The child is being treated at the Beijing Ditan Hospital, and is in stable condition, Zhong Dongbo, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau, said in a press briefing.

The girl developed flu symptoms, including fever, cough, sore throat and headache, Thursday morning. She was brought to the Beijing Ditan Hospital to seek medical treatment around noon and was then hospitalized for lung infection.

[…] Two people who have had close contact with the child have not shown any flu symptoms, a spokesman said. He added that the girl’s parents were engaged in live poultry trading in a township of Shunyi District in Beijing’s northeastern suburbs.

11 have now died from the disease, which causes “severe pneumonia, septic shock and other complications that damaged the brain, kidney and other organs”, but a four year old boy in Shanghai made the first recognized recovery on Wednesday. Tests suggest possible resistance to drugs such as Tamiflu and Relenza, at least in some cases, but much remains unclear. “Few in the flu world would place strong bets on what the history books will say about this outbreak,” according to Helen Branswell at The Canadian Press:

To date it doesn’t appear as if the virus is spreading person to person, which is perhaps the best feature of this virus. But two weeks after China announced it had found people infected with a new flu, concern among those in the influenza research world remains high.

“I think we are genuinely in new territory here in which the situation of having something that is low path in birds (yet) appears to be so pathogenic in people,” Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health security and environment, said in an interview.

“And then to have those genetic changes … I simply don’t know what that combination is going to lead to.”

[…] “Almost everything you can imagine is possible. And then what’s likely to happen are the things which you can’t imagine,” Fukuda, who spent years as an influenza epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control before joining the WHO, said of the virus he has studied for so long.

Chinese authorities’ openness compared with the SARS outbreak ten years ago has continued to attract praise, as Gillian Wong reported at The Associated Press:

The new openness is thanks in part to people like Li Tiantian, founder of Dingxiangyuan, an online medical network popular with Chinese health care workers. His microblog is among a number of sites that have been tracking the government’s response to the new bird flu. “It’s evident that the strength of social media can pressure the government to be more open, more transparent,” he said from his base in the eastern city of Hangzhou.

[…] Health experts have given kudos to Beijing for being forthcoming with information, sharing the H7N9 virus’ gene sequencing and samples with the World Health Organization’s global research centers and providing timely updates of new infections and deaths. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, some patients were taken out of hospitals in Beijing and driven around the city to keep them out of sight as a visiting team of WHO investigators toured health facilities.

“I think all of us have been very impressed with the Chinese response,” said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota infectious-disease expert. “You gotta give credit where credit’s due.”

While the flow of official news has greatly improved, however, authorities have taken steps to control competing information. A Central Propaganda Department directive dated April 10th instructed domestic media:

Regarding the epidemic situation in Shanghai, give first place to Xinhua wire copy and information issued by authoritative departments. Avoid confusion of information. Report discreetly on related issues, and do not sensationalize them.

Xinhua reported on Thursday that 11 people had been detained in Guizhou, Zhejiang, Shaanxi, Gansu and Liaoning provinces “for fabricating online posts about H7N9 infections that caused panic among some netizens and local residents.” According to Caijing, the detainees numbered at least 13 but possibly “dozens”. One is said to have “confessed that the posts were all made up in order to boost his popularity on the Internet.” Southern Metropolis Daily reported that a tight lid had been kept on early cases in Shanghai until the presence of the new strain was eventually acknowledged some three weeks later. Relatives of the second victim have previously complained about being kept in the dark, saying that they did not learn his true cause of death until seeing it on TV news. From The Economist:

So far the government’s response has appeared far swifter and more open than it was in 2003. Mr O’Leary said the WHO was “very satisfied and pleased with the level of information shared” by China. After the first two deaths were reported on March 31st (both of them in Shanghai), the authorities looked for the virus among live poultry sold in the city’s markets. When they found it, they were quick to close the markets and cull thousands of birds. […]

The public’s response, however, suggests the government still has some way to go before ordinary people trust it to respond effectively. Even though no cases of the virus’s transmission between humans have been reported, many people in Shanghai and the affected regions nearby are jittery. Pharmacies have been emptied of their stocks of a traditional flu medicine called ban lan gen, despite its dubious worth in dealing with H7N9. Sales of chicken in all forms have plummeted. McDonald’s in Shanghai has responded by cutting the price of its Chicken McNuggets.

[…] Even in the official media, questions have been asked about why 27 days elapsed between the first death from H7N9 and its public announcement. The authorities say it took that long to confirm the cause, because the virus had never before been identified in humans. They have not explained, however, why on March 7th, three days after the first death, health officials in Shanghai denied rumours in social media that people had died of bird flu in a local hospital. One man was later proved to have died there of bird flu, along with one of his sons who was not found to have the virus. Despite official denials, suspicions remain that this could have been human-to-human transmission.

Global Times quoted a Shanghai health official’s own account of the delay, while at The New York Times, Keith Bradsher explained possible technical reasons for it. Meanwhile the World Health Organization has also come under fire over the timeliness of its Chinese-language reports. From Xie Wenting at Global Times:

Beijing resident Wang Weikang said that it is irresponsible that the WHO does not publish its flu report in Chinese in a more timely way.

“It [H7N9] is related to people’s lives. For instance, the flu influences our decisions about whether we can travel to Shanghai. How come they don’t update on time?” said Wang.

Beijing resident Su Ya said that WHO’s slow update is because they do not pay enough attention to Chinese readers.

“Chinese is one of the official languages of the UN. It should be given equal importance as English,” Su said.

[…] “We, the WHO, can only post cases and deaths based on the official notification from the Chinese International Health Regulations Focal Point. Therefore, inevitably, the counts in the media will be ahead of the official counts we post,” the WHO said via e-mail.

With many already put off their pork by the 12,000-plus dead pigs in the Huangpu river last month, Nicola Davison reported at The Guardian that poultry is now also regarded with unsurprising suspicion:

The price of vegetables at Yanqing market have spiked accordingly. Chen says she will pay these premium prices rather than buy meat. “We’re also avoiding pork,” she said, adding: “Actually my family and I don’t dare to eat anything these days.”

In a teahouse in Ninghai, a county in Zhejiang province 180 miles from Shanghai, Tu Youjin counts himself as a victim of H7N9. Tu’s company, Ningbo Zhenning Poultry Breeding Limited, is a co-operative working with 150 farms in the region. It supplies Shanghai and other cities with 4m chickens a year. (Shanghai consumes 130m birds annually, mostly imported from Jiangsu, Anhui and Zhejiang, provinces where H7N9 has been found in people.)

Local officials have found no trace of flu among his fowl, but sales have dropped off a cliff. Normally, the farm sells 10,000 chickens a day, but now they are selling fewer than a dozen, he said.

“We can’t even sell our eggs,” said Tu. “I’m under great pressure as my company makes up the farmers’ losses, most of them are elderly peasants. The government has shown concern but we haven’t had any compensation so far.”

Some airlines, international schools and hotels have taken poultry off menus, and KFC’s parent company Yum has been hit hard, just months after CCTV exposed it for selling tainted chicken. Authorities in Shanghai are reportedly considering a permanent ban on the sale of live poultry, while Nanjing has ordered a cull of domestically kept poultry, bans on live poultry trading and feeding birds in public, and a suspension of “all kinds of bird performances”. Hong Kong has begun testing of live poultry imports from the mainland, which have dropped by almost half in the past week, promising to stop the trade and possibly cull if the virus is identified. The effectiveness of such measures has been called into question, however. From Hu Qingyun at Global Times:

Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Global Times that it was still not certain that shutting down poultry businesses would be effective.

“There is still no solid research data showing that the ban of the live poultry trade has slowed the spread of the virus, though it might to some extent help contain cross-infection between poultry in some infected areas,” Zeng said.

[…] “Banning the trade and culling birds is only an expedient. Research into vaccines and effective medication are critical,” Zeng said.

But the likely effectiveness of vaccines—which in any case are months away—is also in doubt. From Helen Branswell at The Canadian Press:

There hasn’t been enough time to produce even the seed strain to make H7N9 vaccine, let alone small batches of a prototype vaccine for testing. So researchers haven’t had a chance to see how a vaccine against this new flu strain might work in people.

