More internet blocks abolished

In China, when you predict trends, you always keep your fingers crossed, but this time I seem to have been very much spot-on.
My analysis said last week that ahead of the Olympics, the internet censorship would become much more subtle and illustrated this with a few new features. That trend has now continued as also Wikipedia, blogspot and others are unblocked. Danwei does not believe yet it will stay, but unless the new censorship system is an obvious failure (a partly failure would not be that bad, since the system has never been flawless) the url-blocks will be gone.

How to detect nonsense in articles on the Chinese internet

The Washington Post made a very sloppy article on this intriguing subject: how are the Chinese authorities going to control the internet and mobile communication? It started with a little anecdote that was new for me, but when I read this I knew I was losing my time:

It hasn't been for lack of trying. The Public Security Ministry, which monitors the Internet under guidance from the Central Propaganda Department, has recruited an estimated 30,000 people to snoop on electronic communications. The ministry recently introduced two cartoon characters -- a male and female in police uniforms -- that it said would pop up on computer screens occasionally to remind people that their activity is being tracked.

The urban myth of those 30,000 police officers monitoring the internet is the official benchmark that we are leaving serious journalism. The number has never even been proven and - it has been argumented before - on 162 million internet users that is actually a very low number. That number - if true - only proves China does not take controlling the internet very serious.
For the ministry of Public Security it might be news that they are under the guidance from the Central Propaganda Department. There is a committee of about 17 government departments who try to discuss how the government should deal with the internet, but none of those departments takes the overhand.
Of course, the cute cartoons - what a way to crack down on the internet users - were not introduced by the ministry, but by the Beijing public security. It is a very local affair, but Western media try to make small things big by declaring them wrongly into national issues.

SARFT-ban of today: sex

Sex sells, all media know and since being attractive is the last thing the State Administration of Radio, Film and TV (SARFT) want their Chinese media to be the regulator has banned sex, reports Josie Liu.

Prompted by some sex talk radio programs on several radio stations in Sichuan, China’s broadcast regulator has banned television and radio stations from planning, producing and broadcasting programs relating to sex life, experience or medicines.

China's media have always found ways around the rather conservative character of the regulator. In the 1990s you could listen all night long to call-in programs on the radio where people could ask expert advice om their sex problems. This was of course meant to be purely educational.

Now, sex is everywhere and the boys at Xinhua even have their own soft-porn departments. But that is print and SARFT will not allow that for "their" media. Not that the ban will help though, but since it is their job to ban thing, they will even ban the rain, when then think they should do it.

Cyber nanny into overdrive

Danwei summarizes the first emotional reactions at the Chinese internet as our internet nanny seems to go into an overdrive, ahead of the 17th Party Congress in October. As Jeremy Goldkorn notes, the lady even makes Wang Jianshou from Shanghai frustrated, and that takes a lot.

What is happening is bad enough: thousands of servers and ten thousands of websites just being unplugged is quite a disaster for those involved. The actions also seem to be rather localized in stead of a concerted China-wide action.

Of course, some of the local authorities are very eager to show they are doing enough to guarantee a harmonious society, not realizing that what they do might reach the opposite. I have no information from the bigger cities, where such a disruption might cause severe economic damage.

Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei has gladly agreed to join our speakers' bureau at Chinabiz Speakers, although it might take a few week before we have his profile active.

Internet nanny drives me against the wall

For a while I thought I could live with the internet censorship, or our nanny as some call the grumpy old woman. While being irrational and wrong in itself, I would be able to find patterns I was sometimes even able to explain to outsiders.
For example, for a long time - apart from real emergencies - new IP-blocks would only get in place at the first working day of the month. This was all based on the basis principle of any bureaucracy: we take ourselves very serious, but do not like to work too hard.
By reducing the actual number of IP-blocks the Great Fire Wall (GFW) even became slight more efficient, since many newbies did not see a good reason to educated themselves on circumventing that wall.
But now the old woman has gone crazy and all my old certainties seem out of the window. First, she blocked Feedburner. What sense does it make to block the world's largest producer of RSS-feeds? Maybe nanny wanted to punish Google, who bought Feedburner recently, for not joining the non-sensical declaration on self-discipline on the internet, that was signed for the first time by Yahoo and Microsoft.
Now, today the English section of Wikipedia was closed again, and act that made really no sense to me. The problem of course when you cannot make sense out of it (unlike in my first example), the punishment does not make any sense. It only forces more angry users to get their proxies in place again.

