RConversation

links for 2006-03-31

• AsiaPundit: pick on yahoo! day
  "AsiaPundit enjoys Jack Ma's media appearances, he is inclined to say provocative things and the local media treat him like a rockstar. But while AP thinks Ma has a strong chance of beating eBay with auctions, he is not so sure that he will be able to tur
  (tags: Yahoo! china chineseinternetresearch china/tech business alibaba)
• CPJ News Alert 2006: CPJ supports effort to release filmmaker and blogger Wu Hao
  “CPJ supports Nina Wu’s efforts as she tries to gain the release of Wu Hao,” said Ann Cooper, CPJ’s executive director. “Wu Hao is the sort of courageous and thoughtful journalist China needs. Nina Wu’s energy and tactics to gain his freedom r
  (tags: freehaowu china chineseinternetresearch freespeech humanrights)

Hao Wu's sister blogs about his detention

(Cross posted at www.Freehaowu.org or http://ethanzuckerman.com/haowu)

Nina Wu, sister of the detained filmmaker and Global Voices contributor Hao Wu has now started a blog on MSN Spaces. It includes a photo gallery of "Haozi" as the family calls him. Even if you don't know Chinese, leave her a comment in English and let her know your support for Hao. Thanks to a volunteer who wishes to remain anonymous, we have a full translation of her first post, below. She includes an update on her latest visit to the police. It is a chilling account of what it's like to be the family member of a Chinese person who has been detained without charge. I have put a few key paragraphs in bold:

Ever since I found "Where is Hu Jia?" (http://spaces.msn.com/zengjinyan/) on Google, Jinyan's blog was a rest stop for my soul. I would often read her diary and the comments following it, sharing her joys and sorrows, as I too had experienced the pain and confusion after the disappearance of a loved one. Now, Hu Jia has returned. I am wholeheartedly happy for [Jinyan] and her family, and I will continue to search for my brother. With the support of my friends, I believe that I will also wait for the day when I can smile again.

I had never thought that I, after becoming an adult, would write anything besides research reports and investment records. In high school I experienced the embarrassment of someone secretly reading my diary, and I also read and heard many stories about diaries during the Cultural Revolution. After twenty, I stopped trusting the pen to record my own thoughts and feelings. Perhaps because work is so time-consuming, I only knew about the most popular blogs on the Internet, but I had never visited one myself. After my brother disappeared, I visited his blog, Beijing or Bust (spaces.msn.com/chinafool/), for the first time. Once I started I couldn't control myself, and read his stories one after another.

My own writing has always been weak, and composition gave me even more of a headache. But now I believe that true feelings will leap onto the keyboard, as I type out the characters of my family and friends who miss Wu Hao. These feelings do not require eloquence or adornment. They just need to be faithfully recorded. I hope it can fill in for the "I love you, brother," that is usually so hard for me to say.

Having always been proud of my enthusiasm for my job, I had hoped to remain as dedicated to my work as before, but I still left the Shenyin & Wanguo Spring Investment Strategy Conference early to drive to the petition office of the Beijing Public Security Bureau. I hoped that after Hu Jia had returned home I could get information about my brother.

This time they did not ask me to fill out paperwork. It was the same officer as last time. He and another one promised to get in touch with the officer in charge of the case. After coming in and out many times and waiting, I never met the officer in charge. I only received a message: Wu Hao has committed a crime (When I came on March 20, they only told me that Wu Hao had been arrested.) They still refused to inform me what crime he was suspected of, and also refused to allow our lawyer to see him. Threatening to go to the Ministry of Public Security was also useless.

Can these law enforcement organs really ignore his rights and those of his relatives, and after detaining him for five weeks not offer any explanation? Anger swelled in my chest.

When I heard that the repeated promises of a deadline for my brother's release from the previous employee in-charge were just "one of the working techniques" I nearly burst with fury.