But clinical trials of vaccines made to protect against other viruses in the H7 family have shown the vaccines don’t induce much of an immune response, even when people are given what would be considered very large doses.

“In all cases where these vaccines were trialed, it was found that the vaccines were poorly immunogenic,” said Nancy Cox, the virologist who heads the influenza branch at the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control in Atlanta.

[…] “If you add all those [questions] together, it doesn’t paint a really very optimistic picture about influenza vaccine being a really significant weapon against this, should a pandemic emerge quickly,” [Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota] said.

Beyond food and farming, businesses have met varying fortunes. Indonesian importers of badminton equipment may suffer, but speculation that the outbreak has depressed house sales in Shanghai is said to be ill-founded. Face masks and hand sanitizer are naturally selling well, and there have been promising signs for Malaysian rubber glove manufacturers, while shares in car manufacturers climbed based on an anticipated exodus from public transport. Despite skepticism about proclaimed benefits, vendors of traditional Chinese remedies have also enjoyed a windfall.

As with other public health hazards, many have greeted the outbreak with dark humor. Dexter Roberts compiled a handful of jokes at Businessweek, including one referring to Shanghai’s recently pork-infused water and Beijing’s famously bad air:

The two best ways to safeguard against bird flu: 1) drink a lot of water; 2) keep the air flowing. People living in Shanghai, please ignore No. 1. People living in Beijing, please ignore No. 2.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, bird flu, food safety, H7N9, Huangpu pigs 2013, meat, Ministry of Agriculture, Nanjing, public health, rumors, SARS, Shanghai, transparency, vaccines, world health organization
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“He was on hunger strike twice and force fed,” one source told Reuters, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case. It was unclear how long the hunger strike lasted.

“He was not tortured, but fell ill and was taken to a hospital in Beijing for treatment,” the source said, declining to provide details of Bo’s condition and whereabouts which have been kept under wraps since his downfall.

[…] The recent lack of information about the case – Bo has not been seen in public since last March – harms the government’s credibility in the eyes of the people, said Bao Tong, the most senior official jailed over the 1989 Tiananmen protests.

“It’s not normal, too much time has past,” Bao told Reuters, referring to the lack of information from the government about the case.

“This is not good for the party’s image. They have not thought about this clearly. If they are able to properly deal with a big shot like Bo Xilai then they will increase people’s trust in the party,” he added.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, Bao Tong, Bo Xilai, hunger strike, justice, rumors, Tiananmen, trials, trust
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Rather, it’s surprising to see state media even acknowledging the coverage of the rumor, and thus implicitly the rumor itself. Perhaps most significant of all is North Korea’s decision to chastise Chinese media. Beijing isn’t just North Korea’s most important ally, its policies – watering down U.N, sanctions, limiting the flow of North Korean defectors, providing investment and hard currency – are crucial for the regime’s survival. You would think that North Korea’s propagandists would be extremely careful to avoid even the slightest sliver of daylight between the two countries.

Still, even if this incident is over, it might not be the last time that Chinese media and social media, where the rumor circulated long before appearing on Shenzhen TV, upsets North Korea. The recent scandal over censors restricting Southern Weekend, long relatively free for a Chinese paper, exposed the degree to which the Chinese increasingly consume and even expect news media that serves them. Social media’s reach and raucous freedom are expanding as well, all of which threatens to bring Chinese attitudes toward North Korea closer to the surface.

North Korea is still seen as an ally by many people in China, where students learn in school about the “Help Korea, Oppose America” war, Beijing-based journalist Helen Gao wrote in The Atlantic last year. But there is also a growing sense that Pyongyang’s backward policies are an embarrassment to and burden on China, according to Gao. Those sentiments, as well as the usual interest in juicy rumors about plastic surgery and the sort, could drive more Chinese public interest in stories like this one. And that could translate into Chinese media interest, or at least public pressure for it.

This all comes at a time when Beijing had been struggling a bit to keep Pyongyang close. In a post at Johns Hopkins’s Korea-focused blog 38 North, analyst Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt argues that the relationship is souring a bit. “Kim Jong Un is determined to set a course for greater political independence from Beijing,” she writes. “This has left China in a state that one insider has referred to as ‘desperate’ over its rocky relations with the country since Kim Jong Un came to power.” She says she’s found no evidence that Beijing is anything less than fully committed to its policy of maintaining regional stability and a reliably pro-Beijing regime in North Korea.

North Korea has responded by calling the rumors “sordid” and “hackwork” published by “rubbish media.” According to NKNews.Org, the rumor had circulated for months in South Korea, but it was not until the Shenzhen TV report that North Korea responded to the rumors:

What was particularly noteworthy was that the Chinese censors had specifically ordered their media to censor their country’s own state media report from Xinhua in a bid to prevent Chinese citizens from reading their own governments official propaganda, which had in this case been written for consumption by a foreign audience.

Regarding the report on Kim Jong Un’s plastic surgery, apparently Pyongyang communicated their grievances to Beijing and China’s ruling party instructed the official party media organ, Xinhua, to debunk the stories. As such, this Tuesday Xinhua issued a report that cited two of its correspondents in Pyongyang who denied the plastic surgery rumors.

The rumours of Kim Jong Un having a face lift have been fed by Pyongyang’s propaganda apparatus for months who have carefully crafted a meticulous written and pictorial narrative trying to evoke similarities between Kim Jong Un and his grandfather, including through his dress, haircut, gestures and public appearances.

Following the new censorship directive, Xinhua said that “there have been no news reports in North Korea about Kim Jong Un’s plastic surgery” and that there was “nothing suspicious” about Kim resembling his grandfather since they carry the same genes. While Kim tries to dress, walk and smile like his grandfather, together this just aims to give the impression that he “holds the people dear,” Xinhua reported.

This incident comes amid tensions between Beijing and Pyongyang due to North Korea’s satellite launch. China has called on the UN Security Council for prudence on North Korea, but tensions continue to mount as the UNSC, including China, passed a resolution calling for tightened sanctions against North Korea with a unanimous vote. The New York Times reports:

Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has ordered his top military and party officials to take “substantial and high-profile important state measures” to retaliate against American-led United Nations sanctions on the country, the North’s official media reported Sunday.

“At the consultative meeting, Kim Jong-un expressed the firm resolution to take substantial and high-profile important state measures in view of the prevailing situation,” said the North’s Korean Central News Agency, or K.C.N.A. “He advanced specific tasks to the officials concerned.”

The K.C.N.A. dispatch, which was distributed on Sunday, was dated Saturday, indicating that the meeting in Pyongyang, the capital, took place then. That was the same day on which the North’s main party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said that the United Nations Security Council’s resolution last Tuesday calling for tightening sanctions against the North left it with “no other option” but a nuclear test.

The resolution was adopted unanimously — with the support of the North’s traditional protector, China — as punishment for its Dec. 12 rocket launching. The Security Council determined that the launching was a cover for testing intercontinental ballistic missile technology and a violation of its earlier resolutions banning North Korea from conducting such tests.

Read more about the Directives From the Ministry of Truth, via CDT.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Kim Jong-un, media censorship, North Korea, rumors, UNSC
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“Only Almighty God can save humanity.”

The following example of censorship instructions, issued to the media and/or Internet companies by various central (and sometimes local) government authorities, has been leaked and distributed online. Chinese journalists and bloggers often refer to those instructions as “Directives from the Ministry of Truth.” CDT has collected the selections we translate here from a variety of sources and has checked them against official Chinese media reports to confirm their implementation.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The original publication date is noted after the directives; the date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source.

Central Propaganda Department: Discontinue reporting on recent public conversion assemblies and other illegal activities orchestrated by the Almighty God cult.

Xinchang Launches Special Investigation of Evil Cult

Source: Xinchang County [Zhejiang Province] Government Portal
Date: December 14, 2012
Visitors: 30

On December 13, Xinchang convened a meeting on the special investigation of the “Real God” cult. County Party Standing Committee member and Public Security Bureau Director Pan Yimin was present.

Pan asks that all levels of authority unite their thinking, raise awareness, stress key points, and devote utmost attention to looking out for the “Real God” cult. Realistically grasp the organizational characteristics, management targets, re-education, and guidance of [key members of] the evil cult. Complete tasks to standard, organize safeguards to standard, and coordinate government departments, villages, and town (streets) to standard. Practically create a joint workforce. Effectively stymie the momentum of the evil cult’s public conversion activities. Guarantee the political and social harmony and stability of the entire county.

