Read more about Hexie Farm’s CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.

[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ccp leadership, hexie farm, NPC 2013, political cartoons, self-immolations, Tiananmen Square
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Beijing Municipal Propaganda Department: Do not report on the glass that was broken at the [Chairman Mao] Memorial on Tiananmen Square. (February 25, 2013)

北京市委宣传部：有关天安门广场纪念堂玻璃被砸一事不报道。

Beijing Municipal Propaganda Department: Regarding the trash dumps in the upper reaches of the Miyun Reservoir, all media coverage is to be conducted in accordance with the information released by the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau. Media are not to conduct their own coverage or commentary. From now on, media are to submit drafts of all reports involving public opinion to be examined and approved by the Municipal Propaganda Department. (February 25, 2013)

北京市委宣传部：有关密云水库上游垃圾填埋坑一事，按北京环保局统一信息发布，媒体不再自行报道和评论。以后媒体要将涉及舆论监督的报道一律上报市委宣传部备案审批。

Two directives from the Beijing Municipal Propaganda Department were reported on February 25, 2013. The first directive referred to an apparent act of vandalism at the Chairman Mao Memorial Mausoleum on Tiananmen Square.

The second directive forbade coverage of trash dump sites near the Miyun Reservoir from deviating from official information released by the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau. Recently, fears spread that the reservoir, which is reported to supply about two-thirds of Beijing’s drinking water, was being contaminated by illegal dumping.

Public awareness of the issue can be traced back to a call by popular Weibo personality Deng Fei for Spring Festival travelers to take note of the condition of the environment in their respective hometowns. Mr. Deng, who is the director of the department of reporting at Hong Kong based Phoenix Weekly, is a champion of environmental causes in China. H generated tremendous buzz on Weibo last week when he accused Shandong officials of forbidding media coverage of illegal pollution in Shandong Province.

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.

© Little Bluegill for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing environment, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, environment, media censorship, Ministry of Truth, propaganda department, reservoirs, Tiananmen Square, water pollution
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

As Oscar fever grows around the world with the 85th Academy Awards set to begin in Los Angeles just hours from now, excitement is building in China, even though it has no films in competition. There is also a sense of frustration here about why China’s movies aren’t nominated for the world’s biggest awards?

[…] The most popular answer to the question, held by ordinary Chinese and film experts alike, is: “Too few good films. That’s the real reason in recent years Chinese films have moved further and further away from the Oscars dream,” wrote The International Herald Leader newspaper, in a story carried on the country’s popular Tencent entertainment site.

An article by The Economic Daily, carried on People’s Daily Web site, gave another interpretation: “The Oscars have never been a communal forum, the films taken seriously have only the responsibility to portray the North American world view and the lives they’re willing to see.”

The Oscars’ presence in China is almost as thin as China’s at the Oscars, according to The Los Angeles Times’ Barbara Demick. Only one of this year’s Best Picture nominee has so far reached Chinese theaters: Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, which as a co-production with China enjoyed exemption from tight import quotas in exchange for compliance with the whims of the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television.

As for Oscar viewing parties? Unimaginable. The ceremony, which begins at 9:30 a.m. Monday in China, will be broadcast only in much-redacted form hours later by state-owned CCTV. (Last year, it didn’t air until 10:40 p.m. Monday.) […]

[…] “Nobody even has the live stream in China,” complained Raymond Zhou, film critic for the English-language China Daily. “The government won’t allow it. They are afraid somebody will say something against China.”

Chinese television used to broadcast the ceremony live, but stopped after Richard Gere, as a presenter in 1993, called on then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to remove troops from Tibet.

“The Chinese translators didn’t know what to do, so they just tried to ignore the sentences. After that, they were afraid of the Oscars,” said Wu Renchu, a Shanghai film critic. “It is regrettable. There are many Chinese movie fans, students and white-collar workers who really would like to watch the ceremonies.”

[Update: CCTV6's M1905.com (via Bill Bishop) is streaming the awards ceremony.]

Gere’s outspokenness earned him a twenty-year ban from the awards, ending tonight with a musical performance to mark Chicago‘s six-Oscar haul in 2003. “Apparently, I’ve been rehabilitated,” he told HuffPost UK. “It seems if you stay around long enough, they forget they’ve banned you.” Despite this punishment, Gere became a symbol of Hollywood’s defiance of Chinese authoritarianism, before hunger for Chinese funding and market access made this a disposable luxury. From Damien Ma at Foreign Policy:

In Hollywood in the 1990s, China was an oppressive place. Red Corner opens with Gere gazing up at security cameras in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, ground zero of the infamous bloodshed of early June, 1989, seared into many Americans’ memories. Brad Pitt, too, had been blacklisted from China, ostensibly for starring in the 1997 feature Seven Years in Tibet, in which his character becomes friends with the young Dalai Lama.

[… But t]he era in which China could still be a menacing villain and stir political passions from the Spielbergs and the Geres appears to be ending. Even Brangelina are reportedly studying Mandarin. And the political drama surrounding disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai, ripe for Hollywoodification, will never see the light of day. Too bad, because the Bo Ultimatum is the Chinese Godfather waiting to be made. As Hollywood gathers for its biggest awards night Sunday, the industry seems to be biting its tongue. After all, the future, as Jeff Daniels quips in Looper, is in China.

From The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos:

[… T]hese days, Hollywood directors find themselves in the curious position of being more compliant than some of their Chinese counterparts. When censors ordered the Chinese director Lou Ye to make additional cuts to his movie “Mystery” just over a month before the film’s release date, Lou took the unusual steps of publicly tweeting the censors’ demands and then removing his name from the credits. Online, he explained his decision to break the taboo of discussing censorship in the hope that the system would “become more transparent and eventually be cancelled.” He was not willing to comply in silence. “We are all responsible for this unreasonable movie-censorship program,” he wrote.