That dignified state employees would carelessly trample on someone's dignity, that a promise to a family member could be torn to shreds like wastepaper—what powers did the law grant them? Thinking about it, the people I dealt with never showed police credentials (despite repeated requests), and never called each other by name. I only know that the lead officer is surnamed Sun. After graduating from police academy he spent some time as a teacher, and then moved to this job for (?) [sic] 15 years. Even this limited information might be false. I was angry at myself for my political naïveté, and angry at this place that displayed the police insignia but did not actually "Serve the People."

Finally, I got in an argument with the guard over using the restroom.

It was all about regulations.  It was all about protecting secrets.

Why didn't they dare to write it down? I needed to vent my anger, but finally I just ran out sobbing. I couldn't make trouble for the insignificant guard and staff. In vast Beijing, finding a place where people can talk sense and speak clearly is terribly difficult.

In the evening, while eating dinner with friends, I found out that a friend had a terrifying experience this afternoon. He tried calling me and J for a long time, but the call wouldn't go through. He worried that we had had an accident. Thankfully, he persisted in dialing the number until the call went through. Only then was his mind at ease. It was strange, because at the time I was in XXXX's [sic] hall, where the cell phone signal was excellent, but my phone didn't ring. I checked the call record but there were no missed calls. Why didn't it go through? I thought about it and realized that other friends also complained that I wasn't answering my phone.

Very fishy. Finally, like a martyr saying her final words, I gave my friends contact information for my husband and my former employer. I felt disconnected from reality, like in a novel. Would anything really happen? I had thought that a person disappearing without a trace was something that only happened in novels, but hadn't that already happened in real life too?

I had to give my daughter a call. When she said "Mommy" over the phone, my tears began to flow again. As she, completely unaware of what was happening, excitedly reported her dancing achievements and progress in class, I was silently apologizing to her. Mom has been missing too often. Mom really wants to hold your little body, share every little thing that happens at school, and read to you. I hope that everything ends quickly, and your uncle can come back soon. Then Mom can hold your little hand again.

Thank you, Huang. I did not want what happened in my life to disrupt the lives of my friends, but you still learned that information from the World Journal Even if you can't help, your phone call let me feel the warmth of friendship in the cold Beijing spring.

I hope that friends can use this blog to enter my life, searching for my brother in 2006.

Thanks to Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal for his story today: China's Detention of Filmmaker Rouses Fears over Curbs on Media.  (The story is accessible without a subscription.) Key excerpt (emphasis added):

Mr. Wu's sister, Nina Wu, said the Beijing Public Security Bureau's petition office confirmed Mr. Wu had been detained but won't specify any charges against him. "His dream is in China," she said. "His dream is for speaking out freely, and for making films....He knows there are some problems here, but he loves China and thinks things are getting better and better."

In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal about why Mr. Wu was detained, the Public Security Ministry and the State Council Information Office said they are looking into the matter.

A half-dozen friends and colleagues who have known Mr. Wu for about 20 years, both in China and the U.S., describe him as outgoing and principled and said he hasn't had problems with drugs or the law. What might have spurred the arrest, they said, is the film Mr. Wu had been working on for several months about underground churches. They said that on Feb. 24 Mr. Wu's editing equipment and several videotapes were removed from his apartment.

The Chinese government really shoots itself in the foot by detaining people like Hao.

links for 2006-03-30

• Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: A Chinese "Fool"
  "His political struggles and attempt to criticize his own government while loving his own country make the contradictions we Westerners labor under seem petty."
  (tags: freehaowu freespeech humanrights china)
• Pop and Politics: Multi-racial Dream by Claire Light
  "The stereotype/fantasy is an attempt to control the uncontrollable, to understand that which you can’t understand."
  (tags: americanvoices race)
• Tech's Faster Boat to China
  "Microsoft, Motorola, Intel and others are expanding their mainland research facilities -- so much so, finding workers could soon get tougher"
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch techtrends internet business)
• China's Clash of Cultures in Cyberspace - Los Angeles Times
  "A blogger's video spoof of a big-budget film is swept up in the debate over censorship and the freedom to speak one's mind on the Internet."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch blogs internet freespeech humanrights democracy)
• Web crackdown, Web protest: Three recent cases (Updated) :: China Digital Times (CDT) 中国数字时代
  "Since the "Rules on the Administration of Internet News Information Services" came out last September, government control over online content has intensified. Following are three recent examples of how the local authorities have acted on the regulations,
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet censorship freespeech)