During the meeting, county Politics and Law Commission Vice-Secretary Yang Zhuodong expounded on the harmfulness and present severity of “Real God” and other evil cults, setting forth prevention and control work for the current period of time. County Political Commissar Qiu Guoting introduced the origins and characteristics of the “Real God” cult, putting forth the specific plan for its investigation and management.

According to our understanding, “Real God” is also known as “Eastern Lightning.” Cult members call it “Almighty God.” This group creates an atmosphere of social panic by spreading rumors and propagating false claims and heresies, such as the apocalypse. The cult seriously endangers social stability. It is essentially an anti-social, misanthropic, perverse religious sect. Recently its activities have become rather common in certain villages and towns in Xinchang, particularly in remoter areas. It has an evil influence; the need to crack down and bring it under control is acute. All levels of the government are to alert the masses to awaken to the nature of the “Real God” cult, such that they do not fall prey to the faith. When propaganda materials or individuals from this evil cult are discovered, please report this immediately to the local police station or call the police by dialing 110. (December 12, 2012)

中宣部：对近期一些地方发生全能神邪教组织公开传教聚众滋事等非法活动不再报道。

新昌部署邪教组织专项排查处置工作

信息来源：新昌县政府门户网站 日期：2012-12-14 浏览次数：30

12月13日，新昌召开“实际神”邪教组织专项排查处置工作会议，县委常委、公安局长潘益民出席会议。

潘益民要求各级各部门统一思想，提高认识，突出重点，高度重视防范处置“实际神”邪教组织工作，切实把握好邪教组织特点、处置重点和教育引导工作，做到工 作措施到位，组织保障到位，部门、乡镇（街道）协作到位，切实形成工作合力，有效遏制邪教组织公开传教活动势头，确保全县政治社会和谐稳定。

会上，县委政法委副书记杨卓东阐述了“实际神”以及其他邪教组织的危害性和当前形势的严峻性，部署了当前以及今后一个时期对邪教组织的防控工作。县公安局政委裘国挺介绍了“实际神”邪教组织的产生过程及其特点，提出了具体的专项排查处置方案。

据了解，“实际神”又称“东方闪电”，组织内称“全能神”。该组织通过散布谣言、宣扬世界末日等妖言邪说，制造社会恐慌气氛，对社会稳定造成了严重危害， 其实质是一个反社会、反人类的邪教，目前在新昌个别乡镇特别是偏远乡镇活动较为频繁，影响恶劣，打防控形势严峻。各级政府提醒广大群众要认清“实际神”的 邪教本质，做到不信邪教，发现该邪教宣传资料和人员的，请及时向当地派出所举报，或拨打110报警电话。

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: apocalypse, censorship, church of almighty god, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, harmony, hoaxes, media censorship, Ministry of Truth, Pan Yimin, propaganda, Qiu Guoting, re-education through labor, rumors, social stability, stability maintenance, Yang Zhuodong
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We had Yeſterday another Holland Mail , which brings no conſiderable News, except that the Emperor of China, his Court, and a great Part of his Kingdom have embraced the Chriſtian Religion; but this is too extraordinary to be believed without farther Confirmation. Whatever I hear more certain, I’ll acqaint you with in my next.

TIME’s Austin Ramzy saw another contemporary parallel:

Chinese leadership rumors, circa 1694 – bit.ly/V597xx “too extraordinary to be believed without farther Confirmation”

— Austin Ramzy (@austinramzy) December 18, 2012

Talk of China’s leadership this year has frequently matched that description, with rumours frothing intensely around episodes such as the Bo Xilai affair and the fatal Ferrari crash involving Ling Jihua’s son. “Farther Confirmation” is often hard to obtain, more now because of official opacity and obstruction than distance. The Economist lamented this enduring difficulty in September, after Xi Jinping’s unexplained disappearance just weeks before his anticipated appointment as Party General Secretary:

With no hard facts, rumours flourish, even more so today with the rise of social media and a huge global China-watching profession. In the case of Mr Xi’s disappearance, explanations have ranged widely and wildly from a back injury to a heart attack to, most implausibly, an assassination attempt by means of a traffic accident, though the source of this last tale, Boxun, a Chinese-language website hosted in America, quickly deleted it.

All of this reminds China-watchers how little has changed in the four decades since Mr MacFarquhar admitted the tools of his trade were blunt and unreliable. They might recall one of their early manuals, “The Art of China-Watching”, an in-house article produced by the CIA in 1975, containing the best wisdom that American spymasters could offer. The author summed up years of exasperation in one subheading: “Does Logic Help?”

Since that forlorn cry, China has undergone a dramatic social and economic transformation. But its elite politics remains an intricate and frustrating puzzle to be tackled with crude techniques and unreliable sources. Genuine knowledge of the handful of men who rule the country, including whom they will choose to rule after them and what policies they will favour, is as rare as the Chinese unicorn. Even their health is a state secret.

See also Gady Epstein’s survey of The Economist’s 170 years of China reporting, which marked the launch of its Analects blog in February.

Spoof site China Daily Show also addressed the issue last month in a piece shared by a number China-based foreign correspondents on Twitter:

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – The chief correspondent for a top US newspaper has admitted that he has pretty much no idea what is currently going on in China.

“Nope – I’ve got nothing, to be honest with you. Not a goddamn clue,” said 44-year-old Peter Whitman, a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars who was previously a correspondent in Syria and Egypt. “And neither does anyone else. Your next guess is probably just as good as mine.”

[…] Observing somewhat bitterly that even the most well-researched bit of Pekingology might as well be pulled out of his own behind, Whitman pointed out that most of the sources available to well-placed journalists regarding the Party’s inner dynamics are likely to be in some way flawed, compromised or subject to bias.

[…] “I mean, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this but it’s all pointless, in a way. I don’t know why I bother sometimes,” Whitman shrugged. “I really don’t [….]”

While secrecy is particularly dense around China’s leaders, it extends much further afield. This has posed particular problems for coverage of self-immolations in Tibetan areas, where restrictions on foreign journalists obstruct independent verification of reports leaked by activist networks. In an interview with Global Times last week, Barbara Demick of The Los Angeles Times suggested that this kind of opacity has backfired in the past:

As a Western reporter in China, Demick finds ordinary people are happy to talk to her. By contrast, the government can be unnecessarily elusive at times, she said, noting as a journalist she has to find ways to persevere to carry out her watchdog role.

“Tibetan rioters really did a lot of bad things,” Demick said, referring to the 2008 incident in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region. “But when the riots started, we weren’t allowed to go to Tibet, and [the government] wasn’t giving us any information,” she said. “At the beginning, much of the information [reported by the Western media] came from Tibetan exile groups in Dharamsala.”

Demick based her stories on the incident on conversations she had with a colleague in Tibet, although this was hindered when communications were cut. She also visited an ethnic Tibetan township in Qinghai Province to seek deeper perspective.

“If [the government] had let the story be told, it would have been more critical of the rioters,” she said.

As for the Account Of The Publick Transactions in Christendom, the rumour in queſtion presumably had roots in the successes of Jesuit missionaries established as scientific and military advisors in the court of the Kangxi Emperor. Their efforts led to the 1692 Edict of Tolerance, which for almost thirty years allowed the preaching and practice of Catholicism in China. From S. Neill’s A History of Christian Missions, quoted at Fordham University’s Internet Modern History Sourcebook:

“The Europeans are very quiet; they do not excite any disturbances in the provinces, they do no harm to anyone, they commit no crimes, and their doctrine has nothing in common with that of the false sects in the empire, nor has it any tendency to excite sedition … We decide therefore that all temples dedicated to the Lord of heaven, in whatever place they may be found, ought to be preserved, and that it may be permitted to all who wish to worship this God to enter these temples, offer him incense, and perform the ceremonies practised according to ancient custom by the Christians. Therefore let no one henceforth offer them any opposition.”

