internet - Can you tell me what you know about....

Schools and universities are in full swing, so the number of questions arriving in my mailbox is overwhelming. "What is the influence of the state on personal communication in China?" "What are the recent developments in the Sino-Japanese relationship?" Just two questions I was politely asked to answer in the past 24 hours.
Always happy to help somebody out with their home work or thesis, but I have stopped writing them myselves. So I offer them my phone number of skype address and offer to chatter around for an hour or so. Saves me in the end much more time than writing it up myself.

The two biographies

media - The killing book market

Doing business in China might be not easy in general, entering the media market is something I would mostly warn against. Entering the book market is most likely the most difficult media market in China.
I have watched that market with amazement and have solidly resisted efforts of my Chinese publishing friends to get my book out in Chinese. There would be a small chance of hurting some Chinese feelings (but that would only be good for sales). More important is that it would mean a lot of work with almost no returns. When the book failes (and it was not targeting the Chinese market to begin with) that would be lost. When it would be even mildly succesful, the illegal publishers would take it over.
Well, despite those misgivings I got entangled into a couple of book projects, still not sure whether it can take off or not.
At least, this account by ESWN was very recognizable. It is the story of the famous author Ye Yonglie, who saw his contribution on an English biography on Jiang Zemin back on the black market in Xujiahui, Shanghai, as a biography of current president Hu Jintao.

Ye Yonglie noted that Shanghai's Dongfang Television had made a program about how Ye Yonglie's books were pirated and faked, but it was never shown to the public. Supposely, this was because it "hurt the image of Shanghai" because those pirated banned books were everywhere on the streets of Shanghai.

Very enlightening on how the Chinese book market works indeed.

law - Trouble at Xiaonanguo

The Financial Times gives the backgrounds of a pretty heavy handed business conflict in the middle of Shanghai, at the famous Xiao Nan Guo restaurant at Nanjing Road. I saw the first report by a flabbergasted weblogger who was there to cover another protest, got in the middle of a fight surrounding the restaurant.
The trend describes is all too troublesome: the business conflict started in court, but the judicial authorities were unable to deliver after a verdicts and parties took the case into their own hands.

media - From the declining dead-tree industry

China Business News has interview editor Cai Xiangqi of the Asian Wall Street Journal (here cut and pasted from Danwei.) as the paper changes to tabloid format this month. Some of Cai's observations about the declining market for English language papers in Asia:

I must admit, this is a difficult time for the newspapers - it is an era of challenges. Today, a state of chaos has formed in the newspaper industry: opportunities and pressures exist together for us all. This era is turbulent because our readers' habits are changing quickly, and our business model has been turned upsides-down. Newspapers have endured the assaults of radio and television, but in today's era of the Internet, we need to adapt ourselves to the new environment more resourcefully and agilely than in the past. In the US, over the past decades, newspaper circulation and readership has experienced a continuous decline. A recent survey of American news included a shocking figure: a survey of readers under 30 showed that only 23% of them had read a newspaper the previous day. And even more surprising, at least on the surface, was the finding that time spent watching TV among this age group had dropped 16% over the last decade.

I see the market for news in China declining with similar speed, as media in addition to a fundamental change in their production methods, also have to face a heritage of state-controlled propaganda machines. Cai is voor Asia as a whole not that pessimistic:

In Asia, the situation is not that bad yet. In 2004, newspaper circulation increased 4.1%. But global media is continuously changing, including the emergence of non-traditional forms of media, which shows means that any individual media entity is having a harder and harder time attracting those readers of interest to advertisers. But looking back, at the founding of the AWSJ, the Vietnam War had just ended and Asia was in turmoil, full of uncertainty. This is not the first time for us to see innovation and breakthroughs, and it certainly won't be the last.

