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 A stroll in Guizhou Chinese state-owned media, journalists, bloggers, and forum posters have all written about the riots that took place in Weng'an, Guizhou Province a week ago. The story, and how it has played out in official and unofficial media, illuminates several aspects of Chinese society and media, ranging from Internet pop culture and censorship, press freedom, the government's attempts to encourage but somehow control 'information openness' corruption of local officials and popular resentment against it, and what happens when crowds get out of control.
The best summaries of the affair are on ESWN (several articles, start here), and by Jonathan Ansfield on the Newsweek blog. This article is from Danwei.org
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 Ji Sha's blog: "I love you, my whole class loves you" China's biggest blog host Sina has recently upgraded its blogging system. A bug in the new system has caused some revealing and laughable accidents: The real identities of some of the fans who post sugary comments anonymously on some entertainment celebrities' blogs were revealed, and turned out to be the celebrities themselves.
Self-promotion and egos aside, it seems curious that these celebrities would waste their precious time engaging in this kind of childish behavior.
Jin Sha, a singer, actress and one of the self-commenting bloggers, wrote on her blog about her feeling after what she did was exposed.
It was when I opened my blog and few people knew about it, so I just entertained myself a little bit with those anonymous posts. I didn't expect that when it was upgraded, anonymous comment became "posted by hosts". So embarrassing.
The image above is a screen grab of Jin's own 'fan' comments:
- You are so cute behaving like a little boy.
- I love you!! My whole class love you!
- Jin Sha sister you are my favorite star, all boys @%^$&*
 Zhou Jie talks to himself The image to the right is a screen grab from the blog of Zhou Jie, an actor most famous for starring as Er Kang, a charming Qing dynasty prince in the 1998 TV drama Huanzhu Princess.
- I have read your book. Great book. Support for you. Wish you well.
- I forgot, I am the first one today.
- I know you are working on Fengshenbang (a Chinese TV series) I hope everything goes well. Want to watch your new work.
- This blog reminds me of the days when you were starring in Huanzhu Princess
—All said by Zhou Jie to himself.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Hu Jintao meets netizens China's President Hu Jintao had a brief online chat with members of the People's Daily's 'Strong Country' online forum this morning.
The whole chat lasted about four minutes. President Hu answered three questions asked by three netizens. The three questions were:
1. Do you use the Internet?
2. What do you do on the Internet?
3. Netizens have put up a lot of suggestions about the country; do you read them?
President Hu said that he did use the Internet quite often, though not every day. He pointed out that the People's Daily' Strong Country Forum is one of the few sites he checks every time he gets online.
He said the Internet is an important source of news as well as a channel where the president can find out what netizens' concerns are, and a way to gather their opinions. Then the moderator said the President was very busy and announced the end of the talk. Hu wished everyone good health and happy life.
Possibly because of the sudden increase of traffic, many netizens who were eager to have a word with their president found the site inaccessible. Nevertheless, their unanswered questions are posted on the forum. Some of the questions:
- Are you angry with the harsh questions posted on the forum?
- What do think of the 93% support rate for your government?
- What is your comment on the performance of the Chinese people in the face of disasters this year?
This is a video of Hu's online chat session that has been uploaded to Youku.com:
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Little Cloud wants you to donate A minor ruffle on the Chinese Internet: at the beginning of June, a girl calling herself Xiaoyun or Little Cloud started posting slutty photos of herself to various Chinese websites. She says she was from Sichuan, and she was posting the photos to encourage people to donate money to earthquake relief.
Some Chinese netizens are condemning her, calling her a "shameless 90s generation girl", while others are praising her altruistic spirit.
It seems that the Furong Jiejie method of achieving Internet fame still works (see Danwei post on Internet celebrities below).
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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The Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's performance during the earthquake relief effort over the last two weeks has given his popularity a powerful boost. And now someone has started a Facebook fan page for him that so far has more than 12,000 supporters.
Wen, or 'Baobao' as many of his supporters call him, has had a legion of online fans for several years, a long time before the Sichuan earthquake. See for example this Danwei post: A portrait of the Premier as a young man (from 2007).
In 2005, a blog appeared on a popular blog host service that was allegedly written Wen (see this Danwei post). This article is from Danwei.org
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 CAPTION COMES HERE Related to yesterday's post, MSN together with Honda (Guangzhou) has launched a one-for-one donation campaign. For every MSN Messenger user that changes their screen-name to "(R) 彩虹连心 支援灾区" [trans (rough): Rainbow of United Hearts, Supporting & Assisting the Disaster Area], MSN will donate RMB 0.10 toward the effort to rebuild schools and the local education system in Sichuan / Wenchuan; Honda matches MSN's donations.
