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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Duncan Clark, chairman of market research company BDA China Ltd, said that Schmidt’s visit to China was incidental, after his visit to the DPRK.

However, Clark added that “both Google China’s R&D presence in Beijing and its massive influence on the smartphone market through Android still give it a lot of heft here” despite the fact that local rival Baidu Inc has won the upper hand in recent times. Google’s Android is the world’s most widely used smartphone operating system.

…

Faced with a declining market share in China, Google is pushing into the mobile sector,trying to generate revenues from its mobile advertising products, which enable ads tobe shown on mobile applications, mobile search results and online videos.

John Liu, corporate vice-president of Google China, said earlier the mobile ad business is the company’s fastest-growing business in the country.

Meanwhile, the cat-and-mouse game with Chinese authorities over web freedoms in China continues. Google recently cancelled a search filter notification feature which tipped off users to banned or risky keywords, prompting some to claim that the Internet giant has given up the fight against Chinese government censorship. While activist groups such as GreatFire.org have expressed disappointment with Google, The Economist tries to put the move in perspective:

Fair enough, but a question comes to mind. Why should Google be buckling under now? Some see crassly commercial motives, supposing that the firm has stopped crying foul on censorship in order to woo back the Chinese government on behalf of its business interests. Such folk observe that Google has recently announced a tie up with Qihoo 360 Technology, a Chinese firm that puts out popular antivirus software as well as the country’s leading web browser.

Qihoo is determined to take on Baidu, which has consolidated its grip on China’s search market after Google’s departure (it is estimated to command a share of greater than 70%). A tie-up with Google would help Qihoo to improve searches and to better match eyeballs with relevant advertising. Google could benefit from the tie-up as the benevolent rich uncle, using the local firm as a proxy for its commercial aims. By keeping Baidu from becoming an utter monopoly, goes this argument, Qihoo helps keep the China market open for Google’s eventual re-entry when and if the censorship regime changes.

That seems a plausible thesis, but there is another. Every move Google has tried to make to combat, expose or pervert China’s efforts at censorship has been met and defeated by the authorities—often with overwhelming force. This was true too of its latest warnings about censorship. In the end, it may be that Google simply stopped banging its head against the wall, having realised that the headache was pointless.

The notion that Google could curry favour with the leadership now by halting its warning messages is ridiculous, insists a former Google insider: “the opportunity to capitulate was lost forever when Google gave the middle finger and left.”

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Post tags: Eric Schmidt, Google, Internet, Internet censorship, mobile applications, search engines
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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.

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Post tags: Great Firewall of China, Internet, online public opinion, Twitter, XInhua News
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Yuan offers an unsentimental view of the global environment. His particular concern is not the common fear of direct military conflict with the United States (although he also addresses this), but rather the fortuitous advantage that China presently enjoys due to the international malaise in the wake of the post-Global Financial Crisis, one that, given the right leadership, could well work in favour of the People’s Republic. The essay provides, therefore, valuable insights into the canny calculations of one prominent analyst. Its message was, however, not greeted with universal equanimity. For, among other things, Yuan controversially identified what his critics immediately dubbed the ‘New Black Five Categories of People’ 新黑五类 that threaten China’s social stability and party-dominated top-down reform (groups that he claims are being infiltrated and manipulated by the American imperium for its nefarious ends).