media - From a fence-sitter: conflicting concepts

In the ongoing debate on the Taishi/Guardian Asiapundit has described me once as a 'fence-sitter'. I must say, that is a rather comfortable position as the combatants are increasingly divided up in two camps.
From the fence two observations, that are triggered off by a short debate I had earlier this week at the Dutch radio on - what I had qualified as - the one-sided view of most human rights organization on the changes taking place in China.
Ben Knapen, the future foreign correspondent for NRC Handelsblad in Indonesia, said that when in a country one person is wrongly beaten, tortured or prosecuted, the government should be held responsible. That is riding morally very high grounds and basically there is very little you can say against it, apart from that it does not work, at least it does not work like that in China. Not only because of the size of the country, but also because the central government does not have enough leverage over what is happening locally that it can actually be held responsible for many of the things that go wrong in China.
That is bad enough and the problem seems to increase as the central power seems to be eroding. Politically, it might still be correct to hold Hu Jintao accountable for everything that happens in his country, in real life it only contributes to the self-satisfaction of those who have only those moral highlands in sight, not the swamps of Guangdong province.
The conflicting concept of a second participant was even more troublesome. For my book on 15 misunderstandings about China and the Chinese, I wanted initially skip the misunderstanding that China is on the brink of collapse. While having some validity in the years after Tiananmen, very few people are still waiting for this upcoming collapse. I still kept it in my book, since it allows to tell so many nice stories about Western observers who have been wrong.
In my time in China I must have noted large numbers of reasons why China would collapse and all those doomsday theories have only one thing in common: it did not happen. There are very good reasons (but that would take a bit more time to explain) why it is very unlikely it will happen, despite the enormous problems the country faces.
This doomsday scenario has made many observers, media, academics, trade unions and human rights organizations very lazy. They think they can just wait until the end is there and do not have to look into what is really happening. Even for that reason alone it would be very useful to shelve this concept, until there is a real reason to use it again.

internet - Chinese blogs: hardly an ad market

Chinese blog users have rather little money to spend, a new report discloses, according to China Tech News.
Half of the Chinese blog users are students who have hardly or no money to spend and 70 percent of the blog users have less than 2,000 Rmb (USD 250) per month to spend. Rather surprising if you look at the fairly low income among Chinese internet users in general. A short snippet from a report I made last week:

Income of the internet users is, partly because of their age, relatively low. More than 25 percent has less than 500 Renminbi (USD 60) per month to spend, making them as spenders at best a promise for the future. Using the average GDP per capita (USD 1,293 – 2004) or even PPP per capita (5,811 – 2004) in China to assess spending power might be deceptive. The number of online high-earners is rather low.

the Chinese band Muma

internet - Chinese pop from Amsterdam on Friday

The China band Muma and others will perform on Friday evening from the Melkweg in Amsterdam. The performance will be webcast, both live and on demand, for those in China who do not enjoy pop on two o'clock in the morning.
The performance is part of the Amsterdam China Festival. (In Dutch).

Lu Banglie in his home town

media - After the attack on Lu Banglie 6

The Guardian has started to give the democracy activist Lu Banglie after the incidents of past week a Ghandi-like treatment.
Leading Chinese papers like the Nanfang Daily have dealt with Lu more extensively and they portrait, not surprisingly, a more messy development of the grassroot democracy movement. (Here in a new translation by ESWN).

"Banglie is a good person. He is honest and hardworking. But he is not the material for an official. He will never win against those people." Many villagers said so when they saw Lu's problems.

Really worth a read, before we start to use all-too-easy cliches that would match a Western mindset.

media - After the attack on Lu Banglie 5

ESWN has translated a few other notable statements by the Chinese journalist and blogger Michael Anti:

When Benjamin Joffe-Walt reported about happened to Lu Banglie, our immediate reaction was to believe him because we have believe in foreign media all along. We even started to prepare to donate money, voice support, sign petitions and make protests. But suddenly we were told that this was just a fantasy of Benjamin Joffe-Walt. You must realized what a major shift it is for us. Even though this does not destroy all of the trust by the civilian sector, it is for sure that the next time that The Guardian or any other foreign media reports on an exclusive about an incident, we cannot be naturally trusting.

Compared to that the official statement of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club looks rather obligatory and shallow:

The Foreign Correspondents Club of Shanghai condemns the 8 October 2005 attack in Taishi Village, Guangdong, on Benjamin Joffe-Walt,correspondent for the Guardian (UK), and the brutal assault on his source Lu Banglie,provincial legislator. We are deeply concerned that journalists working in have had their lives and those of their sources and translators put at risk....

