The Chinese media responds to Tibet with tough talk

A few weeks ago I made a few predictions about the challenges the Chinese government would face over the Tibetan unrest in the runup to the Olympics:

... most Chinese do not sympathize with the Tibetan independence movement. According to the New York Times, Chinese-language news outlets are not reporting the riots in Lhasa. But when the news starts to leak out into unregulated, free-wheeling discussion forums and blogs in China, watch out. I believe many Chinese will demand that authorities crack down even harder in Tibet ...

The Chinese blog chatter started almost immediately. You can see a translated sample here, keeping in mind that this is the relatively tame stuff. And according to today's New York Times, now the Chinese media has weighed in, and not surprisingly, the government is playing up the nationalism angle and trying to look tough to its Chinese readers:

For two weeks, as Chinese security forces have tried to extinguish continuing Tibetan protests, Chinese officials and state news media have tried to demonstrate the party’s resolve to people like Ms. Meng. They have blasted the foreign news media as biased against China, castigated the Dalai Lama as a terrorist “jackal” and called for a “people’s war” to fight separatism in Tibet.

If the tough tactics have startled the outside world, the Communist Party for now seems more concerned with rallying domestic opinion — both by responding to the deep strains of nationalism in Chinese society and by stoking it. Playing to national pride, and national insecurities, the party has used censorship and propaganda to position itself as defender of the motherland, and at the same time to block any examination of Tibetan grievances or its own performance in the crisis.

What I also found interesting in the NYT report was the reference to overseas Chinese getting involved, by joining the anti-Tibet, anti-foreign media online crusade.

Former Berkman fellow and CNN journalist Rebecca MacKinnon has lots of commentary and links on her blog. See Tibet... is discussion possible? and Anti-CNN and the Tibet information war.

The wildcard for Tibetan dissent: The Internet

Tibet's capital, Lhasa, is under a curfew after Tibetans fought Chinese security forces today. The New York Times has the report. I've been reading about monks making protest marches throughout Tibet, but this is the first report of violence that I've seen.

The timing is notable. China is trying very hard to pull off a controversy-free Olympics, and preemptively cracking down on a range of potential problems -- such as foreign performers showing support for Tibetans -- seems to have been one of the PSB strategies. This, and the fact that Tibetans know China will be closely watched in the runup to the Olympics by the outside world, are two key factors contributing to the unrest, in my opinion.

The wildcard is the impact of the Internet on events in China. Internet-driven dissent is a problem for Chinese authorities in urban regions, but most Tibetans don't have Internet access, and most Chinese do not sympathize with the Tibetan independence movement. According to the New York Times, Chinese-language news outlets are not reporting the riots in Lhasa. But when the news starts to leak out into unregulated, free-wheeling discussion forums and blogs in China, watch out. I believe many Chinese will demand that authorities crack down even harder in Tibet, which will put the PSB and the government in a tight spot. China wants to put on a friendly face for the Olympics in Beijing, and a bloodbath in Tibet -- spread by pictures and video uploaded to the Internet -- would result in international condemnation and protests at the Olympics.

Fifteen years ago, China could easily hide news of protests and riots. In the age of widespread Internet connectivity and cheap digital cameras, it's just not possible.

(The picture below is from the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, India, and shows armed troops massing at Drepung, Tibet, last year after the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal. Drepung is the location of one of the monasteries where monks have been protesting.)

The pitfalls of automated Chinese-English translation

I've talked about issues related to simplified and traditional Chinese before, but the Ritter's Life blog brings up an issue I hadn't considered: Bad words cropping up in the English translations of otherwise mundane simplified Chinese phrases:

In "Gan: whodunnit, and how, and why?" (5/31/2006), I explained one of the sources of this phenomenon: several Chinese characters pronounced GAN1 or GAN4 -- and meaning such widely disparate things as "dry," "calendrical sign," "to do," and much else beside -- all got collapsed into one simplified character: 干. This has led to enormous confusion, especially when people who know next to no English rely on machine translation software to convert Chinese into English. The chaos caused by this combination of circumstances is vastly exacerbated by the fact that this little, three-stroke symbol also has a vulgar meaning when pronounced in the fourth tone ...