The Emperor later changed his mind after a papal decree ordered Chinese Christians to abandon “pagan” ancestor worship and Confucian rituals. The IMHS’s editor, Paul Halsall, describes this as the loss of “a very good opportunity to convert a significant part of the Chinese elite to Catholicism.” From the Emperor’s 1721 decree:

“Reading this proclamation, I have concluded that the Westerners are petty indeed. It is impossible to reason with them because they do not understand larger issues as we understand them in China. There is not a single Westerner versed in Chinese works, and their remarks are often incredible and ridiculous. To judge from this proclamation, their religion is no different from other small, bigoted sects of Buddhism or Taoism. I have never seen a document which contains so much nonsense. From now on, Westerners should not be allowed to preach in China, to avoid further trouble.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Christianity, journalism, journalists conditions, Kangxi, leadership, Lhasa riots, Ling Jihua, news gathering, news media, rumors, Tibet, Xi Jinping
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Scores and perhaps hundreds of members of an outlawed cult known as the Church of Almighty God have been detained throughout the country in recent days as Beijing tries to stop believers from taking drastic action on what they believe to be the eve of the apocalypse, according to relatives of cult members and state media reports.

The sect, which preaches the second coming of a female Jesus, appears to have adapted an ancient Mayan prophecy that some people believe predicts the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012, and has been popularized by Hollywood movies such as “2012”.

“They are telling everyone that on Friday the sun will rise in the west and then disappear for three days and then there will be 72 days of terrible natural disasters starting from January 1, 2013,” one 24-year-old former cult member whose 50-year-old mother is still an adherent told the Financial Times. He asked not to be named because he feared retribution from the cult, which is also known as Lightning from the East.

“There are many examples of similar fringe religious movements in China, and this one has been around for a long time, but the difference now appears to be its move into politics and its calls to destroy the Communist Party,” said Tao Yong, a Canada-based historian and author who is an expert on the Taiping Rebellion. “In the past, I haven’t seen this particular group use this language of slaying the red dragon, and it is this sort of thing that hits a nerve for the Chinese government.”

According to the Dui Hua Human Rights Journal, the Church of Almighty God, also known as “Real God” church or “Eastern Lightning,” was founded by Zhao Weishan in Henan in the 1990s. The church also believes only believers will be saved and claims present-day China is an imperial family in decline.

In order to combat the unrest caused by the apocalypse, various news sources in China are refuting claims that the end of the world is near, from The Telegraph:

“It’s a normal, natural event,” Yang Guang, a Chinese astronomer, told Xinhua.

Speaking to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, Sun Xiaochun, a top professor from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: “The event will be as destructive as when we throw an old table calendar into the rubbish can at the end of the year.”

But Friday is just one of hundreds of dates for which the Apocalypse has been marked down. Despite nervousness in some corners of China, most people are unconvinced.

“Forget about the end of the world,” commentator Rong Xiaoqing instructed her readers in the Global Times. “Work a little toward saving the current one.”

CDT previously reported on a knife attack that injured 22 school children and the subsequent debate and comparison with the Newtown, Connecticut shooting. The Global Times has reported the school slasher was driven by the ‘doomsday’ belief and wanted to gain greater notoriety. NPR, citing Xinhua, has linked the apocalypse frenzy with the knife attack in Henan, from NPR:

Armed with a kitchen knife, the attacker in Henan province reportedly wounded 22 children and 1 adult. Xinhua reports that the suspected attacker, now arrested, was “strongly psychologically affected by rumors of the upcoming end of the world predicted by ancient prophecy.”

The victims of the Chinese attack are said to have suffered non-life-threatening injuries — many of them to their hands and ears. But the case has also sparked anger from Chinese citizens who say their state-run news media provided far more coverage of the U.S. attacks in Newtown than of the assault in Henan province.

Others who commented on the disparity noted that President Obama visited Newtown and showed both emotion and respect for the dead — something they say China’s leaders have not done.

According to The Guardian, despite these apocalypse rumors and unrest, some companies have tried to turn the end of the world into a business opportunity:

Some Chinese people have found less subversive ways of dealing with the prophesy. Companies have made waves on social media websites by offering doomsday holidays and bonuses. One farmer in Hebei province built seven buoyant steel-and-fibreglass “survival pods” in his garage. Each costs about £30,000, holds 14 people, and includes oxygen, food, water and safety belts. Another pod-maker in Zhejiang province has received 21 orders for his high-quality, custom-made arks. One sold for almost £500,000.

A farmer in the far-western Xinjiang Autonomous Region spent about £100,000 to build a barge-like ark with 60 tonnes of steel and 30 protective layers of fibre resin. “I invested all of my savings in the construction of this boat,” he told Chinese media. “When the time comes, everyone can take refuge in it.”

As CDT reported earlier, China’s Central Propaganda Department has issued directives to the media on reporting of end of the world prophecies.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: apocalypse, church of almighty god, Henan, rumors
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(Dan Piraro)

The following example of censorship instructions, issued to the media and/or Internet companies by various central (and sometimes local) government authorities, has been leaked and distributed online. Chinese journalists and bloggers often refer to those instructions as “Directives from the Ministry of Truth.” CDT has collected the selections we translate here from a variety of sources and has checked them against official Chinese media reports to confirm their implementation.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The original publication date is noted after the directives; the date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source.

Central Propaganda Department: All levels of the media must strictly vet reports on the so-called “end of the world.” Strengthen positive guidance and forcefully guard against the creation and spread of rumors, as well as working up panicked feelings. (December 10, 2012)

中宣部：各级媒体对所谓“世界末日”说法的报道，要严格把关，加强正面引导，大力防止造谣传谣，渲染恐慌情绪。

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, hoaxes, media censorship, Ministry of Truth, propaganda, rumors
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Local residents in Shuangliu and Longchang, two counties located in southwest China’s Sichuan province, have almost cleared shops there of candles and matches after speculation spread online that there would be three straight days of darkness starting Dec. 21, according to state-run Xinhua news agency. Vendors in both places are also selling supply packages and self-help manuals, according to the report.

[…] Worries about the world coming to an end are driving the Chinese to other drastic measures, including getting married. Xinhua reported that marriage registry offices in Xi’an, Hefei, Guangzhou and Shanghai have already maxed out their quota for approving marriages on Dec. 21.

[…] Surprising as it may be, the apocalypse panic in Sichuan pales in comparison to a salt-buying panic in 2011, triggered by more reasonable (though ultimately unfounded) fears over nuclear radiation spilling from Japan’s quake-damaged reactors. Chinese authorities arrested a 31-year old Internet user for “spreading salt rumors” via an online posting that urged people to stock up because radiation from Japan had polluted the sea off of China’s coast. Some Chinese citizens even demand refunds for their salt after finding themselves with more than they could use.

Both spates of hysteria have roots in more general anxieties, according to Peking University sociologist Lu Jiehua, who told Global Times that “this panic buying not only shows people’s fear of an upcoming apocalypse, but also reflects their sense of uncertainty toward life and society.”

Many other retailers have also seen commercial potential in mankind’s looming destruction, to the despair of Global Times’ Xuyang Jingjing:

Stores are […] hyping up their year-end promotions, capitalizing on an “end of the world” marketing opportunity. As the old saying goes, “when life gives you a lemon, make lemonade.” In this case, when the universe gives you a doomsday, cash in on others’ fear!

I’m hardly surprised by such business gimmicks anymore. Over the past few decades of rapid development, we’ve fostered the amazing ability to not just see the silver lining in every cloud; rather, we’ve managed to squeeze silver out of every cloud.

[…] They say money can’t buy you love or happiness. Well, maybe with the money you get from selling your kidney, you can buy that latest gadget that you perceive will make your life complete.

Sure, when the end comes we might die short of a kidney or some other vital organ. But at least we’ll be a lot happier.

(This refers to the case of an Anhui teenager who sold a kidney to buy an iPad and iPhone. The leader of the gang which arranged the operation was sentenced last month to five years in prison, while nine people involved have paid 1.48 million yuan in compensation.)

If retailers have pushed things too far, others have tried even shadier ways of cashing in on the looming cataclysm. From Chen Xiaoru, also at Global Times:

Shanghai police received 25 complaints about people prognosticating doomsday prophecies outside of residents’ homes in eight districts Wednesday and Thursday, the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau said on its official microblog.

