Police from Xinyu, in the southern province of Jiangxi, detained Liu for “inciting subversion of state power”, her lawyer, Zheng Jianwei, told Reuters, by telephone. The charge is often leveled against critics of the party.

Police could not be reached for comment.

Liu, who has also advocated on women’s rights issues, last year started demanding that officials disclose their assets, Zheng said. She took her campaign to the internet and to fellow Chinese.

Zheng said he did not know the exact reason for Liu’s detention, but added that he had warned her “to be aware of her actions” six months ago.

A fellow activist told Patrick Boehler of the South China Morning Post that Liu was one of eight people who were apprehended by unidentified men on April 27 as they prepared to travel to Suzhou to commemorate Peking University student who was executed during the Cultural Revolution for criticizing the Communist Party:

Two of the people detained along with Liu have been released, Jiang said. One of them, Li Xizhen, shared on her microblog photos of bruises from beatings she said she had sustained in police custody. Li could not be reached on the phone.

Liu’s daughter, Liao Minyue, who on her microblog has documented several unsuccessful requests for information on her mother’s fate, declined to comment for fear of harming her mother’s case.

“Because the law doesn’t require relatives to be notified for such charges, we actually don’t know how many people have been arrested and charged,” said Hangzhou-based lawyer Wang Cheng, who has previously helped Liu in legal matters.

He said he could so far only confirm that five people including Liu were still detained, but only the charges against Liu had been made known, he said.

Police in Beijing detained four activists in early April for holding up banners in a public square demanding that top government officials publicly declare their assets, and four more were detained later in the month for participating in the street campaign. The issue of financial disclosure has simmered since last year, when some officials at the 18th Party Congress told foreign reporters that they would be open to the idea as a way to curb corruption. It also became a popular Weibo topic after Global Times Chief Editor Hu Xijin addressed financial disclosure on his own microblog.

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Post tags: assets, detention, financial disclosure, Jiangxi, official corruption, sina weibo, Xi Jinping
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The deal values Weibo at about $3.3 billion — equivalent to Sina’s entire market value as of Friday.

Alibaba and Sina also agreed to cooperate in improving ways to marry social networking with e-commerce, as microblogging services like Sina’s continue to grow in popularity. Sina Weibo said that last year it had more than 46 million daily active users, an increase of 82 percent from the period a year earlier.

Alibaba also retains the option to increase its stake to 30 percent in the future, according the Financial Times, as one research analyst said that the deal “suggests that Alibaba’s ambitions go beyond just commerce.” The Wall Street Journal reports that the deal also highlights Alibaba’s desire to compete more closely with Tencent Holdings, whose Weixin chat application has emerged to rival Sina Weibo.

Some analysts said that Alibaba’s offer for Weibo was generous, according to Reuters, though they pointed out the potential benefits of the strategic alliance:

“(The stake purchase) is as an endorsement from Alibaba … of the value of Sina’s Weibo platform,” Morningstar analyst Dan Su said.

“This indicates the tremendous value of the data that is present on the Weibo platform that can be mined for a lot of activities, such as ecommerce.”

…

“We believe this deal is very positive for Sina. It instantly gives pricing to Sina Weibo with a valuation of $3.26 billion; the per share base could be $48,” T.H. Capital Research analyst Tian Hou said.

“Sina’s resource consolidation with Alibaba Group, which has a huge dominant position in China’s e-commerce, can escalate Weibo’s development,” she said.

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Post tags: alibaba, e-commerce, jack ma, mergers and acquisitions, microblogging, sina weibo, social media, tencent, WeChat
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To be sure, some of Mr. Obama’s jokes managed to cross the culture barrier just fine. Photoshopped images of the president sporting a set of bangs to mask his receding hairline required little in the way of translation in a country where leaders are renowned for adulterating their comb-overs with the liberal quantities of black hair dye.

But for most Chinese commenters, more noteworthy than the individual one-liners was the general air of self-assuredness Mr. Obama displayed in making fun of his own foibles and failures—a self-assuredness many said they wished was more evident in their own leaders.

[…] Interestingly, quite a few Chinese viewers focused their attention on the end of Mr. Obama’s speech, when he dispensed with the jokes to argue that public officials and the media “can do better” in living up to standards set by the first responders and others who helped in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and other recent challenges.

“In the end Obama also said ‘serve the people,’” one Sina Weibo user observed. “It sounded so natural coming from him.”

