China's SMS/Texting problem, illustrated

The irrepressable Edward Cody of the Washington Post has done it again, uncovering another trend in Chinese Internet and mass media development. The article is entitled Text Messages Giving Voice to Chinese, and it points to a major hole in Beijing's media control policies: SMS/"Texting":

By the hundreds of thousands, the urgent text messages ricocheted around cellphones in Xiamen, warning of a catastrophe that would spoil the city's beautiful seaside environment and foul its sweet-smelling tropical breezes.

By promoting the construction of a giant chemical factory among the suburban palm trees, the local government was "setting off an atomic bomb in all of Xiamen," the massive message sprays charged, predicting that the plant would cause "leukemia and deformed babies" among the 2 million-plus residents of this city on China's southern rim ...

Later, in a description about a peaceful demonstration against the same planned development, the second wave of network-enabled discussion spread to a wider group:

Citizen journalists carrying cellphones sent text messages about the action to bloggers in Guangzhou and other cities, who then posted real-time reports for the entire country to see.

"The second police defense line has been dispersed," Wen Yunchao, one such witness, typed to a friend in Guangzhou. "There is pushing and shoving. The police wall has broken down."

Chinese tuned in to the blogosphere in great numbers, viewing written accounts and cellphone photographs. Sites carrying the live reports recorded thousands of hits. Some sites were knocked out by security monitors. But by then their reports had bounced to other sites around the country, keeping one step ahead of the censors. Many of those tuned in were traditional newspaper and magazine reporters whose editors were afraid to cover the protests because of warnings from the Xiamen party Propaganda Department.

I've been talking about these trends since 2005 -- on this blog, in the South China Morning Post, and in an essay I published earlier this year online. The top-down, centralized control of the media and the message has broken down in China. People are using the Internet, telecommunications networks, and cheap portable electronics to bypass government censors and discuss the issues they think are important, without regard to the "official line." And this is just the beginning. Here is an excerpt from my essay, Meeting the Second Wave: How Technology, Demographics, and Usage Trends Will Drive the Next Generation of Media Evolution (you can also see the original Harvard version):

How will this wave of user-generated photographs and video impact the news landscape? More importantly, how will this wave of content impact the public's understanding of the world around them? Let's consider a real-world event that was defined by news imagery: The Tiananmen Square demonstrations and its most enduring image, a man standing in front of a column of tanks. The still image and video clip of this scene were both taken by professional photojournalists. Imagine if the consumer and 'Net technology of today were available in 1989. Suppose just five percent of the tens of thousands of people in Tiananmen Square at that time had portable phones, digital cameras, and video cameras, and the content from 10% of those devices had been uploaded and spread via the 'Net? There wouldn't be just one iconic image of the events — a courageous, solitary figure defying the might of the People's Liberation Army. There would be dozens, hundreds, even thousands of images for the world to consider. And the government wouldn't just have to put out fires in Beijing and a few other big cities — there would be anger in practically every city and town in China where there are people with 'Net connections.

Related posts:

• Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications


• Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones


• Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China


• Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and
  press freedom


• Five reasons why Chinese authorities won't be able to regulate the 'Net

Marxism-Leninism dies an uncaring death in China

I've been remiss in my China-related blogging duties. The fact of the matter is I don't have the time to blog everything that catches my eye -- between work, studies, and family duties, and an impending move, I'm lucky if I can devote more than three hours per week to blogging. Lately, I've been devoting that time to my Computerworld and I Lamont blogs.

However, in the past few days, there have been a couple of mainstream media articles about China that piqued my interest. The first item is from the Los Angeles Times, and discusses the near complete failure of the regime in Beijing to teach Marxist-Leninist thought in China. Even though the Chinese Communist Party holds the reins of power, and forces millions to attend classes on Marxism-Leninism, no one cares. And it's not just students -- even some cadre intellectuals have given up:

Daniel A. Bell, a Canadian who is the first Westerner in the modern era to teach politics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China's most elite educational institution, wrote in the spring issue of Dissent magazine of his surprise at how little Marxism is actually discussed in China, even among Communist Party intellectuals.

"The main reason Chinese officials and scholars do not talk about communism is that hardly anybody really believes that Marxism should provide guidelines for thinking about China's political future," he wrote. "The ideology has been so discredited by its misuses that it has lost almost all legitimacy in society. To the extent there's a need for a moral foundation for political rule in China, it almost certainly won't
come from Karl Marx."