The complaints, which police received over a 24-hour period, illustrate how serious some residents are taking the Mayan prophecies about the end of the world, which authorities fear might be exploited. “Police made the announcement because there might be people trying to take advantage of the prophecy to scam residents out of money,” said Zhu Liang, a press officer with Huangpu police.

[…] Other reports have emerged about scammers trying to cash in on people’s beliefs. In Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, two con artists tried to persuade residents to donate all their money to escape the end of the world, according to the Zhejiang Province police’s official microblog.

While impending doom has brought out the worst in some, it has inspired others to impressive feats of inventiveness and engineering. In Urumqi, Lu Zhenghai has invested his life’s savings in the construction of an ark. Should the end not come to pass, the half-finished vessel may have some potential as a tourist attraction. Yang Zongfu, meanwhile, has developed a 1.5 million yuan spherical life-pod capable of holding three people and a year’s supplies. Yang claims to have sold over a dozen of the capsules, though The Wall Street Journal was unable to verify this. The eve of reckoning also moved one Chengdu company to generously grant its staff two extra days of vacation.

Adam Minter examined the 2012 phenomenon at Bloomberg View last week, describing its debt to Hollywood and how it has become a channel for some subtly barbed political commentary.

City Express, a popular, state-owned evening newspaper in Zhejiang province, tweeted photos of the collapses with this commentary:

“Today three major collapses happened nationwide. 1. A sink hole opened near the Palace Station of the Nanjing Metro Line 3 and a bus filled with passengers fell into it … 2. In Xiamen, the Jiangjun Temple Road collapsed and four cars were destroyed; 3. At the Guangzhou headquarters of Hainan Airlines a portion of the construction collapsed, burying alive a father of twins. PS: This convinces one to believe in the Mayans!”

The intent of this tweet is a matter of some controversy. Some netizens see it as an attempt to shake off blame for poor infrastructure. “This is a man-made disaster,” wrote one user in the comment thread beneath the City Express tweet. A second expressed outrage that the Mayans would even be invoked under such circumstances: “Taking this kind of thing as an excuse for shoddy engineering?”

More likely, though, the comments are over-interpreting what is actually intended as a pointed critique of the local governments and contractors thought to be responsible for China’s shoddy buildings. As a state-run newspaper, City Express wouldn’t really dare to criticize so directly (or generally), so it has used the most convenient platform available: Mayan prophecy.

Minter later tweeted:

Anybody taking bets on whether/when Chinese microblogs ban doomsday/Maya/Apocalypse-related search terms? I say Dec 15.

— Adam Minter (@AdamMinter) December 11, 2012

Also on Sina Weibo, a widely shared spoof video of Australian prime minister Julia Gillard comforting her people in the face of “flesh eating zombies, demonic hell beasts or […] the total triumph of K-pop” sparked a clash of political cultures. From Monica Tan at Daily Life:

The video of Prime Minister “Ji La De”, as Gillard is called in Chinese, along with these reactions by Chinese web users says just as much about Chinese politics as it does Australian. The vast majority of Australians might react to such a video with mild amusement, but hardly consider it shocking stuff. In contrast, for Chinese audiences this kind of “larrikin” behaviour coming from the country’s most powerful leader is literally too strange to be believed, with partial credit surely due to Gillard’s deadpan delivery.

User sleepeat said: “This can’t be possible, that a head of state is talking this way.” [Gillard is not, in fact, a head of state.] While another called Sum Shudong wrote, “How many glasses or bottles has Sister Prime Minister drunk?” A few even accused Gillard of being crazy and irresponsible, with user Chen Yue Cyanni writing earnestly, “Why has the Prime Minister of Australia been convinced that all this end of the world business is true when this type of thing has no scientific basis? She’s misleading her country.”

Some sceptics do maintain that life will carry on as usual. Sina Weibo’s explanation of the candle panic-buying when it trended last week concluded (via Tea Leaf Nation) that: “Experts have stated: Anyone with a bit of scientific common sense knows that there will not be three days of consecutive darkness.” Xinhua consulted a range of authoritative figures who assured the public that there is no need to panic—at least, not about the Mayan calendar.

Science fiction author Wang Jinkang believes those convinced by the rumors would do well to focus more on the here and now, stating that they should be more wary of disasters caused by climate change, a possible shortage of freshwater and deadly pathogens.

“The rumors are a misinterpretation of the Maya calendar and are still going on,” said Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist for China’s lunar orbiter project, adding that he believes Dec. 21 will be a peaceful and safe day.

“The sun will still rise on Dec. 21. All reactions to the doomsday prophecy show a strong recognition of the crisis of human existence. However, these reactions should be rooted in science,” said Wang Sichao, an astronomer at the Nanjing Purple Mountain Observatory.

He explained that when the sun transforms from its current stable state into a red giant, its expansion will devour Earth, signaling the end for the human race and the very planet itself.

“However, that won’t happen for another 5 billion years. At that time, humans will have to be able to find a new home,” Wang Sichao said, adding that the best reaction to the rumors should be to cherish one’s life and loved ones.

A weary NASA has assembled a Frequently Asked Questions page debunking the 2012 Doomsday prophecies, while astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson addressed the issue in a 2009 video at Fora.TV:

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Anhui, commercialism, consumerism, crime, fraud, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Hefei, hoaxes, jokes, NASA, Peking University, rumors, scientists, Shanghai, Sichuan, sina weibo, tofu construction, Urumqi, xian, Zhejiang
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Two years ago, on June 4 — the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and the most sensitive date in the Chinese political calendar — Ji Pomin received a text message from a high-placed friend: It said that former president Jiang Zemin had been taken to a military hospital in a critical condition. Ji fired off a coded message to hundreds of people in his address book to seek confirmation, asking: “The Supreme Old Master ascended to heaven?” Many of Ji’s politically connected friends forwarded the text to their friends, who misinterpreted the cryptic question as a statement. By June 6, overseas Chinese websites were reporting that former president Jiang Zemin was dead.

[...] A few days after Ji’s text message, he received a phone call from someone claiming to be from a parcel delivery service. They said the package was too big to fit down the lane in which he lived, so he walked to nearby Dongdan, one of Beijing’s busiest shopping areas, to collect it. Standing there, he said, in the blind spot between two security cameras outside an upmarket wedding photography store, were two burly men. They pulled a cloth hood over Ji’s head and bundled him into a car.

[...] The daylight abduction of a princeling like Ji, in downtown Beijing, shows just how delicate the subject of elite politics has become. That Ji wasn’t tortured, that he felt emboldened to speak his mind, and that his captors politely drove him back to where they found him two days later, shows the privileges afforded by his status. The secret police had originally lured him out on to the street, says Ji, so they would not disturb his then 86 year-old mother, who had joined the revolutionary struggle with his father at the age of 14 in 1938. By contrast, Ji says they ransacked the homes of several people who received his message. And a historian whose work had influenced Ji’s negative views on Jiang was reportedly arrested and convicted of subversion in May 2011.

See more on “princelings“ and illegal detentions via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: illegal detentions, Jiang Zemin, kidnapping, princelings, rumors, stability maintenance, state security
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The translations are by Rogier Creemers of China Copyright and Media.

30 December 2005

(1) Websites may not play up the case of Cui Yingjie in Guizhou, for relevant information, only Xinhua copy is to be transmitted, information from other sources may not be used, do not set up special subjects, those already set up must be immediately removed, it may also not be discussed in forums. Management over forums, news trackers and blog websites must be strengthened, timely block and delete attacks, rumor fabrication, incitement and all other harmful information.

(2) Concerning the issue of litigation and compensation for the Songhua River pollution, without permission, this may not be reported on any website without exception, forums may also not discuss this, existing matters must be immediately removed. Management over forums, news trackers and other interactive columns must be strengthened, timely block and delete corresponding information.

30 December 2005

(1) All websites shall promptly make “Beijing News” into a filtering keyword for forums, news trackers and blog websites, and immediately implement this.

(2) Online public opinion management concerning the “6 December” incident in the Red Sea Bay, Shanwei, Guangdong must be further strengthened, strictly implement the spirit of the Information Office’s notices, further strengthen management over forums, blogs and individual websites, timely and firmly block and delete corresponding harmful information.

29 December 2005

Concerning the matter of today in the morning, where a man shot a home-made pistol on bus 14, do not send short messages, forums are not to report this.