A bit more reflection in public would have been in order.

media - After the attack of Lu Banglie 4

The debate on The Guardian's way to deal with its report on the attack of Lu Banglie continues. I support very much the list of questions Bingfeng wants to see answered, to get really a good insight in what is happening at Taishi.
He blames some of the participants in the debate they are not able to ask those very relevant questions. And he continues:

people with such mentalities don't have a place in their minds to raise such questions beacuse they are not detached and their minds are pre-occupied by such prejudice that the government must be bad and they must collaborate with the one who hired those mobs.

such mentalities are fine with writers or preachers or propagandist, but are very bad for those who claim to be "china observers". and with more than 20 years experience of fighting such mentalities in china, i have no tolerance of them.

I'm just in the middle of a minor media row in the Netherlands, after I blamed human rights organizations last Monday in a short piece they give a rather distorted picture of the reality in China. I do see media have to simplify, clarify, but you do cross a border when you are missing relevant information because they do not fit your single-minded view on China.
Amazing to see that many of the European media are still chewing on the initial report in The Guardian and have not noticed yet that something is stinking here. A more straight-forward clarification by The Guardian would be the least to expect.

internet - Beijing Netcom unblocks blogspot

Danwei writes about it, so it must be true: the millions of blogger.com generated weblogs can now be seen in China without a proxy. Other bloggers have been mentioning they could go to the website that have 'blogspot' in their domain name, but their observations were not very coherent.
Also the Google cache is available, says Danwei. Both have been blocked for over three years time.
There is no clear reason why one provider frees the IP address and others do not, but then, logic is not a helpful instrument in China anyway.
The suggestion is that improved key word censorship might have triggered off the change. More reports about this change are welcome.

labor - The costs of claiming unpaid wages

Migrant workers did not get up to 100 billion RMB or yuan (USD 12.3 billion) paid over 2003 and the central government made repaying them into a priority, to prevent traditional unrest about unpaid wages ahead of the Chinese New Year. A new report by the Beijing Legal Aid and Research Center for the Youth (here quoted by the China Labour Bulletin, a tip of CDT) indicates why doing something about this problem is a problem: costs for this operation might be three times as much as the outstanding payments: 300 billion RMB (USD 36.9 billion).

The report was based on material taken from 8,000 questionnaires submitted to the research centre. The replies suggest that to claim wage arrears of 1,000 Yuan, migrant workers have to pay at least 920 Yuan in various charges and lose between 11 and 21 days at work. The lost days will cost them an additional 550 to 1,050 Yuan. On top of that, government and court officials are paid between 1,950 Yuan and 3,750 Yuan in wages for assisting each migrant worker to claim his or her wage arrears. Added together, the total comes to between 3,420 Yuan and 5,720 Yuan. As a result, the report concludes it will cost at least 3,000 Yuan to claim wage arrears of 1,000 Yuan.

media - After the attack of Lu Banglie 3

The Guardian come not with a kind of retraction , as Simon World suggests, but at least with a clarification of what has happened last weekend in Taishi, after the presumed dead activist Lu Banglie reemerged from his local hospital:

The Pan Yu propaganda office [officially in charge of Taishi village] said there had been "no violence" and that Mr Lu had "pretended to be dead".
Mr Lu said such claims were laughable. "When I came around, I was too nauseous to eat. My body aches all over and my head hurts." But he said only his arm was visibly wounded.His supporters, who include lawyer Gao Jisheng, say they are considering legal action.
The Guardian has asked the Guangdong authorities to investigate the attack but a spokeswoman said a response would be made in the next few days. Mr Lu said he was aware of the dangers and had no regrets about going to Taishi. "I believe you cannot write off truth. The authorities control the village tightly. They try to prevent news from leaking out, which hurts not only the democratisation of Taishi village but the entire country."

A critical Shanghai Daily

economy - Grand Prix out of steam?

Yesterday I talked to a business person who was eager to tap into the booming Chinese market of F1-enthusiasts. I gave my traditional warning, that Chinese consumers are very unpredictable and what has been a success yesterday is not necessarily a success tomorrow.
I did not see then this article in the Shanghai Daily. Last year the first F1 races in Shanghai were an unexpected success, but according to the paper, sales of tickets are sluggish at best this year. A 'full house' like last year is not expected.

labor - Cheap labor gone by 2011 - academic

Director Cai Fang of the population institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences claims that much of China's cheap labor will be phased out by 2011 - not that far away. In Asia News:

His study indicated that for wages to remain low the influx to the cities of rural workers must continue, and this is going to end in a few years. In 2004, for example, the scale of increase in migrant labour was 74 per cent below that of 2003. The trend will eventually mean that the workforce will stop increasing by 2011 and start to contract by 2021.