I found the Dissent article to read more about what Bell had to say. His thesis did not dwell so much on the rise of capitalism, but rather the increasing role of religion and Chinese social philosophy:

In China, the moral vacuum is being filled by Christian sects, Falun Gong, and extreme forms of nationalism. As Peter Hays Gries has noted, many Chinese intellectuals call on the state to deal with extreme forms of nationalism (rather than viewing the state itself as part of the problem). But the government considers that such alternatives threaten the hard-won peace and stability that underpins China's development, so it has encouraged the revival of China's most venerable political tradition, Confucianism.

See also:

• Beijingology, democracy, and "socialism with Chinese characteristics"


• Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications


• Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones


• Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China


• Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and
  press freedom


• Five
  reasons why Chinese authorities won't be able to regulate the 'Net

Terra Nova recap

I've been meaning to put together a short list of the topics that I discussed on Terra Nova during my stint last month as guest author. I mentioned a few of them here -- most notably, the interview with Rebecca Nesson on her Harvard Law School/Extension School teaching experience in Second Life -- but there were a few other excerpts from posts and comments that I submitted to Terra Nova which I also want to record here, along with links back to the full versions.

In addition, I am including links to a few interesting responses that others made, but unfortunately cannot include every one -- a few threads received several dozen responses apiece!

---

Comment: Virtual worlds, MMOs, Taiwan and China:

Issues that potentially limit virtual/electronic interaction are China's constantly evolving regulations and restrictions on Internet use in the country, and the ability of authorities to close down local websites, block individual sites or domains overseas, and even monitor traffic and messages for certain characters and phrases that the government doesn't like (e.g., names of dissidents, "Taiwan independence", etc.). These controls -- part of the so-called "Great Firewall of China" -- are only partially effective, but potentially limit the ability of local Internet users to see information that goes against the official line. Local media outlets that publish alternate interpretations of Dynastic or Republican history can be shut down, while Taiwanese and foreign sources can be blocked. ...

The other issue which limits exchange between Taiwan and China are the different character sets in use in the two countries. Standard spoken Mandarin in China (putonghua, or "common tongue") is very similar to Mandarin spoken in Taiwan (Guoyu, or "national language") but Chinese use simplified characters (jiantizi) which impacts typing, search, software installation, Web design, and game design.

What this all means for game and VW developers is that they cannot simply sell and support the same product in Taiwan and China. Localization is required, and in China, special sensitivities have to be taken into account.

---

Post: Second Life's infrastructure issues prompt an open letter to Linden Lab

My follow-up comment: "I don't believe Linden has to worry about residents abandoning ship. Where would they go?"

• (Tripp's response)
• (thoreau 's response)

My second follow-up comment: Proprietary virtual worlds/"Is giving up SL for another virtual world an option?"

---

Post: Evaluating virtual population projections:

... Can we expect the number of users/residents for individual virtual worlds to double every few months, or every year? Will hundreds of millions of people also have a virtual presence in just four-and-a-half years, as Gartner suggests? If not, when will a majority of "active Internet users" also be active virtual users?

In my opinion, growth in virtual platforms will continue, but at more restrained levels, owing to demographic usage patterns and technical limitations. For instance, in the United States, converting 78 million baby boomers to active MMO gamers or SL participants will be difficult. Most boomers are well below retirement age, and finding the time to join virtual worlds in between existing family and work responsibilities is difficult. Moreover, the boomers, and for that matter, people of all ages already have ample leisure time distractions, including television and traditional Internet use. And even if millions of boomers suddenly wanted to plunge into virtual worlds, perhaps attracted by some killer virtual app or community, would they be able to do so? ...

My follow-up comment: Gartner virtual world projections:

"I am very interested in seeing what types of SL competitors emerge, and how the features and functionality will differ. Ease-of-use will be critical to building support for new VWs, not just in terms of the client UI, but also for the 3D building tools. The company that develops a tool that makes avatar or 3D object creation as easy as Blogger makes creating a website will usher in a massive wave of adoption and interest. I am also interested in seeing how standards affect competition."

