internet - Blacklisted!

In addition to my problems earlier in the week, now my domain name seems to be blacklisted and emails to ***@chinaherald.net do not get through. Damned. Try fons@cbiz.cn if you want to email me in stead. When servers of a company like my host ipower gets blacklisted, they might as well close the internet.

internet - Job: internet commentator
Beautiful Suqian

While I was offline, international media picked up the story of the Nanfang Daily in Guangzhou that local governments in China now employ official commentators who should roam the internet and leave their comments promoting the official governmental viewpoints. Fortunately, ESWN posts the whole translated article, since the internet nanny still prefers to ban in stead of giving its own comments. The original story has been removed from the website of the Nanfang Daily.
In Suqian city, Jiangsu Province, this provides work for 26 people, so if this takes off we look at a whole new industry.
From the article:

"The Internet commentators will lead public opinion as ordinary netizens. This is important, and it is also the most effective way." Ma Zhichun emphasized. According to the "Practical ideas on Suqian City Internet opinion," the Internet commentators has the option of using the status of official spokespersons when something major breaks out in order to clarify the truth.
The young Lu Ruchao has the job of being the "opinion police" at the Internet chatroom. Recently, Lu Ruchao noticed that some chatroom visitors were complaining that the police tended to sound their siren while rushing down the main street, thus disturbing half the city. In the ensuing comments, the discussion by the netizens turned into criticisms of the police as a whole.
Lu Ruchao immediately followed up by explaining that when a police car sounds a siren, they must have an emergency and so they should not be criticized. Lu said emotionally, "We have to face knives and guns while on duty every day. How can they criticize us? Of course, I have to turn their opinions around."

This might actually be a good idea, as long as they identify themselves as 'official' commentators. It shows that local governments realize the importance of the internet, at least in Jiangsu Province.

Buy your own nanny

law - Crackdown on Shanghai jaywalkers

Game: the revenge of the pedestrian

Just another proof of the repressive nature of the Hu Jintao regime. Shanghai police has announced a five-month crackdown on jaywalking pedestrians. That means the end of the freedom as we know it in Shanghai. The police is going to hit the Shanghainese, according to the plans, where they feel it most: their wallet. Last year 2.4 million pedestrians and cyclists were fined, but that number will go up fast.
Fines have gone up from five yuan to fifty and those who physically abuse police officers during the crackdown face criminal charges, writes the Shanghai Daily. The target is high:
Police say that they would like to see 90 percent of pedestrians and 95 percent of cyclists following traffic rules by the time the campaign has concluded.
The campaign is only starting next month, until then the police will mainly issue warning. Shanghai will be a different city when I return in a few months time.

Books on jaywalking

internet - Where can I find the internet police?

The question was bound to come and I got it today. A group of students from UC Berkeley is roaming over Shanghai doing all kind of stories. One of them has heard about the internet police and asked for my help. My basic story that the number of 30,000 internet police is basically a fabrication, first made by the Chinese media to show how caring their government is, then taken over by the Western media to show how evil the Chinese government is. In both cases, a fabrication.
That is of course the simple story. There is a bit more to it, but that would be too boring for most media.

internet - Lenghty downtime

Sorry for having been out of the air for a long time. First my US host stopped my from updating my weblog, and after days of shouting at robots they now opened up my account against. It was closed because of an sudden upsurge in email traffic. Well, looks like I have also lost a good deal of useful emails.
Now also my blogger-software shows problems: also here login-problems and talking to another bunch of robots. When you can read that the problem might have been solved. Leaving on Monday for Europe and many meetings to go, so perhaps light blogging anyway.