[… O]f the ‘New Five Black Categories’ in Yuan’s analysis, four are not new. Nor indeed is the discussion of social anomie or unruly elements, given the fact that the Chinese party-state is presently much taken with the theory and practice of ‘social management’ 社会管理. What caused particular offence (apart from Yuan’s clear identification of perceived ‘threats’) was that ‘vulnerable groups’ 弱势群体 were included in the list. Critics were appalled that in a booming modern China that boasts of its aspirations to achieve global status the groups most deserving of support, protection and care were being identified as an incipient danger. That such a suggestion came from an analyst working for a government think tank that was itself created to protect the Chinese revolution, and its own elevation of the formerly dispossessed and oppressed classes of the country seemed nothing less than confronting. To offer the state policy advice that overtly targets the marginalised and disempowered appeared, to many, as inhumane and in blatant contradiction of the Communist Party’s founding principles and avowed value system.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCP, Cultural Revolution, democracy, dissidents, Geremie R. Barmé, global financial crisis, Internet, people's daily, religion, rights lawyers, U.S. relations, underground churches, United States
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A failure to agree on these norms is destabilizing. One country may see its action as permissible, the other as an act of war. It is unclear how wedded Beijing is to its opposition to cyber and LOAC, and we could begin to see some modification of the Chinese position. Wang Tianlong of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges writing in the Shanghai Securities News recently argued “we should study the feasibility of applying the principles of the Law of Armed Conflict to cyberspace and push for the formulation of a code of conduct for cyberconflict.”

The United States has certainly upped its rhetorical pressure on China over the last year. The more open discussion of offensive cyber has been accompanied by the increasing number of U.S. government officials naming and shaming Chinese hackers (the most recent is Rear Admiral Samuel Cox stating that the pace of attacks was actually increasing). Secretary Clinton and Secretary Panetta both raised cyber with their Chinese counterparts during recent meetings.

The most important driver may be that Beijing could soon find itself isolated. Russia has been much more receptive to discussing how LOAC applies to cyber, and has been less adamant about the International Code of Conduct in multilateral meetings recently. The United States needs to keep engaging Beijing on this issue, but, as with so many issues, it is likely to get better traction with China by scheduling more meetings in other countries’ capitals.

Cybersecurity has become a flashpoint in Sino-US relations over the past year, with Washington claiming late last year that they had linked a bulk of China-based cyberattacks against America to groups backed or directed by the Chinese government. From compromised intellectual property to the potential theft of state secrets, experts in the U.S. have also called on President Barack Obama to take more forceful measures to tackle the issue. And most recently, a year-long U.S. House intelligence committee concluded that Chinese telecom giant Huawei poses a security risk to America, allegations which the world’s largest manufacturer of telecom equipment has denied.

See also previous CDT coverage of Huawei, cybersecurity and cyber espionage.

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Post tags: Barack Obama, cyberattacks, cyberespionage, cybersecurity, cyberspace, huawei, international law, Internet, U.S. relations
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The Baidu Mobile Browser, which will compete with UCWeb Inc’s UC Browser, Google Inc’s Chrome and default Android browser, and Apple Inc’s Safari, is about 20 percent faster than its rivals based on internal tests, Li Mingyuan, Baidu’s general manager of mobile and cloud computing, told reporters on Friday at a pre-launch briefing.

Baidu’s mobile browser also allows users to access a plethora of web-based mobile applications (apps) and run high-definition video through the browser without having to download apps or supporting software.

The browser, together with Baidu’s other mobile products such as its mobile operating system and cheap smartphones launched with partners, forms the core of what Baidu hopes will eventually become a source of revenue.

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Post tags: Baidu, Beijing, Internet, mobile technology
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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.

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Post tags: Baidu, chinternet, Great Firewall, Great Firewall of China, Internet, intranet, Iran, Netizen Voices, netizens, North Korea, sina weibo, weibo
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Points can be deducted for online comments that are judged to be offensive. When a blogger reaches zero, the service stated, a user’s account will be canceled. Users who suffer lesser penalties can restore their 80 points by avoiding violations for two months.

Deductions will cover a wide range of sins, including spreading rumors, calling for protests, promoting cults or superstitions and impugning China’s honor, the service stated.

Most notably, the contracts also will punish time-honored tactics that bloggers have used to avoid censorship, like disguising comments on censored topics by using homonyms (where two different Chinese characters have nearly identical sounds), puns and other dodges.