Obama’s speech can be viewed at WhiteHouse.gov.

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Post tags: Barack Obama, leaders, netizens' voices, serve the people, sina weibo, United States, weibo, White House
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The Tianzi Road Project is an important source of political capital for local Party leaders in Xinjiang and there has been pressure in recent months to complete phase two. On April 16, just two days before the on-site accident, local media reported that work on the project had been accelerated.

One source in Xinjiang, who requested anonymity given the local sensitivity of this story, said many problems had been exposed at the Tianzi Road Project and that the local government had violated normal construction procedures for the sake of “political point scoring” (政府为了政绩违背建设规律一味最求速度). The source also alleged that the Urumqi Evening Post had sent two inexperienced interns to the Tianzi Road Project worksite because it believed they would be more amenable to the propaganda goals of the local leadership.

According to the Xinjiang source, the accident on April 18 happened on a section of the project directly across from Urumqi’s famous bazaar, the “Dabazha.” The source also told CMP that the reporting intern killed in the accident, Bailu (拜璐), belongs to China’s muslim Hui minority.

The priority nature of the infrastructure project and the ethnicity of the intern who was killed both make this a potentially sensitive story for the local leadership.

Bandurski further reports that Sina Weibo users noticed when the Urumqi Evening Post deleted one post on the story and removed specific details from another. with some netizens speculating that local officials wanted to distance themselves and the project from the tragedy.

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Post tags: construction project, infrastructure projects, netizens, online public opinion, sina weibo, Urumqi, Xinjiang
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The men arrested last week include Zhao Changqing, a democracy advocate who has been jailed several times in the past; Ding Jiaxi, a human rights lawyer; and two activists, Sun Hanhui and Wang Yonghong. All four are being held at Beijing No. 3 Detention Center, lawyers for the men said.

According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a nongovernmental organization based in Washington, the whereabouts of two other activists, Qi Yueying and Li Wei, were unknown on Friday.

Liang Xiaojun, a lawyer who represents several of those detained, said prison officials would allow him to see only one of the detainees, claiming that the others were still being interrogated by the police. “I doubt this case will go through normal procedures,” he said. “Can you imagine a trial for a group of activists who demanded that government officials disclose their assets? I don’t see that trial happening.”

Analysts say the crackdown on dissent, coupled with newly announced media restrictions and the absence of any new anticorruption initiatives, are gnawing away at any hopes that Mr. Xi will embrace the rule of law and clean government.

The issue of financial disclosure has simmered since last year, when some officials at the 18th Party Congress told foreign reporters that they would be open to the idea as a way to curb corruption. It also became a popular Weibo topic after Global Times Chief Editor Hu Xijin addressed financial disclosure on his own microblog.

One rights lawyer told Voice of America that the family of one of the activists, prominent human rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi, received official notice last Thursday that he had been detained the previous evening:

Li says the activists have been charged because of their participation in a street campaign calling on officials to disclose their assets.

“It’s hard to say what is going to happen. Administrative detention can be expanded up to 37 days,” he said. “Then there will be an investigation and then a trial. How long this all will take depends on how important they consider the case to be.”

Xu Zhiyong, another prominent rights lawyer in China, is founder of the New Citizens Movement – a group that seeks to promote social justice, political and legal reforms. He is being held under what he called “illegal house arrest” and spoke to VOA by phone Friday.

“Up until yesterday, eight people who advocate asset disclosure by officials have been detained,” he said. “They have been accused of illegal gathering, but we believe this is illegal, because citizens have the right to assemble and demonstrate freely.”

The latest round of detentions came just before Xi Jinping addressed a group of Politburo members last Friday about the country’s anti-corruption efforts, according to Xinhua News. In a South China Morning Post opinion piece published Monday, Chinese writer and journalist Xiao Shu claimed that Xi’s administration “is sending very contradictory signals about its commitment to the rule of law and the fight against corruption.”

What is the long-term interest of the Communist Party? I would argue that it is in leading China, by means of peaceful transformation, into democracy and national reconciliation. Look no further than Chiang Ching-kuo and Lee Teng-hui, the last two non-democratically elected presidents of Taiwan, who did exactly that for the island. Any other path would be not only self-destructive for the party, but also catastrophic for the whole nation. To transform themselves and transform China, the Communist rulers must open the door to civil movements that will usher in a civil society.