Register when you cheat – the WTO column

(Later also at Chinabiz)
The outside world tends to get pretty upset when governmental departments enter into their ritual registration drive. You can just see, all the clueless bureaucrats sitting together in their huge meeting rooms, wondering what they can do to bring down evil in society.
“Why not let them register,” suggest one of them. Others express approval: that is a good idea. “What then after they register,” asks a smart-ass at the back. “Should we punish the wrong-doers?” “Let’s worry about that later, first they should register,” says the chairman.
I know I should not make too much fun about longstanding traditions in China, people might get upset or – even worse – make me register. In China people know that one register more or less does not make that much of a difference, although every now and then the smart-ass in the corner might get an audience and our group of officials might even put some sanctions on not registering, although that sound pretty nasty and mostly registration is enough.

Chinese websites with news already had to register before we knew the internet existed, but now also non-profit and commercial websites have to register. Although the ISP’s have reacted differently most of then threaten to switch off websites that are not registered and in some cases they have already done so.
Most companies just do not want to go through this fuss and move their operations to Hong Kong or elsewhere in this globalizing world. But I really wonder whether the administrative procedure would have made such a difference. When I got my first fax, I was registered, as was I when I opened my first internet account. Then I was one of the first, now I’m with a hundred million users and it must be very hard to dig up my analog application form to open an internet account with a special office of the police.

Then, not impressed by one registration more or less, even for me the order to Nanjing officials to register their extramarital affairs, here reported by Xinhua, was really a bit over the hill. The reason: “According to marriage law experts, 95 percent of China's convicted corrupt officials had mistresses. In south China's prosperous cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Zhuhai, for instance, every official involved in the 102 corruption cases investigated during 1999 were found to be having affairs.”
Back to basic logic, the idea is when you catch the guys with mistresses, there is a big chance he is corrupt? What then when all guys have mistresses, even those who are not corrupt? That seems a fair assumption. What about all those corrupt officials who are now going to get rid of their mistresses, to avoid being exposed as being corrupt?
There must have been again a lengthy meeting of officials trying to find a solid way to beat corruption. The smart-ass in the corner probably did not say anything, since he has two mistresses and is corrupt.
Privacy concerns of course do not count, when China wants to register:
“Zhuo Zeyuan, a professor in the politics and law department under the Party School of the Communist Party of China's Central Committee, said requiring officials to report their marital situation will help put them under public supervision.”

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internet - Bloggers go commercial in China

How to get 10,000 visitors on your weblog after four days? Start a forum during the anti-Japan demonstration in China. A commercial site in China kangri.blogku.com got it done and Wired explains here how it was done. The 24-year old Edwyn Chan wants to set up commercial weblogs, just like it is done in the US.

Chan's media network already has three blogs up and running, including Dianziren, which covers consumer electronics; a humor blog called Shuanga; and Jiaexp, a site for gamers. He also has plans for two more: one for women that would be about beauty and cosmetics, the other he hopes could mimic Gawker (except it would be funny).

Books on weblogs

media - Shanghai city guide at the Economist

The Economist published a fairly decent, short travel guide for Shanghai. Just tested a few pages and wanted to see whether they had discovered a few hotels I bumped into in the past few days for the first time (like the Bund Hotel at Guangdong Road). But they made it very easy to themselves and published only the favorites in most sections. Probably the best way out in this city.

Guides on Shanghai

internet - Having a host in the US

Has both advantages and disadvantages. Because I'm hosted in the US I do not have to comply with the murky new internet rules that force both non-profit and for-profit websites to register in a special register. For media websites there was alreay much longer a registration.
I talked to an internet entrepreneur this morning, after my talk for the BBA, who got an email of his ISP telling him to register before June 1. He had decided to move his sites to Hong Kong.
Then, because of the stringent safety measures my account with my host in the US has been blocked and the "abuse department" in charge seems to be sleeping. When you read this, it might be over, but now my weblog cannot be seen and I cannot update it. Also email to my account seems to be blocked. Anyway, very busy in preparing my take-off on Monday anyway.