Cai Fang has been at the basis of a whole bunch of interesting articles about related issues.

media - After the attac of Lu Banglie 2

Lu Banglie is alive and well, not very well, but alive, contrary to the rather dramatic description in The Guardian's report. And critical voices are getting up.
If that part of the report is not true, Benjamin claimed he worked as a medic, the question is what more might not be what it seems. I have talked to some ill-informed and rather suspicious Chinese minds who are very sure Mr. Lu has even set up the whole show to promote his own case. Again: there is nothing to support this theory, but when things fall apart all theories seem to be worth considering.
ESWN quotes again a very critical Anti, who repeats some of the article and says:

These are lies. No matter whether the 25-year-old Joffe-Walt was fantasizing out of fear or because his imagination was running wild, he is a liar as far as reporters are concerned. It is a blight on The Guardian to have such a correspondent in China. If The Guardian does not dismiss such a correspondent and if The Guardian does not apologize and examine itself, then we can publicly say that insofar as China reporting goes, The Guardian is untrustworthy. Anytime that they report again, we will think back how this inflammatory "first-person eyewitness" account by Joffe-Walt deviated from the facts.Therefore, I ask The Guardian to dismiss this liar for the honor of the media professionals. I ask my colleagues to support my proposal.

And:

The Guardian's error obviously has severely affected the Taishi village case and even other rights cases. Whenever a reader hears about another rights activist being beaten, they will automatically think about Joffe-Walt's fantasy. Lies cannot promote fairness; they can only impede fairness. I am a democrat and I support the democratic movement in China. But I will express my anger in a professional manner against any exaggerated or fabricated reporting of the pursuit of democracy. I will not permit a crazy reporter, who once was a Baghdad human shield, to destroy the common ideals of media workers in China."

Very serious matters indeed.

media - After the attack on Lu Banglie

ESWN notes the first rather critical reactions at the Chinese internet after Lu Banglie got attacked, and is possibly killed, while helping the Shanghai-correspondent of The Guardian on assignment in Taishi.
Michael Anti asks the more serious questions about how Lu Banglie was being used. In a translation by ESWN:

As for The Guardian's Benjamin Joffe-Walt, how the fuck did he still have to nerve to write this kind of report? Perhaps he is young and does not yet know that reporting in certain areas of China is just like in a war zone. He should not have gone there against the advice of others, and he should not have brought Lu Banglie to the village. Since he was being taken out by the police, why didn't he insist on rescuing Lu Banglie as well? It is alright to beg for mercy when it happened. But the more important thing is that you have a duty and you must assume responsibility for your companion. Or is that Chinese person just a guide dog?

While there can never be any justification for the attack, asking yourself whether you have done enough - including deciding not to go - to prevent harm to the people who help you is a very important one. Anti suggests others have advised him not to go; I guess I would not have gone unless I was very sure through earlier research, that it would be save for all involved.
Still wondering why Benjamin decided to leave the country"for security reasons" at the mailing list of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club said this morning. Despite all its severity, it does seem like a pretty local conflict that should have no impact on his safety in Shanghai. Guess this is not over yet.

'They beat him until he was lifeless'

(The stunning story about the killing of a democracy activist. Benjamin has left the country fo the time being- Fons). Updates: More updates and links at Simon World.

How democracy activist in China's new frontline was left for dead after a
brutal attack by a uniformed mob

Benjamin Joffe-Walt in Taishi, southern China
Monday October 10, 2005
The Guardian

The last time I saw Lu Banglie, he was lying in a ditch on the side of the street - placid, numb and lifeless - the spit, snot and urine of about 20 men mixing with his blood, and running all over his body.
I had only met him that day. He was to show me the way to Taishi, the hotspot of the growing rural uprisings in China. It felt like heading into a war. Taishi is under siege, I was warned. The day I arrived a French radio journalist and a Hong Kong print journalist were rumoured to have been beaten somewhere around Taishi.
The Taishi election had also been scheduled for that very day, and news of a hunger strike by one of the two most famous figures in Taishi had just come out.
Mr Lu was a very soft-spoken man, one of those skinny guys who looked like he might start tearing at any moment. Born as a peasant in Baoyuesi village of Bailizhou town in Zhijiang city in Hubei province, he was a people's representative and had been in the village of Taishi since the start of a democratic movement in the area.