In this sense, activists like Xu Zhiyong, Wang Gongquan and Ding Jiaxi are not only heroes of civil movements, but also champions of public interest and allies of the Communist Party. In his push for the rule of law and war on corruption, Xi is coming up against the powerful special interest groups within his party, and has no chance of winning without soliciting the help of a strong civil society.

The persecution against these activists thus can be seen as an effort by the special-interest groups to sabotage Xi’s reforms. They were successful in the past 10 years, during the rule of Hu and Wen – the security apparatus launched a series of stifling blows against the burgeoning civil movements. In doing so, they also tamed and manipulated then top leaders including Hu and Wen, turning their “golden decade” into one of the biggest political jokes in modern Chinese history. Whether they will succeed again in Xi‘s time remains to be seen.

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Post tags: Beijing, detention, financial disclosure, official corruption, sina weibo, Xi Jinping
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Ma Gangquan, one of the lawyers, said the activists were dumbfounded by their treatment.

“Our leaders are the ones who came up with the ‘China Dream’ slogan, vowing to rule by law and to fight corruption,” said Mr. Ma, who represents Ma Xinli, 47, an employee in the logistics department of a Beijing bus company. “Their goal was simply to make his cause their own.”

Another lawyer, Ding Xikui, complained that the police bloodied the face of his client, Hou Xin, as they dragged her away.

Although it is unlikely that Mr. Xi and other top leaders were aware of the protest, rights advocates say the detentions, coupled with the recent harassment of other people fighting corruption, are a worrying sign that the leadership is determined to constrain any populist campaigning on an issue central to the president’s agenda.

A number of political activists have signed a petition in favor of the so-called “sunshine law,” according to Radio Free Asia, which spoke to the wife of one of the detained demonstrators:

“[The leadership], including Xi Jinping, is always talking about having officials declare their assets, but they’re all talk and no action,” Zhu said.

“And now that we citizens have taken this action, the police crack down on us,” she said. “We didn’t do anything destructive or violent; we just wanted to speak out.”

Online transparency campaigner Sun Hanhui said a number of rights lawyers have offered to defend the activists.

“Some lawyers have already agreed to represent and defend the case this morning,” Sun, who works in a law firm, said on Tuesday. “They are putting together a legal team, and eventually they will announce it.”

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Post tags: assets, Beijing, detention, financial disclosure, official corruption, sina weibo, Xi Jinping
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Liang said his client, Yuan Dong, was taken into police custody along with three other activists for criminal investigation after they held banners in the Xidan Culture Square in Beijing’s Xicheng district on Sunday afternoon calling for greater disclosure of officials’ assets to improve the transparency of governance and combat official corruption.

Yuan, 45, was being held in the Beijing No3 Detention Centre along with two other activists, Zhang Baocheng and Ma Xinli, Liang said, but the whereabouts of the fourth activist, Hou Xin, was unknown.

Beijing police did not respond to an inquiry about the detentions yesterday.

The activists’ street campaign is part of a broader civil campaign launched in December calling for top government officials to declare their assets publicly to help fight rampant official corruption.

The issue has simmered since last year, when some officials at the 18th Party Congress told foreign reporters that they would be open to the idea as a way to curb corruption. It also became a popular Weibo topic after Global Times Chief Editor Hu Xijin addressed financial disclosure on his own microblog.

On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch urged the government to release the activists, calling the detentions “the harshest action yet against activists involved in a grass-roots campaign to press the government to honor its promise to fight corruption:”

“The detention of four anti-corruption activists calls into question President Xi Jinping’s commitment to get tough on graft,” said Sophie Richardson, China director, “The government’s treatment of these activists is a litmus test about whether Xi’s campaign to end China’s corruption epidemic is more than mere rhetoric and a few show cases.”

Police in Beijing arrested the activists – Hou Xin, Yuan Dong, Zhang Baocheng and Ma Xinli – on March 31, 2013. The four were displaying large banners with slogans such as “require officials to publicly disclose assets” and “unless we put an end to corrupt officials, the China Dream can only be daydreams.” The activists also gave a speech about the need to address corruption in Xidan Cultural Plaza in Beijing’s Xicheng District.

Police arrested them for “illegal assembly,” which carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Yuan, Zhang, and Ma are being held in Beijing’s No. 3 Detention Center, while Hou is in No. 1 Detention Center. Under Chinese law, anyone accused of a crime is entitled to a lawyer within 48 hours of being taken into police custody. The police may detain a person for 37 days before they are required to obtain permission from the prosecutor’s office for a formal arrest.