• (response from Mike Sellers)
• (my response to Mike and others)
• (Mike's second response)

---

Post: 3D media in 3D worlds:

... I mention these examples to illustrate the shift in popular views of 3D animation. This technology was once remarkable. It is now so common that it is taken for granted. Hollywood movies, kids' programming on television, and even advertisements are the most conspicuous examples, but these may soon be joined by a crop of next-generation 3D media formats that are being developed by academic labs, hobbyists, and a few adventurous media companies.  Examples include Video Mods, NewsAtSeven, and Machinima. I recently wrote an essay about these and other emerging media technologies, "Meeting the Second Wave: How Technology, Demographics, and Usage Trends Will Drive the Next Generation of Media Evolution," but what I am interested in discussing with the Terra Nova community is how these formats, programs, and characters might be integrated with virtual world experiences.

We know that people make friends, form teams, and respond to pitches for products and services within virtual worlds, paralleling experiences in the real world. Is it reasonable to assume that other real-world communications habits -- such as listening to, watching, or interacting with mass media -- will be transferred to virtual spaces in the years to come? If so, what 3D formats will be able to gain traction, and how will the personalization options and creative freedoms available in virtual worlds lead to new formats and usage patterns? In Second Life, there have been some very creative marketing experiments using interactive 3D buildings and objects. But why don't we see Pororo, Buzz Lightyear, the cast of Red vs. Blue, and other 3D "stars" in Second Life or other virtual worlds?

• (response by Ren Reynolds)
• (my response to Ren)

---

Post: Virtual reality and higher education: Another perspective:

... There are other virtual world/virtual reality technologies [besides Second Life] that can support instruction and classroom activities, and this week we will get a perspective from someone who is using these alternate technologies to teach. The interview is with Aaron Walsh, a programmer and instructor who has used modding software and other tools to create VR classrooms for courses at the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College (the inset photo is from one of his experiments, and depicts "students gathering in the virtual Egyptian environment"). His VR classes are part of a larger effort that he is leading to develop a standards-based educational platform called Immersive Education. ...

My follow-up comment:

One interesting aspect of using WoW or Unreal Engine as the basis for classroom sessions, is that both platforms are optimized for fighting/killing/combat. That's not a bad thing -- it certainly serves as a hook for younger students, potentially flattens out the learning curve, and helps with customization-related tasks, thanks to the large developer/support base. Nonetheless, it seems to me that using these tools for instruction is a square peg/round hole type of situation. Of course, instructors can neuter the fighting nature of these platforms, while emphasizing the engines' communication, teamwork, and design capabilities.

Second Life, on the other hand, is a platform optimized for creativity. That can be a disruptive force, but it also appeals to many institutions. It allows customization of environments and objects, and lets students be themselves in a way that might not be possible with many gaming-based worlds.

At some point there may be virtual worlds or VR platforms that are optimized for education. My question for the group: What does "optimized for education" mean to you? What capabilities, characteristics, tools, cost considerations, etc., are most important to teaching students in a virtual world or space?

• (response from illovich on what "optimized for education" means)
• (Aaron Walsh's response to illovich and others)

---

Overall, the Terra Nova blogging experience was a good one. I've blogged about 3D technology, MMOs, and virtual worlds on my I, Lamont blog for three years, and have sometimes talked about virtual worlds on Harvard Extended and my Computerworld blog, but my month on Terra Nova was a great opportunity to discuss and debate these issues with a formidable audience of academics, experts, and enthusiasts.

Many thanks to Aaron Delwiche, Dan Hunter, and Greg Lastowka for extending the invitation -- and I hope to keep on contributing to the newer threads in the future!

College imposters, part III: It's more common than you think

The LA Times yesterday had a report about fake students sneaking into prestigious colleges and universities across the country. The Harvard College imposter was not mentioned, but several other cases, including Azia Kim's deception at Stanford, were described.

Why does this happen? The article has this to say:

Jerald Jellison, a former USC psychology professor who specialized in the study of lies, said some charlatans take on a new identity to hide a criminal past. But impostors like Vanegas typically begin their charade to win approval from someone important, such as their parents.

Related post:

College imposters, part II: Azia Kim exposed at Stanford

Chinese tattoos can be really, really dumb

This is the first and last time you will ever see a blog post on Harvard Extended that mentions Justin Timberlake.