Jon Russell, Asia Editor of The Next Web, wrote this morning that he saw “no obvious sign of the points system being introduced as yet,” and called out one of a number of clauses in the contract that he believes are “open to fairly broad interpretation.” The “user contracts” went live following a trial period that began three weeks ago, and represent the latest attempt by state regulators to control the flow of information and limit the spread of sensitive rumors online after Sina failed to effectively implement the state-mandated “real name registration” policy.

Reflecting on a just-completed visit to Sina Weibo in Beijing, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg writes that the old model of control is evolving as figures such as Ai Wei Wei, Koonchung Chan and Han Han continue to influence China’s “evolving free-speech landscape”:

Sina’s biggest fear seems to be not that users will complain about the limits placed upon their activity, but that that its failure to police the site itself will provoke the authorities to close it. Party officials have paid admonitory visits, and suspended commenting for three days last month in response to proliferating rumors about the Bo Xilai scandal. But shutting down Weibo (which refers to the Chinese version of microblogging, as opposed to Sina, which is the biggest company that provides a platform for it) would now count as an outsized act of repression, difficult for the government to get away with. China’s biggest blogging and micro-blogging platform has 324 million registered users, and there are millions more on competing services. Constrained though it is, Weibo has become a boisterous national conversation. Stopping it at this point would both infuriate its users and deny the security services their best tool for gauging public opinion.

The Chinese government’s can’t-live-with-it, can’t-live-without-it relationship to Weibo epitomizes the paradoxical condition of free expression in China apparent during our trip. State censorship is no longer just a question of dissidents testing the boundaries of what is permissible and regularly running afoul of the authorities—the old, familiar model. It has become a matter of authoritarian innovation as well, with the one-party state experimenting in with ways to constrain and control its explosive new media environment.

Finally, China Media Project’s David Bandurski reminds China watchers that official bureau’s and agencies have seized on microblogs as a valuable tool as well.

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Post tags: Ai Wei Wei, censorship, Great Firewall of China, Han Han, information control, Internet, Koonchung Chan, microblogs, netizens, online public opinion, rumors, sina weibo
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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and China’s Defense Minister Liang Guanglie on Monday struck a positive note at a joint press conference at the Pentagon, announcing a joint counter-piracy naval exercise in the Gulf of Aden later this year and tentative plans to cooperate in the sensitive realm of cyber security.

Liang’s trip marked the first visit by a Chinese defense minister to Washington in nine years and US defense officals were anxious to avoid any mention of blind rights campaigner Chen Guangcheng.

Chen “didn’t come up” in the talks and officials had said beforehand that his fate was a subject for US diplomats at the State Department, not the Pentagon.

The dissident dramatically escaped house arrest and took refuge at the US embassy in Beijing on April 26, creating a dilemma for both governments just days before the arrival of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Although the two countries have agreed to work together, some officials are worried because the most often cited source of cyber attacks is from China. According the the Voice of America, Liang has denied these claims:

Liang, a general in the People’s Liberation Army, said that there is no evidence directly linking cyber attacks in the United States to China. He said that in his talks with U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the secretary agreed that all of the attacks could not be attributed to China.

Liang said that during their talks Monday, he and Panetta discussed ways to strengthen cyber security, but added that they would leave the details of that effort for experts to work out.

President Barack Obama has cited cyber security as one of the most serious economic and national security challenges facing the United States. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says Sino-American cooperation is crucial.

“Because the United States and China have developed technological capabilities in this arena, it’s extremely important that we work together to develop ways to avoid any miscalculation or misperception that could lead to crisis in this area,” said Panetta.

Liang’s visit has been the first visit by a Chinese defense minister since 2003.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cyberpolice, Internet, Internet safety, Internet security, Internet technology, U.S military
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Political cartoons have emerged over the years as the Chinese media have become more commercial, and the Internet and microblogs have exploded.

“This has dramatically changed the environment for cartoonists,” says David Bandurski, a researcher with the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project. “They now have a really good platform to find an audience.”