Feedburner feeds unavailable in China

I just learned that the Feedburner feeds are unavailable in China. A bit of a nuisance, since I just started to just them for this weblog. Be advised that this weblog also has an atom-feed that works as well and is also available on the home page.

Blogger unblocked, blocked and unblocked again

For those who are still interested in what our moody internet nanny is doing: the blogspot-domains owned by Google (or blogger) are unblocked again.

A blocked blogger got his court hearing

Global Voices translates the weblog of Shanghai-based blogger Yetaai who tries to sue China Telecom for blocking his website.
After quite some delays he got his court hearing and a verdicts is due, well, within the next six months that is. The real case is of course against the Chinese internet censorship or GFW, but by suing China Telecom for their poor service, there is suddenly somebody to sue.

Trying to blackout an explosion

The Washington Post describes the efforts of local authorities to keep an explosion at Tian Shifu in Liaoning province under wraps. It is an excellent case study in how an explosion, costing at least 25 lives and problably much more, is kept out of the publicity.

In Beijing, officials in the central government of President Hu Jintao have suggested repeatedly that a more open attitude is necessary in the age of cellphones and the Internet. Wang Guoqing, vice minister of the government's national Information Office, told China Central Television last month that local attempts to block coverage of negative news are "naive" given the new technology.
Whether Wang was sincere or not in his call for more openness, the message has not gotten through in China's provincial propaganda offices. At those levels, senior propaganda officials often are on close terms with local newspaper and television editors; they attend the same party meetings and follow similar career paths. Coverage of Tian Shifu's explosion was a case in point.

The struggle for openness is an ongoing one. The story in the end made it into the Washington Post, but might not got a huge readership in Benxi county.

Yahoo! lied in Shi Tao's case

Shi Tao

Rconversation points at new material found by the Dui Hua foundation that proves Yahoo! legal counsel has been lying in a congressional hearing when he said that his company did not know why the judicial authorities in Beijing wanted to go after the journalist Shi Tao.
Shi was - with the help of Yahoo! - convicted to ten years of jail for giving state secrets to foreigners.
The Dui Hua foundation has translated the original document. Rconversations links to it all.

Update: The Dui Huai foundation comes with additional prove in other cases Yahoo knew why the police was after journalists and internet users.

Tough days for Li Changchun

Li Changchun

Propaganda Czar Li Changchun has a day-job in stifling debate. Coming from the Jiang Zemin school, that would have been an easy job, but if we can believe this report in the Washington Post, Li has been regularly at odds with his current boss, Hu Jintao.
The latest problem occurred when Li wanted to ban the July issue of the academic magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, because it carried an articles saying that the power monopoly of the Communist Party lays at the root of many of China's current problems:

Although Hu has generally shown a restrictive attitude toward free speech, he counseled tolerance this time, the report said, advising Li that it is healthier to have such debate out in the open than to let it ferment under the surface. The magazine remains on the stands.
The incident was only the latest in a string of setbacks for Li and China's propaganda bureaucracy. An explosion of negative news -- tainted food exports, slave labor at brick kilns, political challenges and even supposed cardboard dumplings -- has pained party censors and renewed demands for ideological and political discipline among China's journalists.

More at the Washington Post.

Second report on environmental damage killed

At the beginning of this month China's environmental authorities got critiziced after they forced the World Bank to tone down a report, estimating the annually 750,000 Chinese would die prematurely from environmental damage. Now, according to the Los Angeles Times, an annual report on the environmental damage for the GDP, due in September, was killed.
Last year the so-called "Green GDP" said environmental damage had cost China US$ 67.7 billion or 3 percent of its GDP over 2005.

Chinese and Western experts, however, said Monday that authorities might have acted for reasons not readily apparent to casual observers. They said the reluctance to publicize the country's environmental woes might have had more to do with political relations between the central government and provincial leaders than with a fear of airing dirty laundry.

The now cancelled "Green GDP" report would also be a tool to put a price tag on the environmental damage per province, a problem for those provinces who are more focused on economic growth than on environmental protection.