That movement, deeply unpopular with the local authorities, has come to be seen as a weather vane for China's tentative steps toward a more representative society. It has led to beatings and mass arrests among its population as well as for observers who ventured into its environs.
Mr Lu was at the forefront of this maelstrom. And yesterday this was where the problem lay. We had hired a taxi. Mr Lu got in the car to put us on the right road. As we got closer, I asked him to get out. He refused. "If you go, I go," he insisted. I told him he would be endangering himself, the driver and maybe us. He was unfazed, not even listening. I repeated for a
third time that I wanted him to get out of the car. It didn't work. The translator was annoyed and asked me to leave it. Mr Lu knew the risks better than us, he reasoned. So I dropped it, and it was this appeasement that determined Mr Lu's fate.

We arrived on the outskirts of Taishi, just as the dirt roads start. There were 30 to 50 men - angry, inebriated, bored men. Most looked like thugs. Some wore military camouflage uniform. Some wore blue uniforms with badges on the shoulders, and one guy had a greyish-mauve uniform with a walkie-talkie. Our taxi driver, who we had hired randomly in a neighbouring
village, was called out by the thugs. They screamed at him: "What the fuck are you doing here?"
He knew nothing. He came back in and screamed at us. "Fuck all of you, look now you've gotten me into trouble."
We told him to reverse but by that time it was already too late, the car was encircled. "Don't go out!," I screamed, telling everyone to lock their doors. I called a colleague on my mobile, asked him to stay on the phone with me.
The men outside shouted among themselves and those in uniform suddenly left. Those remaining started pushing on the car, screaming at us to get out. They pointed flashlights at us, and when the light hit Mr Lu's face, it was as if a bomb had gone off. They completely lost it. They pulled him out and bashed him to the ground, kicked him, pulverised him, stomped on his head over and over again. The beating was loud, like the crack of a wooden board, and he
was unconscious within 30 seconds.
They continued for 10 minutes. The body of this skinny little man turned to putty between the kicking legs of the rancorous men. This was not about teaching a man a lesson, about scaring me, about preventing access to the village; this was about vengeance - retribution for teaching villagers their legal rights, for agitating, for daring to hide.
They slowed down but never stopped. He lay there - his eye out of its socket, his tongue cut, a stream of blood dropping from his mouth, his body limp, twisted. The ligaments in his neck were broken, so his head lay sideways as if connected to the rest of his body by a rubber band.
We were probably in the car another five to eight minutes. The front windows were open and various men were reaching in to unlock my door. I held my hand tight to the lock. They punched me, twisted my wrist, tried everything possible with a quick grab to get me out. But I wouldn't let go, and I defended myself while watching Mr Lu get beaten through the window.
Eventually, my translator got out. I followed. They opened my pen, searched my pockets, underwear and socks, asked my translator if his watch could record anything. They asked what we were doing in Taishi. They found my Chinese press pass. "You foreigners you are ruining Taishi," they screamed. "You write write write so much about what's happened here that all these businesses have fled the new industrial zone."

My head was spinning. I was in a mixed state of shock at what had happened to Mr Lu and utter fear for my life. I shamelessly begged. I prayed. I offered them money. I tried to smile at
them. Random people came up to Mr Lu and kicked him in the head, clearing their nose of snot on his body, spitting on him, peeing on him, showing off for each other. I had no idea what to do.
I stood there, sweating, my hands ripping my hair out, just staring at the blood all over the man who had risked his life to help me.

An ambulance came. The medic got out, checked his pulse and left. Then it hit me: I'd done absolutely nothing to save Mr Lu. I stood there watching. I'm trained as a medic, and I did nothing to save Mr Lu. Absolutely nothing. They put us in a car, told us we were being taken for interrogation. On the way the men joked, laughed and we shook.