Bandurski follows 20 to 30 cartoonists on social media, but suspects there are many more. He says the Communist Party still has ultimate control over media here, but the digital revolution and decentralized power have created openings for freer expression.

“This is what we call chaos,” he says, “and in this chaos, there is a lot you can do.”

And some things you can’t.

One Chinese cartoonist, Hexie Farm (蟹农场), has teamed up with China Digital Times to produce a series of weekly cartoons which are published exclusively on CDT.

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Post tags: cartoon, CCP, hexie farm, Internet, netizens, online public opinion, satire
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The proposed deal will strengthen the new company’s ability to compete with Baidu Inc. (BIDU) and Tencent Holdings Ltd. (700) in adding online video users in a nation where Google Inc. (GOOG)’s YouTube is restricted. Youku and Tudou together accounted for more than a third of China’s Web video advertising revenue last quarter, according to research company Analysys International.

“There are huge purchasing economies for content through this merger,” said Eric Wen, head of Internet research at Mirae Asset Securities in Hong Kong. “They need to have scale, bargaining power with upstream TV producers and deter entry by Tencent and Baidu.”

The two companies have been locked in a recent legal battle over allegations of stolen content on both sides, as television viewers increasingly look to the Internet for their entertainment fix amid a crackdown on state TV content. Forbes’ Russell Flannery called the merger news the “latest sign of consolidation and search for ecnomics of scale” in an industry whose rapid early-stage growth has waned:

It’s instructive to look over the rest of China’s top 25 to see some of the larger cross-over and consolidation trends afoot. No. 1 Baidu, a search site led by the richest mainland Chinese entrepreneur Robin Li on the new Forbes Billionaires List, crossed over into the travel space last year by spending $306 million for a stake in Qunar. Baidu already owns no. 17 Hao123.com, a directory site. Alibaba Group, which is 40% owned by Yahoo and led by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, owns three sites in the top 25: no. 3 Taobao.com, no. 13 Tmall.com, and no. 19 Alipay.com. No. 19 Renren has built it itself up in part through acquisitions, and No. 12 Soso is owned by the same company that runs No. 2 qq.com, Hong Kong-listed Tencent. No. 22 Sogou.com, another search site, is owned by No. 8, Sohu.com.

As RedTech advisors managing director Mike Clendenin recently told China Wealth, a larger trend in China’s internet space is the adjustment to slower growth. “If you look at the Internet in general, you see the maturation of the Chinese Internet,” he said. Click here for the full Mike Clendenin interview.

Analysts called the deal constructive, Reuters reports, but cautioned against conceding dominance of China’s highly competitive online video industry to the new combined company:

“This creates China’s biggest video site, but it doesn’t create a YouTube – they still have less than 50 percent market share,” said Bill Bishop, an independent analyst based in Beijing.

Youku currently leads the fragmented Chinese online video market with a 21.8 percent share, ahead of Tudou’s 13.7 percent, according to Internet research firm Analysys International.

“We know online video is way too competitive. There are 10 players, where there should be only one to two,” said Michael Clendenin, managing director of Shanghai-based RedTech Advisors.

“After this merger there are still too many players in the industry,” he said, noting others in the market such as Sohu.com Inc, Baidu Inc, and Tencent Holdings Ltd , which is trying to develop an online video platform.

“These are not small, insignificant players. So even though this is a step in the right direction in terms of consolidation, there’s still a long way to go,” Clendenin added.

Twitter is also abuzz over the deal, according to Shanghaiist.

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Post tags: industry consolidation, Internet, merger, Online video, tudou, Twitter, Youku
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Wang Chen, head of the State Internet Information Office — a government body set up this year to supervise online content — also urged officials to use the web to “guide public opinion and promote positive social values”.

“All regions and departments must… use more forceful and effective measures to strengthen the construction and management of cyber culture,” he was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency late Saturday.