[…] By comparison, Hollywood has been less vocal on the subject of censorship. When James Cameron released “Titanic” in 3-D last year—having agreed to censor Kate Winslet’s breasts—the Times asked him about the compromises of working in China. He said, “As an artist, I’m always against censorship… [But] this is an important market for me. And so I’m going to do what’s necessary to continue having this be an important market for my films. And I’m going to play by the rules that are internal to this market. Because you have to. You know, I can stomp my feet and hold my breath but I’m not going to change people’s minds that way.”

Transparency might be a more constructive approach than either foot-stomping or meek compliance. While there may be no end in sight for Chinese film censorship, Osnos suggests that the industry could formally and publicly catalogue cuts made at SARFT’s behest. Lou’s defiance, meanwhile, together with changes recently imposed on imports such as Cloud Atlas and Skyfall, has prompted calls for a more codified and less capriciously restrictive system. From Kristie Lu Stout at CNN:

[…] Lu Chuan is calling for change in the censorship system, hoping that Chinese filmmakers can be governed less by guesswork and more by a transparent rating system.

Lu says there must be change for the sake of his craft and also because his audience demands it.

“In an American movie, you can blow up the White House. We cannot blow up (Tiananmen) Square. It’s different. But the audience wants to see a lot of exciting visual things. So I think the leadership will think about that.”

He’s asking for the freedom to film China’s own “Independence Day,” the freedom to blow up anything without fear of political blowback.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Academy Awards, Dalai Lama, Evan Osnos, film censorship, film distribution, film industry, hollywood, Lou Ye, Lu Chuan, oscars, Richard Gere, SARFT, Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Titanic
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The coming year […] suffers because it is considered a “blind year,” meaning it won’t include the first day of spring. Because the Chinese use a lunar calendar, the first day of the new year typically falls between late January and mid-February. But spring always starts in early February—this year, on Feb. 4—while the Year of the Snake doesn’t begin until Feb. 10.

That means the Year of the Dragon had two first days of spring—one at the start and one at the end—while the Year of the Snake will have none.

For all of these reasons, wedding halls and maternity wards have been packed for the past year, in particular in recent months.

“We were almost restless, with wedding banquets almost every day between November and December, as clients were rushing to complete weddings during the Year of the Dragon,” said Sam Ip, spokeswoman for Chinese restaurant group Federal Restaurants Group Ltd., which has 16 outlets in Hong Kong. “We’ve seen fewer inquiries for the coming year, as it’s a blind year.”

It’s not just blindness and general uncuddliness that have dampened the Snake’s reception, as Geremie Barmé explains at The China Story:

A certain wariness surrounds the Snake, one of the twelve zoological signs of the traditional Chinese calendar, and not only because the reptile inspires fear and repulsion. The Chinese word ‘snake’ she 蛇 is homophonous with she 折 ‘to break’ or ‘lose’. Business people in particular regard the snake with some trepidation since she ben 折本, ‘diminished capital’, hardly chimes with the usual New Year’s benedictions to make money 发财 and enjoy good fortune 吉利. Even greater is the anxiety that things may start out with a ‘tiger’s head only to end in a snake’s tail’ 虎头蛇尾. People attempt to ward off maledictions by employing sayings about ‘not losing out in the Year of the Snake’ 绝不蛇本 or ‘hoping for the Golden Snake [of wealth] to come out of its hole’ 金蛇出洞. In recent years, bureaucrats too have become increasingly alert to any ominous snakes that may she, break or foreshorten, their ‘progress along the path to official success’ 官运 resulting in a side-tracked career or even abject failure.

Recent historical precedent does little to make up for any of this, though the year’s precise astrological taxonomy might help. From Annie Huang at The Age:

As undeserved as the snake’s reputation might be, its last two years did not go so well: 2001 was the year of the September 11 attacks and 1989 was when Chinese forces crushed pro-democracy protests around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

[…] Hong Kong feng shui master Raymond Lo is trying to put a positive spin on the year. He points out that according to astrological tables, this year’s variety is the relatively mild “morning dew” type of common water snake, less venomous than recent predecessors.

“It’s more moderate, humble and patient,” Lo said of the 2013 snake. He added that he is bullish on the year’s prospects for the world as a whole, and sees good opportunities for economic growth.

Still, Lo said, people should probably take precautions against the snake’s traditionally destructive power, perhaps by wearing monkey pendants around their necks. That goes double for anyone born in a year of the snake, he said, like incoming Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Xi’s 1953 birth coincided with the final convulsions of the Korean War.

Unflustered by the approaching serpent, meanwhile, Jeremiah Jenne explained the origin of the term chunjie 春节 or Spring Festival at Rectified.name.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: births, feng shui, Korean War, snakes, Spring Festival, Tiananmen Square, weddings, Xi Jinping, Year of the Dragon, Year of the Snake
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The capital will take 180,000 old vehicles off the road and promote clean energy autos among government departments, the public and the urban cleaning sector, which includes street cleaners and trash collectors, Wang Anshun said at the opening of a session of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, the municipal legislature.

The heating systems of 44,000 old, single-story homes and coal-burning boilers downtown are to be replaced with clean energy, Wang said as he delivered a government work report.

The city will also speed up the promotion of clean energy in rural areas and strictly control dust in construction projects, said Wang.

He vowed to strengthen air quality monitoring and analysis, as well as the release of such information.

The promise of increased transparency, itself coming on the heels of a wave of unusually frank coverage in state media, was accompanied by a call for public comment on the new regulations. From Dexter Roberts at Bloomberg Businessweek:

In another sign that Beijing officials are, for now, leaning toward openness, officials will allow the city’s 20 million residents to weigh in on draft regulations aimed at curbing the Chinese capital’s horrendous air pollution, according to a notice posted Jan. 20 on the Beijing municipal government website. The public can comment on the proposed new measures until Feb. 8, the day before China shuts down for the annual Chinese New Year festival, said the statement issued by the city’s legal affairs office.

