Countdown Beijing : Media and Message

Even the Propaganda Dept wants records broken

Jonathan Ansfield — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:03:12 GMT

Okay, so Xinhua's English-language break on the attack beat the Chinese version by more than an hour. Early info on Monday’s ambush in Xinjiang was spotty too: the perpetrators' identities absent, and suspicions of a “terrorist” plot hence, as usual, thin at best. Then broadcaster CCTV, after releasing the first whiff of news in Chinese on its News Channel at noon, skipped the story entirely on the tightly scripted Evening News. By afternoon the news began tumbling down top news charts of Chinese news portals. And the next day the headline was a minor blip on the front pages of mainland papers. The story was dumped deep inside in a single-paragraph summary, at a fraction of the column inches used by official English-language coverage directed at foreign readers.

Yet one thing did impress about Chinese coverage of the Monday morning attack in Kashgar, in which two Uighurs reportedly killed 16 border police and wounded another 16: not that official media broke it, but that it did so with uncustomary hustle. The lag was a little over three hours. That’s swift for state media when it comes to an incident of this magnitude, delicacy and geographical remoteness from Beijing. It’s supersonic for news out of Xinjiang, where Chinese reports of violent plots by separatist Muslim Uighurs tend to be a challenge to confirm or deny. We foreign hacks are used to working our way back days or weeks to chase iffy revelations by Xinjiang officials or stingy official press matchers issued only in response to a Radio Free Asia dispatch or the like. That's the way it was as recently as this Spring, in fact, when the government took its leisurely time to acknowledge a spate of clashes and foiled plots.

The comparative burst of speed Monday was no fluke, Chinese journalists inform us. After the hurly burly the country went through the first half of the year, the Communist Party leadership is placing never-before-seen demands on government media to gain the edge on reporting serious disturbances and manage crises more deftly. Key to the strategy is to get the official scoop on events before overseas media do, particularly around the time of the Olympic Games.

In recent weeks the deputy head of the Party’s Central Publicity Department, Li Dongsheng, has hammered home this agenda in meetings with provincial propaganda counterparts and top representatives of “central media” organs, according to two sources within Party media organizations. According to one formulation, they and other Chinese journalists say, the orders are to diyi shijian qiangbao –to “grab” the news as soon as it happens. “Central media” include the Party papers People’s Daily and Guangming Daily, news wires Xinhua and the China News Service, broadcasters CCTV, China National Radio, and China Radio International, and official dailies China Daily and the Economic Daily. Provincial propaganda bosses would relay word to local government media as well.

Li instructed them that over the two-month “Olympic period” - July 20-September 20, through the time of Paralympics - official media should take greater initiative to report “major sudden incidents” (natural disasters, accidents, riots, terrorist attacks, etc.) . As usual, the Xinhua News Agency was intended to act as the clearing house for such news and all other Chinese media were under orders to pick up its reports. But Xinhua and other official media outlets were not necessarily to wait for explicit instructions from senior propaganda authorities before running with the news. The official embrace of up-to-the-minute news is no secret here; Beijing has been touting it in the context of new rules on official accountability and such events as the Sichuan earthquake, and the idea of an express lane for breaking events has been floating around Party propaganda circles for some time. But for the department to expressly grant such leeway is “unprecedented,” according to one of the Party media sources, who were briefed on the recent meetings. They spoke on condition of anonymity so as avoid repercussions.

As to how official outlets are to report a “sudden incident”, well, that's not going to change. Any such story still had to reflect official conventions and the Party line, or what is known in Party jargon as its “guidance of public opinion” - “not your Newsweek stuff,” as one of the sources put it. Moreover, the leeway to bypass some of the traditional channels only applied during Olympic period. “It’s still represents a new direction of transparency. It’s more open than before. In that way it’s still a form of progress,” he said, adding, “but right now only for the Olympics.”

Nor were the Party newsmen under any illusion as to the primary intent: to strengthen the authoritativeness of the Party, and minimize embarrassment to Beijing. That's especially vital with well over 20,000 foreign reporters descending on Beijing to cover the Games this week. In the briefings, Li and other propaganda bosses have made clear that the objective is try to beat them in the event of major disturbances – at least out of the blocks. (No, this does not in any way explain why on Tuesday police in Kashgar beat two Japanese journalists trying to report at the scene of Monday's attack).

Xinjiang was not the first big test case of the new M.O. on faster reporting. Reports of bus blasts in Kunming last Monday also appeared to embody the edict, sources said. “The thinking is that if you don’t report it first, the country will be on the defensive from the very start,” said the first source.

But the new M.O. did not rule out that some incidents would still remain under wraps, the other Party media journalist cautioned, pointing to information he had received from official sources of at least one other bombing incident outside Beijing in recent weeks (but which we could not independently verify). “You still cover up what you can cover up. But when you can’t cover it up, you have to report it first,” he summarized: “The point is to contest the foreign media for the right to speak.”

Propaganda's orders to get the scoop stemmed partly from the “spirit” of an “important speech” by Party boss Hu in late June, Li and other propaganda officials also made clear. Hu visited the Party flagship People’s Daily to fete its 60^th birthday, and used the occasion to articulate the media’s “active role” in “guidance of public opinion” (David Bandurski at the China Media Project offers insightful exegesis of what Hu meant). That in turn followed on the state media lessons of the first half of 2008, Li also explained - from the poor and sluggish reporting of snowstorms which plagued much of the country in January to the internationally recognized boon from coverage of Sichuan earthquake in May, and the nasty internationally waged battles over ethnic Tibetan unrest and the Olympic torch relay in-between. The new instructions were packaged as the sum-total learned from those experiences, the sources noted.

Li specifically addressed the case of Tibet, the sources said. Internally, propaganda authorities have recognized for months that the slowness to release news of the outbreak of Tibetan rioting in Lhasa was a mistake which abetted the public relations disaster internationally, they said. But after the initial paralysis, authorities were convinced, they clinched overriding domestic support and stood up to international condemnation by releasing TV clips of the Lhasa riots a few days later. Footage showed Tibetans torching cars and smashing storefronts.

“’Fifty-plus seconds of television footage surpassed the force of 100,000 soldiers,’” one of the sources cited the deputy propaganda boss saying.

Coverage of the international torch relay too had boosted the leadership’s confidence in its ability to engineer public opinion. In conversations in recent months, these sources and other Chinese media insiders have marveled at how the trajectory of nationalist protests corresponded directly to the degree of detail people were exposed to via official press. When protesters marred the opening legs in Athens and London, Chinese media were mum. But as details seeped in over the Internet from overseas media images and Chinese-language press, sources said, anti-foreign anger engulfed the Web. Netizens could read and watch in plain view what they were not being told.

The Chinese leadership took note. After the London leg, the sources said, Chinese media organs received orders from on-high to fangkai wangluo, fangkai minjian – code for “open up the Web, open up public opinion.” That order hit in the nick of time for the Paris leg, where demonstrators lunged at paraplegic torchbearer Jin Jing. This time, the handful of officially designated outlets of international news reported the scene, most notably the Global Times, a staunchly patriotic, often polemical newsstand tabloid published by the People’s Daily. Its file from Paris got top billing on the mainland news portals. Soon people were clamoring for boycotts and protests against the French hypermarket Carrefour. But in fact, Carrefour became a target somewhat by happenstance. “The Paris protests were not really bigger than London but the backlash here was much, much bigger,” said one of the sources. “Because they were publicized.”

As soon as domestic protests threatened to spiral onto the streets, though, the government began tightening the few mainland spigots of overseas news on the torch relay. Clashes in South Korea were the last to be featured. By the time of the Japan leg the taps were turned off, just before Hu was to make a historic trip there.

The torch relay to-do seems to have shown the leadership that a few carefully parsed nuggets of fresh reporting can work more powerfully than decades of patriotic government rhetoric. “They definitely feel their propaganda strategy was ultimately successful,” commented one of the Party media sources. Domestically, since at least as early as late April, the Party leadership has conceived the publicity war over Tibet and the torch relay as a victory over the dreaded nightmare of “peaceful evolution” – shorthand for Western-style democratization and the peaceful overthrow of the Party. “The torch relay completely failed in its original aims” – that is, displaying before the world China’s benevolent progress – “but they won a much bigger victory, and this victory was not expected at all,” explained another Party media source. “Many young people got to see up close that the West is not always so friendly, that the West’s peaceful evolution was not such a good thing.” He added: “Two decades of patriotic education could not make the same impact.”

At one recent meeting, sources said, Li opined that the Party had faced the greatest risk of “peaceful evolution” when the “third” or “fourth generation” of Red babies born since the Communist takeover in 1949, i.e. in the 60’s and 70’s, came of age. That danger passed in the 1980’s and 90’s, and the Party survived. With the fifth and sixth generations, born in the 80’s and 90’s and coming of age today, Li said there was “basically not a chance [of peaceful evolution].”

So there you have it. More on China’s Olympic media game plan to come in future posts…

More Blasts Out West: How Big is the Terrorist Threat?

Melinda Liu — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:39:25 GMT

This morning’s attack, which killed 16 police in the far western region of Xinjiang, did not exactly surprise me, but it may have startled at least one senior official from the area, Kerexi Maihesuti. Just last Friday in a Beijing press conference for foreign media the vice chairman of the Xinjiang region described the threat of ethnic Uighur separatists there as a disorderly band of wanna-be’s “with limited power” who are “not competent make the attacks which some hostile forces wish".

Are authorities dangerously downplaying the threat? Well, not always. A People’s Daily editorial last month warned grimly that “The Beijing Olympics is facing a terrorist threat unsurpassed in Olympic history.” With such mixed signals – and the Beijing Olympics just days away – Chinese Netizens are buzzing with questions and speculation about the most recent incident. What seems clear – perhaps the only thing that’s truly clear – is that already stringent security precautions in China’s capital will no doubt become tighter still.

　This morning Web postings on an Internet bulletin board popular with IT professionals revealed surprise, alarm, and conspiracy theories. One post starts out “F---! Xinjiang attacked by bombs. 16 armed police died, 16 injured. CCTV just reported it” and goes on to describe the 7:55 AM incident in which two vehicles tried to ram a group of People’s Armed Police engaged in their routine morning exercises, including jogging in formation. The drivers threw two grenades and slashed their victims with knives. “Terror” says one respondent. Update: later official reports said there was only one vehicle, a dump truck of all things.
　
　A person using the cybernym Orion frets “I was even thinking of driving to Xinjiang in August. It’s not safe even in a non-Games region.” To which another Netizen says “They’re too bold, even picking on the border troops. It looks like the border troops don’t have enough fighting force, so many died and injured.”
　
　 Then someone posts a news report of the press-conference comments made by Kerexi Maihesuti saying the East Turkistan separatists aren’t as powerful as reported by some media. “When I watched this news the day before yesterday, I realized the terrorists wouldn’t let this go,” says William920. “They did this because of that news,” agrees Eggcom. “Was Kerexi Maihesuti bragging or [public security personnel] not doing their jobs?” Concludes another, “Obviously it was not appropriate for him to give those comments at that moment.”