With more than half a billion Chinese now online, authorities in Beijing are concerned about the power of the Internet to influence public opinion in a country that maintains tight controls on its traditional media outlets.

Large-scale strikes have hit China in recent weeks, as workers resentful about low salaries or layoffs face off with employers juggling high costs and slowing exports — news that quickly spreads round the country via the web.

China Media Project translates comments by Wang Chen in People’s Daily on “Actively Carrying Out Public Opinion Channeling Work”:

As we actively encourage various aspects [on the government side, intellectuals, member of the public etc.] to actively use microblogs to serve society, we must recognize that there are a number of problems involved in the use of microblogs that must be settled urgently. A small number of people use microblogs to fabricate and disseminate rumors, or to transmit obscene or vulgar information, intentionally violating the rights of others and carrying out illegal online public relations [activities]. These must be investigated and handled according to laws and regulations. When they are online, internet users must obey the law and discipline themselves, not transmitting rumors and not believing rumors. Various microblogging sites must strengthen their management of information posting, not providing a transmission channel to illegal or harmful information.. [We] invite the online masses to actively notify [authorities] of obscene or other harmful information, so that together we can create a creditable, healthy and civilized internet environment.

For more on recent concerns over increasing social unrest, see China Leader Warns About Social Unrest Due to Economy via CDT.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet, microblogs, social media, social unrest
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As China’s microblogging population continues to surge, with more than 300 registered users reported last week, Shanghai’s municipal government launched an official microblog on Sina Weibo called “Shanghai City” on Monday. From The People’s Daily:

The microblog, officially verified as originating from the Information Office of Shanghai Municipal Government (IOSMG), has accumulated more than 30,000 followers in the five hours since its launch.

According to IOSMG, the content of the postings will be mainly about new policies and regulations, practical information related to activities in Shanghai, and interactions with Internet users over issues of public concern.

Vegetable prices, the selection of affordable housing, and upcoming cultural activities in Shanghai are included in the first several postings.

The “Shanghai City” platform includes links to several official microblogs from the city’s various authorities, including the Public Security Bureau, Transportation Bureau and Environmental Protection Bureau. Shanghai joins a growing list of government agencies and officials now using microblogs, and is the second to do so at the municipal government level following the unveiling of a Weibo news platform last week dedicated to a score of municipal agencies in Beijing. From the Global Times:

Wang Chen, the director of the State Internet Information Office, said more official entities and leaders are encouraged to soothe public concerns by soliciting public opinions, needs and resolutions, offering appropriate answers to heated topics and maintaining the legal rights of the public via the microblogs.

Despite of the positive actions from officials in utilizing new media outlets to enhance their administrations, experts have said there still remains a string of problems which need to be addressed.

“What to post, when to post, and how to reply to a post on the public microblogs poses a great challenge to the capabilities of the official microbloggers who represent their offices in the eyes of the public,” said Wang Sixin, the Media Law professor at CUC.

For example, how to choose the right words to quell public doubt via the microblog when an unexpected incident happens is all the more important, added Wang.

A report conducted by Shanghai Jiaotong University earlier this month revealed that 75 of the top 100 microblogging government departments in China are public security bureaus, leading the Global Times to proclaim that “The Cops are Going Virtual”:

The first PSB Weibo account was opened in February 2010 by the Zhaoqing police of Guangdong Province. The bureaus in the city of Ji’nan and Hebei Province followed.

“We are always looking for ways to promote relations between the public and the police. We also invite people to our offices. None have worked as well as our Weibo account,” Xu Chunhua, vice director of Ji’nan Public Security Bureau told the Global Times.

Weibo also provides for two-way communication with the public. “We created an open platform and anyone who wants to chat can write to us on Weibo.”

“The public is curious about what we do and how we work and Weibo lets them get involved,” said Xu.