“This is important. Now public scrutiny should play a key role in promoting pollution control and enforcement of this rule,” says Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Ma’s environmental advocacy group plans to comment through the online platform that the municipal government has created for this purpose.

Edward Wong argued at The New York Times on Sunday that Beijing’s “extraordinary surge” in air pollution was one of several drivers of growing demands for political input. But Reuters reported a generally unfavorable response to the plans on Sina Weibo:

“These plans are just dreams,” wrote one user.

Others said the phasing out of old cars would make little difference in a city where about 250,000 new cars hit the road every year, albeit with supposedly higher emissions standards.

“These ‘old cars’ are what the ordinary people drive. You people can only dare talk about this subject when you start phasing out all the cars officials drive,” wrote another user.

Other doubts remain about the likely effectiveness of public consultation, enforcement, and of rules targeted only at the city itself. From Yin Yeping at Global Times:

Zhang Yuanxun, a professor of resources and environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that a lack of law enforcement will be a problem.

“The punishments enshrined in the regulations are too strict and broad. It will require many more law enforcement officers to ensure its effective implementation,” he said.

“The old laws were not enforced, not to mention this new one,” he said.

[…] “Also, just restricting the local atmospheric pollution would have little contribution to its improvement if there are no changes in the pollution conditions in the surrounding areas [of Beijing],” [Zhou Rong, climate and energy director of Greenpeace] said.

Wang Yan, a resident working in international trade, said she thinks the new laws should have been launched already.

“I don’t think I’ll offer comments on the new regulation since I doubt if my voice will be heard,” she said, adding targeting street barbecues is ridiculous.

At chinadialogue, Gavin Lohry suggested an additional measure that might help address a range of environmental concerns, from air quality and energy consumption to drainage:

Green roofs – roofs covered with plant vegetation – first gained popularity in Germany and have since been spreading around the world. They help cities reduce storm water runoff, cool the urban environment, absorb air pollution, insulate buildings and increase biodiversity. With enough green roof adoption, Beijing could realise positive impacts on the environment and improved quality of life.

My research on the topic found that in Beijing there is around 93 million square metres of roof space suitable for cost effective green roof adoption. If the cheapest and most basic forms of green roofs covered the suitable roof space, the urban environment would be substantially improved.

Under this scenario air particle pollution could be reduced by as much as 880,000 kilograms every year, equivalent to taking 730,000 cars off the road. The roofs could reduce storm water by 3.5 million cubic metres during large rain events, equivalent to filling the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square with two metres of water or 1,400 Olympic swimming pools.

Any boost to Beijing’s drainage infrastructure would be valuable in the event of more storms like last summer’s, which killed 77 people. But there are no easy solutions: the problems are tangled, often beyond the scope of local government policies, or out of human control entirely. From Jonathan Kaiman at The Guardian:

Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China’s environment at the University of California, San Diego, said that there is no silver bullet for the country’s air pollution. The underlying causes are dynamic and diverse: power plants, small factories, automobile emissions, rampant construction, farmers burning coal for heat. “One of the things about the air quality in Beijing is that it varies a lot more than it used to,” she said.

Beijing’s air quality fluctuates with the weather – a strong wind from the north can blow the smog to sea, she said, while south-eastern winds trap the air against a nearby mountain range, drowning the city in a pea-soup haze.

[…] Beijing has taken significant steps to combat pollution – it invested an estimated $10bn before the 2008 Olympics to raise emissions standards, replace residents’ coal stoves with natural gas heaters, and relocate a ring of steel plants on the city’s outskirts. Yet Beijing still shares its airspace with six surrounding provinces which may not adhere to comparable environmental standards.

“One of the fundamental problems is that the environmental regulators don’t have sufficient authority and resources to overcome the forces that are creating the pollution,” said Alex Wang, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on China’s environmental law.

The problem is indeed hardly limited to Beijing, as Peking University professor Pan Xiaochuan angrily pointed out while blasting the term “Beijing Cough” as an “extreme insult” to the city. Other cities have been even more severely affected, and Shanghai has not escaped. From Reuters:

Shanghai, too, is improving public communication of air pollution data, as Angel Hsu describes on her blog:

[… B]y far my favorite innovation Shanghai’s EPB has made so far is in the use of this little air quality mascot to communicate what the various levels of pollution on the normalized AQI index mean. For the most part, things take a sour turn for AQI girl (let’s just call her that, I’m not sure if she has an official name) after the Good (51-100) part of the range. I like how they coordinated her hair color with the official color codes of different pollutant thresholds – it’s a great way for people to automatically remember and understand what the different colors mean. AQI girl also provides a much more people and user-friendly means to calculate air quality, as opposed to other cartoon characters or anime figures that they could gone with.

[…] I can only imagine next will come a video game for AQI girl, that will feature her navigating Shanghai’s polluted streets, having to dodge roadside exhaust coming from tailpipes, all the while remembering to wear her face mask when she sees AQI readings above 150.

The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Spegele and Wayne Ma described the obstacles to implementing deeper and broader solutions. Proposed changes inevitably raise questions of who will pay for them.

Over the long term, drawing down emissions will require costly upgrades to industrial facilities and oil refineries, measures resisted by state-owned companies unable to pass costs on to consumers and local governments that depend on industrial output for revenue.