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Post tags: assets, Beijing, detention, financial disclosure, human rights watch, official corruption, sina weibo, Xi Jinping
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The survey by the Chinese Academy of Governance found that by December 20, 2012, a total of 176,700 weibo accounts had been opened by government organs and officials on the four major domestic weibo service providers.

The figure is a 249.5 percent increase from the end of 2011.

[...]The accounts were opened by Communist Party committees, government departments, courts and prosecutors, as well as committees of local people’s congress and political advisory bodies. Some of the accounts were opened by cadres and officials under their real names.

The report said government organs opened 113,400 weibo accounts, up 250 percent year on year. The number of officials’ accounts rose 248 percent to 63,300.

At the end of last year, Danwei covered a similar report focusing more narrowly on the government use of Sina Weibo [zh], one of China’s most popular microblogging sites. After summarizing the report’s findings, Danwei translates its predicted government microblogging trends for 2013:

1. Government microblogging will become more scientific and more standardized While 2012 could still be characterized as somewhat of an experimental phase for government microblogging, 2013 will see more standardized microblogging practices with the implementation of rules and standards on how to use Weibo and exactly what content can be uploaded by whom.

2. Government microblogging to become more youth-oriented Young people are clearly the major users of new forms of media such as Weibo, and the operators of government Weibo accounts will strive to better harness the participation of energetic and passionate youth. This will change the style and operational procedures of government Weibo accounts.

3. Government microblogging to deepen and expand to new areas 2012 not only saw a vast increase in government microblogs to more than 60,000, it also saw an expansion of microblogging engagement both at the top level ministries and at the very bottom of the use of social media in the grassroots. In 2013, in terms of quality we can expect government microblogging to expand further into new areas such as industry and administration and other areas to expand the government’s provision of information and to strengthen social management of innovation.

Also listen to a recent China Radio International broadcast covering government use of microblogs and websites.

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Post tags: e-government, government PR, microblogs, sina weibo, weibo
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The public mood seemed to be favourable for CCTV until around 8:26pm, when Taiwanese actor Peter Ho, posted the following message on his Weibo: “Apple plays so many tricks with their customer service? I feel hurt as an Apple fan. Have you done right by [Steve] Jobs? Have you done right by boys who sell their kidneys [to buy iphones], he asked, adding: “this is an example of big-name shops bullying customers.”

Ho’s message ended with a short line which soon became notorious: “To publish around 8.20pm.”

But it was nothing to be missed by sharp-eyed netizens and eager fans.

Minutes later, criticism, speculation and theories were posted on Weibo about Ho’s 8.20pm statement.

Within two hours, Ho claimed in a new post that somebody had commandeered his Weibo account and posted the controversial message. But the post had gone viral before authorities censored it, according to the Atlantic’s Liz Carter, and the incident was picked up by every major Chinese news organization. Netizens ridiculed both Ho and CCTV, and one well-known author who had denied on his Weibo that he had accepted money to post supportive comments. Kaifu Lee, the Google executive and well-known blogger who had not joined the fray, admitted that CCTV had invited him to post comments.

The chatter continued into Monday, according to David Bandurski at the China Media Project, who posted a screenshot of Peter Ho’s Weibo account. Bandurski also partially translated a blog post from Chinese writer Li Chengpeng which chided CCTV for its behavior:

It’s not that you can’t do some things on and off the air to go along with the fight against fakes. But you cannot use public power to make targeted strikes against those who aren’t your major advertisers. Of course you can criticise Apple, but you cannot let all of these domestically manufactured fraudulent goods off the hook when you could so easily investigate them, then turn a harsh and uncompromising eye on a mobile brand that leads the world in overall quality — even making it out to be something of great concern to the people, a form of national discrimination . . . The thing is, you’ve always done things this way. You act all the time like you don’t give a damn about your own face, and then you place the condom of state power over the instrument of your own private profit.

Those enterprises are bad, but what you’re doing is disgusting. A massive network like yours, with massive channel resources in your grasp and high-level contacts, but your creativity is such that you can only be compared to [propaganda] megaphone shouting over the countryside . . . .