Print censor eyes online publications

Time for code orange as the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP) announces it will try to regulate online publications. According to the China Tech News Kou Xiaowei, a deputy director of the print censor, his organization is preparing a system of approval and permission for online publications.
China's regulatory system for media is highly segmented and the different regulators one by one try to get involved in the online media, who are breaking down the traditional segmentation of the media. At the end of last year the State Administration of Radio, TV and Film (SARFT) tried to get hold on the video sharing market, but basically got nowhere, at the time.
When the regulators are fighting to hold or even expand their turf they are up for a fight with colleague censors, the industry and the audiences, who increasingly turn to the internet. My prediction is that GAPP will not get very far, but might still be out to kill some chickens to scare off the monkeys, as the Chinese saying goes.

Killing Dragon TV news

Just heard a story of an incident that happened two weeks ago while I was in Europe, but is rather telling for the current media relations in China. Dragon TV of the Shanghai Media Groups has been competing successfully with the national news of CCTV at seven o'clock. Traditionally all Chinese watch the news at seven.
The news of Dragon TV was broadcasted from 6:30 to 7:30 and was doing very well, because it was unlike the CCTV propaganda show more like a news program. Last year it won a prize as the best news program in China. But two weeks ago Shanghai's new party chief forced the Shanghai Media Group to toe the old line. Since then Shanghainese can enjoy each day at seven the national news. The Dragon news program has been killed.
Of course, this step caused quite some bad feelings at the Shanghai Media Group and was widely discussed on the internet. But as always: politics does prevail.
None of the official media was allowed to publish about the incident and - even more remarkable - non of the foreign media actually noticed it.

Problematic email delivery in China?

China's internet censor system has been messing around with email messages coming into the country, says Danny Levinson of BDL Media and an article at Reuters.

In layman's terms, the problem seems to be that often, but not always (and unfortunately not always easy to replicate), emailing into China from outside servers get bounced, and sending from inside China out also sometimes, but not always bounce. Sure, this happens in general, sometimes. But since about 2AM on Monday morning, it's been quite problematic.

I have been writing before about the new nanny-software China seems to be testing, but had not noted any problems with the email delivery. What is annoying is the unpredictable way it switches off my Google news searches, but I just restarted my proxy and that problem is now gone.
It is clear that we can throw our old ideas about how the Great Firewall of China's internet censors works in the dustbin. Like the introduction of previous systems, new systems cause a massive amount of problems and the only positive side of it is that in those precious months you can actually learn how the system works.

Dear Policeman Kang

Nick Young of the China Development Brief has - after the closure of the Chinese edition of his leading publication - published a statement and a letter he wrote to investigating police officer Kang. (In full here - courtesy of the WSJ).
Of course, policeman Kang probably does not care less, since it is for him an illegal operation. But it show a bit what kind of trouble he is heading for, when he or his superiors decide to push ahead with the closure.
The letter includes a list of organizations who have supported the newsletter:
Oxfam Hong Kong, Save the Children UK, The Worldwide Fund for Nature, The Ford Foundation, The Trace Foundation, The Kadoorie Charitable Foundation, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Great Britain-China Centre, The Japan Foundation, ActionAid, The British Council, The Canadian International Development Agency Civil Society Program, The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office Human Rights Project Fund, The Australian International Development Agency, The Charities Aid Foundation (UK), The European Union Beijing Delegation, CARE International; Voluntary Service Overseas, Save the Children UK, The International Fund for Agricultural Development, The United Kingdom Department for International Development, The University of Harvard Centre for Global Equity, JP Morgan Bank, HPBilliton

China Development Brief ordered to close

Authorities in Beijing have ordered the leading publication on NGO-activities in China, the China Development Brief, to close its Chinese edition. reports Time at its blog.

Nick Young, founder of the publication that has been around since 1996, keeps hope:

"My hope is that these actions have been precipitated by zealous security officers," he says, "and that more senior figures in the government and Communist Party will realize that actions of this kind are not in China's best interest."

The publication was, according to the local security officials both "illegal" and conducting "illegal surveys". The closure, last week, comes at a time when China seems busy in trying to control non-governmental activities by foreigners, one year ahead of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Earlier a US group also accused China of deporting over one hundred foreign missionaries from China.

While those acts are obvious going to be an embarrassment for the central government, zealous local official might have their own interpretation of what is needed in the country.

Nick Young remains faces a 5-year ban from China, but remains optimistic for the time being:

One irony of the moves against the publication is that the China Development Brief, whose motto is "to enhance constructive engagement between China and the world," has editorialized against what Young describes as "more or less openly hostile" Western criticism of China. "I do consider myself to be friend of China," he says. "I think it's a serious problem if the state cannot distinguish between friends and enemies."