Concerning the news of high-level change at the Beijing News, this is not to be reported or discussed without exception, please strictly implement this!

26 December 2005

The Independent Chinese PEN, presided over by Liu Xiaobo, recently has awarded the third “Freedom Writing Award” to Wu Si (Executive editor of the magazine “The Spring and Autumn of Yan Huang”), and awarded the “Lin Zhao Commemorative Award” to Hu Xuesong, concerning this matter, there are to be no online reports, forums are not to discuss or disseminate this, “Independent Chinese PEN,” “Freedom Writing Award” and “Lin Zhao Commemorative Award,” etc., may be made into keywords.

Concerning the matter of the associate head of a police station in Qingyuan, Guangdong being held as hostage, and being killed together with three villagers, apart from Xinhua copy, there is to be no reporting without exception, it may also not be issued in the important news section, do not set up special subjects, do not send short messages, forums are not to discuss this or spread rumors.

9 December 2005

All websites must further strengthen management over online public opinion concerning the incident in the Red Sea Bay, Shanwei, Guangdong and the mass incident at the Victory Oilfields, duty forces must be strengthened, the first contact person is to maintain 24-hour connectivity via mobile phone, guaranteeing that relevant management requirements are implemented timely and firmly; “Dongzhou” and “Victory Oilfields” are to be made into filtering keywords; all website forums and news trackers must firmly implement the system of examination first, publication second, and guarantee that all sorts of harmful information is timely blocked and deleted.

8 December 2005

Today, it has been received that articles concerning sisters of the Sacred Heart being beaten in Xi’an. Everyone seeing this content is to delete it without exception!!!

8 December 2005

Concerning the matter of a dispute arising between the Shantou Armed Police and villagers, with deaths and injuries (carelessness), this may not be reported without exception, it may not emerge in forums.

8 December 2005

Reports concerning a Master abusing a cat may no longer be published on the main page of websites and the main news page, no more surveys or crossfire-type content may be made.

8 December 2005

On the disaster at the Tangshan mine, only issue Xinhua copy, do not make large headlines, do not issue it at the top of the important news section do not publish it on the front page of websites, do not open news trackers, to not make it into a special topic. Forums are not to discuss the disaster at the Tangshan mine, corresponding commenting articles are not to be published without exception.

7 December 2005

1. The case of a vice-mayor in Jilin committing suicide is not to be reported without exception;

2. The case of the sudden incident of occupation of offices at the Victory Oilfields is not to be reported without exception;

3. Only use Xinhua copy for the case of a Central inspection group going to Jilin Chemical for investigation;

4. Only use Xinhua copy without exception for sudden incidents and natural disasters until the end of the year, do not place it in a prominent position, do not make large headlines, do not make focus pictures, do not make large titles, tracker quantities are to be strictly controlled.

1 December 2005

Concerning information on “Head Surgeon Takes Phone Call During Operation, Paralyzed Patient Claims 180,000 in Damages from the Armed Police General Hospital,” all websites are to report this no longer, do not play this matter up, close news trackers, play it down as soon as possible; the case of Li Jindou is not to appear on websites and news front pages; recently, some departments have dealt with a number of heretical organizations, not report this in any way.

The Hong Kong SAR government and the Hong Kong Chinese Liaison Office will organize a joint “Forum on Issues in the Political Development of Hong Kong” on the morning of 2 December in Shenzhen. All websites must timely transfer Xinhua copy well, and are not to use copy from any other source. They must handle this as regular news, not play this up and not set up special subjects. Management over forums, news trackers and other interactive columns must be strengthened, timely block and delete all sorts of harmful information not conform to the spirit of the Centre.

 

2005年12月北京网管办发出的禁令

2005-12-30

1、网站不要炒作贵州崔英杰案，有关消息只转发新华社通稿，不得使用其他来源的消息，不设专题，已开设的要立即撤除，论坛中也不讨论。要加强对论坛、新闻跟帖、博客网站的管理，及时封堵和删除攻击、造谣、煽动等各类有害信息。

2、关于松花江水污染诉讼和赔偿问题，未经允许，各网站一律不得报道，论坛也不讨论，已有的要立即撤除。要加强对论坛、新闻跟帖等互动栏目的管理，及时封堵和删除相关信息。
2005-12-30

1、各网站近期将“新京报”设为论坛、新闻跟帖和博客网站过滤关键词，立即执行

2、要进一步加强广东汕尾红海湾“12.6”事件网上舆论管理，严格贯彻新闻办通知精神，进一步加强对论坛、博客和个人网站的管理，及时、坚决地封堵删除相关有害信息。
2005-12-29

关于今天早上一男子在14路公交车上用自制手枪鸣枪一事不报道，不发短信，论坛不讨论。

关于新京报高层变动的新闻，一律不报道，不讨论，请严格执行！
2005-12-26

由刘晓波任会长的独立中文笔会，近日把第三届“自由写作奖”颁给吴思（《炎黄春秋》杂志执行主编），把“林昭纪念奖”颁给卢雪松，关于此事网上一律不报道，论坛不讨论，不传播，可把“独立中文笔会”、“自由写作奖”、“林昭纪念奖”等设为关键词。

有关广东清远一派出所副所长被劫持，与三村民同被杀一事，除新华社通稿外一律不报道，也不要发要闻区，不建专题，不发短信，论坛不讨论，不传谣。
2005-12-09

各网站要进一步加强对广东汕尾红海湾事件、胜利油田群体性事件网上舆论的管理，要加强值班力量，第一通知人保持手机24小时开通，确保有关管理要求 得到及时、坚决贯彻落实；将“东洲”、“胜利油田”增设为过滤关键词；各网站论坛和新闻跟帖要坚决落实先审后发制度，确保及时封堵和删除各类有害信息。
2005-12-08

今接到删除有关西安圣心修女被欧打的文章。大家看到有关此内容的一律删除！！！
2005-12-08

有关汕头武警与村民发生纠纷致人死伤一事（大意）一律不得报道 论坛中不得出现
2005-12-08

硕士虐猫事的相关报道不再发网站首页和新闻首页，也不再搞调查，交锋类内容。

2005-12-08

唐山矿难事，只发新华社稿，不做大头条，不发要闻区上部，不发网站首页，不开跟贴，不做专题。论坛不讨论唐山矿难一事，相关评论性文章一律不发。

2005-12-07

1.吉林一副市长自杀一事一律不报;

2.胜利油田突发性抢占办公楼事件一律不报;

3.中央调查组赴吉化调查一事只发新华社通稿;

4.岁末有关突发性事件与自然灾害一律只用新华社通稿,不发突出位置,不做大头条，不做焦点图，不做大标题,跟帖数量严格控制.

2005-12-01

有关”主刀医生手术中接听电话，患者面瘫向武警总医院索赔18万”的消息，各网站不再继续报道，不要炒作此事，关闭新闻跟帖，尽快淡化；李金斗事不再上网站和新闻首页；最近有关部门对一些邪教组织进行处理，不做任何报道。

香港特区政府和香港中联办于12月2日上午在深圳共同举办“香港政制发展问题座谈会”。各网站要及时转发好新华社通稿，不使用其他任何来源稿件。要作正常新闻处理，不炒作，不设专题。要加强对论坛、新闻跟帖等互动栏目管理，及时封堵和删除与中央精神不符的各类有害言论。

These translated directives were first posted by Rogier Creemers on China Copyright and Media on November 14, 2012 (here).

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Beijing Internet Instructions, Beijing News, censorship, Censorship Vault, Cui Yingjie, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, dongzhou, Guangdong, Guizhou, Hong Kong, Hu Xuesong, Internet censorship, jilin, Li Jindou, Lin Zhao, Liu Xiaobo, Ministry of Truth, rumors, Shantou, Shenzhen, Songhua River, Tangshan, Wu Si, xian, Xinhua
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The translations are by Rogier Creemers of China Copyright and Media.

17 October 2005

I. There are to be no online reports concerning the matter of Guangzhou laborers blocking the road and demanding salaries without exception, already published matters must be immediately removed, communities and forums may not discuss this.

Concerning the Wang Binyu case, without authorization, there is to be no more online reporting, communities and forums may not discuss this.