[…] Though attention over the years has focused on power plants and passenger-car emissions, China’s pollution problems are complex and spread broadly across the economy. Mr. Zhao, of Nanjing University, and a research team studied the effectiveness of Chinese government policies in curbing emissions between 2005 and 2010 and estimated PM2.5 from coal-fired power generation fell roughly 21% as cleaner technologies took hold. Meanwhile, PM2.5 emissions from iron and steel production rose roughly 39% to 2.2 million metric tons, according to the estimates, as output increased.

China is particularly struggling to curb what are known as secondary pollutants, formed when primary pollutants—such as emitted sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, from coal burning and other sources—undergo reactions in the atmosphere. The government has had some success targeting primary pollutants, but analysts say it is just beginning to target secondary pollutant problems, including particulate matter that is harmful to human health.

Spegele also discussed a range of air pollution issues with the Journal’s Deborah Kan:

Officials have been careful to manage expectations, stressing that real change will take years, just as the current situation was years in the making. South China Morning Post’s Li Jing spoke to Qu Geping, whose career in shaping China’s environmental policy included a stint as the country’s first environmental protection administrator from 1987 to 1993. Qu lamented that the present of emergency was foreseen thirty years ago, when China nearly chose a different development path to avoid it. He blames the lost opportunity on government according to “the rule of men”, rather than rule of law.

“I would not call the past 40 years’ efforts of environmental protection a total failure,” he said. “But I have to admit that governments have done far from enough to rein in the wild pursuit of economic growth … and failed to avoid some of the worst pollution scenarios we, as policymakers, had predicted.”

[…] But, Qu said, if the central government had respected a policy that it released in 1983, China could be in a much better place now.

“The State Council published a document that year, stipulating that economic and urban construction should synchronise with environmental protection, so that the three legs of social development could reach a co-ordinated benefit,” he said. “It was a pragmatic and feasible strategy, even more approachable than the notion of ‘sustainable development’ enshrined by the United Nations years later.”

[…] “Why was the strategy never properly implemented?” he said. “I think it is because there was no supervision of governments. It is because the power is still above the law.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Beijing Olympics, air pollution, air quality, Beijing, Beijing environment, beijing flood 2012, Chinese Academy of Science, clean air, clean energy, factories, forbidden city, greenpeace, industrial pollution, law enforcement, Ma Jun, PM2.5, power plants, rule of law, Shanghai, state-owned enterprises, steel, Tiananmen Square, Wang Anshun
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Where the old guard of Chinese contemporary art lived through the Cultural Revolution, the experiences of this new generation are more rooted in the everyday competition of urban life, and the rapid changes that China has gone through as they grew up. For one installation, the 30-year-old artist Li Liao laboured at a Foxconn factory for 45 days. With his wages he bought the very iPad Mini model he had been assembling. He displays it—alongside his work overalls, identity badges and contract—as “Consumption”. (The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has posted an interview with Mr Li.)

But they are not entirely divorced from the past. In another work, Zhao Zhao, a 30-year-old former assistant of Ai Weiwei, cut cubes out of stone Buddha statues that had been destroyed by Red Guards, “to return them to their original state…in a repetition of history”. And that tank fashioned from leather cannot help but hold a particular charge in a post-1989 Chinese setting, even if the artist who conceived it, He Xiangyu, was only three years old when those tanks rolled into central Beijing.

Bao Dong, himself 33 and one of the exhibit’s two curators, said that “since 2000…China’s artists no longer only face an autocratic system but one of soft power. The market and capitalism [is] a soft, invisible cage.” It takes just as much courage to be original and daring in these conditions, he thinks, and such is the challenge for young artists who have “grown up in a society and culture beset by binaries, constantly toggling between extremes”.

Photographs and more information on the exhibition are available at the Ullens Center’s website.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: art, art exhibition, artists, Cultural Revolution, Evan Osnos, Foxconn, IPad, June 4th, Red Guards, Tiananmen Square
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The book was a long time in the making and has come at huge personal cost. Faced with the threat of more prison if he had it published abroad, he decided to flee China in 2011, leaving his mother and others behind.

“They were watching my emails and they knew I was in touch with editors in Germany and Taiwan,” he said at the launch of For a Song and a Hundred Songs in Paris.

“They said I couldn’t publish the book, and if I did, they would put me in prison again, this time for at least 10 years … The German and Taiwan editors got worried about my safety and they pushed back the publication date.

“All in all, they pushed it back three times. The third time, I decided to escape.”

Liao discussed the book’s origins with Mariana Grépinet (article in French) at Paris Match:

This book almost never saw the light of day. Why is that?

I started writing it upon leaving prison. I’d formed the habit of scribbling poems in very small writing, because they only gave us pencil and paper for a couple of hours each month. The first time, it took a little over a year. I had over 300,000 characters! On April 4th, 1995, the police came and confiscated my manuscript. At that point, I wasn’t using a computer, I wrote it all by hand. So I had a choice: I could forget about it, or rewrite the whole thing. I spent two years rewriting it. That was a formidable memory exercise! And paradoxically, it helped a lot with the literary structure as well as my reports on the dregs of Chinese society: I was able to record everything down to the slightest details …. Then the police came back. I’d written even smaller so I could hide the pages more easily, but they stole it again anyway. The third time, I had a computer, a big one, and took the precaution of making extra copies. Of course, each version was different. Only the police could say which was best: they are my most loyal readers!

[…] You seem bitter ….

In China, the air, the blood, the milk, and even the values are polluted. If the west continues to import from China, it too will end up as one vast dustbin.

Fragments of Liao’s time in prison can be seen in Nineteen Days, his recollections of June 4ths from 1989 to 2009, translated by Wenguang Huang and published in The Paris Review:

June 4, 1993

I was transferred from the No. 2 Sichuan Provincial Prison in the suburbs of Chongqing. I will serve out the rest of my sentence at the No. 3 Prison in Dazu County, in northern Sichuan Province. Tonight, a dozen convicted counterrevolutionaries gathered spontaneously in the courtyard, squatting down and silently watching the sky like those fabled frogs stuck at the bottom of a deep well.