See also recent CDT coverage of microblogging in China, including a visit by TechCrunch to Sina Weibo’s headquarters, and new measures passed to oversee microblogs and limit online rumor-mongering.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, environmental policy, Guangdong, hebei, Internet, microblogs, municipal government, Public Security Bureau, Shanghai, Shanghai Jiaotong University, sina weibo, Transportation Bureau
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In March, police in the cities of Lanzhou and Xi’an in west China found some people were getting and selling drugs through chatting in online chatting room, which were usually inaccessible to outsiders.

New comers could only be allowed to enter the online chatting room after being introduced by “acquaintances” and performing drug-addiction through the online video, Liu said.

The MPS soon launched a nationwide battle to fight against online drug-related activities on Aug. 31, and started tightening the net to seize the suspects on Sept. 2.

Among the 12,125 arrested suspects, 66.2 percent are young people under 35 years old, and 2.6 percent are under 18, with the youngest being 14 years old, according to Liu.

China’s war against drugs also recently cut off a well-connected trafficking ring based in Guangxi and yielded the largest-ever drug bust in Hong Kong’s history.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: chat rooms, drug addiction, drug trafficking, Internet, Ministry of Public Security
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The operators of China’s most vibrant equivalent of Twitter notified each of its 200 million users Friday that several bloggers deemed to have spread unfounded rumors would have their accounts suspended for one month.

In messages, the operators ofSina.com’s Weibo microblog detailed the suspensions of the bloggers. The announcements provoked a torrent of online protest, some of which was directed at the government on the assumption that it was behind the punishments.

If so, it was the clearest expression yet of the government’s growing concern about its inability to curb free expression on the Internet — particularly searing criticism of official acts — despite a sweeping and extremely sophisticated censorship regime.

On Monday, a member of the Politburo, the nine-member Communist Party committee that acts as China’s collective leadership, visited Sina.com officials and bluntly said that they should “resolutely put an end to fake and misleading information.” The official, Beijing’s party secretary, Liu Qi, said they should employ new technology to better manage the microbloggers, whose numbers have grown explosively in the last year.

The company’s notices stated that two bloggers who had spread false rumors on Weibo would lose their right to post messages or to add followers for a month. One stated that a blogger had been suspended after posting a false report that the accused killer of a 19-year-old woman had been set free after his politically powerful father intervened.

Another notice disclosed the suspension of a blogger who accused the Red Cross Society of China, which is mired in a financial scandal that has drawn national attention, of selling blood at a profit.

Sina has been under fire recently and all Chinese internet content will probably be subject to stricter governmental regulations. From Zachs Investment Research:

Chinese micro-blog “weibo” provider, SINA Corp. (SINA) is expected to face stiff regulatory control over Internet content, according to a recent report by Chinese newspaper Beijing Daily.

Beijing Daily, which is backed by the Communist Party of China, quoted party leader Liu Qi, who warned Chinese Internet companies including SINA to tighten control over online material, particularly sensitive information that spreads dissent among the general public. The Beijing Internet Media Association, a government-sanctioned industry group, also called on its 104 member companies to filter Internet content.

According to a latest report published by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China has the world’s biggest online population, which was 485 million Internet users at the end of June 30, 2011.

However, China’s social network market is shrinking, as the number of social network users decreased to 5.16 million in the first half of 2011. The decline can be primarily attributed to strict government censorship. Chinese search engines and online video sites, microblogging services also require appropriate licenses to operate and are subject to censorship. Politically sensitive posts are often removed while searches involving sensitive keywords show no results.

However, these tough regulations did not deter the micro-blog market, which soared 208.9% year over year and accumulated 195 million users (40.2% of the total Chinese Internet population) at the end of the first half of 2011. The primary beneficiary of this tremendous growth has been SINA, which has registered users of more than 140 million as of June, 2011.

Sources:

Accounts of Chinese Bloggers Suspended, Causing Protests – New York Times

SINA Faces Strict Regulations – Zachs Investment Research

© cdtstaff for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet, sina weibo
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