You turn your eyes from knife attacks on our own children, but focus your attention on tragedies at schools overseas; you don’t criticize the way our own congresses have gathered like so many artificial limbs for 60-odd years, but always mock the way shoes have been thrown again in a parliament in some other country. You’ve never questioned why officials in our country don’t open up about their assets (great, so on this issue we must thank foreign reporters for asking this question at press conferences), but you take great joy in reporting about some government official overseas who got caught using public funds to buy a bottle of wine. Yes, there are certainly many untoward things happening outside China — poisonous foods, corrupt officials, poverty. But no matter how many of these dirty stories there are overseas, what the hell do these have to do with me? I don’t have family there. I criticize ugly things in China because these do harm to my own family (Oh, I see, so perhaps you criticize things overseas so much because you own relatives have already . . . ?). You are China’s national television network, so you should be criticizing more things happening right beside you. That’s how you contribute to your own country. Is it so hard for you to understand this simple concept?

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Post tags: Apple, CCTV, chinternet, Kaifu Lee, microblogs, netizens, online public opinion, Peter Ho, propaganda, sina weibo
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Today, Dan Wallach at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a few pals reveal the results of a detailed study of censorship on Weibo. Their method has allowed them to reconstruct the censorship techniques used by the government, to calculate the number of workers who must be involved and even to discover their daily work schedules.

The work is possible because at least some of the content on Weibo is not censored prior to publication, only afterwards. Their approach was to collect posts from a set of users once every minute. They then tracked these posts to see which ones later became unavailable.

Of course, it’s not feasible to track everyone on Weibo so Wallach and co spent some time looking for users who seemed to have posts deleted more often than others, assuming that these users would be more likely to be censored in the future. Using this manual technique, they ended up observing some 3500 users over a period of 15 days last year who between them experienced around 4500 deletions per day, or about 12 per cent of the total.

Tech In Asia’s Charlie Custer sifted through the report, drawing quotes that show just how fast Sina’s internal censors work:

The study, which we came across via MIT Technology Review, used “architecture [that could] detect post deletions within one minute of the deletion event,” giving the researchers perhaps the most precise look yet into how quickly Sina’s content team takes down sensitive Weibo posts. The results? Sina is pretty darn fast:

We found that deletions happen most heavily in the first hour after a post has been submitted. Focusing on original posts, not reposts/retweets, we observed that nearly 30% of the total deletion events occur within 5-30 minutes. Nearly 90% of the deletions happen within the first 24 hours.

So Sina’s censors are pretty fast. But what, exactly, are they deleting? Researchers used a variety of analytical tools to look at what content was most quickly deleted, and found that:

The topics where mass removal happens the fastest are those that combine events that are hot topics in Weibo as a whole (e.g., the Beijing rainstorms or a sex scandal) with themes common to sensitive posts (e.g., Beijing, government, China, and policeman).

A post at Quartz notes that the study seems to have discovered when censors are likely to take a break:

Here’s a tip for the 300 million users of China’s Twitter-like microblogging site Sina Weibo: If you don’t want to get censored, post your messages at around 7pm, Beijing-time.

[...]These censors are monitoring and deleting posts around the clock, often very late at night, the study notes. But there are two noted dips: one at around 7pm, when the national news is on, and again early in the morning, when most of the country is asleep. You can see that trend in this chart from the study [click through].

For more on Sina Weibo or Internet censorship, see prior CDT coverage.

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Post tags: academic resources, censorship, Internet censorship, microblogs, sina weibo, weibo
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Five years ago, for example, you might think that the pollution of a local river was just a problem with a nearby factory, but thanks to Deng Fei’s weibo campaign and others, it’s easy to see on Weibo that many rivers nationwide have similar problems. So, what you previously considered a local problem is now a national one, and when that happens, you’re more likely to try to push for national changes instead of just complaining about your local authorities.

[…] That’s why Weibo’s fight with WeChat is so crucial. WeChat is a totally different service with a very different focus, but the more time users spend on WeChat, the less they’re spending on Weibo. And while chatting with your friends and following celebrities is fun, the service just isn’t designed for the swift passing-along of information the way that weibo is. WeChat’s focus is your circle of friends and your local area, Weibo’s focus is far wider. To return to our polluted river analogy, on Weibo you share your photos of the river with your followers all over the country, and they pass it on to theirs; quickly, it can go national. But on WeChat, you bitch with your friends and coworkers about the river and it stays in your (mostly) local social circles. Even if it does spread, that spread isn’t easily visible or trackable, which makes it seem like fewer people are talking about it and thus reduces its impact.

While Sina Weibo currently has 500 million registered users to Weixin’s 300 million, its lead may be less substantial than it appears. Also at Tech in Asia, Steven Millward suggested last week that as many as 95% of all Sina Weibo accounts may be either “zombies” or spammers, and Weixin is likely to reach the half-billion mark within the next twelve months. Whether or not Weixin encourages a narrowly local focus among users, Tencent has global ambitions for the service. Its largest user bases abroad are currently in Malaysia and India, but the company appears intent on conquering America as a springboard to world domination. From Fang Yunyu at Global Times:

“We are planning to set up our WeChat office in the US, in a bid to explore opportunities in the US market,” Tencent Holdings said in a statement e-mailed to the Global Times.

[…] “If a foreign product can succeed in the US market, where many excellent IT products and companies were born, it will be relatively easy for the product to go into other markets,” Tencent noted.

[…] Tencent announced last month that the total number of WeChat users had reached 300 million, including over 10 million overseas users, about two years after the Shenzhen-based company launched the mobile application.

“The figure may exceed 500 million by the end of this year, which will be equivalent to the number of Internet users in the country. In other words, it means the domestic WeChat market will very soon be saturated,” Fang Xingdong, founder of the Beijing-based industry consultancy Internet Laboratory, told the Global Times Monday.

International users may be deterred, however, by reports of Weixin actively assisting Chinese authorities with surveillance of political dissidents and censorship even of users outside China.

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Post tags: India, Malaysia, river pollution, sina, sina weibo, social networking, tencent, United States, Weixin
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Major General Luo Yuan, whose recent suggestions include turning the Japanese-administered Islands, known as Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan, into a Chinese target range, entered the microblogging internet fray to debate a university professor who argued he was “crazy” to advocate bombing Tokyo.

[...] In less than a week he has attracted 237,000 weibo followers and his first post alone has attracted more than 33,700 comments and been forwarded 37,800 times as of 2pm Sydney time.

But efforts by propaganda authorities to delete negative comments could not hide that his foray has been a bruising one.

“If weibo is the battlefield between pro-state voices and civil society, then it looks like General Luo has hopelessly lost his first encounter,” said Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of China Digital Times.

Luo’s appearance on Weibo was a surprise as usually military officers are discouraged from joining the microblogging service. But Luo reportedly gained permission first. From the New York Times blog:

Mr. Luo also wrote in what appeared to be his first post Friday that he had received “permission” (Chinese media reported that it came from the People’s Liberation Army) to set up the account. In the past, members of the military have been barred from opining online, reports said (though some do, including an air force colonel, Dai Xu, who has a microblog).

Some person or persons, possibly high up in the security or propaganda system, seem to have had a change of heart about that general policy, and the man who reportedly said last September that China should cooperate with Taiwan’s military in a “people’s war at sea” — blasting the disputed Diaoyu, or Senkaku, islands “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,” while the Taiwanese could do it “Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday” — is back, and characteristically vocal.

General Luo is believed to be close to the incoming Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and his father, Luo Qingchang, was an early member of the Communist Party and a senior official and intelligence officer, according to Chinese and overseas Web sites.

But whoever granted him permission to join Weibo may now be regretting it, considering the response from netizens. Caixin reports:

Other Weibo users asked whether it was appropriate for military officials to be involved in the country’s internal affairs and whether the army should serve the Communist Party’s interests first.

Questions were also raised about Luo’s family background and his relatives’ businesses activities. Luo’s father, Luo Qingchang, was a former deputy secretary general of the State Council, China’s cabinet.

Luo’s Weibo account had a bit of a hiccup on February 24. A comment supporting him appeared on the account, but oddly referred to him in the third person. Afterward Sina, the company that operates Weibo, published a statement that said the account was briefly hacked, but was back to normal.

The third-person “hacked” comment supporting Luo called him “a soldier and a scholar,” a catchphrase that netizens quickly latched onto in mocking Luo. From Quartz:

But this, too, may have backfired. First of all, a meme have have been born: Weibo users have already grabbed on to the “Luo Yuan is a soldier and a scholar” quote such that many are typing it into the comments sections of Luo’s new posts.

Then there’s the larger problem with the hacking defense. As the Sydney Morning Herald pointed out, Kai-fu Lee—former head of Google China and major Weibo personality—summed it up this way: “If the national security professional can’t even change his password then the people really should be worried.”

OffBeat China has more on netizens’ reactions to Luo’s posts:

Instead of being excited about a top military officer showing up on Weibo and sharing views on possible strategies, Chinese netizens denounced Luo’s attempt to get the hang of Weibo: “How, in a normal country, is an active military officer allowed to openly discuss politics?”