The "vulgar word" begins with an F and ends with a K, and has led to some bizarre signage in restaurants and department stores all over China, says Ritter. The Chinese in one example shown on his blog is a listing for fried cabbage with dried shrimps, but the English translation is quite twisted. There are many other examples (with photos) on the blog, and Ritter and his readers have actually identified the Chinese software programs that are likely responsible for the messed-up translations.

You may laugh when you see the signs, but this simple three-stroke character (see inset photo) has probably sunk more than a few international business deals when used incorrectly in translated correspondence or email.

(Thanks to ESWN for the reference)

Chinese media, international news, and foreign policy

Today's New York Times has a great article on Chinese media coverage of international news issues and events. The article notes that while domestic Chinese journalism is in the midst of a "golden age," foreign news is generally sourced from a handful of state-run news organizations that have foreign correspondents, including Xinhua/NCNA (新華社). As a result, says the article, Chinese audiences get a heavy dose of propaganda when they read about international events:

News media critics say one result of this lack of vigorous independent reporting is that what most Chinese news readers know of the world closely conforms with government policy and propaganda.

“By and large, China’s international reporting is a mirror of China’s diplomacy,” said Yu Guoming, a journalism professor at People’s University in Beijing. “As government mouthpieces, their international reports are linked with the government’s diplomacy. It’s not free, so what we’re really talking about is China’s diplomacy, not its media.”

This is a major problem for China and Chinese audiences, but it can't last, considering the problems Chinese authorities have controlling the Internet and networked communications.

On the other hand, as long-time readers of Harvard Extended know, this media/diplomacy connection in China's state-run press that allows observers to better understand the policies and actions of the Chinese government. Political and military experts have long used Xinhua and other official news sources to fathom internal power struggles (see my description of Beijingology), and I used a computer content analysis of Xinhua content from 1977 to 1993 to gauge Chinese policies toward Vietnam during the Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) era.

In any case, the NYT article is a good introduction to the topic of international news censorship in China. To learn more about domestic news in China and the challenges Chinese reporters face, I recommend reading some of the reports filed by Edward Cody of the Washington Post over the past few years.

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

1907 and 2007: The late Qing press vs. the current Chinese Internet

I'm currently doing some research for an essay in my final class (Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext) and stumbled upon a passage worth sharing here. The essay is about the rise of the Chinese press in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the influence of Western newspaper models. The passage is from page four of Joan Judge's Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), and discusses the connections between the Chinese press and revolutionary politics toward the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911):

While print journalism served a political function in many nations, this role was particularly consequential in late Qing China, which had neither a system of political parties nor a representative national assembly. Independent of the dynasty and accessible to the reading public, the political press provided one of the few forums where reformists could advance their political agenda. Opening a field of mediation between the different spheres of late Qing China made it possible for reform publicists to challenge imperial authority and express popular grievances, encourage debate over government policies, and educate their compatriots about the urgent need to reform the structure of dynastic power.

Does anyone else see the parallels between what was happening at the end of the Qing dynasty, and what's happening now with the Internet in the People's Republic of China? We're not seeing much online debate in China about the CCP or the current political structure, but late Qing newspapers in the 1870s didn't have this kind of debate, either .... Judge is referring to newspaper activity several decades later, in the first decade of the 20th century -- right before the fall of the Qing.

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

"Economic Nationalism" and patient safety in China

What used to be called "protectionism" is now known as "economic nationalism," at least when China is involved, according to a source quoted in today's New York Times:

“There is clearly a growing economic nationalism in China that is leading to discrimination against foreign investors in pillar sectors of the economy,” said Myron Brilliant, vice president for Asia at the United States Chamber of Commerce. “It’s not only a threat to foreign investors but it also undermines China’s transition to a market-based economy.”

The issue at hand are Chinese regulations that dictate safety inspections for imported medical devices, but not devices that are made in China. What's interesting to me is that the debate is being framed in terms of fairness in international trade, as opposed to a patient safety issue.

Sinocidal lampoons parachute journalists in China

I got a chuckle from this: Sinocidal's satirical advice for foreign journalists attempting to write an article about China:

You've just arrived in your 5-Star room at the Shanghai Hilton and unpacked your fancy new Apple laptop. As you pull the top off the mini bottle of Hennessey XO, you finally turn to your instructions from the editor back home. 2000 words by Monday about the important issues facing China today. Easy.

But two days have passed and you are still staring at a blank screen. You're experiencing a stretch of writer's block as long as the Great Wall of China and the deadline is hanging over your head like the proverbial Sword of Damocles. It seems that more research than flicking through a copy of Wild Swans in the airport is needed after all.

The list of tips that follows is a hoot, ranging from getting sources ("ask a taxi driver!") to choosing headlines (using Sinocidal's 'China-headline-o'matic').

And there's more than a hint of truth to the account. It's known as "parachute journalism," and it occurs every time a local crisis or event makes waves in an out-of-the-way place, and reporters with insufficient knowledge of the local situation are flown in and attempt to interpret the news for the folks back home. You've seen articles or TV segments like this before that pertain to Chinese culture. You will see dozens more next year when thousands of foreign journalists who've never been to China and can't speak Chinese descend upon Beijing for the 2008 Olympics and attempt to "explain" China to the rest of the world.

(Thanks to Myrick at AsiaPundit for the link.)

Pulling the plug on the Chinese Internet

Yesterday on Computerworld, I blogged about China's latest preemptive Internet damage-control mechanism: Pulling the plug on entire data centers. Here's what I had to say about the episode, and its causes:

Despite regularly updating and strengthening the rules that govern the press and Internet communications, free-wheeling discussion on a wide range of topics continues to flourish.

Until now. Authorities in China have done something which I previously considered very unlikely: They are actually pulling the plug on the Internet. Or at least parts of it -- the troublesome parts. Data centers are literally being taken offline, because "inappropriate content" has been found on some servers hosted in them. Of course, such actions affect other Websites whose servers are hosted in these facilities, and irritate Chinese users.

Inappropriate content is nothing new to the Chinese Internet. This begs the question: Why are Chinese authorities taking such drastic steps to remove this content from the Internet? The reason is the upcoming Communist Party Congress in Beijing, which, according to China's official news agency, is slated to "mobilize the entire Party and the people of all ethnic groups to emancipate their minds, stick to the reform and opening up, advance scientific development, promote social harmony and strive together for a new victory over the building of a well-off society in an all-round way and the new development of building socialism with Chinese characteristics." Some highlights of the event include electing a new "Central Commission for Discipline Inspection," listening to endless speeches, joining banquets, and doing whatever else senior Party members like to do when they get together. While undoubtedly extremely boring, it's not that much different than what usually happens at these gatherings, which take place every five years.

Except for one thing: The Internet in China is not just an irritant anymore. It's a force to be reckoned with. There are more than 100 million additional Chinese Internet users in 2007 than there were during the last Party congress in 2002, and this population is far more comfortable using blogs, forums, and other tools (ranging from poems delivered by mobile phones to online games) to protest various domestic and international issues.

Beijing is not taking any chances. The government has the authority and the will to pull the plug on the Internet, even if it means angering their own people and upsetting 'Net businesses across China.

This type of heavy-handed approach can't be used whenever China gets nervous about discussion and criticism of the Party and state -- it will only frustrate more people, and make the government look even worse. Nevertheless, we may see similar actions next year. That's because the Chinese propaganda apparatus has another major event to worry about -- the 2008 Beijing Olympics -- and they don't want negative public buzz marring the competition. China is trying to clean up the city in time for the arrival of hordes of foreigners and the international media, but they will have a much tougher time cleaning up the Internet.

A Crisis for China's propaganda apparatus?

I swear, I could maintain a separate blog devoted to Edward Cody and his coverage of developments in China. The Washington Post journalist frequently reports on media-related issues in China, giving me lots of fodder for further analysis and commentary. His latest dispatch is no exception. He examines how, in an age of rapid change and increased openness in Chinese media, old-guard propagandists are faring. It turns out not so well, at least in some regards. Cody's article states that propaganda chief Li Changchun (李長春) was recently slapped down by President Hu Jintao after suggesting that an anti-CCP article be suppressed. The article also suggests that the credibility of the government propaganda apparatus is very low.

Nonetheless, the central government maintains a great deal of control over the type and tone of coverage appearing in mainstream news outlets, particularly in the runup to the 2008 Olympics and the 17th Party Congress this fall:

After a meeting of top Beijing propaganda officials, for instance, the capital's newspaper editors and television news directors last week were handed a list of newly off-limits subjects, Beijing journalists reported. The list included food safety as well as riots, fires, deadly auto accidents and bloody murder cases, they said.

The rest of the article is an interesting read. It discusses the rise of sensationalism in Chinese mass media and the spread of anti-Hu Jintao dissent on the Internet.

Mandarin Chinese gaming vocabulary in Taiwan and China

I am a proficient Mandarin speaker. I lived in Taiwan for six years, studied for more than two years at the Taipei Language Institute, and traveled extensively throughout mainland China. I have family members from Taiwan and China, and we try to speak Mandarin with our kids as much as possible (a difficult proposition, considering both are more and more inclined to speak English -- I'll try to blog about this sometime in the next few months).

Anyway, even though I am proficient in Mandarin, I have not achieved fluency. I often have to learn specialized vocabulary lists prior to conducting interviews or preparing for visits to Asia. In advance of my trip to Singapore to participate in the State of Play V conference, I wanted to get a handle on the Mandarin terminology used to describe virtual worlds and popular gaming platforms. These are words that do not appear in my Oxford putonghua dictionary, so I asked a friend and former colleague of mine to help translate some of the Mandarin used to describe the videogame industry and related software concepts.

It was interesting to see her list. I recognized many of the characters right away, and many terms made perfect sense -- these phrases are often direct translations of the modern English expressions, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG, 大型多人線上角色扮演遊戲, da4xing2duo1ren2xian4shang4jiao3se4ban4yan3you2xi4).

Others were readable, but were clearly not character-for-word equivalents. According to my wife, some of these terms may have been derived from classic Chinese literature, or older translations from foreign sources -- for instance, the term for "dungeon" is 地下城 (di4xia4cheng2), lit. "underground castle," or 魔洞 (mo2dong4), lit. "monster's cave." It's also interesting to see how -- in certain cases -- the terminology has split in Taiwan and China.

The list:

3d (3d image): (3D 影像）or 三度空間影像
video game engine: 電玩遊戲引擎
Software platform: 軟體平台 (Taiwan); 軟體平台 (China)
Hardware platform: 硬體平台 (Taiwan); 軟件平台 (China)
Tolkien: 托爾金 (Taiwan and China)
Lord of the Rings: 魔戒
Gaming experience: 遊戲體驗 or 遊戲經驗 (in different contexts)
Players: 玩遊戲者 （could also be 玩家）
Gamers: 玩家
Fans:（電玩）迷
Massively multiplayer online game (MMOG, MMO game): 大型多人線上遊戲
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG): 大型多人線上角色扮演遊戲
Subscription model: 訂購模式
Micro-transactions: 微交易
Virtual goods: 虛擬物品
Dungeons: 地下城 or 魔洞
player-vs-player: 玩家對玩家
Online account: 線上帳戶
Username: 使用者名稱
Online community: 線上社群
Beta: 測試版
Concurrent users: 同時上線使用者
Game industry: 電玩業
Internet cafe: 網咖 (Taiwan), 網吧 (China)
Prepaid cards: 預付卡 (Taiwan), 預付費卡 (China)
Prepaid playing time: 預付遊戲時間

Attending State of Play V in Singapore/HiPiHi

About two months ago, I was invited to participate in a panel at the State of Play V conference in Singapore, and I have just confirmed my participation after sorting out the travel-related details. This is the third public speaking engagement I've had in the past year that touches upon virtual worlds and 3D media. The title of the State of Play panel: Understanding Virtual World Inhabitants. From the program:

As the virtual world landscape matures, industry and academic researchers are developing systematic methods of measuring user behaviors and understanding resident attitudes. This panel explores the value of quantitative and qualitative approaches to such investigations.

This is a chance to discuss the role of the media in shaping public opinion about virtual worlds and their inhabitants, as well as the expectations of new residents. There is also a lot to say about quantitative research and data relating to virtual worlds and behaviors in virtual worlds. These are topics which I have discussed several times in the past year on this blog and elsewhere.

The rest of the program looks interesting, too -- the list of panelists and speakers includes a few people from the Chinese gaming industry, which has grown very rapidly in the past five years. I've heard that there will be a screening of a documentary about Chinese "Gold Farming" at the conference.

As part of my preparations for the conference, I've been reading up on the state of gaming and virtual worlds in China. There's been lots of news about the incredible popularity of World of Warcraft in China, and the virtual demonstration that I remarked upon last year, but there are some new products that are worth mentioning, too, most notably the emerging VW platform, HiPiHi.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to try out the beta version of HiPiHi -- like many software products designed for the Chinese market, it's PC only, and my Mac is too old to effectively use Boot Camp or Parallels.

Over the next few weeks I'll try to log some of the reading and other information that I am gathering as the conference approaches. The event takes place August 19-22, so I am going to combine it with a family trip to Taiwan, which will also give me a chance to do a little pre-conference research about the Taiwanese gaming scene. This is not a work-supported trip, but I was able to secure a small travel grant through my Harvard association, and the other out-of-pocket expenses are worth it -- this is an exciting field, and the conference seems like a fascinating opportunity.

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

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 ...

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

Investigative journalists for hire in China

Edward Cody of the Washington Post has once again dug up a fascinating story about the new rules of journalism in China: Professional journalists who hire themselves out to interested parties to uncover and report -- via the Web -- on scandals or perceived injustices. From the article:

Xu [Xiang] and Li Xinde, another Web reporter for hire, said they take fees from those who can afford to pay but also investigate for free if victims cannot raise any money. Often they ask only for their expenses, such as plane fare and hotel costs, they said.

"It's not strange for the self-supported Web-site reporters to ask someone to cover transportation expenses," Li said, "and usually the reporters clearly state that on their Web sites or in e-mails."

Party censorship also extends to the Internet, which is policed by an elaborate computer system and an army of snoops who monitor what Chinese people read and say online. But that censorship comes after the fact; it can only monitor what has been posted. Web condottieri such as Xu and Li may get bounced off the Internet, but only after their articles reach the public and get passed around. If one site is blocked, they quickly start up another.

Xu, who has been sued for defamation by one group of officials, said he takes care in his articles to attack only the misdeeds of corrupt local officials and not the government in general. He has studied law, he said, to avoid getting into trouble with the police in the cat-and-mouse game he is forced to play.

What's also interesting about this trend is that it extends to rural areas, where a new class of Internet-savvy users are bypassing local media and local officials to air their grievances, potentially to a national audience. One example cited by Cody involves a property-related dispute in a small village in Sichuan. A young man from the village used the 'Net to research and contact about 30 journalists-for-hire. It's hard to imagine something like this happening five years ago, but the fact of the matter is a huge number of people across China -- including people living in rural areas -- are getting online and using the 'Net to communicate and gather information. This has huge implications for the government, which until recently had much stronger controls over information transfer.

What keeps Hong Kong successful?

The American has an interesting analysis of Hong Kong, and what has kept it successful in the nearly ten years since the UK/PRC handover. The author, John Fund, identifies two main factors -- namely, bureaucracy-free capitalism, and rule of law. He also delves into the mid-1990s predictions of some Western naysayers, who predicted that China couldn't resist meddling once they took over in the summer of 1997.

Of course, such predictions were totally at odds with the history of the People's Republic of China's treatment of Hong Kong since 1949. Senior Communist/pseudo-Communist leaders in Beijing clearly recognized the importance of the British colony as a gateway to the rest of the world, a capitalist outpost that could benefit China, and a bargaining chip/point of leverage with the West. If they wanted to meddle, they would have done so in 1949-1950, when they were clearning out the last knots of Nationalist troops from China's southern coast and Hainan, or in the 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution and Vietnam War were raging. They didn't meddle then, and they sensibly didn't meddle in Hong Kong post-1997, with the exception of rejecting many of the democratic reforms that were implemented under British Governor of Hong Kong Christopher Patten in the mid-1990s (something that Fund did not address, incidentally).

Shades of the 1990's Taiex in the Chinese stock correction of 2007

At the Computerworld newsroom this afternoon, we all followed the news coming out of Wall Street. The tumble in the Chinese markets led to a 400+ drop in the Dow. Our focus was on U.S. technology stocks and the impact of computer trading, but I was thinking back to major drops in the Taiwan stock exchange in the 1990s, when I lived and worked in Taipei.

Then, a lot of ordinary people had big investments in the Taiex, and there wasn't much sophistication about what they were buying or selling. Few retail investors paid attention to fundamentals, or invested in less risky investments like mutual funds. To millions of people, investing in securities was all about taking a gamble on stocks that TV gurus and friends recommended. People listened to these strategies, rumors, and supposed breakouts, and pumped more money in the runup. More often than not, they got seriously burned when the inevitable corrections took place. I know two people who played the market like it was a casino and lost lots of New Taiwan Dollars, especially after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and a string of fradulent transactions carried out by executives at Taiwanese banks and investment companies led to panic in Taiwan's financial sector.

So earlier this year, when I heard about some of the risky investing behavior taking place among mainland Chinese investors, it reminded me of some of the irresponsible investing activities taking place in Taiwan ten years earlier. Chinese people love to gamble. It's a part of Chinese society. When this tendency carries over to investments, local real estate and stock markets can rise to spectacular heights -- and fall hard when the herd heads for the exits. We've seen it happen in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1990s and early part of this decade, and now we see it happening in China.

And, if Taiwan and Hong Kong are any guide, what we saw today in Shenzen and Shanghai is the start of a long-term cycle of heady rises and sharp corrections in mainland Chinese stock markets. The government in Beijing is making noises about reining in risky investment behavior, but I'm not convinced such measures will solve the problem. While limited controls -- such as those instituted by Taiwan in the 1990s, to halt trading in a stock if it moved 7% in either direction during the day -- may help limit the pain of panicked selloffs, they can't stop gamblers from entering the stock market casino.

Related Harvard Extended posts:

• The myth of the China market becoming reality?


• Blood money in Darfur: Harvard divests, Fidelity invests (involves two Chinese companies, Sinopec and PetroChina)


• Fidelity funds that invest in the Sudan genocide


• My new media manifesto

Chinese blogs: An organized translation effort

One of my favorite sources for current media developments in China is Roland Soong, who runs the EastSouthWestNorth blog (東南西北) from Hong Kong. He has been directly responsible for alerting me to interesting or unusual incidents, such as the Freezing Point fiasco, and what I believe to be the first-ever spontaneous mass political demonstration in a virtual world. The reasons Roland has been such a good source: his "news junky" personality, his sensitivity to differences between Western and Chinese media practices, and his bilingual abilities.

Now Roland and a few other bloggers are participating in a much more organized effort to translate interesting or important conversations taking place in the Chinese-language Internet. Former Berkman fellow Rebecca MacKinnon explains:

Roland has become one of the most famous Chinese-English "bridge bloggers," bringing articles, blog posts, conversations, and debates from the Chinese-language Internet to the attention of the English-speaking world.  But there are many other people doing this on their own blogs. They include John, LfC, the good folks at Danwei, Interlocals, the China Media Project, the team at China Digital Times and many many more bilingual bloggers scattered around Greater China and across the globe.

The problem, as John points out, is that so far there has been little co-ordination about who is working on what, and people are often worried about duplication (i.e., whether Roland will beat them to the punch after they spend hours working on something).

The solution: Something Roland calls "Open Source Translation Blogging." Participants have set up a wiki, where you can sign up (if you can read Chinese and are willing to help identify and translate Chinese Web discussions) or find out about the translations projects that are being worked on. It's too early to tell if the translation project will be a success, but there really is a need for such an effort, and this one is really leveraging the power of the Internet -- and blogs -- in a constructive way.

Fidelity funds that invest in the Sudan genocide

A few weeks ago, I described how Fidelity Investments, the Boston mutual funds giant and one of the preferred investment companies for Harvard employees, has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in two companies that are helping support the genocide in Sudan: Sinopec (中國石油化工總公司) and Petrochina (中國石油天然氣股份有限公司).

I also described my fruitless attempts to ascertain which Fidelity funds that I personally own (thanks in large part to my rollover IRA through Fidelity, which is based on my former employment at Harvard) have holdings in either of the Chinese companies. The day after writing that blog entry, I logged onto Fidelity.com and wrote a simple message:

Could you please help me identify which one of the Fidelity funds that I own currently have any investments in Sinopec and PetroChina? I tried searching for this information on your website and in the prospectii, but it is very difficult to find or confirm. All I need to know are those funds which are currently invested in these two companies. Thank you, Ian Lamont

I sent the message on February 6. Despite an email confirmation from Fidelity which promised a reply within 48 hours, I never got an answer. I sent a follow-up request on February 16, but still no reply. Finally, today I used the "instant message a rep" feature on Fidelity.com to see what was going on.

The polite answer: My earlier questions had been "escalated" to higher-up executives. One of the reps said quite a few Fidelity customers have asked about these two companies. Judging by the lack of a response, Fidelity still doesn't know how to respond.

There's more: Fidelity customer service reps can't (or won't) tell investors which Fidelity funds are currently invested in Sinopec and PetroChina. It seems like a simple request, but there is no app in their arsenal which will quickly bring up a list of the companies that a particular Fidelity fund owns (No wonder some people get upset with Fidelity!). The best the reps could do was direct me to the most recent annual reports on Fidelity.com, which in a few cases were more than four months old. But at least I could build a list of *some* of the funds that *had* Sinopec/Petrochina holdings, as of Dec. 31 or Oct. 31, 2006:

Fidelity Diversified International Fund
Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co. Ltd. sponsored ADR
42,000 shares
$1,794,660

Fidelity China Region
PetroChina
14,100,000 shares
$15,564,990

Fidelity Pacific Basin
PetroChina
8,712,000 shares
$9,617,177

Fidelity Southeast Asia
PetroChina Co. Ltd. (H Shares)
25,800,000 shares
$28,480,620

Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co. Ltd. (H Shares)
6,200,000 shares
$2,630,767

Upon review of my own limited holdings, I sold my entire stake in Fidelity's Diversified International Fund. This fund, managed by Portfolio Manager William Bower, is the only fund from the above list that I owned. The amount I had invested in the mutual fund was small, and the fund's holdings in Sinopec are (or were) relatively small, but the idea that my retirement savings are contributing to one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the decade is utterly repulsive. I urge anyone who owns shares in Fidelity Diversified International Fund, or the other funds named above, to dump their shares and contact Fidelity to let them know how you feel.

Additionally, I encourage anyone who is a member of the Harvard community to contact the University administration and petition it to force Fidelity -- with whom it has granted a profitable contract to be one of the sole suppliers of 403(b) services to Harvard employees -- to drop these funds from the roster of investment options for employees.

If Fidelity and Harvard are unwilling to take a stand, the next step is obvious: Harvard should end its relationship with Fidelity. And, for that matter, any company which profits from genocide.

Blood money in Darfur: Harvard divests, Fidelity invests

The 10 pm local news had an alarming story about Fidelity Investments, the Boston mutual fund giant, and some of its overseas activities. According to the report, Fidelity still has about half a billion dollars invested in PetroChina and Sinopec -- two Chinese oil companies which are allegedly propping up the Sudan government by helping it export oil. The government in Khartoum and pro-government Arab militias are responsible for genocide/ethnic cleansing/massacres in Darfur and other parts of Sudan, according to human rights groups and the U.S. government.

Harvard made the decision nearly two years to divest from the Chinese oil companies with activities in Sudan. Fidelity did not. Its response to enquiries from the television station were quite cold: These investments were purely business decisions based on maximizing value for shareholders.

My response to this -- as a Fidelity investor who got started with many of Fidelity's international funds while I was still an employee at Harvard through a 403b retirement plan -- is that there is no justification for investing in companies that are contributing to genocide. It's a disgrace.

I tried to determine which Fidelity funds invest in PetroChina and Sinopec, but the Fidelity search engine seemed to leave out a lot of results, based on my comparison with the listing of Fidelity funds on this website that allegedly highlights the company's investments in the two Chinese oil companies.

I also drilled down in the prospectii and annual reports of several overseas funds that Fidelity operates, but these reports only list the top 10 holdings for each fund, and I did not see Sinopec or PetroChina listed.

My next step is to contact Fidelity directly and ask which funds have holdings in the two companies. Those funds will be sold from my portfolio; I will also ask Harvard to remove from the 403b plans it operates with Fidelity any funds which are investing in the Sudanese genocide.

Or should Harvard also divest from Fidelity?