Link here for details about the campaign. At the time of publishing, the campaign had already raised / donated RMB 160,047.60 [800,238 users x 0.20]. Digital corporate social responsibility, bravo! This article is from Danwei.org
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MSN China has initiated an MSN Messenger campaign allowing Chinese netizens to express their "prayers and blessings" toward the "Sichuan / Wenchuan earthquake disaster area" by changing their MSN signatures to display a rainbow (see photo below). This campaign follows in the footsteps of the recent "(L) China" MSN / QQ IM campaign, covered in detail by Shanghaiist.
According to MSN, the rainbow represents hope and a good things to come: "We [MSN] believe that there is always a rainbow after the wind and rain."
Participation in the campaign only requires adding an "(R)" before your MSN Messenger screen-name. For detailed instructions and the text from which the above quotes are translated, link here (in Chinese). This article is from Danwei.org
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 混球vCNN from the USA votes often Sina, a major Chinese web portal that's been running with the anger that many Internet users feel toward CNN and the western media, is hosting a signature campaign that asks Chinese round the globe to sign on against CNN and separatism.
As with other online polls, this petition is open for abuse, particularly given its explicit goal of racking up 20 million signatures.
Blogger Wen Yunchao took a look through the results and found some interesting names on the list.
At right is a screenful of signatures from individuals named "混球vCNN" who posted from the US. Another screenshot shows the same name posting multiple times from Iraq.
Other fake signatures are less obvious:
Screenshots 3, 4, and 5 are of signatures from 3:00-6:00 on 16 April (pages 8,500-10,000 at 0:15 on the 25th). Here we can see that the names are all different, but the province is almost entirely Yunnan. During those hours, vanishingly few people from other provinces and cities signed their names.
From the changing "names," we notice that the name Genghis (成吉, Chengji in Chinese) occurs frequently (as in Genghis Kehong, Genghis Xingshuang), as does the character 爽 (in Mingshuang, Xingshuang, Jiashuang). Evidently, a whole slew of surnames and given names were entered, and then the computer randomly selected a full name. What's interesting is that the two character surname Chengji, which you usually don't see, suddenly turns up on Sina. Did the editor imagine that Genghis Khan's surname was Chengji? If you entered all the names into a computer list, you'd probably come up with some pretty interesting things.
From these screenshots we can see that there's a possibility of ballot-stuffing on Sina. If Sina takes this data as a "signed protest against the western media," then it's only going to turn itself into a laughingstock.
Of course, Sina could say that that this was done by netizens maliciously using automatic voting programs, but in that case, as China's Biggest News Portal, how will it explain to its clients and users why it was not prepared to prevent ballot stuffing in a serious signature-gathering event that has implications for the nation's reputation?
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Not fully recovered On April 18, CNN.com was temporally unavailable in mainland China. CNN later confirmed that its website "was targeted by attempts to interrupt its news Web site, resulting in countermeasures that caused the service to be slow or unavailable to some users in limited areas of Asia."
Some Chinese hackers celebrated success by using a picture, allegedly was grabbed from the hacked CNN's website. (See it here. )
Today's The Beijing News ran an article doubting if this screen grab was really from the CNN website, or just another site with the misfortune to have the letters "cnn" in its URL. The website appears not yet fully recovered, but based on its URL "sports.si.cnn.com", it seems the argument is rather unnecessary: No mistake, it is part of CNN.com and it is screwed.
 The hacked website The top picture is screen grab that shows the current state of the website. The second image shows the hacked web page and the slogans left by the hackers, both in English and Chinese. This image is circulating on the Internet like a trophy of the hackers' success at "making CNN.com disappear from the earth." This article is from Danwei.org
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China Digital Times reports:
Hero to Traitor: The Difference a Day Makes
After excoriating a respected news editor for advocating greater freedom of speech and venting their anger on a Chinese student at Duke University for trying to promote dialogue between pro-China and pro-Tibet protestors, Chinese nationalists have turned their sights on a new, and frankly shocking, target: Jin Jing, the wheelchair-bound fencer declared a national hero last week after using her frail body to protect the Olympic flame from protesters in Paris. Jin’s crime? Expressing doubts over plans for a boycott of French retailer Carrefour–a boycott motivated in large part by the treatment she received in Paris.