　To be sure, the deadly incident in Kashgar – an ancient Silk Road oasis town in Xinjiang where Muslim Uighurs are the largest single ethnic group – has not been proven (yet) to have been the work of separatists aspiring to establish an independent “East Turkistan”. But the official Xinhua news agency said the incident was “suspected to be a terrorist attack”. Xinhua said local public security department officials received intelligence that the separatist East Turkistan Islamic Movement would seek to disrupt the Games or their run-up with attacks between Aug. 1 and 8. ETIM is a categorized as a terrorist group by both the U.S. and Chinese governments though its size, effectiveness, and viability is a source of much debate.
　
　　 In other words, Uighur separatists have presented Beijing with a public-relations dilemma: is it better to scoff at them as incompetents, or hype them as a major security threat? At the moment we’re getting both messages, which leaves the public (and the foreign media) somewhat suspicious of official statements on the situation in restive Xinjiang.
　
　For months Chinese authorities have cited a number of foiled Muslim extremist plots to tarnish the Olympics, including a scheme to blow up an airplane and kidnap foreign visitors and media. Hence the Hongqi 7 missile batteries set up near the Olympic competition venues. Last month, in a video released on the Internet, a militant group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party promised to “target the most critical points related to the Olympics” and claimed responsibility for recent bomb blasts in Kunming, Shanghai and other cities. (The group is believed to be based in Pakistan which borders Xinjiang.)
　
　I’m waiting to see how that plays out. Sixteen dead in a terrorist attack is an extremely high number for China, the most deadly in years.(Another 16 police were injured). Then again, Kashgar is 4,000 kilometers away from Beijing, where the intensity of security inspections, credentialling, and surveillance are already unprecedented. After living here for a decade, this is the first time I’ve seen helicopters over my residential compound, except for a ceremonial fly-past during the National Day parade rehearsal in 1999 (which doesn’t count). While entering the Olympics media center yesterday my wedding ring set off the medal detection device, which was a first for me and suggested perhaps the settings were a tad sensitive. I’m still not sure whether to be reassured, amused or annoyed.

China's 'Finest News Source'

Jonathan Ansfield — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 12:24:03 GMT

Yesterday we brought you the Extrauterine Pregnancy Express, journalist-blogger Chen Feng’s Oniony news parody on Beijing’s Olympic prep work. The unseemly title, as was explained in the post, derives from a punning Chinese nickname for the Games that's been creeping around the blogosphere (Gongwaiyun). Chen bashed out his cycle of mock dispatches in a flurry on Thursday. When complimented on his wry wit, he could only scoff back. “What’s so creative about it!”

Anyway, translated herewith is another installment:

Extrauterine Pregnancy Express Number Two

The government announced today that they will require Beijing citizens to share one kitchen knife for every five households, so as to ensure 100-percent safety during the Gongwaiyun [read: Olympics]. When not in use, the kitchen knife is to be placed in a fixed location under the protection of a specially appointed individual. It will be subjected to random inspection. Migrants will have to share one kitchen knife for every ten households, and must have a Beijing resident as a guarantor in order to use it.

When in use, the knife’s user along with the purpose and length of use must be registered, and a record must be kept with local urban management personnel. Users must re-apply when using the knife over the appointed period of use.

Asked by a reporter why such stringent regulations were being introduced, a Gongwaiyun spokesperson noted that during the period 2008 Beijing Olympics, security checks are being carried out on cars from other places entering the city, and knives the least bit large are not allowed to be brought in. But on taking into account that every single household in the city owns knives, some sharper and bigger than those being restricted, the government decided on this measure, using Yuan Dynasty controls on knives as a reference.

Not enough? Here's a bonus installment:

Extrauterine Pregnancy Express Number Four:

The government is considering more stringent measures during the period of the Gongwaiyun, in order to ensure environmental protection efforts pass muster, a spokesman announced today.

The spokesman expressed outrage at the ulterior motives of some foreign media, who've criticized Beijing's recent spectacular skies as environmental pollution. He stated, “The inability to see clearly is a kind of misty beauty, and by no means represents poor air quality.” Citing one example, he said, “In a bathhouse you can’t see clearly. That’s called steam, not pollution.” Citing another example, he said, “On the moon you can see clearly. You think air quality there is good?”

He also said, however, that in order to enable the broad masses of foreign nationals to fully understand our level of commitment to the slogan “One World, One Spring Dream,” in addition to the recent orders to halt production at a greater number of enterprises, the government will consider restricting all people considered "Three Have-nots" (no power, no money, no background) from driving their vehicles, except for those whose license plate numbers do not end in odd or even digits. "Three Have-not" enterprises will only be allowed to operate after 25:00 in the evening.

Asked by a reporter what would be done if results cannot be effectively achieved on time, the spokesman said with a mysterious smile, “The government have already identified the largest source of pollution, and will adopt stringent measures to control it.”

The government’s stringent measures, sources have revealed, will include a ban on farting by the "Three Have-not" people. Violators will be fined.

Chinese Olympics Blogging: Comedy Sports on the Web

Jonathan Ansfield — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:41:55 GMT

Beijing's standout bloggers (like its natives) are an intrinsically grouchy lot. No surprise then that they’ve been griping on and on about Olympic-related hassles of late – though in many cases more offline than on.

“Achhhh, we’ve been spending half our days erasing posts,” groused the founder of one of China’s edgier blog forums, reached by phone earlier this week. Come Olympic time, he said, “I’m not even sure we’ll be operating.” He asked not to be named and declined to elaborate. “Please don’t ask me to talk about it.” (His site, incidentally, is still up.)

“I can’t really say what I want, so I’m not writing much at all,” carped a fellow blogger over an iced cappuccino a couple days later. A journalist with a large online cult following, he was planning to flee Beijing for China’s deep south to take care of some unfinished reporting during the Games. The shortage of non-Olympic-related cultural activity permitted in the months beforehand, he said, had left him with far less than usual to cover. He too declined to be named. “Please, don’t make things harder for me.”

Members of the foreign press corps arriving in town this week also are coming to grips with the reality that they won’t have completely “free and unfettered access” to the Internet during the Games, contrary to what Beijing Olympics organizers and their International Olympic Committee counterparts seemed to have promised. What a shocker. Welcome to Beijing!

The bigger surprise came Friday afternoon, when Beijing unblocked a number of sites after hashing out a new deal with the IOC (which later denied there was ever a previous “deal” sanctioning censorship). The unblocked sites include those of organizations the government has long treated as its personal nemeses: Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, and the BBC’s Chinese service. Meanwhile those of others deemed “subversive” enemies of the state, like Falun Gong and the Free Tibet Campaign, figure to remain off-limits.

The Great Firewall of China can actually make for a thrilling tour, once you get used to the bumps. The unacquainted visitor may learn the lessons of forbearance and a handy tip or two from Beijing’s subculture of dark-humored bloggers, mostly thirty or forty-something and male. For them, playing volleyball with Web forum monitors and Internet filterers is a daily exercise. Their sociopolitical commentary can get them into serious trouble with the law, granted, but for most the consequences seldom amount to more than getting a blog shut down, at which point they decamp to a new hosting site. Through some sick perversion of Confucian dynamics, the whole gambit cultivates in many a sense of make-do kinship with Communist Party speech police, along with an abiding awareness of what is and isn’t politically correct. This is not all that unlike the way a grounded adolescent resents the “old man”, or a p-whipped husband the “ball-and-chain”.

Officialdom is projecting some serious Olympic harmony over the Internet, at least on the surface, via the home pages of China’s major private Internet portals (QQ, Sina, Sohu, Netease), which have been carrying strikingly similar firey-hued background motifs. Many official billboards look about the same. Hmmm.

The pressures on dissent have inspired the blogosphere to new feats of linguistic gymnastics. So as to deride by indirection and escape the radar of post scrubbers (not to mention humorless patriots), bloggers are up to their old tricks again. They're trying farce, spoof and other forms of couched criticism, rearranging compound words and entire blocks of text, and in particular, coining various snide twists on the Chinese for Olympic Games, ao yun (奥运) for short.

Many of these turns of phrase have multipile interpretations. Keyword filters have not caught up with them. There’s nao yun (闹运), which could be defined as “troublesome Olympics”, the “make-trouble Olympics” or just plain “no Olympics”. And there's bi yun （避运), literally to “shun” or “avoid the Games”, is also a homophone for the Chinese for contraception, and thus a dig at the snug wrap of security over the Games. Ergo a biyuntao, or condom, is the current tourism industry slang for a "package to avoid the Games". The blogger heading South may be about to head on one.

I myself am partial to an expression that I began using on my own: ao yun (熬晕), as in 我熬晕了, which in my mind roughly translates: “I’m so sick of the Games I could faint.” My Chinese friends generally don’t seem to get at first. Maybe that's because of the tonal discrepancy with the ao yun for Olympics. More likely, it's just not that funny.

On Thursday, the acclaimed journalist Chen Feng took to blogging a series of Olympic news satire named for yet another derogatory expression for the Games, the gong wai yun （恭外运）. Literally, the coinage is an abbreviation for an “event where foreign athletes are respectfully received.” Alternately, it’s a homophone for “extrauterine pregnancy”.

Chen pegs every dead-pan installment of the Gongwaiyun Express to some breaking news item about Beijing’s preparations. The security and environmental stopgaps are favored targets of ridicule.

Here’s Gongwaiyun Express No. 1, which Chen wrote after the city urged subway passengers to leave their bags behind:

"Authorities are bolstering subway security checks to ensure security during the Gong wai yun [read: Olympics]. In order to avoid congestion caused by security checks, relevant officials have urged the public not to wear clothes when taking the subway.

A reporter asked whether the measure would cause inconvenience to the public, questioning why such a strict measure was being introduced.

A Gongwaiyun spokesmen acknowledged that this would cause the public to feel inconvenienced, but pointed out that the during the 2008 Beijing Olympic period, authorities already have been urging the public not to carry bags when taking the subway. The spokesman noted that it is commonplace as well as necessary for the public to carry bags when they go out. Since the Beijing Olympics can still urge the public not to carry bags, there is also nothing wrong with urging them not to wear clothes.

The spokesman also pointed out that not carrying bags would in reality not resolve issues of security. It is entirely possibly for terrorists to conceal bombs in the crotch of their pants. So in order to ensure that the Gongwaiyun is 100 percent safe, it is only proper for the public to sacrifice some convenience. It’s a noble act accommodate the Gongwaiyun."

Look for more kicks from the Gongwaiyun Express to come in further posts on this blog.

Meanwhile, Chen has been doing some serious thinking about Olympic developments as well. A career muckraker, he won fame for his 2003 scoop of the death of a young graphic designer named Sun Zhigang, which fueled a media uproar that led the government to abolish the 20-year-old procedure by which migrants without proper residential permits could be held in detention centers and forcibly repatriated. After stints as a senior editor at The Beijing News and Sohu.com’s news channel, he’s now with the financial news portal Hexun, where he also keeps his blog. He calls it 'Journalistic Education' (新闻性教育), itself a flick of whimsy at the Advanced Education, Communist Party chief Hu Jintao’s 2005 propaganda campaign to reinvigorate the Party ranks and reincorporate basic Party values. Versions 1.0 and 2.0 of Chen’s 'Journalistic Education' were eventually shut down. The Hexun version is 3.0.

Recently, Chen revealed over noodle stir-fry, his own Web site rubbed out a couple of his more scathing entries on the Olympics. He responded by reposting them using vertical typesetting. The classic form of printing Chinese has become a tool for Netizens to circumvent censorship, and it’s not as much trouble as it looks, Chen noted. “There are programs to do this for you.”

Chen’s post from July 13 opens:

│屋│七│　│浪│就│　│性│人│执│太│都│，│抢│太│理│桥│今│　│然│前│
│﹂│旬│　│的│因│　│？│到│法│太│要│在│没│，│了│下│天│　│后│天│
│　│老│　│自│为│　│　│底│者│，│被│桥│骗│都│。│的│新│　│来│来│
│　│太│　│由│奥│　│　│有│的│可│清│下│，│７│这│流│京│　│了│了│
│　│告│　│都│运│　│　│没│妈│以│出│有│靠│０│位│浪│报│　│抓│查│
│　│别│　│没│，│　│　│有│妈│当│去│一│捡│了│拾│户│又│　│狗│暂│
│　│桥│　│有│我│　│　│一│的│这│，│个│废│，│荒│也│刊│　│的│住│
│　│下│　│了│们│　│　│点│，│些│这│小│品│没│的│要│出│　│。│证│
│　│小│　│。│连│　│　│点│这│所│位│窝│为│偷│老│被│来│　│　│的│
│　│﹁│　│　│流│　│　│人│帮│谓│老│，│生│没│太│清│，│　│　│，│

Translation:

"The day before last they came to check temporary residency permits. Then they came to capture the dogs.

Now today The Beijing News is reporting that the vagrants under the overpasses are going to be cleared out as well. This old lady who collects scrap, she’s 70 years old, she hasn’t stolen or looted or swindled, she survives off of picking up waste, she has a tiny nest underneath an overpass, and even she has to be cleared out. This old lady could be the mother of these so-called executors of the law. Do these guys not possess one shred of humanity?

Just because of the Olympics, even our freedom to be vagrants is gone…"

About-Face on the Internet (plus tips in case it doesn't last)

Melinda Liu — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:59:08 GMT

There’s a new game in town. The screeching halt, 180 degree Politburo about-face has such a high degree of difficulty that the sport is rarely held – and never rehearsed – except during extremely important, internationally scrutinized public events. Like the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.

Which is why Chinese authorities today abruptly allowed access to previously blocked websites such as those of Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders. This occured after the eruption of a bruising controversy when foreign media arriving to cover the Games were dismayed to discover they couldn’t reach dozens of sites related to sensitive groups such as the banned Falun Gong religious movement, Free Tibet activists, and other organizations critical of Beijing and its policies. Sites that host thousands of Chinese blogs have also been affected by the Net clampdown. (update: as of Saturday the Falungong and Free Tibet sites remained blocked, though other sensitive sites such as Amnesty's were still accessible in the Olympics media center.)

Chinese citizens have lived with such Web interference for years, of course. But Chinese authorities and high-level IOC officials continually reassured the world in the run-up to the Olympics that IOC-accredited journalists covering the Games would not encounter Internet censorship. Once foreign journalists began squawking about blocked websites earlier this week, the it's-all-going-to-work-out-just-you-wait facade began to crack. IOC Press Commission head Kevan Gosper apologized for the Net hassles and said the IOC had "negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis that they were not considered Games-related." But early Friday morning Beijing time – VERY early, like around 1:00 AM – the IOC faxed around a press release saying that senior IOC figures were holding discussions with Chinese counterparts about the Web problems – and that “the IOC would like to stress that no deal with the Chinese authorities to censor the internet has ever in any way been entered into.” By Friday afternoon, sensitive sites began to open up.

OK, so now we’ve seen an IOC reversal and then Beijing’s backtracking. What other public-relations gymnastics are in store, with the Games opening ceremonies just a week away? At least China got a break on one unrelated front: the weather. Suddenly after weeks of rain and cloud and murk, Beijing's skies suddenly cleared -- to the extent that that my colleague Jon Ansfield thinks Beijing should simply start the Olympics now, early, to take advantage of the glorious weather. Enjoy it while you can – it may not last.

Which brings me back to China's Internet cops. In case you’re wondering if China’s loosening of Net restrictions are the beginning of the end to Web censorship here, my answer is: don’t dump those VPN’s and proxy servers just yet. In case the current relaxation doesn’t expand as hoped, here’s some info on navigating the Internet compiled by the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China. (Full disclosure: I’m a former FCCC president and helped publish its recently released “Reporters’ Guide” with insider tips on how to deal with reporting challenges here on the ground):

Virtual Private Network (VPN). As the name suggests, these are secure, private networks that run through the public Internet. This gives them the benefit of bypassing China’s Internet monitoring and censorship systems. Many corporations use VPN systems to allow employees to access company e-mail remotely; if you work for one of them, you probably will not need other tools for accessing e-mail and blocked websites. For others, there are a number of off-the-shelf technologies that can easily create VPNs. For explanations of what a VPN is see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN or http://www.howstuffworks.com/vpn.htm

VPN software and services:

·Paid

http://www.witopia.net/personalmore.html

http://www.hotspotvpn.com/

http://www.publicvpn.com/

·Free / advertising-supported

http://anchorfree.com/downloads/hotspot-shield

Other tools for private/secure Internet access

· Gladder (an add-on for the Firefox browser)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2864

·Tor

http://www.torproject.org/index.html.en

·Psiphon

http://psiphon.civisec.org/

· Anonymizer

http://www.anonymizer.com/

·Proxify

https://proxify.com/

Secure email

·Web e-mail

Gmail. Accessing gmail via https:, rather than the usual http: connection creates a secure connection for e-mail, and should be your default option. The added "s" means secure.

* https://mail.google.com/mail/

Hushmail. A service offering web-based email encrypted with PGP technology (see below).

* https://www.hushmail.com/

·PGP email. The open-source standard Pretty Good Privacy allows for high-level encryption of e-mail sent through standard desktop e-mail software. This prevents anyone intercepting the e-mail from being able to read it.

Explanations

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

* Phil Zimmerman, inventor of PGP: http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/background/index.html

Software

* http://www.pgpi.org/

* http://www.gnupg.org/

* http://www.winpt.org/

* http://www.cgeep.com/

The Tiananmen Paper

Jonathan Ansfield — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:43:40 GMT

It’s bad news for a mainland newspaper to let something slip about the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Really bad news. The news only tends to get worse when the slip-up occurs at a time as delicate as now, with the Olympics days away and Beijing on tenterhooks about, among lots of other things, foreign TV broadcasts and tourists at Tiananmen Square. But one week after its well-publicized infraction, the propaganda-meisters remain eerily silent in the case of The Beijing News. Persons informed on the matter say it may very well stay that way until after the Games.

Last Thursday the paper, one of the country’s elite commercial dailies, ran an interview with Pulitzer Prize-decorated photographer Liu Heung Shing. Liu is the editor of a new coffee-table volume of photos that spans the tumultuous history of the People’s Republic (Newsweek’s Alexandra Seno profiled him last week). Much of the subject matter is politically tinged, including images of the Tiananmen demonstrations, the Cultural Revolution and previously unreleased shots by Chinese photojournalists. As a result the book is unlikely to be sold on the mainland, and some copies shipped in have been impounded by customs officials.

To accompany the interview in The Beijing News, Liu says, he e-emailed the paper three photos of his in the book, though he was cautious not to select any that would be too risky to publish. When the interview appeared, however, the spread of images featured a fourth he never sent, at the bottom corner of the page:

The Beijing News, July 24, 2008, Page C15

The corner photo, entitled “The Wounded”, was one Liu captured during the June 3-4, 1989 crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen. Its shows civilians pierced by bullets being wheeled away on tricycle carts.

Fourth Photo: 'The Wounded'

Word of the shot's publication traveled fast among Chinese politicos and media insiders, primarily over blogs and blocked overseas-based Chinese Web sites that mainlanders can reach by proxy or tunnel. Liu, who makes his home in a hutong of Beijing, was as miffed anyone by the photo. "I did not discuss what happened in 1989 during the entire interview, nor did the published story mention anything about it,” says the photographer and media executive, adding, “I have never received as many calls as [Thursday].”

At The Beijing News, alarm bells sounded first thing that morning. A pair of ranking editors at the paper got a call about the faux pas from a junior colleague, according to another Beijing-based journalist who spoke with them about it that day. Soon cadres from the paper’s co-parent and official sponsor organization, the Communist Party-published Guangming Daily, were ringing them about it as well. The paper made a last-ditch effort to withhold some copies of Thursday’s edition. But the bulk were already in the hands of newsstands and subscribers. It was too late to launch a systematic recall without causing a major stir, say this source and two other veteran journalists with close connections to the paper. The editors did manage to quietly disable the Web link to the story. But the next step was unavoidable: They would have file a report on the incident to Guangming, which would pass it up to the Party’s Central Publicity Department—the dreaded propaganda bureau.

The editors wrapped up their initial investigation into the matter swiftly. It did not take long for them to conclude that this was an unintended gaffe. There had been a missing hole in the layout. A fourth image was needed to fill it. So, the journalist sources were informed, a young layout editor simply scanned the Internet, lifted another image from Liu's book, and slotted it in—neglecting to consider what it was. The downloaded image had to be stretched to line it up with the others, says one of the journalists. Compared with print output of the three shots that he provided, Liu says, “You could notice the difference in the qualities.”

In the minds of the journalist sources, each of whom was independently briefed, there was scant doubt that the blunder was accidental as the paper claimed. Nearly two decades of enforced silence removed from “June 4th”, they explain, even many young people in Beijing have seen and heard next to nothing of the tragedy. The page editor responsible for the story about Liu is about 30 years old, which means he would have been just eleven in 1989, according to one of the journalists. “I myself was old enough to fully experience Tiananmen, but I didn’t notice [the photo] when I first saw it, either,” he says (incidentally, the same could be said for this writer and his family). At the nearby headquarters of Guangming, where the Party newsmen know far more than they are free to publish, most did not hear about the incident all day Thursday, let alone spot the offending photograph.

Propaganda officials appeared to have realized too that the pic, on Page 15 of the Culture section, was not easily identifiable. By Thursday's end, even after filing their mea culpa, The Beijing News editors hadn’t heard a word back from the Central Publicity Department, says the journalist who was in touch with them. The protracted silence was abnormal. They began to sense that with the Olympics just around the corner, perhaps the propaganda bosses might just let the matter be - for the time being, that is. As one of the journalists, informed about with the inner workings of the department, observed on Friday morning: “Right now they just want to stop this from spreading.”

Still, it was a very anxious weekend for the editors, says the journalist who spoke with them. By Friday morning, Hong Kong’s Ming Pao had come out with a report about the foul-up (translated excerpt here from ESWN). According its story, “authorities” ordered all copies of Thursday’s edition recalled from newsstands on learning of it, and a number of editors and reporters at the paper were expected to be disciplined over it. The portrayal of the recall was clearly overstated and that of disciplinary action seemed at very least premature. But it sent The Beijing News editors' stress levels skyward.

Over the weekend they went about firming up their internal investigation. An oblivious young editor’s error did not explain, for example, how the lapse bypassed vetting by the paper’s own chain of command. Less-than-intended Tiananmen references are known to elude the self-censorship process mainland media are obliged to perform. Last June, the Chengdu Evening News inadvertently printed a classified ad from an anonymous buyer that paid tribute to mothers of protesters killed in the crackdown. Three editors were fired as a result, according to reports. That was a mere classified ad in a provincial tabloid. This was The Beijing News.

The paper's top editors were themselves puzzled that their charges had not caught the photo, says one journalist. The page editor Chen Yuan, while young, is the author of well-received histories on the modern Chinese intellectual scene. And the senior editor who ultimately signed off on it was a ranking photojournalist at the paper.

To complicate matters, a few conspiracy theorists cropped up in the blogosphere. They submitted that someone at The Beijing News might have slipped in the image deliberately, in an act somehow motivated by the internal frictions at the paper.

There was no motive or any other evidence to support suspicions of an inside job, the editors concluded. Nonetheless, the paper’s controversial upbringing was relevant to their case.

It’s the product of a pioneering joint venture between an odd couple of partners: stodgy, cash-poor Guangming, which hasn't been considered on the vanguard of reformism since the Deng days; and the Guangzhou-based Southern Media Group, one of the country’s most enterprising and aggressive today. Savvy news and ad pros bred by Southern Metropolis, a cousin paper, have mostly run the show day to day from the start. But Guangming’s the official guardian and wields editorial and administrative veto power.

At the end of 2005, pressured by Party higher-ups over a mounting number of offending investigations and editorials, Guangming’s newly installed Party boss dismissed the top Nanfang editor Yang Bin. This prompted hundreds of infuriated staff to stage an impromptu walkout (most went out on binge of drinking and karaoke). A few of Yang’s lieutenant editors would have been sacked as well, if not for the backlash and talk of an all-out strike. Within weeks Guangming had appointed several of its own men to senior editorial posts, essentially to act as minders. Yang's lieutenants and many other original editors and senior staff ended up resigning. The paper shrank in pages, distribution and advertising suffered, and the renowned editorial and investigative pages slipped into a virtual coma for months. Over the past two years the editorials and daily news coverage have gradually rebounded, but the investigative reports seldom hit as hard as they once had.

Every Monday afternoon, the paper’s senior editors assemble for a weekly editorial meeting. This Monday, hours before the meeting, they got word that Guangming would be dispatching a special representative to brief them. “They thought the whip was coming,” says the journalist. But instead, the rep spent the time transmitting the “spirit” of recent Party pronouncements to study. Of the Tiananmen photo, not a word was uttered.

The paper's official account of the incident has now been circulated to both Party and governmental media authorities, say the journalists. Several editors have already offered their resignations over the snafu, they say. But as of mid-week, the topmost editors was telling them to wait for authorities to weigh in.

Almost certainly, a personnel shakedown is in store for the paper. But journalists with knowledge of the case now think it highly possible that authorities will wait until after the Olympics to take action. It's also possible, though far from certain, that the delay will translate into a lighter punishment from propaganda czars than would have been doled out otherwise, they say. "But they would be stupid to do it now," says one of the journalists.

“They wouldn’t want to give all the foreign journalists in Beijing reason to hype this thing,” another explains. “Especially after what happened there the last time they sacked people.”

Will the Cameras Blink?

Jonathan Ansfield — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:23:16 GMT

Mounting a "Safe Olympics" has become the Chinese leadership's order of the day. Among the umpteen kinds of security officials are obsessing over currently: “broadcasting security”.

The aim is to shield viewers from the damning specter of anti-government protests -- like that which overshadowed the torch-lighting ceremonies in Greece in March. Despite ominous signals to the contrary, Beijing organizers repeatedly have promised that live broadcasts will be aired without censorship or delay. The catch is that none should be needed, industry sources involved tell us, should the many other security rings and bureaucratic obstacles Beijing’s put in place work.

Heavy skepticism lingers over the organizers’ most basic promises. Much of the controversy has centered on foreign broadcasters’ access outside the arena of sport, where Beijing exerts far less direct means of control over the coverage. A piece in the Hollywood Reporter last week offered a good roundup of the nightmares foreign rights’ holders have experienced.

For months, Chinese security authorities held up shipments of their equipment, visas of many of their journalists, and permits required for satellite trucks and shooting on-location, particularly at sensitive sites like Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall. Last week, Chinese officials finally granted hundreds of satellite trucks freedom to whirl around town. But it’s likely that some key areas will still be restricted while broadcasters may still have to get permission 24 hours before filming from a given location, the AP reported.

Sweeping guarantees from on-high can mean little to local functionaries on the ground, who fear being held accountable should any trouble or embarrassment arise. In one telling example earlier this month, local police repeatedly interrupted live transmission from the Wall by German rights holder ZDF Television, even though its broadcast was pre-approved.

As for the Games action itself, since spring rumors have circulated in Beijing that Chinese authorities were bidding to delay transmission domestically, by as much as an entire minute. Last week, the pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported that the Chinese propaganda department had ordered provincial and lower-level stations to slow the signal ten seconds to give broadcasters to time to cut undesirable content.

But in interviews with the South China Morning Post, local TV sources said they had not received the reported orders and suggested they had no reason to: China Central Television (CCTV) stations are carrying the Games nationally, not them.

A day after the Ming Pao report, the Chinese television flagship reaffirmed that it would beam the Games within China without delay - an unprecedented break with custom. Jiang Heping, controller of CCTV-5, the China Central Television sports network now know as the Olympic Channel, told a news conference that state TV stations in China normally delay live broadcasts by 30 seconds – an open secret, though CCTV sources tell us these days the delay usually much shorter - in order to guarantee programs are aired “smoothly and safely”. "But at the Beijing Olympics, CCTV will not use the 30-second technical delay,” Jiang assured. He explained that CCTV programs will be synchronized with international TV and radio signals distributed by the International Broadcast Center (IBC). So audiences will see "what is really taking place as it happens,” he said.

CCTV itself is not the source of the Olympic signal. That organization is the Beijing Olympic Broadcasting Co., Ltd. (BOB), a Sino-foreign JV between the Beijing organizers (BOCOG) and the IOC-backed Olympic Broadcasting Services, which was formed in 2004 to provide international TV and radio signals for the Olympics and Paralympics and other services to rights holders during the Games. Leadership is shared between BOCOG and International Olympic Committee reps, though CCTV producers and cameramen dominate the technical staff. The COO is Ma Guoli, CCTV’s former sports director.

A well-informed source with BOB, asked about conflicting reports regarding the signal delays, said, “No delay on this end. All our signals have no delay.” The source was not at liberty to elaborate.

It’s unlikely Beijing could build a delay into the original feed if they wished, added another source with NBC, given the binding conditions of their JV cooperation. And if CCTV were to delay relaying the original feed by any significant margin, this source said, the time discrepancy with overseas coverage would be quickly exposed. “So in that sense I think the claim [of no delay] is credible,” said the source.

Chinese authorities have other obvious means to control live coverage, industry sources note.

One is to tinker with the camera shots. CCTV directors and producers, who figure to be calling many of the shots at the stadia, will have a plethora of cameras to choose from, says the NBC source. They will also have designated shots to fall back on, the source expects. “For instance, they could have a camera always pointed on some patriotic scene, like Chinese fans or the Chinese flag.” They can easily shift positions or tighten angles to block out any commotion, “as long as the director is quick enough."

(Here there are some serious question marks. CCTV has been the frequent butt of Chinese Internet scandal of late for its live miscues. The most recent one was dubbed Mirrorgate. Twice in a single broadcast of an Olympic news program on CCTV-1, cameras panned inadvertently on the hostess primping in a vanity mirror.)

Gotcha: Bloggers catch the another CCTV blunder

Because of the security blanket on the city and the venues as a whole, there is also “much less chance troublemakers will be able to get into the sporting venues in the first place,” says a source with CCTV. Officials and police have been going to near-Stasi-like extremes to carry out individual surveillance over expats, migrants and Olympics visitors to Beijing.

At a news conference this week, BOCOG laid out the “Spectator House Rules”, reminding the world that the Olympic charter bans "any kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda ... in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas." The Beijing rules explicitly forbid any "display for commercial, religious, political, military purposes, or those for territory, human rights, environmental protection or animal protection" without prior official permission, Reuters reported.

Officials also stressed that flags of non-participating countries were banned, apparently taking aim at the national colors of Taiwan (which competes at the Olympics as “Chinese Taipei”, under a special flag). Moreover, they urged people not to bring any banners at all – part of a "Good Habit for a Good Games" campaign. "We advise that you do not bring banners of any kind to the Games because we must create a fair play environment for the athletes from all countries," Reuters quoted Huang Keying, BOCOG’s deputy director of spectator services, telling reporters. "The kind of banner with ‘Go China!’ on it would be unfair for athletes from other countries."

Just weeks ago, the Chinese government had declared “Go China” the officially sanctioned cheer of the Games. Huang’s remarks indicate how jittery officials have become about tempering patriotic fervor lest it lead to frictions with foreign fans. China’s army of 60,000 volunteers are also being instructed to watch out for taboo banners, and are being equipped with big stickers to slap over offending T-shirts. One concession, based on the traditional Chinese predisposition against sun-tanned skin, is that umbrellas are to be allowed into venues. Alternative means to spring a protest?

Ten days ago, Chinese authorities finally bowed to foreign TV networks' demands to shoot live from Tiananmen Square, but only in the morning from 6 to 10 am and the evening from 9 to 11 pm – when the area figures to be far less crowded than during peak midday hours. Correspondents would be allowed to do standups only, not live interviews. The timing is particularly bad for European broadcasters. They're still lobbying hard for extended hours at the Square.

Calling all cadres: Learn from Guizhou

Jonathan Ansfield — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:43:30 GMT

If Premier Wen Jiabao is China’s chief crisis manager, then Hu Jintao’s the architect of crisis aversion. From the Taiwan anti-secession bill to the Great Firewall of China, the Chinese leader has been a frequent practitioner of the tao of pre-emption. Now his government seems so insecure about the possibility that something might go wrong during the Olympics, it’s attempting to dictate most everything that goes on.

Is there cause for panic inside the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai? Sure. Enforcement ebbs and flows in China. This is a system that bends its own rules daily based on money, personal connections and political mood swings. So the current season calls for a clampdown, and Communist Party leadership have ratcheted up demands for order, stability and unity high enough that they filter down to the lowest level of authority.

Such “security concerns”, in local dialect, translate into job security concerns. Any disruption on my watch, any troublemaker on my turf, and I’m done-for. Or so goes the present mindset among police, city management officials, and other petty functionaries. So better to eliminate any possibility thereof.

That M.O. – in some cases, for lack of any clearer explanation – says a lot about why and how authorities have been clamping down on everything from visas to party venues in ways they have not since periods of the 1980’s and 90’s, and responded to recent turmoil swiftly and strongly. Beijing’s projection of strength within its borders can make it look inflexibly lame to the outside world. But to the Middle Kingdom, what's more important, internal or external perceptions?

Come to think of it, the government’s handling of the recent riot deep down south in Guizhou offers an interesting case in point. Communist Party mandarins wasted little time in taking charge of the case and off-loading blame for it. That said, they have sent a mighty loaded message in the process.

Protests erupted June 28 in Weng’an county, you’ll remember, over rampant suspicions that a teenage girl said to have jumped into a river and drowned was in fact raped and killed; that two men with her on the bridge were related to police and party chiefs in the county; and that the girl’s uncle was beaten to death while pressing the family’s case – charges which local officials harshly rejected.

Within two days of the riot, the provincial government opened a full investigation, backed by official instructions from Chinese leader Hu Jintao. Local authorities detained hundreds of rioters, ordered a third autopsy which they said confirmed the girl had drowned, and released eyewitness testimony of her friends and background on them in an effort to dispel all the “rumors” of foul play. They also pointed the finger at local gangs of petty criminals accused of instigating the crowd. Then, shifting gears, provincial authorities turned around and announced the sacking of two top cops in Weng’an on Thursday, and the two top cadres in the county on Friday.

No, no, local leaders were not implicated in any wrongful death or cover-up - for no such thing had occurred, the government maintained. Rather, provincial higher-ups skewered them for “severe malfeasance” in handling the protesters as well the underlying roots of unrest, according statements released by the Guizhou government media and the official news agency Xinhua:

[Provincial Party chief] Shi [Zongyuan] said the superficial trigger of the protest was the death of the 17-year-old student, but it was a "culmination of deep-rooted grudge" from the public over the local authorities' repeated violation of citizens' interests when they handled mines, residents' relocation and property demolition to may way for urban construction.
"Some officials neglected their duties, but resorted to police force when any dispute happened, which led to strained relations between officials and the people, and police and the public," Shi said.
He said some officials handled disputes involving these issues in a "rude and roughshod" manner.
Shi also blamed local authorities for long-standing disregard for rampant crime in the county and incompetence in maintaining public security.
He urged Weng'an officials to make the people's rights and interests their first priority and to deal with public grievances.
"If the people's rights and interests are hurt by improper polices or government decisions, we should admit mistakes and correct them promptly," he said.
He also told local government to strengthen construction of the cadre team and management of the police force and vowed to seriously punish those who covered up for criminals.

Guizhou’s deputy Party chief, Wang Fuyu, chimed in with an important sound bite about preemption:

Wang said the protests would not have happened "if local officials had communicated appropriately with the aggrieved people after the first sign of protest emerged."

The verdict out of Guizhou will not have been lost on other local bosses across the country: Talk to the people when necessary. Avoid confrontation at all costs. This is no time to foul up.

Over the years, Hu and Wen have launched a number of major initiatives – including education and tax relief, rules on official accountability, and Internet speech policing - aimed at tempering grassroots tensions arising from land redevelopment, corruption and miscarriage of justice. They’ve saddled local cadres with the duty of resolving disputes quickly and quietly.

The sackings in Weng’an vaguely recalled the handling of a deadly siege three years ago in Dingzhou, a few hours’ drive from Beijing, where 150 armed thugs were bused in to run villagers off their land. Dingzhou’s top cadres were sacked within 48 hours and the land reclamation process they had overseen was declared illegal. But the extent of the local government’s role in the attack was never clearly established, and the peasants continued to be harassed, as did Chinese and foreign journalists covering their story.

If it’s possible to compare the two cases, then the level of transparency this time around in Guizhou was a marked improvement. Then again, this was a protest that turned a town upside down, involving somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 citizens, and millions more following along on the Internet.

The Guizhou government seems to have tamed the uproar over the past week, even though its message went muddy on much of China's mistrusting Netizenry. On Internet forums, people continue to poke holes in the official story of the girl’s death -- where they can, that is. Internet blocks on key forums and bloggers, and the dearth of independent coverage in state newspapers, has sustained people’s skepticism. Although the three witnesses hanging out with the girl before she died were finally allowed to meet with a group of ten reporters over the weekend, they basically parroted their official testimony of how the girl inexplicably jumped to her death. That left a lot of unanswered questions about her “suicide” motives.

“Who simply says ‘Okay, I’m going’ and jumps off a bridge?” said Little Wang, my cantankerous bartender friend. I checked back in with him after the firings to sound out his feelings on China’s hottest news of the week. He was not convinced that the truth was known, or that justice was served.

“It’s sort of seems like that old Chinese proverb, ‘No 300 taels of silver here’,” he said. The proverb derives from a tale in which a man buries a stash of money and plants a sign by it saying that money is not there, which of course tips people off to the fact it is. The moral is that clumsy protests of innocence can betray one’s guilt.

“If the officials had no connections at all to the death and weren’t covering anything up, would they really go so far as dismiss them from their posts?

Little Wang was not satisfied with the “malfeasance” line either. “The government says it [their punishments] were for a different reason, because of the protests themselves, the long-term problems, and so on. But if it was not for this incident, you would never have punished them at all!”

Perhaps the higher authorities was just trying to make an example of them, I proposed. “Still, there are still a lot of inconsistencies here,” said Little Wang. Maybe if the Olympics weren’t happening, it would not have been dealt with this way.”

Seek Truth From Facts

Quindlen Krovatin — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Flying back to Beijing from Hong Kong last Wednesday, I decided to peruse everyone's favorite English-language propaganda periodical, China Daily, to familiarize myself with any state-sanctioned stories I'd missed while traveling outside of the mainland. What I found was deeply disturbing and serves to illustrate why I continue to call China the Wild Wild East:

A 28-year-old man managed to stab five policemen to death and wound five others in Shanghai before authorities subdued him.

Riots raged in Guizhou Province after the suicide-maybe-murder of a 16-year-old girl. Coverage of and debate about the unrest has since been carefully choreographed.

The mainland stock market hit a 17-month low on worries about rising inflation and oil prices (sounds familiar).

60 students at a primary school in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region fell ill after drinking water that police now suspect was deliberately poisoned with pesticide.

Seemingly the only good news was that a 30-year-old gorilla in Xi'an gave up a pack-a-day cigarette habit and then gave birth to a baby girl. She first became addicted after eating cigarette butts thrown on the floor of her enclosure by spectators; after that zookeepers continued to feed her cigarettes whenever she became enraged. You can't make this stuff up.

Oh, and Zheng Jie became the first Chinese tennis player to reach the semifinals of a Grand Slam Tournament after beating Nicole Vaidisova of the Czech Republic at Wimbledon. She ended up losing to Serena Williams, but expect to see a Red Star profile of her soon.

    What really irked me however was an article in which the director-general of the Foreign Ministry's consular department, Wei Wei, claimed that China's new visa policy was not limiting the number of foreign tourists traveling to China in anticipation of the Olympics in August. Wei didn't deny that hotel occupancy rates were way down, but instead blamed the slump on "market fluctuations". Classic.

    Meanwhile, I was returning from Hong Kong because, for the first time since I moved here in June of 2005, I'd been unable to renew my visa on the mainland. Never mind that I have 11 Chinese visas already in my passport (and one from Russia for good measure), which should demonstrate that I'm a foreign friend in good standing and uninterested in disrupting the Games with pro-Tibetan-independence protests. Now I have a tourist visa that requires me to leave China every 30 days (and by leave China, I mean travel to Hong Kong, one of the peculiarities of the "one country, two systems" policy).

    Which makes me wonder what kind of hoops travelers unaccustomed to China's particularly viscous brand of bureaucracy have had to jump through at their local embassies. We've previously reported on the new visa policy here, here, and here. Expect to see more coverage in the near future. This is a problem that won't go away anytime soon (or at least until after the Paralympics wrap up in October).

The noxious combination of lies and airplane food left more than my stomach upset.

Guizhou Riots: How much steam can the machine filter?

Jonathan Ansfield — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:01:21 GMT

Say somewhere in China, during the Olympics, mobs of citizens go spastic over some case of official malfeasance, or mishandled public concerns thereof. Not some quibble over sovereignty or state security (like Tibet or terrorism) which turns public opinion against "anti-China" forces. We’re talking a squarely domestic social crisis. Will word of unrest filter out to the wired masses elsewhere around the country? Will Netizens clamor in curiosity and anger? Will their attempts to access information and engage in debate be stymied?

Will this make them even angrier? Will they find cracks in the vaunted Great Firewall of China? Will senior leaders react fast enough to dispel the uproar? Will a lot of observers still be stewing for some time afterward? Will the 20,000 to 30,000 foreign journalists in China for the Games be all over the story? The answer to all these questions is likely to be yes, if we’re to judge by reactions to violent convulsion in Guizhou this past weekend.

On Sunday night, I stepped into my favorite pub in Beijing to find it dead quiet but for Little Wang, the 22-year-old exec barman. Wang’s a scrawny migrant from the south who mixes a mean mojito with an unflagging social conscience (he appeared on this blog in a previous post), and it does not take much to press his buttons. Little Wang was literally stomping mad over the mass protest in China’s deep-south a day earlier.

Wang had first read about the incident in Weng’an county on popular Chinese Web forums, particularly Maopu. People were up in arms over the death of a 16-year-old girl who drowned in a river a week earlier. Police ruled her death a suicide; her family suspected she was raped and murdered. Rumors spread that two young men she was with were somehow related to the county party secretary and a police station chief, and that the girl’s uncle, a local teacher, was beaten to death outside public security headquarters where he pressed her case (turned out he was beaten but not dead, as later revealed by a Hong Kong TV interview with him from his hospital bed).

On Saturday afternoon, a group of 300 people led by family, friends, and classmates descended on the police and government HQs. The crowd eventually swelled to as many as 30,000 people. A standoff with riot police spiraled out of control. In seven hours of fiery bedlam, people smashed, looted, and torched police cars and government offices, injuring more than 100 police. (The blog ESWN carries lots of pix)

Suspicious death cases with police links can easily stir moments of national reckoning over class barriers in China today, as they long have race relations in the States - take the case of Sun Zhigang in 2003 or Lu Haixiang in 2004. Little Wang was plenty steamed about the rumors of foul play in Weng’an. The sentiment was echoed by his understudy Xiao Huang, who confessed to being “dizzy” from hearing Little Wang’s rant but added: “I myself have never thought anything good of China’s police. They’re all corrupt scum of the earth.”

What really riled Little Wang, though, was his confusion about the case. Why were people in Weng'an angry? Were their suspicions true? Why didn’t the government address them properly? Efforts to answer his questions only left him more frustrated. Wang:

“…All night and morning, I was clicking on posts about it. First it was there. Then it was gone. Then it was there again. Then gone. Every few minutes it was being deleted, sometimes every few seconds. The site had orders to block it. That was obvious. But they couldn’t keep up. Every time they did, we Netizens got angrier and angrier.”

Little Wang gave up surfing on Tianya, the go-to Web forum in China for discussion of social injustices. “Tianya’s too serious!” he scoffed. In fact, though the editors were scrubbing out posts about Weng’an, Tianya groupies were masking their posts under oblique headers, sometimes very oblique headers. Roland Soong, the Hong Kong-based uber-blogger behind ESWN, detailed this phenomena (see comment 030), which was later covered in The Wall Street Journal. Wrote Soong on Sunday evening:

"For example, the first item says that oveseas media are paying a great of attention of the lives of people living in the plateau of the Yunnan-Guizhou area. The second item says that the people of X'an (Guizhou) are lighting an extra large sacred flame to celebrate the Beijing Olympics. The third item just says, "Delete this!! Your mother's c*nt!" The fourth item says that "when the army arrives in southwestern China, I think something big will happen! I believe that our troops have conscience." The fifth item says that the anti-American posts from the anti-American warriors have all met death -- the revolution has not yet succeeded and our comrades need to keep working. What was that last one? The term "American" is being used for "Chinese"!"

I explained Soong’s insights to Little Wang. He said such invention was also evident on Maopu, a buzz-driven entertainment site which targets a younger audience (the name means “pouncing cat”). He took a seat at my laptop and scrolled way down the site in search of links on the Weng’an rioting. Nothing. Little Wang sprung to his feet in a fit of accusatory stuttering:

“You see! Gone again!”

By this time the easiest info to find in Chinese was by far the official Xinhua new agency’s initial two-graph report, which came out after the news proliferated in the forums and on Chinese news sites outside the mainland. Little Wang, for his part, was surprised Xinhua would report the incident at all. “You must be kidding? All we can get is Xinhua?” Part of it read:

"During the process of reception by the relevant government officials, certain people instigated the masses who did not know the truth to attack the county public security bureau, county government and county party offices. A small number of criminal elements vandalized the offices and set fire to many offices and vehicles."

ESWN provided a link to the Xinhua piece that appeared on the obscure site of a Fujian-based trade weekly sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture. Click on the link now and the page is blank. But at the time, the text was accompanied by an unattributed picture – probably not Xinhua’s - of a throng of thousands gathered outside Weng’an government buildings.

“Doesn’t look like a ‘small number’ to me,” cracked Wang.

My shaggy mixologist friend was only further irked by what official attempts to paint people protesters as a herd of know-nothings incited by misinformation and ‘criminal elements’, even if, by many accounts, this was partly the case. “How are they supposed to know any better, when the government conceals everything from them?”

A lot of Chinese Netizens felt that way, and over the next couple days they let the government know it. Not that there were tons of open venues for dissent. Whereas threads of discussion were cut off too fast to engender lasting debate on many Indies forums, those of central media appeared to be less carefully vetted in the first two days. Comments there predominately cast the protesters as “rights defenders” up against corrupt local cadres and police.

It’s not that surprising, in this day and age, that central government media would allow such scrutiny of a small-town mess. This is how the Communist Party distances itself from its problems. Still, it’s interesting to see how -- as the provincial and central government began to investigate the matter and establish their official version of events -- their online departments moved into a guiding role. They became mother ships, swallowing up a good proportion of the virtual space for critique of the government. Soong analyzes this stratagem of co-option in uniquely Chinese political terms, both traditional and technocratic. “Hydrological engineering”, he dubs it:

"Yes, HYDROLOGICAL ENGINEERING! Many of the current crop of central government leaders are technocrats with engineering background. As such, they must understand that public opinion is water that can carry the ship as well as turn it over. [per the dynastic conception of the imperial mandate to rule] The point about hydrological engineering is not to build dams to hold the water back because there will be a catastrophic dam break one day that might bring down the entire system. Instead, the point should be about controlling and redirecting the awesome power of nature in less harmful ways down selected channels."

"In the case of the Weng'an mass incident, the major portals were deleting the related posts as quickly as possible. At Tianya Forum, it was estimated that a Weng'an-related post has an average lifetime of 15 seconds before being deleted by the administrators. That was supposed to be a record speed. The same thing was happening at Sina.com, Sohu.com, Baidu, etc. So this was building massive dams all over the map which builds up a tremendous pressure. Where was the pressure release point? You may be amazed that it was over at the Xinhua Forum. The webmasters posted the official Xinhua news story on the forum. That does not help in itself because Chinese netizens think that this Xinhua story was vague and misleading. However, the webmasters allowed the comments to run freely. This meant that the Xinhua posts became the meeting points of all those who want to talk about the Weng'an incident but could not do so elsewhere. Although that post did not contain any news information (such as photos and videos), it was a place for people to vent their outrage. As a result, Xinhua got a record-setting number of visitors who were very appreciative. Is this the plan for the future? You'll find out at the next mass incident (and there will be many)."

On the independent forums earlier this week, an abundance of anonymous posts have emerged from "authoritative local sources" who dispel rumors of official meddling and blame the dust-up on small band of rowdies. Soong, who has translated quite a few of those posts, notes that Netizens do not trust them:

"On one hand, there is the legendary "50-cent gang." These are supposed to be professional Internet writers who get paid 0.50 RMB for every post favorable to the government position. When yet another version of the Weng'an mass incident gets published as being the ultimate truth, the author is accused of being a member of the "50-cent gang" who is trying to confuse the public. Indeed, if you read through enough versions, you will probably throw up your hands and decide that you don't know what the truth is anymore. Instead, you change your investigation to questioning the motives of the people who are producing these versions."

"On the other hand, there is the legendary "Internet special agent (网特)." These are supposed to be professional spies who are paid by anti-China hostile forces to publish unfavorable information about China. For example, some of the posts mentioned that the People's Liberation Army has been dispatched to Weng'an with tanks and artillery, with the hint of a Tiananmen-like massacre to follow. Immediately, the other netizens reacted by pointing that these posts are coming from "Internet special agents." The netizens want to draw a very clear line: they may be protesting against what is happening in Weng'an but they will not serve the purpose of the anti-China hostile forces. This is very clear."

By Monday, local authorities had detained or questioned as many as 300 rioters, and ordered a new inquest into the girl’s death. But the results of the review appeared a foregone conclusion. Three days after my encounter with Little Wang, state media across the country were leading on the file compiled by Guizhou’s Communist Party-run media – the Guizhou Daily, Guizhou Television, and the Guizhou Metropolis Daily – which took on key questions in the case point by point. It stood faithfully by the provincial government findings that the young men with the dead girl had no family connections to officials and had done no wrong - the girl had simply jumped into the river. The file was broken down into a series of “inquiries” in The Beijing News, a progressive tabloid. At the top of the Maopu message board, the same body of information was packaged as “rumor” and “fact”.

Maopu was back to its perplexing ways on Thursday. One featured link on the Weng'an protest poked a number of holes in the eyewitnesses accounts from the dead girl's friends. But the topmost link turned the problem of public mistrust in the case on its head: "Why didn't anyone doubt the rumors?" begged the title.

One reason is officials in Weng'an did too little, too late to address people's suspicions. So argued the Jinan-based Qilu Evening News, far from Guizhou in Shandong province, in an editorial on Tuesday:

"In the Internet age, if public information lags in the slightest, it can leave room for rumors to be broadcast. This is a reality that must be confronted."

Arguably, senior leaders did react much faster and more attentively than they might have in the past. The provincial government sprung to action, backed by orders from Chinese leader Hu Jintao. Guizhou Party Secretary Shi Zongyuan, formerly chief of the state press and publication regulator, was in Weng'an within 48 hours of the incident.

Shi ultimately pinned the riot on a "criminal elements" with "ulterior motives" - not a popular statement at all, as noted. But at a "public forum", according to the Guizhou Daily, he also did acknowledge "social conflicts that had accumulated over time", "tense relations between cadres and the masses", and "people's dissatisfaction toward our work".

But the remarks were airbrushed when compared to unpublished comments Shi made behind the scenes at a meeting of 100 local officials. Blogging For China translated the intriguing account of a Guizhou journalist named Wu Hanpin, who apparently was in attendance and later blogged on the exchange:

"After listening to the comments of those attending, Shi Zongyuan said: Weng’an county has always had tense relations between cadres and citizens, police and citizens. Weng’an county has repeatedly had violent incidents of robbery, murder, and rape which have gone unsolved. The people who live here lack a sense of security. The failures of the county public security ministry has made everyone in the local community angry. He advised that those responsible for county public security should be “dismissed from class”. Hearing this, all of the local political leaders (members of the people’s congress, political consultative conference) clapped in approval."

That page of Wu's blog now appears to be blocked.

By the end of the week, Little Wang was not impressed by the Guizhou government's moves to resolve the issue fairly. He'd read a dizzying array of accounts and arguments, from Wu's to those on Maopu. He still believed it highly plausible that the dead girl was raped and murdered; that the two young men she'd been with were related to top Weng'an officials; and that the protesters were instigated to commit violence.

He did not believe the provincial government was going over the heads of Weng'an officials to conduct an independent probe into the death or the riots. "Even if they sack a few officials, it's just a show," he concluded. "But how am I to really know?"

Beijing's Clampdown on English-Language Glossies

Manuela Zoninsein — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:18:41 GMT

Two of Beijing’s three free English-language entertainment and listings monthlies have just suffered setbacks, and it is unclear when or if they'll return to newsstands. Time Out Beijing (TOB) has been shelved indefinitely due to “improper licensing." The editorial team that once produced That’s Beijing has had to assume a new identity—The Beijinger— after being dumped unexpectedly by the license-holding local publisher.

Publishing in China is anything but straightforward: the license required for periodicals and books, as well as for Internet sites seeking “to engage in information services,” needs approval by the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP). This is the government agency responsible for drafting and enforcing regulations concerning “prior restraint”— the granting of permission and screening prior to publishing.

The stringent monitoring and licensing process is especially difficult for foreign periodicals, which have been known to publish surreptitiously under defunct local titles. When Rolling Stone magazine put out its first Chinese edition in 2006, for example, it was scrapped shortly thereafter for improper licensing, even though its directors had presumed all paperwork was in order.

The reason provided by GAPP for shelving the June issue of TOB is that it lacked a proper license—a fact that has “not changed in the past three and a half years,” said Tom Pattinson, the magazine’s editor. He interpreted the move as another example of heightened restrictions and tighter monitoring in the capital prior to the Olympic Games -- “perhaps a strange time" for a problem to arise over an issue that had not been problematic before.

The problems encountered by That's Beijing were apparently the climax of a long-running feud. According to an email distributed by Mike Wester, General Manager of True Run Media, the organization which previously coordinated publishing for That's Beijing, the publication's former publisher had brokered -- on the sly -- an agreement with another team to produce content for That's Beijing. Wester's e-mail stated the That’s brand has been under dispute for many years and its trademark status is “up in the air.” True Run Media launched The Beijinger website a number of months ago but has yet to arrange a new publisher for the magazine itself.

Along with TOB and That’s Beijing, City Weekend (CW) Beijing -- a bi-weekly for which I write a dining column -- have been read widely by Beijing’s resident expatriates and short-term tourists. Since CW will continue providing “info on what’s on when and where in Beijing,” according to Managing Editor Collin Crowell, it's virtually the only remaining glossy aimed at informing foreigners about local activities.

Not wanting to sound overly cynical, I should mention that guides on Beijing's entertainment venues during the Olympics might not be needed as much as originally expected. New Chinese visa restrictions are adversely affecting the nation's tourism industry, "casting a pall over Beijing," writes David Barboza in the New York Times. Though the names of the Games' fuzzy mascots, the Five Friendlies—"bei," "jing," "huan," "ying," and "ni"—mean "Beijing welcomes you" when strung together, the city isn't exactly opening its arms to visitors from abroad.

More on Media: A 'Hallmark Moment' Indeed

Jonathan Ansfield — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 11:40:07 GMT

When a snow disaster cracks the land,
When Tibet splittists disrupt the torch relay,
When an earthquake shakes every single person’s soul...

No matter what hardships hit,
[We’ll] never leave any countryman stranded.

Go China! Stand up straight!

Inspiring words from the Chinese Web portal Sohu.com, in a banner ad for its news channel. The plug on the home page, which has been running off and on for a couple of weeks now (between luxury car ads), sums up a troika of blows China has taken this year in one restorative pitch. It also suits the prescription of Community Party propagandists, who've ordered that coverage of the quake be unifying, positive, and conducive to national stability. Sohu, the operator of the official site of the Beijing Games, is simply playing to its market of course, albeit one confined by Web police. It might as well be parroting Communist Party leaders themselves.

The biggie in Sichuan has served to unify the country, brought it more positive press than not, and thereby benefited national stability. First impressions have become critical to Beijing's record in responding to such crises. And Beijing made a good one after the earthquake, pulling together a massive relief operation, ushering in an official media blitz, and tolerating, if not engaging, most of the rest of the state and foreign press corps. It also embraced, on a massive and unprecedented scale, the Good Samaritan giving of public volunteers, private companies and foreign donors. After the highly contentious prelude to the Olympics, the flood of sympathy was a cleansing political catharsis.

Nothing necessarily wrong with that. But there were darker undercurrents. Private charity, having barely just become an option in China, practically became an obligation. Aid from places such as Taiwan and Japan got knotted up in politics. And dissent over the handling of the quake has been mostly relegated to the blogosphere; for elite spheres like closed-door intellectual forums and the pages or Web pages of liberal media; and to those vexed Sichuanese who lost children in toppled schools or failed to get adequate relief, and have been repeatedly hushed up.

Without sufficient breathing space for independent critique, coping and aid, repressed tensions could still boil over in disaster zone. And the progress that might come out of the quake might be much less than originally hoped.

For all the hustle and bustle in the immediate aftermath of the quake, one could argue that the Party always controlled the message - the “main melody" (or "theme"), as its known in official parlance. More than a month on, it’s easier to reflect on the developments. On all the key fronts - publicity, charity, relief work, and even emergent field of psychiatric counseling - Beijing has come to circumscribe a circus of activity under the state's own tent.

Did anyone expect any different? No. Nonetheless, state unity, when egregiously enforced, engenders the underlying strains of isolationism and divisiveness in China’s political DNA. It’s a family-oriented style of politics. Ancient philosophers and conquerors helped implant the notion, colonialist foreign powers exacerbated it, and the Party -- together with many (often rightfully) proud Chinese -- are feeding off it to the present day. If you’re not with China, you risk being branded “anti-China”.

The evolution of the domestic media, post-quake, indicates how authorities have encircled the forces of pluralism and served to polarize public debate. (This I’ve touched on this in previous posts here, here, here and here.) Initially, thousands of journalists scurried to the disaster zone. No one stopped them, but no one invited them either.

Propaganda organs, as in case of many crises and cover-ups in recent years, were initially disarmed. State media editors knowingly disregarded protocol on disaster coverage and an explicit ban on non-official reporting, knowing the demand for the story was huge and the risks (hence the openings) many. Premier Wen Jiabao, on the ground in Sichuan within just a few hours, was already out ahead of them. All the easier for them to chase.

Suppose central and local officials had managed to shut all or most them out, or tried much harder. The backlash would have been bad and looked worse – something on the order of another SARS debacle. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the Chinese masses along with the international community promptly rallied behind the rescue and relief efforts. The propaganda department quickly retreated one step, drawing the line at bad publicity.

And the vast majority of domestic media stuck within the newly established boundaries. In turn, the official broadcasters – especially China Central Television (CCTV) and Sichuan TV – dominated the story. The cascade of real, live, rolling coverage, official and non- alike, trained on the official response and reinforced the impression that under the leadership’s command, the government was doing about the best it could given the circumstances. In most cases, it probably was. But if it wasn’t, few dared say so.

Within a week, media were being ordered to play down a growing list of salacious subjects. When some of the country’s most assertive media began needling away at the most sensitive point of all - the thousands of schoolchildren crushed to death under badly built schools - censors began ratcheting up warnings and punishments.

It wasn’t a blanket crackdown, but a series of targeted strikes, just enough to send a message. Web czars planted key word blocks on search engines, warning of possibly illegal contents. Party propaganda bosses busted papers like the 21^stCentral Business Herald, for spreading “harmful information” in a couple of features. The official newswire Xinhua, presumably at their behest, took aim at the trailblazing Guangdong newspaper Southern Weekly for its investigations into the school construction controversy. Finally, according to insiders, they and other leaders exerted pressure on Guangdong Party Secretary Wang Yang, seen as a relative moderate, to call home watchdog reporters from that newspaper group.

Where Party authorities didn’t directly discourage dissent, nationalistically-charged readers did. A rash of Web debates entangled online commentators in sticky standards of political correctness. A pair of young bloggers were detained by police after their critiques offended the sensibilities of Netizens. A Chinese property tycoon, and a bunch of big foreign brands, were pilloried for not donating enough at first.

The pressure to empathize with quake victims hit absurd heights. When Chinese media discredited a news-making text message purportedly written by a dying mother to her daughter, the China Media Project reported, Netizens seemed less upset with the sham artist than the media itself - for being too cynical. The respected Shanghai writer Yu Qiuyu urged orphaned parents to set aside their festering grievances against officials and contractors, reasoning it would only bring China bad press.

Many Netizens turned on Yu, though he did expose a core truth behind the manipulation of public opinion. There's always the risk free expression can always be used against China. Thus it's forever prone to charges of subversion.

Even the most "democratic" countries fall into this trap at times. Un-Chinese? How about un-American? Is the stiflingly patriotic climate of political correctness here much different than what we found in the United States following 9/11? We all know how since then, in the eyes of most Americans today, the U.S. paid for the surge of nationalism.

But China, by comparison, was never so blatantly divided to begin with. A single-party political system, the homogeneous Han majority, and the Olympic fever have kept political and socioeconomic divisions submerged beneath the surface all year. The snow disaster that crippled the nation's railroads and coal pipelines and left millions of people returning home for New Year’s out in the cold - now that was a temporary P.R. disaster for the government, both domestically and abroad.

But the Tibet conflagration completely split the sides, and kindled the worldwide face-off over the torch relay between pro and anti-China protesters. The Communist Party leadership, whose chief concerns lie on home front, came out of it feeling pretty good. Within the Standing Committee of the Politburo, says one Party media editor in Beijing, the internal appraisal of the ordeal was: “’We won. Not because the torch relay was successful but that Chinese young people showed their disappointment with the West. This means that West’s ‘peaceful evolution’ policy is not a success with the youth. It’s failing.”

Peaceful evolution to a Western-style democracy, he explains, is "their biggest fear of all,” He explains: “It was a result that Communist Party leaders themselves did not expect. They spent all these years with all this patriotic education, but none of it had the impact of this single event. People could view the West with their own eyes and realize, ‘Hey, it’s not always so friendly.’”

The quake response displayed a flash of the civic spirit of reform behind China’s rise - the thing Beijing Olympics were ideally meant to reward and further encourage. This spring, the prevailing icon in China has been the heart, as in “I (heart) China”. But at first it was a hard heart, not to be broken by anti-government protesters. Folks started boasting the heart on My Space sites and on T-shirts during the international torch relay.

Now the heart has softened somewhat, since being adopted by Beijing in the latest mass publicity campaign for quake relief. Propaganda posters show a red heart beating with the slogan: “Shaking the hearts of China”. It’s paired with images signifying the recovery or reconstruction, and related couplets rooting on the effort. Here's a translation of one:

The heavens and earth have been overturned/
But hope has broken through.

Here's another (pictured above):

Hot tears have been shed/
But strength has been gathered.

Still, the question is, "hope" and "strength" for whom?

Last week in Beijing, I sat in on a forum for Chinese media marking the one-month anniversary of the quake. The hosts were the SOHO group, the preeminent developer on the capital’s corporate East Side, and the Shanghai-based China Business News. CBN’s well-travelled chief editor He Li moderated and celeb SOHO founders Pan Shiyi and his wife Zhang Xin joined a panel of prominent scholars.

For a few hours, they meditated on the quake and how they might build on its aftermath toward a civil society. Xu Jilin, an intellectual historian from Huadong Normal University in Shanghai, helped frame the discussion in his introductory remarks. China is again a great economic power, he held, but not a “great political power”, nor a “great civilization”. Xu questioned whether the public outpouring in response to the quake would come to signify a revival of Chinese civilization, or rather its “hui guang fan zhao”. He was referring to a Chinese phenomenon similar to the Lazarus premonition, that last burst of vitality before death.

It was hard to be optimistic in the case of the media expression, observed Zhan Jiang, the straight-talking journalism dean at China Youth University for Political Sciences in Beijing. Comparing official openness at the scene of the quake to unrest in Tibetan regions, he stressed that every case of media coverage still had to be weighed separately. Increasingly, Professor Zhan pointed out, "certain elements" within the central government had been putting the clamps on quake reporting. He predicted that one day soon, all of the sudden, the August Olympics would take its place as the official media's lead story.

Indeed even as I write, the leadership is tweaking the “main melody” - or melodies - of state publicity. This from Xinhua on Sunday (italics mine):

BEIJING, June 15 (Xinhua) -- China's top publicity official Liu Yunshan said here on Sunday that more publicity should be given to post-quake reconstruction and the Beijing 0lympic Games.

"People's efforts in rebuilding their hometown after the massive quake and patriotism as well as great spirits involved should be highly praised," Liu, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, told a national conference of publicity officials.

Liu said models and heroes in quake relief should be publicized by the media, and literatures relating to the quake relief should be created to encourage the nation to weather the storm.

He said more publicity should also be given to Beijing's preparation for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Pushing the Envelope: Media Questions about the Quake II

Jonathan Ansfield — Sat, 31 May 2008 13:40:32 GMT

Still gotta marvel at the Party's ability to bend but not break. In the immediate aftermath of the quake, many domestic media documented the post-apocalyptic squalor at the scene. But few reported anything directly damning of officialdom. China Newsweek (no relation to Newsweek) investigated purported forewarnings of disaster, including a mass migration of toads and claims of suppressed reports by seismologists predicting a major quake. The story cited officials who denied ever being formally warned; even if they were warned, it noted, earthquakes in general cannot be pinpointed.

Some of the most incisive press comments came in the form of “told-you-so” editorials. In the most liberal print outlets, like the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis and its one-time cousin paper The Beijing News, columnists lavished cajoling praise upon the central government for its transparency -- their implicit wish being that Beijing make this case a real precedent, and live up to recent reforms and legislation regarding the official release of information.

Embattled newsman Chang Ping, widely criticized and ultimately demoted in the wake of the Tibet crisis, was once again pressing his case for the "universal value" of freedom of information, independent of national (or "nationalist") interests. But even then, the conventional wisdom amongst journalists was that the initial chorus of voices was just a passing phase of the story, its rite of spring. As the Party editor noted three days after: “When they [propaganda authorities] can get control, you can be sure that they will.”

By the end of the first week, to some extent, they already had. Sichuan designated certain disaster sites off-limits and regulated access to the disaster zone as a whole, by means of an official (albeit easily obtainable) permit. The CPD gave up on blanket orders in favor of stressing that coverage should be positive, unifying, and conducive to upholding stability. Reporters in the field were firmly ordered to disregard rumor and "false information" and to stick by official and military rescue parties - providing rare insights - though they many opted to go it alone.

A few outlets were also reprimanded for going too far. After officials reported on a dam that showed serious cracks, journalists began investigating whether it might rupture. On May 15, the 21st Century Business Herald ran a spot feature stressing the precariousness of the situation in the lead. It was promptly branded you hai xinxi, "harmful information”, according to the Shanghai-based editor. A few days later, on May 19, the paper followed up with a front-page investigation.

Then there was this little ethical infraction, as reported by Beijing-based uber-blog Danwei: "New Travel Weekly (旅游新报), a Chongqing-based newspaper was suspended from publishing because it used bikini-clad women on the front page of its May 19 issue, which was allegedly dedicated to earthquake relief efforts. The newspaper was accused of 'violating journalistic ethics' in its earthquake reporting."

Fairly edgy stuff has flowed day in and day out, nonetheless, from the Web platform of Caijing magazine, one of China’s most celebrated sources of investigative journalism. (Its irrepressible founding editor, Hu Shuli, in her latest editorial, urges Beijing to institute a system to better ready it for future catastrophes). Regulations forbid Web sites in China from doing original reporting, but Caijing is among a number of Chinese-language financial sites that skirt those rules, including the local embodiments of major foreign news brands.

Reuters, for instance, was quick to report the now-notorious case of the lower-class primary school that toppled like a house of cards in Wuhu, killing 200 to 300 young pupils, while other structures all around were barely affected. Parents and kids who survived the collapse charged that teachers had locked a couple classes of kids in a classroom over the lunch break, and then gone out to play mahjong. Reuters' Chinese site posted the piece in translation, and it got wide play in the mainland blogosphere. (The original page on the site was later scrambled within China, or so it would currently appear.)

China’s best-reputed newspaper, the Guangzhou-based weekly Southern Weekend, took few chances in its package of stories the week of the quake. One story probed a dilemma many people faced - that of where donations could be best put to use. The piece portrayed the government charities as the most reliable and largely glossed over questions of past corruption scandals, institutional inefficiency and hefty deductions for operational costs.

But by Week Two, Southern Weekend dug into the imbroglio over "crumbled tofu" construction in a Page One probe, translated in part by China Digital Times: "One member of the rescue team explodes with anger: 'It’s this tofu dregs construction! Inside the concrete, there’s only wire, not a single bit of reinforcing bar.'"

The paper right back at it last week, reconstructing the story of another school that was squished, translated by ESWN: "We wanted to try to determine if the deaths of the 127 students were due to a natural disaster or a manmade one."

The Beijing News bit to the rotten core of the issue a few days ago in an analysis by Peking University professor Zhang Qianfan. The China Media Project's Bandurski translates: "…how can we ensure that schools in other areas do not collapse? Essentially, this needs to happen through local democratic mechanisms making local officials answer truly to the local people." More specifically, ordinary people must either directly or indirectly participate in the government budgeting process so that expenditures become truly 'public expenditures' rather than budgets made at the discretion of the local governments themselves."

Call that "playing down"? These and other articles emerged despite a lot of finger-wagging from Chinese media czars urging otherwise.

Yet Beijing was smart to at least own up to the staggering number of school collapses early on. This makes it more likely that the brunt of the blame will fall on local officials, should the government be forced to respond further. In coming weeks, it's safe to expect that either a head or two will roll or the speech police will get much tougher on media critics - probably both. One way or another, notes the editor in Shanghai, “They’re going to have to ‘placate the people’s anger’,” an old turn-of-phrase connoting political damage control.

It would be difficult for media anywhere to ask unvarnished questions at such a tragic time, of course. In China, that's especially so. To a remarkable extent, the quake ordeal has demonstrated, the Party still guides the mass process of coping in times of crisis, and sets the standards of public decorum and political correctness. And helping enforce the Party's tone and tempo are the Internet “lynch mobs”, the easily inflamed anti-imperialist Red Guards of the Chinese digital age, who have gone on the attack against a couple of Chinese bloggers for mounting unappetizing critiques of the government, resulting in said bloggers' detention by police - precisely the kind of twists that free speech defenders like Chang Ping rail against.

A mob of viral messengers is also behind "Donations-Gate", as ESWN explains, wherein Western companies stand accused of being too slow to ante up, or too cheap.

Would-be muckrakers face more practical impediments. Knock-on emergencies like the "quake lake" have kept traditional media preoccupied, while aftershocks have made it that much harder for journalists to do cutting-edge reporting. By Week Two, the Shanghai-based editor said at the time, a lot of his friends in the field were physically and emotionally beat. “A lot of media are really, really exhausted right now,” he sighed. One Southern Metropolis reporter was narrowly saved after being washed away by a landslide, punctuating the extent of dangers in the field.

Meanwhile, telecommunications failures around the epicenter have limited the impact Indie bloggers might have had on quake reporting otherwise. Instead, the single-most publicized post to this point, it would appear, was the blow-by-blow eyewitness account of Premier Wen Jiabao's efforts the night of the quake, filed by a journalist in his traveling press corps (viz. our earlier blogs on that). The leaked IM transcript so lionized the Premier that state papers and radio broadcasts used sound bites. It turned out to be better P.R. than a Party puff piece could ever be. Far better.

The din of criticism is unlikely to die down, though, even as the censors try to move the story along. You get nowhere searching “earthquake+school buildings+collapse”, which has been blocked and branded "may be" illicit for more than two weeks now. It's the same treatment "Carrefour" got in April after Chinese protested the hypermarket over reported pro-Tibet ties. But key in something slightly different, “earthquake+collapse+schools”, and thousands of Chinese links pop up. "School buildings" or "rooms" (xiaoshe 校舍) is the term officials have used, which would seem to explain why it’s the term Web authorities have banned. The big sites typically comply to the letter of the block orders they get, but don't go any further than asked. Sometimes they even neglect to go that far. On Google's main indigenous rival Baidu, for whatever reason, the "school buildings" search went through fine at last check.

Search and Destroy: Tough Media Questions about the Quake

Jonathan Ansfield — Fri, 30 May 2008 11:52:24 GMT

Google the Chinese words for “earthquake + school building + collapse” here nowadays and you get nothing but a white screen and a warning:

搜索结果可能涉及不符合相关法律法规和政策的内容，无法显示。

Which means:

“The search results may involve contents that do not accord with relevant laws, regulations and policies, and cannot be displayed.”

Not that this has snuffed out online rancor over the subject. Some 7,000 school "buildings” (or "rooms", depending on your interpretation) crumbled in the Sichuan quake, by officials’ own preliminary count, burying alive a disproportionate number of schoolchildren among the more than 80,000 dead or still unaccounted for – perhaps 10,000 kids died altogether.

Blatantly substandard construction is to blame, and in some cases corruption too -- and on a deeper level, a system in which the average Chinese taxpayer exercises no oversight over their tax renminbi. The matter has incensed bereaved parents in Sichuan and ordinary folk nationwide. Some parents who lost children have banded together in protests, and now legal action. So ministry chiefs are promising to investigate and punish those responsible.

Meanwhile Communist Party censors are working to stem the controversy. While they cannot manage to muzzle domestic coverage completely, they're carrying out damage control. One means is through "key term" blocks on search engines such as Google.cn and portals like Sina and Sohu.

Beginning late in the week of the May 12 quake, the Central Publicity (nee Propaganda) Department (CPD) has warned state media to not to “play up” (xuanran 渲染) a long and growing list of sensitive questions that the calamity has stirred up. Collapsing schools are perhaps the prickliest so far, but there are others.

In addition to shoddy schools, topics red-flagged in CPD directives and word-of-mouth exchanges, veteran Chinese journalists tell us, include:

1) pre-quake warnings of major seismic rumblings;

2) the operation of state charities since;

3) the disbursement of relief, relocation and rebuilding funds;

4) the role of aid workers from other countries (particularly Japan);

5) the potential threat posed by nuclear facilities located in the disaster zone;

6) the fallout from cracked dams, floods and aftershocks,

7) and in particular, the movements of individual state leaders in response to the cataclysm.

On state TV, reporters have constantly badgered ministry point men with questions on these topics, which is unusual enough. News on these issues is otherwise meant to originate exclusively from central media organs, which represent the party line, rather than unofficial news media outlets in China, which are still monitored and owned by state organs but largely run as independent businesses. “We might be able to touch on some of these issues,” notes one Shanghai-based magazine editor. “But we’re not supposed to write full-page stories focusing on them.”

The commercial media haven't exactly bowed to their masters so far. So devastating was the 7.9-magnitude jolt (later upgraded by Chinese -- but not foreign -- seismologists to 8.0) that the state information regime soon broke into real-time news mode - a breakthrough for a major domestic emergency. Within hours, Premier Wen Jiabao had flown to scene. Central Television went live from the front lines. The Xinhua News Agency kept spitting out updates. Relevant authorities fed them casualty counts, and provincial and ministry officials began giving regular televised news briefings.

Hundreds of journalists hit the ground from the official central and provincial press corps. A few thousand additional Chinese journalists, by some estimates, high-tailed it to the disaster zone as well -- most of them unauthorized. Propaganda minders, disarmed, were forced to tolerate their dispatches.

The frenzy, while somewhat unscripted, proved to be a blessing in disguise for Beijing -- so long as it could keep the domestic media focused on the tragic fallout from a natural disaster, and government’s dogged efforts to help victims. Reports showcased its rapid response, relatively high degree of openness, and embrace of civic and international aid, which unified the international community in a cascade of sympathy and the Chinese people in a national catharsis. Both of which seemed sorely needed after months of pre-Olympic calamity and controversy.

But the storyline of the quake has quickly shifted, from the tough work of rescue and remembrance to the tougher challenge of recovery and circumspection. It was only a matter of time before Chinese media, gleaning the popular subconscious from the blogosphere, began to dwell on causes and effects of the quake not up to Nature. In other words, what could officials be doing (or have done) differently? The question now is whether the government can stay ahead of the publicity curve as it bends toward the underside of the story.

Back on the day of the quake, the CPD came out with pro forma instructions, journalists with central media organs in Beijing told us later. It forbade first-hand reporting outside of four official organs – central TV and radio, the news wire Xinhua, and the Communist Party flagship People’s Daily. It thus activated emergency response guidelines, under which, as of last year, media outlets' licenses can be revoked if they report "false information" about natural disasters, emergencies or government responses to them without obtaining prior authorization.

But this was an incomparably massive disaster. Local propaganda and security officials, who would normally be counted on to enforce the ground rules, had no chance of blocking access to the disaster zone. They were busy enough getting in themselves. The CPD orders were unenforceable.

Many newsrooms across the country, sensing there would be chaos, had already dispatched reporters by the time they got the initial orders not to. That was a loophole in timing that many have exploited in recent years. One of the more aggressive papers in Shanghai, the China Business News, sent out a pair of reporters. When higher-ups from its parent conglomerate rang, editors told them that the reporters had struck out on their own volition. The editors held back a second team, but only briefly. Seeing that everyone else was sending reporters, they did too. In fact, says the Shanghai-based editor, “a lot of reporters weren’t explicitly sent by their companies in the beginning. They went themselves.”

Not everyone did, though. Those commercial dailies in Beijing administered directly by the city, not known for taking on big national news themselves, stuck predictably to the Xinhua copy. And in the Sichuanese capital of Chengdu, explains David Bandurski of Hong Kong U.’s China Media Project, provincial leaders asserted broader sway over the commercial press. The front page of the Huaxi Metropolis Daily, one of Chengdu’s saucier tabloids, morphed into a mouthpiece advertising their response.

Other state media did take unanticipated risks. The provincial television crews of Sichuan, known in recent years for adventurous and sometimes invasive social and legal reportage, plumbed the rubble to interview dying victims pinned beneath (witness this LA Times report). At times they also shoveled out casualty tolls from the hardest-hit areas on their own, rather than through central disaster authorities. At the headquarters of one aging Communist Party broadsheet, editors who would never even consider bucking the rules gave serious thought to sending reporters in this. “Even we could sense from the beginning that (authorities) wouldn’t be able to enforce (their orders),” says a Party media editor. “It’s not that (authorities) didn’t want to keep the media under control. It’s that they couldn’t.”

Not that all this unofficial coverage came off critically. Instead it mostly fed into the prevailing image of state officials, military men and journalists on top on the situation, or at least doing their darnedest to help the people amidst ungodly horror. Officials reported ballooning body counts quickly and with almost incredible precision, and offered detailed analysis, and the media gobbled it up. The dramatic effect satisfied iconic Revolutionary ideals of the PRC in crisis.

I've got more to say on this in tomorrow's blog.

What's Taboo about "Schools"?

Jonathan Ansfield — Sat, 24 May 2008 23:49:43 GMT

Some Chinese Netizens told me Internet censors are concerned about the growing number of protests by Sichuan parents criticizing the apparently substandard construction of schools in the quake zone. The parents are angry, of course, because so many schoolkids died in structures that may have been shoddily constructed to begin with. There have been mini-riots, and some parents of students who died in the Juyuan school collapses have signed a petition and sought legal advice.

Which helps explains why searching on Baidu or Google (Chinese) for "school dorm", "earthquake" and "collapse" yields that now-familiar message: "your search might be related to items that because of laws and regulations you might not be able to..."

However other permutations in searches about "schools" still yields some information. And of course the foreign media is crawling all over the story of protesting parents.

Chinese journalists have been working really really hard on the quake story in general, by the way. A Southern Metropolis reporter was almost washed away in a landslide, apparently. And the Internet is bulging with photos and blogs about the disaster, including alot of comments about local corruption. But two topics are emerging as "sensitive" ones in the eyes of authorities: 1) grieving parents' protests over possibly substandard schools, and 2) the status of China's nuclear facilities in the quake area.