But I have to get it out here, because Hollywood has used him as a platform to promote a most disturbing pop culture fad: Chinese character tattoos.

My wife draws my attention to an article on the front page of the entertainment section of the World Daily News (世界日報) for June 12, 2007. It shows Justin Timberlake posing for a picture with two large Chinese characters decorating his left bicep. The characters are nicely painted (see the picture at right), but there's a bit of a problem. They don't fit in with the streetwise persona that Timberlake is famous for, or the other gang/prison tats on his body. That's because the characters are 溜冰, which translates to "ice skating" in English. The article is incredulous -- why does a well-known star have such a ridiculous tattoo?

There's more. On his right torso, he has a four-character decoration (seen here in the bottom two photos) that reads 風土水火, lit. "wind earth water fire". While Mandarin has hundreds of common four-character idioms (人山人海, 一路平安, etc.) the example that Timberlake uses is not one of them.

But don't blame Timberlake. The tattoo designs are temporary, affixed by makeup artists for his film Alpha Dog. Someone in the crew probably thought the four-character tattoo looked cool, in a New Age kind of way. The "ice skating" tattoo is harder to explain -- someone playing a joke?

However, this example only reflects the tastes and fashions of the larger popular culture. Basketball stars, rappers, and Hollywood celebrities have been sporting Chinese characters for years. I remember one starlet who had the character for "death" (死) proudly displayed on her leg.

Back in the early 90s, Chinese tattoos were not so mainstream. They had an alternative cachet -- this was right around the time tribal tattoos were all the rage. When I lived in Taiwan, I noticed a Canadian friend had an unusual combination on his arm. It read, 外人, which seemed very strange to me -- it means "outside man" in Chinese. Turns out it was Japanese kanji for gaijin, or "foreigner."

This is not to say that Chinese people don't have tattoos. They do. Gangsters in Taiwan sometimes have detailed dragons drawn on their backs and upper arms. My wife says that some veterans from Chiang Kai-shek's army had anti-CCP slogans inked on their arms and torsos "to remind them every day" of their desire to fight. They said things like 反攻大陸 ("counterattack the mainland"). These dropped in popularity as the "retake the motherland" dream died, and age withered the ranks of militant KMT loyalists. I only saw one or two of these tattoos when I was in Taiwan, worn by men in their 70s.

But meaningless Chinese tattoos on Western youths has another parallel with Chinese culture -- meaningless English phrases on shirts, jackets, and food! Slogans include phrases like "Happy family acorn house" and "dream funny playtime No. 8". Food products also feature such phrases -- we have bought "Vermont Curry" down at the Asian supermarket, and my kids like Strawberry Pocky.

But my personal favorite: A baseball hat I spotted in a Jiayi night market about five years ago. It had the Calvin Klein emblem ("CK") but the English below it read "Cavalier Killer Diller." It was only NT$100 (about US$3). I bought two of them to give to friends when I got back home. They looked kind of cool ...

Who says data visualization has to be boring?

This should appeal to anyone who works with quantitative research and is a music fan: It's a blog devoted to entertainment-related data visualizations.

Emo+Beer=Busted Career hard to describe unless you visit the site, but some of the examples include color-coding newspaper reviews of pop music according to whether the sentences within the review were informative, positive, negative, or jokes. Another applies colored bubbles of various sizes that describe the blogger's Lil Wayne tape collection.

The blogger in question is named Andrew Kuo ("earl boykins"), and he even got a write-up in the New York Times, which also supplied a summary of visualizations that apply to one of Kuo's favorite artists, Bright Eyes (Conor Oberst). See some of the charts which the Times gathered, such as "Quality Arc of Each Show," "Number of Times Certain Entertaining Phrases Were Shouted," and "Number of People Onstage at the End of the Encore"

UMass Boston and bias in the Boston Globe, continued

I wanted to post a brief follow-up to an issue that came up last year, when a student group at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, claimed bias in the Boston Globe. The story was picked up by Universal Hub, and drew a lot of community comments. The group used stats from LexisNexis to support their case, claiming that "the Boston Globe has an established pattern of seriously underreporting events at UMass Boston--a large public college--when compared to its generous coverage of large private colleges in the Boston area."