II. Concerning network propaganda after Koizumi visits the Yasukuni Shrine:

(1) Websites having news publishing qualifications must timely and correctly transmit the declarations of our country’s government.

(2) Concerning reports on issues involving Japan, websites are only to transmit the corresponding reports and commentaries of the People’s Daily and Xinhua, without permission, no copy from any other source may be used, and especially information from foreign media may not be edited and issued.

(3) Management over forums, news posts, chat rooms, short mobile message information, instant communication groups, etc. must be strengthened, forum posts must be examined first and issued afterwards without exceptions, harmful information of rumor fabrication, rumor dissemination, inciting demonstrations and rallies, organizing signings, attacking the Party and government as well as our foreign policies, etc., is to be deleted without exception.

13 October 2005

The Network Supervision Office today notified: because of the “graduate student” registration work as well as news reports concerning the “adult higher education examination,” etc., many information related to “sharpshooters sitting the exam,” “online question selling,” etc., has emerged in large numbers, websites are requested to strengthen supervision and control on information in this aspect, as soon as it is discovered, report it upwards together with the daily post deletion situation.

11 October 2005

(1) Concerning online reporting requirements on the “Shanghai Dongqian Company Arson Incident.”

Reports concerning the arson incident in the Dongqian Company, Shanghai, must not be played up by any website, do not set up special subjects, forums are also not to discuss this anymore, existing discussions are to be removed without exception. Management over forums and news trackers must be strengthened, discussions that are wantonly accusatory, distorted or inflammatory must be timely deleted.

(2) Concerning instructions on not transmitting two articles on “Tengzhou Seeks to Be Under Provincial Governance.”

All websites may not transmit the two inaccurate articles published by the “Caijing Times” on 7 October, “County Level Is ‘Losing Blood,’ Tengzhou Seeks Provincial Governance” and “How Long Is the Wait for a ‘Provincially-Managed County’?,” already transmitted matters must be removed as soon as possible, it may not be discussed in forums. All websites must strengthen management over forums, and timely block or delete corresponding harmful information.

(3) Concerning instructions on online propaganda on the “Fujian Typhoon Disaster Situation”

Concerning reporting the Fujian typhoon disaster situation, all websites may not play this up, are to use copy from main central and local news work units, and are to handle it as an ordinary news item. Management over forums and news trackers must be strengthened, timely block all sorts of harmful information of rumor fabrication, rumor dissemination, incitement, etc.

Concerning the requirements on online reporting of the “Especially Large Fire on 2 October in Some Armed Police Camp in Fujian,” all websites are only to use Xinhua copy, it is strictly prohibited to use information from any other source, do not set up news trackers, forums may not discuss this. Management must be further strengthened, timely block up and delete rumors, inciting organizations to “appeal” and all other sorts of harmful information.

11 October 2005

Focus points for supervision and control this week:

(1) All online comments aimed at the 10th National Games, the 5th Asia-Pacific City Mayor Summit and the Second China-ASEAN Exhibition, as well as information all sorts of mass incidents, sudden incidents and other matters influencing social stability during those times.

(2) Domestic and foreign online information related to the Chongqing Special Steel labor strike incident, the rights defense incident of the Chongqing Special Steel laborers, the case of the Shanbei People-Run Oil case and all other rights defense activities and mass-type incidents.

(3) All sorts of online comments aimed at the 5th Plenum of the 16th Party Congress and all sorts of information during that time on mass incidents, sudden incidents and other information influencing social stability.

(4) Domestic and foreign information playing up the Guangdong Taishi village case.

(5) Domestic and foreign information on activities and persons related to Japan’s preserving the Diaoyu islands.

6 October 2005

Delete the article titled “Police Chase Police to Kill Them–Only Because Reporting that the Police Commissioner Supports Mistress Police Officer,” its content is that officer Xu Jian from the Qinhuangdao City Public Security Bureau Port Office’s Second Criminal Section, because the wife of the Public Security Bureau Commissioner let him kill a mistress police officer supported by the Commissioner, reported this to the relevant provincial authorities after refusing.

5 October 2005

Everyone: on the case of relevant personnel of Beiqing Media being arrested, only report copy from central focus websites, do not let it on website main pages, do not issue it in the important news section, do not create special subjects, corresponding links, short messages or trackers, forums are not to discuss this.

3 October 2005

Everyone: Camp 1 of the Fujian Armed Police is destroyed by a typhoon, a number of personnel is missing, all websites are to use Xinhua copy without exception: auditing departments announced the auditing report results of 32 departments, report the vigorous reform situation of all work units more. Also, on 4 October, on 12:29, information is received: trackers must examine first and post later, and only positive discussion can be issues, forums are to be strictly managed.

2005年10月北京网管办发出的禁令
2005年10月17日

一、

有关广州工人堵路讨薪事网上一律不报道，已转载的要立即撤除，公社及论坛中都不要讨论。

有关王斌余案，未经授权，网上不再报道，公社及论坛中都不要讨论。

二、

关于小泉参拜靖国神社后的网络宣传

1、具有登载新闻资质的网站要及时、准确地转发我国政府对此事的表态。

2、有关涉日问题的报道，网站只转发人民日报和新华社的相关报道和评论，未经允许，不得使用其他任何来源的稿件，尤其不得编发境外媒体的消息。

3、要加强对论坛、新闻跟帖、聊天室、手机短信息、即时通讯群组等的管理，论坛帖文一律先审后发，对造谣、传谣、煽动示威游行和集会、组织签名、攻击党和政府以及我对外政策等各类有害信息一律删除。
2005-10-13

网监处今日通知：由于近日“研究生”报名工作以及“成人高考”等考试方面新闻报道。网上出现大量关于“枪手代考”、“网上卖题”等相关信息，请网站加强这方面信息的监控，一经发现随每日删贴情况及时上报。
2005-10-11

1、关于“上海动迁公司纵火事件”的网上报道要求

有关上海动迁公司纵火事件的报道，各网站不要炒作，不开设专题，论坛也不再讨论，现有讨论一律撤除。要加强对论坛和新闻跟帖的管理，对肆意攻击、歪曲、煽动性言论要及时删除。

2、关于不转载《滕州谋求省辖》等两篇文章的提示

各网站不要转载《财经时报》10月7日登载的《县域“失血” 滕州谋求省辖》和《“省管县”还要等多久？》等两篇失实文章，已转载的要尽快撤除，论坛中不讨论。各网站要加强对论坛的管理，及时封堵删除相关有害信息。

3、关于“福建台风灾情”网上宣传提示

有关福建台风灾情的报道，各网站不要炒作，只使用中央和地方主要新闻单位的稿件，做一般新闻处理。要加强对论坛和新闻跟帖的管理，及时封堵删除造谣、传谣、煽动等各类有害信息。

关于“‘10?2’武警福建某营地特大灾害”事网上报道要求，各网站只使用新华社通稿，严禁使用其他任何来源消息，不开设新闻跟帖，论坛也不讨论。要进一步加强管理，及时封堵删除散布谣言、煽动组织“上诉”等各类有害信息。
2005-10-11

本周监控重点

1：网上各种针对十运会、第五界亚太城市市长峰会、第二届中国－东盟博览会的评论及期间各种群体性事件、突发事件等影响社会稳定的信息。

2：境内外网上有关重庆特钢工人罢工事件、重特钢工人维权事件、陕北民营石油案等各类维权活动、群体性事件的信息。

3：网上各种针对十六届五中全会的评论及会议期间各种群体性事件、突发事件等影响社会稳定的信息。

4:境内外网上炒作广东太石村案的相关信息

5:境内外有关涉日保钓的相关活动和人员信息。
2005-10-6

删除标题为《警察追杀警察 只因举报公安局长包养二奶警察》的文章，其内容为秦皇岛市公安局海港分局原刑警二队侦察员徐健，因为公安局局长夫人让他杀局长包的二奶警察被拒绝后向省里有关部门做了举报的文章。
2005-10-5

各位：北青传媒有关人员被捕一事，只发中央重点网站稿件，不上网站首页，不发要闻区，不做专题，相关链接，短信，跟帖，论坛不讨论。

2005-10-3

各位：福建武警一营地被台风冲毁，部分人员失踪，各网站一律用新华社通稿：审计署公布32个部门审计报告结果，多报道各单位积极整改情况。另外10月4日12：29收到消息：跟帖必须先审后发且只发正面言论，论坛严格管理。

These translated directives were first posted by Rogier Creemers on China Copyright and Media on November 12, 2012 (here).