Luo’s choice of words has been the primary target of criticism. Netizen 徐昕, a law professional as his Weibo profile describes, asked: “General Luo, welcome to Weibo. Your willingness to communicate is worth some applause, but here are a few questions for you. 1. Is it “under the leadership of Xi”, or “under the leadership of the Party led by Xi”? 2. Who are the country’s traitors? Do you have a name list? We netizens are happy to help [if you don’t]. 3. A military officer talking about fighting corruption. It may be effective, but how do you do it? Does this count as the military’s interference in politics? 4. Why [you put] beloved people behind beloved country, beloved Party and beloved army?”

This is just the beginning, the highlight is when netizens started to question Luo’s credentials as a general and his family wealth.

More netizens’ comments on General Luo Yuan’s posts are here on the CDT Chinese.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Luo Yuan, online public opinion, People's Liberation Army, sina weibo, weibo
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The defendant, from Zhejiang province in east China, was accused of killing a man he believed was a spy in 1967, according to an online report by the state-run China News Service that was later deleted.

The man, named only as Mr Qiu, stands accused of using a piece of rope to strangle his victim, who was named as Dr. Gong. After committing the murder, Mr Qiu allegedly hacked off the man’s legs and buried his body.

While the alleged murder took place more than four decades ago, Mr Qiu was reportedly only arrested in July last year. He was put on trial this week at his home in Zhejiang. So far no verdict has been made public.

The story had already reached several large news sites and web portals by the time China News Service removed the story from its web site, according to the South China Morning Post. The Wall Street Journal reports that news of the trial has sent ripples through Chinese social media:

Unlike with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 or the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, the Communist Party has tolerated a certain amount of discussion of the Cultural Revolution. Numerous stories of the brutal violence the country’s youth perpetrated on their elders and each other have earned the approval of censors, creating a body of cathartic “scar literature” and its cinematic equivalent, “scar film.”

Still, very few of the crimes committed during the Cultural Revolution were prosecuted—an omission some Internet users were happy to see addressed in Mr. Qiu’s case.

“Every Cultural Revolution criminal should be resolutely pursued and held responsible. Murderers, instigators – not a single one should be left behind,” wrote one anonymous user of Sina Corp. Weibo microblogging service. “They can be treated leniently, but they must be made to take responsibility. Only then will we truly be able to come to terms with the Cultural Revolution.”

Many, however, criticized the pursuit of Mr. Qiu, arguing that there were others more deserving of punishment for the blood spilled in that era.

“The prime culprits of the Cultural Revolution get away scot free and decades later they chase down a minor murderer,” wrote Liu Xiaoyuan, a Beijing-based lawyer. “There were so many homicides during the Cultural Revolution, to pursue one little old man is a failure of judicial justice and political wisdom.”

Did Kirsten Tatlow wrote in The New York Times on Thursday that “some are angry that a little guy is being punished, and not the masterminds of the violence:”

“Have the main culprits who started the Cultural Revolution been punished?” asked a person with the handle Sansu dage, who added an angry red face to the posting.

“Actually, the biggest criminals of the Cultural Revolution have not been held responsible,” wrote a person with the handle Keji huangdan menwei chuangxin. “To pursue an ordinary criminal, decades later, is absurd.”

A_Jing wrote: “There should be mandatory courses in universities to talk clearly about the crimes against humanity during the Cultural Revolution!”

Wrote another: “All the cases from the Cultural Revolution should be tried.”

Read also about the memoirs of businesswoman Ping Fu, which contained personal accounts from the Cultural Revolution and caused controversy over its authenticity.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: China News Service, Cultural Revolution, history, microblogs, murder, online public opinion, sina weibo, Zhejiang
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“If the environmental protection bureau chief dares to swim in [Ruian's] river for 20 minutes, I will pay [him] 200,000 yuan [HK$246,000],” Jin wrote on Sina Weibo.

In three photos Jin posted, a river in small-town Ruian is seen entirely blocked by floating rubbish. Jin blamed a rubber overshoe factory for dumping industrial waste into the river.

This river was where villagers used to wash vegetables and clothes in his childhood, Jin told Chinanews.com.

Asked for comment, Ruian’s environmental protection bureau chief, Bao Zhenmin, acknowledged the river was polluted, the report said. But he said the rubbish is from people, and not factories.

“Overpopulation of this region is the main reason behind the pollution…[The population] has largely exceeded the local environment’s capacity,” Bao told Chinanews.com.

Jin’s push in Zhejiang comes as activist web users accused factories in Shandong province of intentionally dumping waste into rivers, according to Li Jing at the South China Morning Post:

It all started with a microblog post exposing factories in Shandong that injected toxic waste water underground, and evolved into an online campaign to uncover pollution scandals as people returning home from cities for the holiday encountered unbearable levels of water contamination.

Deng Fei , a social activist who helped initiate the campaign, said some journalists and lawyers had mobilised to investigate clues offered by microbloggers, adding that several members of the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference had expressed interest in looking into the problems.

The first post, published on Tuesday on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo, said some chemical plants in Weifang – which were preparing for initial public offerings – had been secretly discharging untreated waste water deep underground, using high-pressure injection wells to avoid supervision.

It has been reposted by about 50,000 microbloggers.

Tea Leaf Nation’s Liz Carter writes that the issue has become the number-one trending topic on Sina Weibo:

News broke on social media that not only were companies polluting the water, but were intentionally pumping wastewater into the ground through high-pressure pipes in order to avoid complying with regulations. The polluted water has caused cancer in many nearby residents, according to reports, and affected the development of local children. A company in Weifang, Shandong was implicated when a journalist travelled there to cover the story.

In a post deleted by censors on Sina Weibo, a lawyer named Gan Yuanchun described how officials from Weifang, Shandong sent some of their subordinates to Beijing to prevent media from breaking the news. China Central Television (CCTV)’s coverage of the story was shelved. and the journalist who traveled to Weifang is still being held there involuntarily. Gan Yuanchun wrote in a follow-up post, “Weifang: You think that by harmonizing [censoring] CCTV, you can cover up the truth about #UndergroundWaterPollution? And you’re still trying to help this kind of soulless company complete its IPO? You must be dreaming!!”

The state-run Global Times reported that the online outcry in Weifang prompted a response from local authorities, who offered rewards to any whistle-blower whose tips proved accurate, and Ernest Kao and the South China Morning Post reports that an editorial in the Beijing News last week urged officials to tackle the water pollution issue:

Beijing’s official mouthpiece called for a “declaration of war” in the new Lunar Year on “unscrupulous enterprises” engaged in the illegal and often secretive discharge of untreated waste into waterways. It urged the public and netizens to help.

…

The editorial said local governments were only compounding the problem by upholding lax environmental regulations and shielding “superstar” companies, deemed too important, from punishment.

“The reason why groundwater pollution has long been ignored is that the vast majority of contamination cases occur in rural counties, where farmers lack the right to speak out,” it said.

The editorial said the fundamental problem lay in governance – or lack of it – and encouraged the public to “take action to investigate and expose any of those unscrupulous companies”. It also called on “the relevant parties” to encourage supervision and ensure citizen activist channels are unimpeded”.

See also recent CDT coverage of water pollution in China, including an accident at a chemical plant which caused the contamination of a river in northern Shanxi province.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: industrial pollution, Internet activism, microblogs, online public opinion, Shandong, sina weibo, water pollution
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Wang Dexue in tears.

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by central government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online.

Central Propaganda Department: With regards to State Administration of Work Safety Vice Director Wang Dexue crying during his inspection of the collapse of the Lianluo Highway Yichang Bridge, do not sensationalize the story. (February 4, 2013)
中宣部：对国家安监局副局长王德学视察连霍高速义昌大桥垮塌事故现场时流泪一事，不炒作。

The February 4 crash in Henan Province left ten dead and 11 injured. The local government states that it will compensate victims and their families according to “Henan standard,” which differs according to household registration (hukou): over RMB400,000 for urban hukou holders, but only up to RMB180,000 for rural hukou [zh].

Wang Dexue’s tears at the scene of the crash are assumed by many to be insincere. He has earned the nickname “New Watch Brother” (新表哥), after the Shaanxi official photographed grinning at the scene of a road accident last summer. “New Watch Brother” is already blocked from Sina Weibo search results.

“According to the relevant laws and regulations, search results for ‘New Watch Brother’ cannot be displayed.”

Chinese journalists and bloggers often refer to these 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 on CDT Chinese 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.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, Henan, household registration, hukou, media censorship, Ministry of Truth, propaganda, sina weibo, traffic accidents, Wang Dexue, weibo
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