As regular readers of this blog know, I have used LexisNexis in my thesis research and class papers. I collected additional information from LexisNexis that better described the patterns of Boston Globe coverage relating to UMass Boston and several other colleges in the area, including Harvard. The data supported the UMass group's claim of bias/favoritism toward different colleges and universities in the area. You can see the results here.

At the time, I anticipated that the public shaming of the Globe would encourage it to pay more attention to the news, events, and research coming out of UMass Boston. So far, that hasn't happened. This afternoon, I did some more Lexis Nexis searches, comparing references to UMass Boston and MIT, and found that coverage of UMass Boston has actually declined in the Globe, when compared with earlier years. (Harvard, BC, BU, and Northeastern were left out of this survey, owing to the tendency of sports-related happenings to inflate the results).

Here's what I found, when I compared the January 1st to June 11th UMass and MIT coverage for each year, starting in 2004:

MIT or "Massachusetts Institute of technology" in the headline

2004: 43
2005: 32
2006: 26
2007: 32

UMass in headline, and "University of Massachusetts at Boston" or "UMass Boston" in the full text, but not Dartmouth or Lowell or Amherst in full text (this allows for the short version of UMass in headline, which copy editors and editors prefer, but the article is about UMass Boston, as opposed to UMass Amherst, UMass Lowell, and UMass Dartmouth)

2004: 5
2005: 19
2006: 7
2007: 2

So, while coverage of MIT has actually increased when compared with the same period last year, and is comparable to the 2005 levels, articles about UMass Boston are not only rare, they are considerably less common than last year's levels.

Of course, it can be argued that this is not a true measure of UMass Boston-related coverage, as I am excluding all of the articles that may also cite the other University of Masschusetts campuses. Furthermore, there may have been some UMass-related news that did not mention the school's name in the headline.

Others may point out that this is not a fair comparison -- MIT is one of the largest research universities in the United States, and is involved with several high-profile national initiatives that generate lots of news, such as the Broad Institute.

But even if you exclude consideration of MIT, and just concentrate on the results for UMass Boston, the trend is clear: The city's largest newspaper has reduced coverage of a major public university on its own doorstep.

Incidentally, I was prompted to look into this issue by an interesting discussion taking place on the Extension Student discussion forum. I started the thread after seeing two of Harvard's own publications -- the Harvard Gazette (a publication of the Harvard News Office, I believe) and the Harvard Crimson (A Harvard College-oriented newspaper) placing the Harvard Extension School last in Commencement-related articles.

Update:


Uncomfortable with the possibility that certain types of articles about UMass Boston were being excluded because of no mention of the school in the headline, I expanded the search criteria to include references to "University of Massachusetts at Boston" or "UMass Boston" in the headline *or* lead paragraph. The results for the year-on-year searches from January 1 to June 11 since 2004:

2004: 30
2005: 52
2006: 22
2007: 24

The results for MIT or "Massachusetts Institute of technology" in the headline or lead paragraph:

2004: 179
2005: 166
2006: 187
2007: 158

The problem with including the lead paragraph results is that many articles are not specifically about the university in question. For instance, one of the 2007 articles that mentioned UMass Boston in the lead paragraph was an editorial that only mentioned the school because of the UMass Boston Commencement speech by Gov. Patrick. The real focus of the editorial was community colleges across Massachusetts.

Building Immersive Education

During my stint as guest author on Terra Nova I interviewed Aaron Walsh about his virtual reality teaching experiences. I actually participated in some of the early virtual teaching demos that Aaron organized at Boston College three or four years ago, and it was very interesting to hear from him (and his students, who responded in the Terra Nova comments) about how he has applied these technologies to actual coursework. He was very frank about some of the advantages and drawbacks of teaching in a virtual world, and he also discussed the Immersive Education initiative.

Since then, I have received several announcements about Immersive Education that I'd like to share here. The first is that Aaron and the other folks working on Immersive Education have issued an open call to educators, students, and professionals who have used VR or videogame technologies (such as Second Life, Croquet, X3D, Panda3D, Quake, Unreal, Torque Game Engine, etc.) to help contribute best practices and take part in the process for establishing standards for VR learning. The second is that the New Media Consortium, an educational organization whose members include hundreds of colleges and universities interested in exploring new learning technologies, has signed on to the Immersive Education development plan.

Immersive Education is a worthy endeavor, and I hope to contribute to the dialogue -- I am fully convinced that virtual reality/virtual worlds are the future of distance education, more so than the streaming video/static HTML/text forum model that many schools now use. I hope to be in a better position to contribute to the discussion this fall, if I can take Virtual Worlds -- the Second Life-based class offered through the Harvard Extension School.

Congratulations to 2007 Extension School grads!

Today's the big day for several hundred HES grads, and I'd like to say congratulations to all of you. Of the ALM degree recipients, the class of 2007 is the first year that I feel a large degree of group affinity with -- I know a fair number of grads and I came pretty close to graduating this year myself!

The Commencement schedule and links to video, news, etc. is available on the Harvard Commencement website.

Also, I am going to sneak in another unrelated post here -- did anyone notice the timing of the Calendar Reform announcement yesterday? I received the broadcast email from Derek Bok at 4:53 pm on Wednesday afternoon -- seven minutes before his interim term as Harvard president came to an end!

Beijingology, democracy, and "socialism with Chinese characteristics"

As part of my thesis presentation on Wednesday evening, I mentioned "Beijingology," a qualitative methodology used by China-watchers to identify and analyze shifts in official policy. It involves examining documents issued by the central government -- including state-run media reports -- to look for hints of change. Such hints may be the use of a certain word or the reappearance/disappearance of a certain official who is known for promoting a specific policy. Roger Garside, a British writer who lived in Beijing in the late 1970s, did not use the term Beijingology (or Pekingology) but he did note that local Beijing residents and foreign residents used such techniques to fathom CCP power struggles and government policy shifts:

"Small changes in emphasis, the reformulation of a set phrase, the appearance of a new slogan or the quiet dropping of an old one occurred only by design and reflected a political development whose meaning one must search for." -- [Roger Garside, Coming Alive: China after Mao (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), 3.]

Edward Cody, the Washington Post's China-based correspondent, has employed Beijingology to describe a supposed internal political debate.

A little background is in order, for those Harvard Extended readers who may not be familiar with the political situation in China. In a nutshell, Communism is dead, and market forces rule China, yet its leaders -- the Chinese Communist Party and its members -- still cling to the notion of "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

Or do they? Cody cites two commentaries published in official media (The People's Daily) as signs that the facade is cracking, but loyalists can still be found to promote the status quo:

"The path of democratic socialism is not able to save China," said Xin Xiangyang of the government-sponsored Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "Only the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics can make China flourish."

The commentaries, by contesting the idea that democracy would be good for China, suggested some within the party are pushing for political reforms to match the dramatic economic loosening that has taken place during the past 25 years.

Any sign of doctrinal differences has become particularly sensitive as leaders maneuver for advantage before the 17th Party Congress next fall, when President Hu Jintao hopes to cement his hold on power and anoint possible successors in the party hierarchy. In particular, analysts here said, he is expected to name his own loyalists to positions of power to replace the holdover proteges of former president Jiang Zemin.

In what was seen as a manifestation of the maneuvering, Shao Hua, the widow of Mao Zedong's late son Mao Anqing, published a front-page article in the May 18 People's Daily heaping praise on Jiang for what she described as warm-hearted concern for the legendary Chinese leader's descendants. Political observers in Beijing saw the article as noteworthy because, amid the effusive praise for Jiang, it never mentioned Hu.

Whether on doctrine or personnel, most differences of opinion within the party have remained private, forcing analysts to look for meaning in such indirect indications of what is happening behind closed doors. But a pair of essays in party-sanctioned intellectual publications early this year -- one by Xie Tao, a former Renmin University vice president, and another by Zhou Ruijun, a former People's Daily editor -- openly called for democratic reforms as the best way forward for China. Xie specifically referred to Northern Europe's democratic socialist systems as a source of inspiration.

I tried to find the English versions of the commentary on the People's Daily website, but was unsuccessful. However, I was able to find out more about one of the academics who wrote the commentaries in question, Xin Xiangyan. According to this article, Xin is a research fellow at CASS specializing in Marxism, and promotes a "socialist core value system," which "consist[s] of Marxism, Socialism with Chinese characteristics, patriotism, the spirit of reform and innovation and the socialist sense of honor and disgrace."


Related Posts:

Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications

Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones

Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China

Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and press freedom

Five reasons why Chinese authorities won't be able to regulate the 'Net