The China Digital Times post linked above translates a post by Liang Fafu of Lanzhou, since harmonized. The last sentence:
"From these actions you can what type of creatures these nationalists are".
See also ESWN's translation of a post by Ramblings of a Drunkard blog: To The Netizens Who Are Cursing Me This article is from Danwei.org
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 Don't love you no more CNN continues to take the rap for evils of the Western media:
• Today CNN.com appears to have been blocked in China.
• There is a new addition to the I Heart China chat software campaign by Chinese netizens: people are adding (U) CNN to their instant messenger user names, which produces a broken heart icon (illustrated here). See this Shanghaiist post for more on the I Heart China campaign.
• According to a post on the overseas Chinese forum website Wenxue City, an anti CNN demonstration is being organized in L.A. this Saturday, starting at 10am outside CNN's Sunset Boulevard offices. Ironically, Wenxue City is blocked in China. This article is from Danwei.org
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 Unfortunate backdrop This article is by guest contributor Alice Xin Liu.
On April 9, 2008 at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, two high-profile student 'protests' for and against Tibetan independence took place. Grace Wang (Wang Qianyuan 王千源), a 21 year old girl from Qingdao, Shandong, joined in the protest on the campus. Wang is a student at Duke University.
To the shock of many Chinese students at Duke and also at home in China, Wang was protesting for some kind of middle-ground between the foreign pro-Tibetan independence group and the Chinese anti-Tibetan independence group. She wrote ‘Free Tibet’ on the back of a student and also communicated with the Chinese side in Chinese.
In videos of the so-called ‘protests’ (see links at bottom of article), Wang makes a public speech in English, facing the Chinese students, and with the non-Chinese students behind her. Her comments include, “Just because I am Chinese does not mean that I can't think for myself."
On forum websites such as Han Wang and Tianya, photos of Wang as a schoolgirl in Shandong have appeared, along with Chinese netizens’ defamatory comments. Their comments range from "race-traitor" (汉奸) to "she can only marry one of the lamas now" (他现在只能嫁给喇嘛了).
In the last few days a pot of human faeces was emptied outside the door of Wang’s flat in Durham.
Global Voices Online has transcribed a letter from a friend of Wang's at Duke, dated April 15, stating that her parents' residence in Qinghai has been attacked by rocks, and that they are in hiding.
Certain netizens expressed doubt as to whether Wang's motive was to support Tibetan independence, instead saying it was more akin to self-promotion. Some commentators asked why she did not speak in Chinese when she was making the public statement on the Duke campus on April 9 (instead, using "broken English"), saying that her purpose was to show off to foreign students, as well as foreign media, such as NPR (who supposedly interviewed her there).
There was some support of Wang though: one comment on Tianya read, "Good classmate Wang, unfortunately I'm on the Mainland so I can only support you in spirit." And from the Han Wang BBS: “She has the freedom to express her own views, her choice to support Dalai is a demand for democratic rights. How could you cover her doorstep with a pot of faeces – using this kind of rough and uncivilized method to object?"
Wang’s phone number and address in the US was revealed online, as was her parents’ address in Shandong. The FBI are said to be involved after Wang has received online and offline threats.
Wang wrote an email to the Duke Chinese Students and Scholars Association on the day of the April 9 protest, and has since participated in discussions about it on campus. In her e-mail, Wang quotes ancient Chinese sages Sunzi (孙子) and Laozi (老子), and argues for the focus to be on mutual understanding. She tells her Chinese compatriots not to act rashly. “Take away your anger, and your heads will become clear, your minds will become sharper, and then your judgments correct” (消除怒气，头脑才会清晰，思维才能敏捷，决断才会正确).
Today The New York Times published an article by Shaila Dewan about Wang, who met the Chinese student at Duke. It seems that Wang is still in a state of excitement. Dewan writes at the close of the article, “for a woman under threat of dismemberment [netizens have threatened to tear her to pieces if she returns to the mainland], she seemed remarkably sanguine – even upbeat.”
Also today, the front page of the CCTV website showed a picture of Wang, together with a video of the protest and the caption “Most hideous Chinese student abroad” (最丑陋留学生).
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 The Biggest Riot in History There's a war going on over freedom of speech, democracy, and western "universal values."
In the above cartoon we see the forces of China.com (the patriots surrounding the sentry tower on the right) arrayed against the defenders of the Southern Metropolis Daily and liberal democracy on the left.