I was holding a flute in my hand. The crowd surrounded me, asking me to play a tune. I was still an amateur, though, and hadn’t yet mastered the instrument. I became really nervous in front of the crowd and played out a string of dissonant notes.

Li Bifeng, an inmate, patted me on my shoulder and said: “Old Liao, I’m glad that you will be released soon.” Another inmate, Pu Yong, who died soon after his release, interrupted us: “We will all be released soon. I bet you that on the fifth anniversary, the verdict will be overturned and all of us, no matter what type of sentences we are serving, will be released.”

In November, Li was sentenced to 12 years in prison for charges related to a property deal. According to Liao, the case was actually motivated by officials’ misplaced suspicions that Li had financed his escape to Germany.

See also Philip Gourevitch on Liao’s move to Germany at The New Yorker, and an interview with Ian Johnson at The New York Review of Books soon afterwards, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: exiles, France, Germany, June 4th, Liao Yiwu, prison, prisoners, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, writers, writers and literature
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Zhao pressed forward with bold political reforms while in office, but he was never seen in public after May 19, 1989, when he made a tearful appeal in Tiananmen Square for pro-democracy demonstrators to leave. He has since become a symbol of thwarted political reform.

Du Guang , a veteran Central Party School scholar, wept and said Zhao had died while still smeared by false charges and he could never forget him. “Zhao initiated political reform but regrettably everything was terminated after June 4, 1989,” said Du, who helped found a semi-official think tank that analysed reform issues in 1988 but was forced to close after the Tiananmen crackdown.

People who visited Zhao’s home yesterday bowed in the mourning room, where a large picture of a smiling Zhao was surrounded by dozens of flowers, including ones from his former aide Bao Tong , who is under house arrest in Beijing.

Some netizens also commemorated Zhao online, though searches for his name remained blocked on Sina Weibo, and posts which mentioned him directly were reportedly removed. Many, though, had no idea who he was:

Just re-Weibo’d a photo of Zhao Ziyang, 1-17 the anniversary of his death in 2005.Typical of comments was this one: 弱弱的问一下，他是谁？

— David Moser (@david__moser) January 18, 2013

“If I may ask, who is he?”

At The New York Times, meanwhile, Andrew Jacobs reported the death of another “largely forgotten” figure of the era: General Yang Baibing, who led the suppression of the protests in 1989 but was later sidelined for conspiring to usurp Jiang Zemin’s succession.

Among democracy advocates, General Yang is best remembered for carrying out Deng’s order to clear unarmed demonstrators occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the spring of 1989. In May, his older brother appeared on television with Li Peng, the prime minister at the time, to justify the imposition of martial law to quell demonstrations that had paralyzed the heart of the capital. As general secretary of the Central Military Commission and the army’s political commissar, General Yang mobilized troops whose gunfire would claim hundreds if not thousands of lives.

[…] In recent years General Yang was said to have sought a publisher for his memoirs, which included a justification for the use of force against the Tiananmen Square demonstrators. Bao Pu, a publisher in Hong Kong, said party leaders had rejected the manuscript, presumably because it broached a subject that remains taboo here.

Mr. Bao, whose father was purged as Communist Party secretary general for opposing the use of force in Tiananmen Square, said many historians were eager to know whether in his memoirs General Yang had expressed regret for the killings.

“Thanks to the Yang brothers, China’s only military victory of the last 30 years involved cracking down on its own people,” Mr. Bao said. “You can’t help but wonder if he had any reflection on that.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bao Tong, Central Military Commission, June 4th, Li Peng, Tiananmen Square, Zhao Ziyang
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Not only could they search for a range of Chinese leaders on the microblogging network, they were free to write criticism.

One comment called Mr Xi a “hypocrite” for suggesting that Communist Party officials should not enter politics for wealth or prestige. “Hasn’t he won wealth and prestige through politics?” asked the poster. Elsewhere, Li Keqiang, the incoming prime minister, was accused of covering up an Aids outbreak linked to infected blood in Henan province for five years. “Now he makes speeches [about Aids], but he is just making a show,” the comment said. The names of some leaders were still blocked. Wen Jiabao, the outgoing prime minister, was unsearchable.

The name of Ling Jihua, the former close aide to Hu Jintao whose son died in a Ferrari crash in March, was also blocked.

Bo Xilai, the disgraced former Politburo member, showed up in searches, as did Zhou Yongkang, the outgoing security tsar.

Moore notes that not everything turned up in a search, as Liu Xiaobo, the Dalai Lama and Tiananmen Square searches remained blocked by China’s Internet censors.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Dalai Lama, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, Li Keqiang, Liu Xiaobo, microblogs, netizens, sina weibo, Tiananmen Square, Wen Jiabao
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

In partnership with the China Copyright and Media blog, CDT is adding the “Beijing Internet Instructions” series to the Censorship Vault. These directives were originally published on Canyu.org (Participate) and date from 2005 to 2007. According to Canyu, the directives were issued by the Beijing Municipal Network Propaganda Management Office and the State Council Internet management departments and provided to to Canyu by insiders. China Copyright and Media has not verified the source.

Afternoon Tea, 2004. A directive from October 11, 2006 asked Beijing websites to remove images of Shi Xinning‘s oil paintings of Mao Zedong with actresses and other famous figures.

The translations are by Rogier Creemers of China Copyright and Media.

9 October 2006, 11:45, Chen Hua

Everyone, a short briefing, on the matter of the North Korean nuclear tests, it is strictly prohibited to transmit foreign dispatches, standardize copy sources, do not gather news by yourself (VIP interviews, news lines, etc.).