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 16th Party Congress, ASEAN, Beijing, Beijing Internet Instructions, censorship, Censorship Vault, Chongqing, diaoyu islands, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, Dongqian, Fujian, Guangdong, Guangzhou, Internet censorship, Japan, koizumi, mass incidents, Ministry of Truth, people's daily, rumors, Shanbei, Shanghai, Taishi, Tengzhou, Wang Binyu, Xinhua, Yasukuni Shrine
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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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Two theories on the deadly smog soon emerged. The most popular, and the least serious, was that Wuhan’s high school students were burning their books in the wake of graduation and the much-hated college entrance examination. The more serious was that a large-scale industrial accident had taken place. Boiled Universe, the handle of a Wuhan-based Sina Weibo user of no great importance, was one of hundreds of microbloggers who offered a variation: “It’s said that a boiler explosion at Wuhan Iron & Steel caused large volumes of toxic dust and smoke to spread, enveloping the whole of Wuhan, and the death of two people.” Others not only promoted the rumor, they did so by re-tweeting what they claimed was a photo of a chlorine gas leak at Wuhan Iron & Steel. (Another microblogger later offered definitive proof that the photo was six months old).

Someone from Wuhan Iron & Steel Co. Ltd, clearly incensed by the rumor-mongering, logged into the company’s Sina Weibo account (the company has 900 followers, billions in revenue) to deny responsibility for the haze . But that was destined to go nowhere: Few in China are going to take the word of a giant state-owned steel company, especially when it comes to rumors about large industrial accidents. By mid-afternoon, fears of a chlorine gas leak had become so prevalent (online, at least), that the Wuhan Fire Department felt compelled to tweet on Sina Weibo to inform its 95,000 followers that over the course of Monday, it had removed two hornet’s nests, caught a snake and put out five small fires, but it had not, under any circumstance, responded to a major alarm, much less a “so-called chemical leak and explosion.”

Local authorities then went further. From Bloomberg, the following day:

Police in the Chinese city of Wuhan detained two people for spreading rumors that heavy pollution in the capital of Hubei province was caused by an industrial accident, a newspaper controlled by the local Communist Party reported.

The Changjiang Daily, supervised by Wuhan’s party committee, said government departments denied rumors the smog that covered the city June 11 was related to an industrial accident or the leaking of toxic gases. The newspaper didn’t give more information about the people detained or the rumors.

After some investigation, Wuhan’s Environmental Protection Bureau blamed burning of straw by farmers for the pollution, in a statement translated and circulated by the US embassy in Beijing:

An analysis of the air indicates the pollution is caused from burning of plant material northeast of Wuhan.

[…] According to our investigation, the abnormal air quality in our city is mainly caused by the burning of the crops northeast of Wuhan towards Hubei province. Similar air quality is occurring in Jiangsu, Henan and Anhui provinces, as well as in Xiaogan, Jingzhou, Jingmen and Xiantao, cities nearby Wuhan.

The straw burning explanation was, as Minter described, greeted with some incredulity. Farmers had long burned straw as fuel, but Monday’s pollution was exceptional, and its intensity seemed to point to an industrial source. But according to Cornell University air quality expert Dane Westerdahl, America’s only source of “beyond index” pollution scores is not industrial activity, but forest fire. Using straw as fuel spread the burning out over many months. With coal and natural gas replacing it in this role, and other traditional uses also disappearing, straw is now incinerated in vast quantities simply for disposal, producing greater, more concentrated amounts of smoke than in the past. Jiang Gaoming described this shift in a 2007 article at chinadialogue, pointing out that with some organisation and investment, the straw could instead be used to produce beef, fertilising manure or carbon-neutral energy.

In northern China it is now the middle of the autumn planting season, and once again the farmers are burning off the crop stubble left after the harvest. The highways that run through the fields are covered in smoke, which seeps in through closed windows and can reduce visibility to half a kilometre. It gets worse at night; crop fires are illegal, so the farmers wait till it gets dark to avoid getting caught. However, you were unlikely to see this a decade ago ….

So why are the farmers so determined to burn off their leftover straw? Because there is nothing else to do with it. In the past the straw was used as fuel, but now farmers are more affluent and burn coal or natural gas. At one time it could also have been used to feed draught animals, but now they have been replaced with tractors. The government has promoted the use of straw in methane production, but to date only 0.5% of China’s total 600 to 700 [million?] tonnes of straw produced annually is used to make the gas. Ideally it could feed livestock, but the cost of storing straw and the livestock itself makes this unfeasible. Even if you fed the entire nation’s herds with straw, there would still be a lot left over. One could increase the number of ruminants, but China’s straw is scattered around the country and the cost of collecting and transporting it is high. If farmers cannot make a decent profit from it (and they no longer care about earning a few yuan here and there) it will be burnt off to prevent it getting in the way of other work.

The immediate grab for explanations involving hushed-up accidents, and the widespread rejection of the one offered by the local government, show the depths to which trust on public safety issues has sunk. New rules requiring publication of PM2.5 data for cities around China, overdue or not, were a sign of progress on this front. More recent developments such as the arrests of the alleged rumour-mongers in Wuhan and demands for the US embassy to stop tweeting its own air quality measurements seem to indicate a backward step. At chinadialogue, Greenpeace’s Zhou Rong argued that, while the American @BeijingAir monitor does indeed accentuate negative readings, silencing it is not a solution. Instead, the government’s best means of overcoming public scepticism is greater transparency.

First, the government should face up to the severity of the air-pollution problem. China has long looked to traditional pollutant indicators like PM10 (coarse particulates) to evaluate air quality, but not PM2.5 levels. The result is a picture of air pollution that is, at times, too rosy – and out of step with public perceptions.

[…] Second, although most Chinese cities have now started to publish PM2.5 figures – a major step forward – they remain evasive about the health implications of that data. The public don’t understand what a daily average PM2.5 figure of 35ug/m3 or 75ug/m3 means for their health. They just want to know if their elderly parents can go out for a stroll or their kids can go out to play, but the raw statistics they are given don’t tell them that. In the absence of more “human” data, it is hardly surprising that so many citizens, concerned about their families, turned to the US embassy’s feed and its depressing litany of warnings – exaggerations that have worsened the fear and mistrust of the government.

It isn’t complicated stuff. But escalating it to a political – even a diplomatic – issue may just make it so. To regain public trust, all that the Chinese government needs to do is push its existing systems of data disclosure further, and provide accurate information in a format the public can digest and use. Breathing air under the same piece of sky every day, ordinary Chinese people make their own judgements about the state of their environment. And when it comes to statistics, urban residents will judge their veracity by their own experience.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture, air pollution, air quality, chemical leak, farming, greenpeace, industrial accident, PM2.5, public opinion, public safety, rumors, United States, wuhan
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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.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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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The interviews help reveal how what began as gossip made the rounds in expatriate circles in Beijing until it became an accepted truth about the Bo family. One person who told the version of the story that eventually surfaced was Mr. Huntsman, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination after his stint here as ambassador. At least two diplomats in Beijing said they heard it from him before he left Beijing in late April 2011. (The New York Times reported this April that American officials had said Bo Guagua came to the ambassador’s residence in a Ferrari. )

Ms. Livingston, one of two Huntsman daughters at the dinner, said in her role as family spokeswoman, “My dad’s version of the story has always been a reflection of what we told him.”

The way the story caught fire so quickly shows the kind of fascination that the lifestyles of China’s elite can evoke in a nation where the upper echelons of the party exist in a world apart from those they govern.

“I did not drive at all that evening, and certainly did not sit in a red sports car,” Bo Guagua said by telephone on Friday, in his first interview since his father was deposed and both parents were put under investigation. “I’m not sure where this story comes from.”

Even Mr. Bo’s appearance was wrong in the account: he did not wear a tuxedo, people at the dinner said.

Bo issued a statement to the Harvard Crimson last week in which he refuted allegations made about his lifestyle and denied that he had driven in a Ferrari.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Guagua, Ferrari, rumors, United States
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