internet - Skype me at the LH727 to Munich

There is still some conflicting information to be solved but it looks like I will have internet access on my flight on Monday 23 from Shanghai to Munich on the LH727 (Lufthansa). As soon as I saw that I knew I would have to play with the system. I'm leaving at 22.25 PM in Shanghai, so timing is a bit difficult for people in Asia, but especially in the beginning of the flight ok for Europe and the US. Might even take my webcam along if I get also MSN rolling.
At least I should talk to Amy Gu in Hong Kong of the VOIP-weblog.
Conflicting information: will I fly Airbus or Boeing, can I plug in my laptop and is it still for free (a kind of promotional thing).
Sorry about light blogging this days. I'm preparing a rant about Nicholas Kristof, but too many lunches and other meetings to really get much online these days. Will even be worse when I arrive in Europe, but more about that later.

books on voip

economy - Report suggests panic sales in Shanghai real estate

Shanghai skyline

A report in the China News suggests panic sales in the Shanghai real estate ahead of a new tax due on June 1, without giving concrete figures. Also Sam Crispin, a real estate consulent writing for Chinabiz, predicted already last week that speculators would possible dump their real estate on the market to avoid this tax.

Books on Shanghai

economy - Another sino-foreign venture falls apart: Alcatel, TCL

Happier days

Alcatel sold today a 55% stake in the Hong Kong entity of the Chinese electronic products producer TCL for 55 million euros, Bloomberg reports, nine months after the EU gave her blessing to the purchase of TCL by Alcatel. The Paris-based company still retains 45% of the company.

Growing losses of TCL were the main reason to get rid of the Chinese company.

While China is conquering the world with cheaper imports, making the high-end deals work is still much harder to do. Also the IBM-Lenovo deal is encountering problems, media reported yesterday. Also Haier is developing more problems, says some in the market. While Chinese companies are trying harder to get foreign experts and managers in their operation, only four percent of those foreigners stay on longer than one year, an upcoming article in the HR-newsletter of Chinabiz will show. Moving up the food chain proves to be hard for Chinese companies.

Doing business in China

media - Counting the dead
Tiananmen in 1989

The gruesome developments in Uzbekistan have put some of the reporting newswires into an overdrive, when looking for a comparison. The number of people shot by the army are between 500-700 according the the current estimates. What caught my attention was this sentence in a dispatch by AP.

If the reports of more than 700 deaths since Friday hold true and if Uzbek forces were behind the killing - as most reports indicate, it would be some of the worst state-inspired bloodshed since the massacre of protesters in China's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

My internal alarm went off. "Since the massacre". How many people were again killed during these dreadful days in Beijing? I know the the original accounts of thousands of killed went later down to hundreds, but how many again? Fortunately, Wikipedia has many of those answers:

Foreign reporters that witnessed the incident have claimed that at least 3000 people had died. Some lists of the casualties were created from underground sources with numbers as high as 5000. However, it is important to note that NSA documents declassified in 1999 show that their intelligence gives an estimate of 180-500 killed. Thus the various Chinese government estimates are in agreement with the official US government estimate. As the PLA is made up largely of draftees, the soldiers killed or injured are very much victims of this tragedy too.

So, the drama in Uzbekistan 'beats' Tiananmen. If the figures are right, of course. The figures by foreign reporters at the time have been too high, told also eye witness John Gittings of The Guardian, when I interviewed him for my book. (Here in German). "We mainly repeated the rumors we got from Hong Kong," he said. He changed his view on the whole issue, but newswires still have a hard time to get it straight.

Books on Tiananmen Square

economy - Lenovo loses IBM'ers and market share



The Beijing PC-maker Lenovo is losing both employees from the former IBM section in China it purchased last year and some market share, claims the Taiwan-based Digitimes. Up to 50 members of the IBM team have left, almost one third of the total, claims the article without identifying sources.
IBM sold less notebooks in the Asia Pacific (ex Japan) over the past two quarters, the article also says using IDG-figures. It dropped from 18 to 13 percent market share and HP overtook the leadersposition with a market share of 15 procent.