9 October 2006, 16:06, Huang Jing

Everyone, recently, some websites reprinted the posts “Laid-Off Workers’ Song of Eternal Sorrow,” please notify all websites to thoroughly investigate their website forums, news trackers and other interactive columns, if this sort of information is discovered, it is to be deleted without exception.

9 October 2006, 19:09, Chen Hua

Concerning the North Korean nuclear tests, only use People’s Daily and Xinhua copy, earlier China News copy is to be completely deleted and may not be used again, everyone is requested to rapidly adjust their pages.

10 October 2006, 8:50, Chen Hua

All websites, please immediately delete the text “Experts: the Six Party Talks May Go from Coma to Death.”

9 October 2006, 12:43, Beijing Municipal Information Office

I. For news on North Korea’s nuclear tests, only copy from Xinhua and People’s Daily can be used, it is not permitted to use that of China News Net. Open trackers, but they must be managed well, in managing trackers, some principles shall be persisted in: (1) Our country’s persistent position of “non-nuclearization” on the Korean peninsula; (2) The hope of return to the Six Party Talks; (3) All sides deal with this matter soberly; (4) Do not disseminate rumors, do not engage in pointless guessing concerning nuclear pollution.

II. Concerning reporting the case of the Beijing City Vice-Mayor Liu Zhihua, including the process of the case, work units and individuals involved in the case, as well as targets of investigation, etc., only official copy from Xinhua and People’s Daily is to be transmitted online, it is strictly prohibited to use copy from other sources. Strengthen management over forums, news trackers, blogs and mobile telephone messages, all information not conforming to these requirements must be firmly deleted. Situations of non-earnest implementation of these requirements will be severely dealt with.

III. All websites, the 6th Plenum will be organized from the 8th until the 11th. During this time, negative news from all localities and all departments may not appear in the important news section, do not report on sudden malicious incidents and production security accidents.

IV. Abe’s visit to China has an important significance, propaganda and reporting must coordinate with the large picture of our country’s foreign affairs; all websites must timely delete provoking and inciting discussions, and the source of harmful information must be tracked down. For reports concerning the South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and Japanese Prime Minister Abe visiting China soon, please use Xinhua and People’s Daily copy without exception, and it is not permitted to issue this in the heading position of the important news section; if separate articles are issued on the visits to China by these two people, the information on Roh shall be before information on Abe, and they may respectively be placed in the second and third position of the important news section; if the visit to China of the two persons is reported in one article, the name of Roh must appear before the name of Abe, and it may be placed in the second position of the important news section; trackers and forums must be managed well, it is not permitted to have extreme discussions.

11 October 2006, 10:43, Beijing Municipal Information Office, Huang Jing

All websites, recently after the complete inspection and earnest re-examination by the Hunan provincial, municipal and county judicial departments, it has been ascertained that the accusation in the original case of the original defendant Yang Mingyin, a farmer from Cili County, of the crime of plundering has not been established. In this regard, some websites have engaged in excessive reporting, which was not beneficial to safeguarding social stability in that locality. All relevant websites are requested to speedily calm down their existing reporting, and will immediately push articles to the back stage, they may not play this up, and may no longer publish new reports.

11 October 2006, 10:48, Beijing Municipal Information Office, Yang Le

All websites are to clean up and delete images of the oil paintings “Chairman Mao Living Today” and “Chairman Mao and Actresses” in forums, blogs and other interactive segments, search engines are to set up keywords to shield corresponding links.

11 October 2006, 16:42, Beijing Municipal Information Office, Huang Jing

All websites, please reprint the following articles in the domestic news section of the news center.

Title: Li Chang: We Were Deceived by Li Hongzhang! Address: http://www.kaiwind.com/xlzt/flzx/200609/t8783.htm

Title: Wang Zhiwen: How Was “25 April” Arranged. Address: http://www.kaiwind.com/xlzt/flzx/200609/t9064.htm

Please pay attention to transferring this from Kaiwind.

12 October 2006, 18:37, Beijing Municipal Information Office

Everyone, please immediately put the special subject on the 70th anniversary of the Long March on the main page of websites and the second position of the news page, and report the speeches of Central leading comrades at the opening ceremony of the “Magnificent Feat, Glorious Process – Exhibition Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Victorious Long March of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army” on 16 October.

12 October 2006, 23:11, Beijing Municipal Information Office, Chen Hua

The matter concerning the case of a suicide by jumping off the Tiananmen building today in the afternoon, and the matter of a person burning a gasoline can tonight in Tiananmen Square are not to be reported, interactive segments are not to discuss this.

12 October 2006, 18:37, Beijing Municipal Information Office

Do the propaganda for the 70th anniversary of the victory in the Long March well, the special subject must be put on the main page and on the second position of the news page, timely disseminate focus articles.

13 October 2006, 15;57, Beijing Municipal Information Office

All websites: please set up the title “Central Party School Social Science Department Professor Qin Gang Talks About Building Harmonious Society” in the “Building a Harmonious Society” special subject header, link to http://www.xj71.com/show_video.php?id=31682&type=video. At the same time, the “Building a Harmonious Society” special subject is to be restored to the important news section.

13 October 2006, 20:50, Network Management Office, Duty manager 2

In recent days, there have been relatively many discussions online concerning cancelling Chinese medicine and Chinese drugs, which is not beneficial to protecting the excellent traditional culture of the nation, is not beneficial to the development of our country’s Chinese medicine and Chinese drug undertaking, and is not beneficial to guaranteeing the people’s health. All websites may no longer reprint or post comments concerning cancelling Chinese medicine or Chinese drugs, and may also not set up corresponding topics to guide netizens’ discussions. Where existing content on forums and blogs plays up the cancellation of Chinese medicine and Chinese drugs, measures must be adopted to curb this. All localities’  foreign propaganda offices are requested to notify websites to implement this.