Update: I just learned from a press release that the servers of this online publication are based in the UK, making it - if it has any nationality - a British publication that should adhere to British laws and regulations. When the authorities have any misgivings about an online publication, they can block it.
That is most likely why Public Security in Beijing got the local statistics bureau involved and included "illegal surveys" as another offense. I'm not sure how much meat is on that one. Anyway, even if the accusation by the Beijing authorities are illegal, it would not make the life of Nick Young much happier.

Do the Xiamen internet regulations have a meaning?

I have been ignoring the effort by the Xiamen government to curtail access to the internet, after the PX-protests, because it just would not work according to my assessment. The internet is a global system, China is trying to pretend it can stop some of the international access, but the idea of Xiamen being able to execute successfully any censorship system seemed rather unrealistic.
But the non-news keeps on hitting headlines, even here at the Financial Times, Xiamen wants to force internet users on Xiamen-based sites to register under their real name, a measure that has just been abandoned by the central government because it was not "mature".
It seems just another case of a local government not being able to get to terms with the new communication tools, that cannot be controlled.

China censors 750,000 environmental deaths

About 750,000 premature deaths caused by the environmental degradation have been eleminated from a World Bank report, writes the Financial Times (here in a pick-up from Howard French). The fear of "social unrest" was quoted as the reason to skip the information from the report.
The report has not been released officially, but a draft was available last year on the internet.

Missing from this report are the research project’s findings that high air-pollution levels in Chinese cities is leading to the premature deaths of 350,000-400,000 people each year. A further 300,000 people die prematurely each year from exposure to poor air indoors, according to advisers, but little discussion of this issue survived in the report because it was outside the ambit of the Chinese ministries which sponsored the research.
Another 60,000-odd premature deaths were attributable to poor-quality water, largely in the countryside, from severe diarrhoea, and stomach, liver and bladder
cancers.

GFW-nanny new style

Chacha, the internet police woman

The rather irrational behavior of China's internet censorship over the past few months has caused quite some irritation and speculation on what the guys and girls behind the buttons might be up to. Most analysis comes as a burst of anger, like yesterday when suddenly Yahoo found itself on the wrong side of the Great Fire Wall. Especially the weblogs hosts like Blogger, wordpress and typepad have suffered from this behavior.

Just like most commentors I have no technical insights in what is really happening, but my take might be different from most who blame directly the authorities for each single action of nanny. My estimation is that just the oposite is happening: the machines are taking over.

Up to not so long ago, nanny was relative predictable. It had it system of blocking IP-addresses that was mostly adjusted on the first working day of the month, unless there was a particular urgent crisis going on. On top of that there was an automated system of key word filtering, triggering off smallish punishments like a temporary block between the computer involved and the IP-address hosting the banned words.

Since a few months an increasing number of incidents shows a shift in behavior. A larger number of nation-wide IP-blocks occurred whithout obvious reason and often disappeared in a day or so. What I expect is happening it that nanny is trying to automate the whole blocking system on a higher level.

Key in understanding the bureaucracy behind the internet censorship is the fact that it is a bureaucracy. An obvious need of any bureaucracy is decreasing the workload. The system of blocking IP-addresses in any system would by now no longer be possibly to be done by humans, especially not by humans who do not like overtime.

What we now see is the finetuning of a new blocking system that should reduce the worldload of nanny, but is obvious working less than perfect. So, in that way there are no new policies, but new systems.

Yahoo blocking rumor

Different webloggers in Shanghai and Beijing report that Yahoo has been blocked. No way to get it confirmed here in Europe. Well, it is not blocked here:-)

Update: All seems well again, for the moment.

"Sincere apologies for deleting your post"

Danwei translates a comment by entertainment journalist He Dong after the death of cross-talk master Hou Baolin. The original post got entangled in China's internet censorship and at the tail of the article we learn how Sina.com deals with that kind of issue. They are very, very sorry about what they do:

I am a blog customer service manager. I am very sorry to inform you that, for certain reasons, we have temporarily placed your article "The death of a celebrity, a festival for the paparazzi" into the trash folder. You may find your article in the trash folder, please back up the contents!
We are very sorry for taking down your article without your permission, so let me apologize to you here! We understand the trouble you've taken to complete a blog post, and we understand your feelings on having your work deleted.