Mr Lu spent his adult life working to empower villagers and to get the attention of Beijing and the world. He was beaten up many times, had scars all over his body. This, he thought, was part of his work.
Once at the township, they put us at a conference table with flowers and spring water. About 15 officials sat round it and politely questioned us, videotaping the interaction as if it were a TV show. "Why did you come to Taishi? Why did you meet Lu Banglie? How did you meet him?" they asked.
"We are not interested in the reception of media interviews of any kind at this juncture in time," one official explained.
His superior arrived: Ms Qi Hong, associate director of the government news office in Guangzhou. "China is open to foreigners," she said. "We welcome any journalists in Guangzhou, but if you don't follow the proper procedures how can we guarantee your safety?"
The initiator of Mr Lu's beating sat at the table, eyes bloodshot, arms crossed at an angle, his elbow jutting into the air as if to show his extreme disinterest in us.
They said we had broken the law by coming here without permission. We apologised. That is all, that is how the night ended. We walked out of the government building, still being filmed, across the lawn, past the Chinese flag at high mast, and into the car.
They waved and smiled, filming us as we drove off. And this is all I can say about the story of Mr Lu because I never saw Taishi from the inside and cannot tell you how it looks, what the people say, how the air feels.
What I can tell you is that what's going on in Taishi is perhaps the most significant grassroots social movement China has seen since the Cultural Revolution, a rural revolt against corruption, against deterioration of healthcare, against the illegal sale of farmland, and broadly against urban capitalism that has reaped no benefits for these farmers.
The Guardian has been unable to confirm what happened to Mr Lu.

Police said they had received reports that he had been taken to hospital, but that he had been released and was "fine". The three nearest hospitals said that no one had been admitted yesterday.
The last words of Mr Lu I wrote down were: "The police cover their arses. They employ all these thugs whose lives mean nothing to them to kill you. That's why once we are in this we can't go out."

economy - Delphi wants to cut some salaries by 2/3

The bankruptcy proceedings by giant US car part producer Delphi, started last Saturday, is going to have a major fallout, as we can read in this reprint of the New York Times.

The company is also seeking to cut wages of its nearly 35,000 hourly American workers by up to two-thirds, to as little as $10 an hour, though it is not clear whether they will succeed in doing so.

It looks very much that a large part of Delphi in the US is going to be dismantled and GM will get more parts from China. While the Chinese Landwind continues to look like a disaster, as I wrote before (but I cannot find back my own writings) China will conquer the car market in the US and Europe not with Chinese cars, but piece by piece. Delphi is going to show the example.

Celap in Shanghai

life - Another side of CELAP

I got quite some reactions on the picture I put up here of CELAP, the newly built Party School in Shanghai. And rightfully so. Here is another side of the building, this time by night.

Muzimei, speaking for Bokee.com

internet - Muzimei goes for podcast

The British Telegraph was kind enough to point me to Muzimei's latest endavour, her podcasting. No, do not click through right away to her site, but listen to some serious warning I have to give you before you leave me.
Of course, some parts of her podcasts are, just as her previous writing, potentially exciting, although most of it is really very, very boring. Guess at least a few or the men must have noticed this time she was wearing a wire. What is worst, her host company Bokee.com has developed a system that will screw up your computer for a long time. When you click on this page, large number of podcasts start to download to your computer.
It blocks virtually all other activity on your computer: my RSS-reader, gmail, nothing worked in the hours I let those podcast come in. After a few hours I lost my patience and quit the whole thing, since despite my excellent internet connection, downloading was still going on.
I could not subscripe to independent RSS-readers, probably a way how Bokee wants you to stick with them. A nuisance, I can tell you.
I will wait until she starts a vlog.

Update: One of my more innocent readers asked me who this Muzimei actually is. The previously Guangdong-based reporter Li Li used in 2003 Muzimei as her pen name for sex diaries where she reviewed the sexual achievements of a fast growing number of men. The men were identified by name - obvious without their consent - and that created a large number of people who were rightfully pissed off.
Not only collapsed the servers under the vast growing interest, Li lost her job and has recently been hired by Bokee.com, a host service for weblogs - depending on your definition of weblogs. She got a bit of attention on those days, and the commercially oriented Bokee.com seems to be eager to follow that line.

internet - Failing email address

Email to fons@cbiz.cn has not been delivered most of last week because of a failing server. When you would have expected a reply from me or have sent me otherwise an email to this address, please resend it to fons.tuinstra@gmail.com. The failure was only discovered yesterday as the holidays in China ended and has not yet been restored.