13 October 2006, 20:50, Network Management Office, Duty Manager 2

Please make “Yesterday Reappeared” into keywords and screen searches. Also, the said article may not be reprinted.

13 October 2006, 0:24

Immediately delete articles with the following content on websites (focus on inspecting searches and blog articles), make the following four words into keywords for screening.

A. Born as Renjie B. Li Renjie C. Renjie Reappears D. Renjie and Weihong Reappear

15 October 2006, 22:24, Network Management Office, Duty manager 2

Notice: on the matter of a number of Jilin Agricultural University Visual Arts Faculty teachers having put forward resignations because they are dissatisfied with the school merging faculties and the corresponding incidents triggered by this matter are all to be not reported, where it has been reported, it is to be immediately deleted, forums and blogs are also not to discuss this matter.

2006年10月北京网管办发出的禁令（一）
2006年10月09日11时45分 陈华

各位，提示一下，朝鲜核试验一事，严禁转外电，规范稿源，不要自采（嘉宾访谈，连线等）
2006年10月09日16时06分 黄婧

各网：近期，一些网站转载了《下岗工人长恨歌》的帖文，请即通知各网站彻底清查网站论坛、新闻跟帖等互动性栏目，发现此类信息，一律删除。
2006年10月09日19时09分 陈华

关于朝鲜核试验，只用人民，新华的，此前中新的全部删除并不得再用，请各位速调整各自页面。
2006年10月10日8时50分 陈华

各网，请马上删除《专家：六方会谈可能从休克走向死亡》一文。
2006年10月09日12时43分 北京市新闻办

一：对于朝鲜核试验的新闻，只能用新华、人民的稿件，不允许用中新网。开放跟贴，但要管好，在管理跟贴中应当坚持几个原则：1、我国坚持朝鲜半岛“无核化”的立场；2、希望重新回到六方会谈中来；3、各方冷静处理此事；4、不传播谣言，不对核污染进行无谓的猜测。

二：关于北京市原副市长刘志华案的网上报道包括案件进展、案件涉及到的单位和个人，以及被调查对象等，网站只转发新华社和《人民日报》的正式稿件， 严禁使用其它来源的稿件。 加强对论坛、新闻跟帖、博客、手机短信息的管理，凡与此要求不符的信息必须坚决删除。对不认真执行要求的情况，将要严肃处理。

三：各网：六中全会于8日到11日举行。在此期间,要闻区不要出现各地方、各部门的负面新闻，不报道突发的恶性事件和安全生产事故。

四：安倍访华具有重要意义,宣传报道要配合我国外交大局;各网要及时删除挑动和煽动性言论,对有害信息要查源头。 关于韩国总统卢武铉、日本首相安倍即将访华报道,请一律用新华、人民网稿件,并不得发在要闻区头条位置;如两人访华消息是分别发稿,卢的消息应在安倍消息 之前,可分别放在要闻区二、三条位置;如两人访华是一条消息发布,则卢的名字须在安倍之前,可放在要闻区二条位置；务必管理好跟帖和论坛,不得有过激言 论。
2006年10月11日10时43分 北京市新闻办 黄婧

各网:近期，经湖南省、市、县政法部门全面审查和认真复核，查明原案指控原审被告人慈利县农民杨明银抢劫罪不成立。对此，有的网站做了过量报道，不利于维护当地社会稳定。请有关网站对已有的报道要迅速淡化处理，将稿件立即压至后台，不得炒作，不再刊发新的报道。
2006年10月11日10时48分 北京市新闻办杨乐

各网站清理删除在论坛、博客等互动环节中的油画图片”毛主席活在今天”，”毛主席和女演员”，搜索引擎设关键词屏蔽相关链接。
2006年10月11日16时42分 北京市新闻办黄婧

各网：请在新闻中心国内新闻位置转发以下文章，

标题：李昌：我们被李洪志蒙蔽了！　网址：http://www.kaiwind.com/xlzt/flzx/200609/t8783.htm

标题：王治文:“4?25”是这样安排下去的　网址：http://www.kaiwind.com/xlzt/flzx/200609/t9064.htm

请注明转自凯风网。
2006年10月12日18时37分 北京市新闻办

各位，请马上将长征70周年专题放在网站首页和闻首二条位置，并报好10月16日中央领导同志在”伟大壮举 光辉历程-纪念中国工农红军长征胜利70周年展览”开幕式上的致辞。
2006年10月12日23时11分 北京市新闻办 陈华：

关于今天下午在天安门城楼坠楼一事及今晚一人在天安门广场燃汽油桶一事，一律不报道、互动环节不讨论。
2006年10月12日18时37分 北京市新闻办

做好长征70周年胜利的宣传，专题要放首页和闻首二条位置，重点稿件及时发布。
2006年10月13日15时57分 北京市新闻办黄婧

各网：请在“构建和谐社会”专题头条位置以“中央党校科社部教授秦刚谈构建和谐社会”为题，链接http://www.xj71.com/show_video.php?id=31682&type=video。同时将“构建和谐社会”专题在要闻区恢复。
2006年10月13日20时50分 网管办值班2

近日，网上有关取消中医中药的言论比较多，不利于保护民族优秀传统文化，不利于我国中医药事业的发展，也不利于保障人民健康。各网站不要再转载、贴 发关于取消中医中药的评论，也不要设置相关话题引导网民讨论。对论坛、博客中现有的取消中医中药炒作，要采取措施予以制止。请各地外宣办通知网站执行。

2006年10月13日20时50分 网管办值班2

请将《昨日重现》设为关键字进行搜索删除。并不要转载该文章
202006年10月13日0：24

立即删除网站内含有以下内容的文章（重点检查搜索博客文章），把以下四个词设置为关键词屏蔽。

A.生当作人杰 B.李人杰 C.人杰重现 D.人杰伟鸿重现
2006年10月15日22时24分 网管办值班2

通知：就吉林农业大学视觉艺术学院部分教师因对学校合并院系不满而提出辞职一事及由此事引起的相关事件均不做报道，已报道的立即删除，论坛和博客也不讨论此事。

These translated directives were first posted by Rogier Creemers on China Copyright and Media on December 8, 2012 (here).