Google sees censorship as trade barrier

Google offers an interesting twist in the censorship dilemma, as it asked US trade officials to treat internet censorship as an international trade barrier, writes AP. Not only it the proposal interesting, it also seems that Google is now actively engaging into governmental relationships, a field it would try to avoid in the past.
This is the argument:

Google sees the dramatic increase in government Net censorship, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, as a potential threat to its advertising-driven business model, and wants government officials to consider the issue in economic, rather than just political, terms.

The problem with Chinese media

Positive Solutions praises a list of requirements for investigative journalists in China in the aftermath of the slave scandal. He adds a few requirements of himself:

China Daily:
OK, publications like China Daily. Too much of China’s media has no interest in investigative reporting as it is far beyond its Party-prescribed remit. The purpose of government media is controlled information release and public relations, not detailing as accurately as possible what is really happening.

A fairly comprehensive set of bullet points for change. Unfortunately, there might be some problems in implementing this all.

Operational guide for China's newspapers

For its thirteen character ad in support of the Tiananmen Mothers on June 4 on the Chengdu Evening News had already a huge effect. ESWN now translates from the New Century Media an account by an old hand of the paper who meanwhile gives a good overview of the way newspapers in China operate.

A very useful overview.

It is so sad for China. The Chinese Communist are so vulnerable that they are afraid of "a thirteen word advertisement that is the size of a cigarette." They are even more afraid of the voices of old people like us trying to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Can a history written in blood be purged and forgotten?
The people in charge of compiling dictionaries have a huge problem. Six cannot be placed next to four, rightists cannot be mentioned and the Cultural Revolution cannot be reported. If all the disasters in history are not allowed to be mentioned, then can this still be called a nation? The value of history is that it can be handed down, which meant that memory is essential. Presently, the Chinese authorities are most afraid that the people should have memories. What can this idiotic action possibly achieve?

Only good news on China's slaves

China Digital News translated the latest censorship order on the discovery of hundreds of slaves, sometimes children, in the kilns of Shanxi province - issued by the central government, so not only the local government trying to protect itself.
We only want good news on our slaves, says the order:

All External Communication Offices, Central and Local Main News Websites:
Regarding the Shanxi “illegal brick kilns” event, all websites should reinforce positive propaganda, put more emphasis on the forceful measures that the central and local governments have already taken, and close the comment function in the related news reports. The management of the interactive communication tools, such as online forums, blogs, and instant messages, should also be strengthened. Harmful information that uses this event to attack the party and the government should be deleted as soon as possible. All local external communication offices should enhance their instruction, supervision and inspection, and concretely implement the related management measures.
The Internet Bureau, CPC Central Office of External Communication June 15, 2007

In stead of addressing the real issue, next will be the hunt for the person who leaked this news: Yahoo might get a visit again. This is exactly what happened when Shi Tao distributed a similar order.

Wikipedia unblocked

The world's fastest growing encyclopedia Wikipedia is not longer blocked in China, many weblogs report, although the Chinese edition is still not accessible.
Our internet nanny has been changing maybe not policies but its approach to censorship. While it does not block whole site (apart from the BBC or course), it more often is able to block specific entries with certain unwanted information. My RSS-reader was always a solid route around censorship, but every now and then I have to use it in combination with a proxy. Changes indeed.

Fuck the GFW

Apologies for being real slow in posting, but busy, busy, busy. The launch for the speakers bureau is planned for Monday, I'm preparing a executive new media training for the Hachette Group, preparing a trip to Europe and a few things I cannot talk about.
So I missed the brouha between the Wahaha-group and Danone, while I love this kind of subjects. I missed the internet uproar on the slaves released in Shanxi and the anger that sparked off after the internet censors blocked partly the picture site flickr.com.
The least I can do is wear one of the t-shirts.

Time blog falsely claims to be blocked

Being blocked by the Chinese internet filter systems is a kind of honorary award, the bloggers at Time Magazine seem to like.

That's what we have been. Blocked. Great Fire Wall-ed. Or Net nanny-ized. Or, as some Chinese netizens say in reference to their President's most famous slogan, "harmonized" (被和谐的), which has an authentically creepy Orwellian ring to it....or maybe it wounds more like "neuralized" from the Men in Black movie, which would make it more silly than creepy.

There is only one problem with that claim, say some of the comments: it is not true. I also have had no problems in getting to their website or weblog, I just did an entry myself on this weblog with quite a high level of sensitive words: it does not matter. Nanny takes a nap I guess.

Shi Tao wins prize in South Africa

Shi Tao

Our internet nanny was making overtime tonight when the news broke that the Chinese journalist Shi Tao has won, the Golden Pen, a price at the conference of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) in South Africa. Shi Tao was jailed by the Chinese authorities for doing his work as a journalist with the help of Yahoo.
In this case I could see why nanny got upset, but it is the first time that I could not get any links to the issue. Also, my proxies did not work. Anyway, we have the most important news, so even a nanny in the highest alert cannot stop the news.

Update I: Got some links here now.
Update II: Got through to the original post by Rebecca MacKinnon.

Press freedom with Chinese characteristics

Over the weekend I discussed with an editor of a Dutch magazine for journalists about press freedom in China, and especially the campaign NGO's have started accusing China of backtracking on its promise to allow foreign journalists do their work without any of the old restriction that were placed on foreign media after June 1989 ahead of the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.
Now, at this stage most looks rather positive, maybe with the exception of Tibet: a few foreign journalists have been called in by the headmaster of the ministry of foreign affairs after they went to Tibet without explicit permission. As far as I know this is the only place in China where all foreigners need permission to go to, and journalists a special one that is hard to get.
But otherwise, when journalists were detained for working in a region without explicit approval, one phone call from Beijing was enough to sort the local officials out.
Probably because their is not so much bad news to tell about the position of foreign journalists, in a strange twist now the position of Chinese journalists has become the issue.

"There is no justification for denying to Chinese journalists even the limited freedoms that their foreign colleagues enjoy," said Richardson. "If China is genuine about press freedom for the Olympics, it must also emancipate its own journalists."

First, the Chinese government has never promised Chinese media would be treated equally as the foreign once, so it is hardly decent to say China is breaking its promises. Further, talking about press freedom in terms of giving journalists more rights is not really helping if the ownership relations in the traditional media do not change. (And I do not see that happening.)
Anyway, the editor generously allocated 250 words to explain this story to a largely ignorant audience.
This morning I was reading this translation by ESWN, an interview in Du Daozheng of Yanhuang Chunqiu and a beautiful example on how China's media are changing. No clue how to summarize that in 250 words.

A long-term perspective on media freedom

Li Datong

China Blog reports on a speech Li Datong gave yesterday at a meeting of the media association in Hong Kong. Li Datong was the editor of Freezing Point, a supplement of the China Youth Daily, who lost his job a few years ago for being too critical.

As we noted before, despite that setback, he remained optimistic about the long-term direction China's media are taking, although it would not go very fast, he warned.

Publications must survive on financial support of the market, not the government. And the Internet offers an outlet for stories that are blocked from being run by newspapers and magazines. Under these pressures, the system of press control is like "solid ice melting," he says. "The layers are beginning to split and break apart."

Chinese media opening up game

SARFT's Yong Huang

What makes my day is when one of China's censorship organizations talks about the country's media opening up, especially when addressing a room full of drooling Western media people, eager to enter China. Of course there are the dazzling 1.3 billion consumers that caused more Western executives to lose their marbles.
Earlier in the month we caught Liu Binjie of GAPP - who censors the printed media, telling China would open up for foreign periodicals. Today Asia Media reports from a Asia Society meeting in Southern California how the censor of Radio, TV and Film (SARFT), represented by Yong Huang, talked for an eager audience about China's opening up for the media. "Be patient," he said and those were probably the two most important words of his speech.
Last week I met one of the executives of one of the few foreign TV-stations that obtained permission to broadcast in China. Of course I wanted to know how his business was going. "Simply not sustainable," he said. "We got a permission to lose money."
Why are these Western executives then listening to all those censors, expecting they are the ones who might be able to make money in China? I guess it is lack of experience. In most of the other industries in the 1990s there was a similar tendency of taking too much the relevant authorities would say for granted. Foreign companies have learned it the hard way, after they got into the market and some are actually doing quite ok.
Media companies will not get into this blessed state for a long time. GAPP and SARFT are here to stay and the implication in the long run is that they will destroy their media industries by banning anything that might be of interest to their audiences. In the big cities you seeing a tidal wave of change in media behavior. That is a change that might also get to the rest of the 90 percent who has no real alternatives like the internet. Only when the destruction of the traditional media has reached a more substantial section of the population, change might be possible.
Up to then, we might have to listen to those meaningless speeches by the censoring government bodies.