Books on IBM

internet - Looking for blogger-meetups in Brussels, Rotterdam, Amsterdam

I will be taking off to the old continent next week for some time, with Brussels as temporary base and a trip to the Netherlands in the last weekend of May. Not sure how the blogging is getting on in Europe, but if bloggers in Belgium or the Netherlands are around: perhaps we can set up something. More details later in the week.

Books on weblogs

media - Rebecca's take on the Nieman training stir

Rebecca MacKinnon

Rebecca MacKinnon gives in Global Voices her take on the recent brawl concerning the involvement of the prestigious Nieman Foundation for journalism at Harvard University. I'm not really surprised that she agrees with my viewpoint: you should get involved in this kind of media training. MacKinnon:

So what was the point of the planned Nieman training? Well, as it so happens, I was asked to help plan and participate in the training. Why was I interested in doing this? I spent 9 years being on the receiving end of official Chinese lies. Not only that, I spent many hours in police detention, was subject to surveillance, had my videotapes confiscated and had satellite transmission signals blocked when we were trying to report things the Chinese government didn't want the world to see. I have no interest in teaching them how to lie better. While I can't speak for the other organizers, I certainly intended to use my presence at the training as an opportunity to tell these people that lying doesn't pay off in the long run, and makes them look like thugs in the short run anyway. I felt that it was worthwhile to at least try to convince Chinese officials that openness, honesty, and transparency is ultimately the
best p.r.

China, including its media, is changing very fast and the chances of having a bit of positive influence on that impressive transition that takes place are zero when you do not want to acknowledge those changes. Looking from the outside at China and trying to boycot it in every possible way until it has changed into a paradise of human rights is so much past century.
Since the system is not going to change in the short run, the only hope for change comes from the system itself. And since paradise is still far away, finding good ways to contribute to that change is paramount.

Book on media training

internet - Radio station Shanghai (under construction)


Today I started to do some long overdue cleaning and that always develops into a dangerous mental state: new brilliant ideas pop up, to distract myself from that boring process of cleaning things. That is some important background when I share this email I have sent just now to my colleagues in Shanghai:
"For some time I have been discussing with some of you ways to start an internet-based podcasting station on Chinese, maybe even Asian affairs. While podcasting is definitely party of the new media hype, partly caused by Adam Curry, who on Friday started a daily four-hour radio show at the satellite broadcasting station Sirius, based on podcasts only. There are serious rumors in the market that the now technically still rather troublesome ways of publishing podcasts will improve very soon. Also ways to record interviews for example by using skypeare going to improve dramatically in the coming months. What I want to try is to get a few people together, first here in Shanghai and later possible elsewhere in China/Asia to brainstorm about the idea. Since it is not a way to make money very fast - although I do not want to exclude the possibility - it will in the beginning be based on the enthusiasm for making radio by a few people and expand from there."
The plan is to have dinner next Sunday evening in Shanghai and see where it begins (or ends). Give me a shout, in Shanghai when you want to join the dinner, or outside when you are interested.

Upgrade: Chris Lydon talks here about Global Voices on the internet.

Books on podcasting

internet - Five years of jail for an innocent email

Police during April demo's

Andrea Leung revisits at T-Salon the case of Tang Ye, who got jailed after the anti-Japanese protests in Shanghai, last April, for sending out a humoristic email ahead of the demonstration. Tang had made the email only for his co-workers, and one of them did sent the email out, including all of Tang's details. A new letter for moral support is now going around. Very disturbing to see how little can bring you into jail for such a long time.

media - Susan Mernit on Shanghai visit

Susan Mernit

US-based new media guru and fellow blogger (proxy needed in China) Susan Mernit will visit Shanghai for a few days in the first week of June. It would be a good opportunity to talk over the latest new media developments in the US, but unfortunately, then I will be in the US. I met Susan for the first time after a fellowship at UC Berkeley last year, when she participated in a panel. After this we joined a conference on Controlling the Internet.
I have suggested the event organizers of both the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club and the Shanghai Webloggers Meetup to make use of Susan's first trip to Asia and Shanghai to make most out of it. I will keep you updated on possible developments.

books on new media