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Beijing Internet Instructions, censorship, Censorship Vault, Chen Hua, china news, Chinese medicine, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, harmonious society, Hunan, Internet censorship, jilin, Liu Zhihua, long march, Mao Zedong, Ministry of Truth, North Korea, people's daily, Qin Gang, six party talks, social stability, Tiananmen, Tiananmen Square, Xinhua, Yang Le
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Kim Jong-Un applauds Beijing. (Rebel Pepper)

As of November 9, the following search terms are blocked on Sina Weibo (not including the “search for user” function):

No Fresh Air: The window cranks have been removed and child locks set in taxis throughout Beijing as a measure against protest during the Party Congress. See Taxi “Zero Spread” Rule for 18th Party Congress.

- seal off a car window (封闭车窗)
- taxi + window (出租车+窗)
- bus + window (公交车+窗)
- taxi + fill out a form (出租车+填表): Netizens report that taxi passengers must fill out a form in order to get to Chang’an Avenue, the thoroughfare passing Tiananmen Square.
- taxi + Chang’an Avenue (出租车+长安街)
- area of political importance (政治中心区)

Sparta By Any Other Name: These terms are all plays on words of “18 Big” (十八大 Shíbā dà), the acronym for the 18th Party Congress. See more nicknames here.
- stone eight big (石八大)
- stone bar big (石巴大)

Note: All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results.

CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search.  CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese’s latest sensitive words post.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, Beijing, censorship, Internet censorship, Sensitive Words Series, sina weibo, Tiananmen Square, weibo
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

At the same time, the government is also busy promoting the Congress, the Party and excitement over the political event, which common citizens cannot witness nor participate in. CDT Chinese has collected a number of images of government propaganda efforts aimed at “Welcoming the 18th Party Congress”:

On Twitter, @WenTommy summed up the different atmospheres in New York after the election of Obama and in Beijing in the run-up to its own leadership transition:

Times Square 在 party,Tiananmen Square 在 Party.

— 文涛 (@wentommy) November 7, 2012

Times Square is at a party; Tiananmen Square is at a Party.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, propaganda, Tiananmen Square
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

CaptainApathy419: What was it like covering the Tiananmen Square protests?

NicholasKristof: I’ll never forget Tiananmen. I was terrified as bullets whizzed over my head. My notebook was stained with my sweat from fear. And that night I saw a level of courage that i’ve never seen surpassed. there were rickshaw drivers who would drive toward the soldiers and pick up kids who’d been shot and drive them to the hospital. they drove toward me, tears streaming down their cheeks, so that i as a foreign reporter could see the carnage. I was awed by their guts.

RedDeadDerp: Do you still feel that sweatshops are still “an unpleasant but necessary stage in industrial development”?

NicholasKristof: yes, i do. i think the critics of sweatshops are right in their criticisms, and on top of those problems some of those factories also have environmental issues (e.g. dump pollution in a river). But the big need in poor countries is jobs, jobs, jobs. And garment factories provide those jobs, often to women who don’t have a lot of other alternatives. i remember a mother in indonesia telling me that her dream for her son was that he work in a sweatshop. My wife’s native area in China, taishan, has been transformed by sweatshops, and women have benefited in particular. In Africa the big problem is that there aren’t enough factories. I know it’s not a popular view, but i think that the one thing worse than being exploited by a foreign investor is being jobless.

supahappyfuntime: Hey Mr. Kristof, thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do an AMA. Would you rather fight one horse sized duck, or 100 duck sized horses?

NicholasKristof: Definitely one horse-sized duck. Then I’d distract it with some cracked corn and, as it gobbled it up, I’d jump on its back and take it for a flight. I’m too poor to afford a private plane, so a personal horse-sized duck would be a nice alternative.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: development, industrial pollution, industrialization, June 4th, new york times, nicholas kristof, sweatshops, Taishan, Tiananmen Square
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The Gate of Heavenly Peace, by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT:

Read more about Hexie Farm’s CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.

[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corruption, hexie farm, Tiananmen Square
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Ya’s son Ya Aiguo was shot in the head by martial-law troops in Beijing, according to an obituary the support group posted on its website. A testimony by Ya Aiguo’s mother on the same site says that at the time, the 22-year-old had been waiting to be assigned a job and had gone out shopping with his girlfriend the evening he was killed.

His father killed himself out of despair and to protest the government’s long-standing refusal to address the grievances of the victims’ relatives, said Zhang Xianling, who knew Ya and his wife from the support group.

“The government’s cold-blooded behavior has caused this tragic ending,” said Zhang, who lost a 19-year-old son in the crackdown.

“I hope this incident will make the government circumspect and that such a thing will not happen again,” Zhang said. “In this, the government has a responsibility. It owes a life now.”

From the South China Morning Post:

Tiananmen Mothers founder Ding Zilin, said it was the first time a member had committed suicide over despondency at the fight against the authorities.

“We didn’t expect that he would end his life like this,” Ding said of Ya.

“Every time he met us, he asked how the campaign was going.

“It was disappointing to him every time.”

Two monks also attempted suicide protests in Lhasa on Sunday, setting fire to themselves outside the city’s Jokhang Temple. One was killed, while the other survived. The self-immolations were the first to take place in the Tibetan capital.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ding Zilin, June 4th, suicides, Tiananmen, tiananmen mothers, Tiananmen Square
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall