”

When the local court decision has been infected by local protectionism even as these instances of widespread intellectual property violation are so plain to see, this means, I’m afraid, that Zhejiang Online, which refuses to acknowledge its own illegal activities but is now on a list of 10 websites preparing to go public, must deal with the problem of “credibility” before it can hope for a successful market listing.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet companies, IT industry, online news
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Kai-fu Lee, vice president of Google, was optimistic about the company’s performance in the first quarter of this year. The company saw 6 percent growth in business volume in the first three months over the same period last year, according to Google’s quarterly report released Thursday.

“We’ve made significant profit despite slowing growth. The company is not severely damaged but only encounters deceleration in business expansion,” he said during the annual conference of Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) held in the scenic Boao town of south China’s Hainan Province.

The three-day forum ending Sunday, which attracted more than 1,600 politicians, business people and scholars and focused on the financial crisis, set a special section to discuss the Internet industry, which seemingly plays a more important role in combating crisis and stimulating the distressed real economy than before.

Indeed, figures indicate that the number of web users has risen. China, already ranked as having the most number of Internet users in the world, now has a reported 316 million users, an increase of 16 million from last year. From China Tech News:

According to Xi Guohua, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China, the number of Chinese netizens increased by 16.2 million in the first quarter of 2009, reaching a total number of 316 million.

Xi said though the global financial crisis brought great impact to the real economy, China’s Internet industry did not slow its development speed. Meanwhile, the development of broadband was more obvious with the number of broadband users accounting for over 90% of total netizens in China.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet companies, Internet users
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EBay Inc. plans to pull back from the fast-growing Chinese market by shutting down its main Web site in China and replacing it with a new site that would be largely run by a Beijing-based Internet company, say people familiar with the matter, in the latest sign of trouble afflicting the onetime Internet star.

The San Jose, Calif., company plans to announce as early as Tuesday that it is taking a 49% stake in the new site in a partnership with online portal and wireless operator Tom Online Inc., these people say. Tom Online would hold a 51% stake. Up till now, eBay had operated its own auction site in China.[Full Text]

© Mo Ming for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ebay, foreign investment, Internet companies
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