War was sparked by Chang Ping's essay of 3 April, "How To Find The Truth About Lhasa," in which he discussed the recent attacks on the bias of the western media in the wake of the Lhasa riots and applied the same reasoning to the domestic media (from ESWN's translation)
The distorted western reports about China came from an unwillingness to listen and understand because they are too engaged in the sort of Orientalism that Edward Said wrote about. But what about us and the ethnic minorities? If we use nationalism as the weapon to resist the westerners, then how can we persuade the ethnic minorities to abandon their nationalism and join the mainstream nation-building? The Dalai Lama asked the Chinese government to reassess him, so what kind of person is he really? Apart from the official government position, will the media be permitted to discuss the matter freely and uncover more truths?
The China.com forums labeled Chang Ping a traitor, and started an assault on the Southern Metropolis Group, where Chang Ping edits the Southern Metropolis Weekly.
Things really got going last Friday with an op-ed that brought the ugliness of the forums to the pages of the Beijing Evening News:
Southern Metropolis Chang Ping and the Freedom to Rumor-Monger
by Wen Feng / BEN
A man named Southern Metropolis Chang Ping, who recently ran afoul of a group of netizens, might want to make another argument for free speech in the belief that the netizens have stripped that right from him. I do not usually concern myself with online forums, but the netizens' broadsides were so fierce this time that I took a look at the so-called speech of this Southern Metropolis Chang Ping. I noticed immediately that this individual had brought "free speech" to an appalling or even "terrifying" degree. The heart of the matter for which he was criticized was this: "Free speech intrinsically includes the freedom of mistaken speech and particularly the freedom to question authority. More frightening than rumors is the removal of free speech." And he openly held this up as a universal value. According to his logic, "free speech" means that you can muddy the truth, fabricate facts, indiscriminately distort history, speak irresponsibly, "freely" rumor-monger, "freely" smear, "freely" toss about labels. Just like the western media's hysterical performance on the issue of China's Tibet. Was that free speech? That was violent speech. I have never seen the western media enjoy that kind of freedom of speech in their own country, because that would be an infringement on the rights of others, and it would trample social justice and betray fundamental ethical principles. If this is the "universal value" that Southern Metropolis Chang Ping wants to protect, then honor is the price he pays in return.  I did not know who Southern Metropolis Chang Ping was at first, but after a short investigation, he turned out to be a "trendy spicy chicken" at the Southern Media Group. Not surprising in the least, because the Southern Media Group, with ____ Weekly [Southern Weekly] at the lead, has always set itself up as China's most "western" newspaper, the "boldest," "keenest," and most "penetrating" newspaper, one that tirelessly promotes western "universal values" and "free press." It is no surprise that Southern Metropolis Chang Ping spoke in such a way. And the subsequent huge uproar was due to the western media's brazen rumor-mongering, smearing, and distortion of the Tibet situation. This leads one to believe that he (or they) are not merely seeking free speech; their last fig-leaf is about to be torn away.
For Southern Metropolis Chang Ping and his ilk, who seek so-called "universal values," only things of the west are universal and need to be upheld. Even the freedom to rumor monger needs to be protected. This leads one to wonder: throughout modern history, all of the colonization and wars were instigated by the west; is this a "universal value"? The very existence of the speech of Southern Metropolis Chang Ping and his ilk proves one fact, which is that those people today shouting and parading around "universal values" and "freedom" are nothing more than using a grandiose phrase as an excuse to achieve their own shadowy ends. But lies remain lies, and in the face of facts and the truth, lies only serve to allow people to perceive hypocrisy more clearly, so that the "universal values" of Southern Metropolis Chang Ping and his ilk are rejected by the people.
Ten Years Chopping Timber first lamented that the standard for frothing-at-the-mouth commentary had dropped in the 42 years since the attacks on "Hai Rui Dismissed From Office," then followed up that post with a look back at the "Evening Chats at Yanshan" affair in 1966.
The Chats were a series of columns written by Deng Tuo and published in the Beijing Evening News. Together with the "Notes from Sanjiatun," a column in Front Lines magazine written by Deng and a few others, the Chats were criticized by Mao Zedong and Kang Sheng in March of 1966, and ultimately the Beijing Daily was forced to put together a three-page spread of criticism which ran on 16 April, 1966. Other national national papers followed up in May with Yao Wenyuan's indictment of the articles as anti-socialist poison.
Chang Ping himself responded in a blog post titled "I'm not your enemy," in which he deflected Wen Feng's overheated criticisms, suggested that he was beating a straw man, and urged more courtesy in future exchanges:
Mr. Wen Feng wrote that "their last fig-leaf is about to be torn away," and mentioned an "excuse to achieve their own shadowy ends." In my opinion, these words make people self conscious, and have shadowy ends themselves. That is the only explanation I have for why, after you finished your investigative work, you got my name wrong in the headline and in the text, calling me "a man named Southern Metropolis Chang Ping," who was a "'trendy spicy chicken' at the Southern Media Group." If I called Mr. Wen Feng a "man named Beijing Evening Wen Feng" who was "'tanghulu at the Beijing Daily Group," that wouldn't be very nice, would it? And I won't say that it's "not surprising in the least" for Wen Feng to come out of the Beijing Daily Group; instead, I would remind myself that the Beijing Daily once published that fine article by Yu Keping, "Democracy is a Good Thing."
Perhaps all of this is a good thing. Taizhou-based journalist Zan Aizong suggested that even though Wen Feng and the anti-Southern Metropolis may mock Chang Ping's appeal to "universal values," at least they're having a discussion:
Returning to the topic, I applaud the open controversy with "Southern Metropolis Chang Ping" that Wen Feng brought to the pages of a newspaper. Perhaps you can find a platform for open debate, where you can discuss universal values and how they are measured.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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Deborah Fallows, a senior research fellow at Pew Internet & American Life Project, recently published a short paper packed full of commentary and stats about the Chinese Internet: usage habits, demographics, content, trust in online media, government controls etc.
Fallows' paper summarizes a survey funded by the New York-based Markle Foundation and directed by Mr. Guo Liang and his research team at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Below are some noteworthy excerpts from Fallows' paper:
• "most Chinese say they approve of internet control and management, especially when it comes from their government."
• "over 80% of respondents say they think the internet should be managed or controlled, and in 2007, almost 85% say they think the government should be responsible for doing it."
• "79% of Chinese said internet companies should manage or control the internet, just over two-thirds, 68%, identified parents, 64% schools, and 59% internet cafes."
• "87% of internet users would control or manage pornography; 86% violent content; 83% spam or junk mail; 66% advertisements; 64% slander against individuals."
• "Half of respondents said online games should be controlled, and more than one in four (27%) said online chatting should be controlled."
• "An influential and highly informed group of elite Chinese bloggers continues to test the limits and vigilance of the censors."
• "Declining trust in reliability of online content. Over four years of tracking user reaction, trust in the reliability of online content has fallen by one-half, from 52% in 2003 to 26% now."
• "Only about one-third of internet users (30%) said they considered online content reliable."
• "Three-quarters of respondents deemed reliable most or all the information on government websites, compared with 46% for pages from established media, 28% for results from search engines, 11% for content on bulletin boards and in advertisements, 4% for information from individuals' web pages, and 3% for postings in chat rooms."
• " 93% of internet users said they considered much of internet content to be unsuitable for children."
• "61%, thought internet users could easily become addicted to the internet, and the same number thought users could easily be affected by online pornography.
• "43%, said the internet could lure users into making the wrong kind of friends."
• "42% said internet use easily presented risks to personal or private information."
Link here for Fallows' paper (PDF, English)
Link here for the full Chinese Academy of Social Sciences report (PDF, English)
Link here (Chinese / English) for the CNNIC report referenced throughout. This article is from Danwei.org
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Benjamin Joffe of Plus Eight Star, an Internet and mobile consulting firm, looks at the 2007 results of Tencent, the company that operates QQ, China's most website / instant messaging / gaming platform.
QQ announces 2007 earnings | Facebook should look carefully
QQ’s 2007 figures:
* Active accounts: 300 million
o This is 50% more than the number of Internet users in China (many have multiple accounts)
o This is about the size of the US population
* Revenues: 523 million USD
o This is close to 4x Facebook, at 150 million USD
o This is real money from IM/SNS. Something even serious companies like The Economist who just wrote an article titled “Everywhere and nowhere” seem to not believe is possible. We hope they will look outside of Silicon Valley next time.
* Operating profit: 224 million USD
o Facebook recorded a 50 million loss last year. How sad.
Though this should already be enough to raise a bit of interest, the most interesting is the split of revenues:
* Internet services (digital goods, games…): 344 million USD (66%)
* Mobile services: 110 million USD (21%)
* Online ads: 67 million USD (13%)
This article is from Danwei.org
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