Holding companies to account with Google Finance

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Seth Finkelstein, who technically definitely knows what he's talking about, points out: "Note: Exposing Yahoo, Inc., or other companies, by having blog posts show up on a company's page in Google Finance, is accomplished by having the post rank highly for the company name, not company ticker symbol." He goes on to explain the algorithm further.

Thanks to Kathryn Cramer for pointing out that her blog post about Secure Computing's export of censorware, tagged with the company's ticker symbol "SCUR," now appears on the Google Finance page for Secure Computing.
 

When blogging about a company, if you want investors to know, be sure to tag your post with the company's ticker symbol. full name (see correction above). I just went back and tagged my most recent post on Yahoo!'s abominable behavior.

How long will this last before the spam and p.r. blogs overwhelm the independent voices? Stay tuned..

Hu Jia plans to sue his captors, day 35 for Hao Wu

AIDS activist Hu Jia's wife Zeng Jinyan reports on her blog that he was dropped off by police yesterday outside a shopping center about an hour's walk from his home on the outskirts of Beijing. In the 41 days of his detention he had no idea what was happening in the outside world. She says he returned exhausted, witha long beard. She took him to the hospital for a checkup in the morning and they found liver problems he hasn't had before. More tests, treatment, and follow-up will be needed. Meanwhile Reuters spoke to Hu Jia and here is an exceprt of the story:

Security police took him from his home and held him without any legal formalities in two "vacation villages" on the eastern outskirts of Beijing, never informing his family of his whereabouts, Hu told Reuters.

Hu said he was unbroken by the experience, which he said included a month-long hunger-protest, roughing up, and sleepless nights. He said he plans to sue the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau for unlawful detention.

"I've always felt this life is like cat and mouse, but I'm the cat," he said. "They're breaking the law and they know it, and I'm going to sue them to show them and the world that people can defend their rights."

The circumstances of Hu Jia's detention are very similar to those of our Global Voices Northeast Asia editor Hao Wu, who has been held without charge or legal representation since February 22nd - that's 35 days now. (See recent AP and Reuters coverage here.) I am concerned that Hao's detention is equally bad for his health.

Despite some nay-sayers who think publicity is counterproductive, it would appear that publicity did help bring about Hu Jia's release. When working in China in the 1990's, I covered the jailings and releases of quite a number of Chinese people detained or sentenced for political reasons - some of whom considered themselves dissidents and some of whom did not, like Hao. In all cases, people reported that outside attention seemed to have resulted in better or at least more careful treatment of them physically, as compared to other prisoners whose cases were unknown to the outside world. In many cases people got released right before a major U.S.-China summit. As it so happens, President Hu Jintao is coming to the U.S. for a summit on April 20th.

As one Beijing-based journalist observes:

Will the public campaign to win Hao Wu's release work? The timing might be right. Chinese President Hu Jintao will soon be visiting the U.S., a trip that was supposed to take place last September but was put off because of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The Chinese government very much wants this visit to go well, so the leaders might decide that letting a lone blogger go free in the lead up to the summit might be an easy way to score some points.

I hope he gets released before then. But if not perhaps Hao's case will become part of a resumed U.S.-China human rights dialogue.

Yahoo! Abomination. (YHOO)

Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang continues to spew excrement, echoing his shoulder-shrugging of earlier this month, which essentially amounts to saying: So sorry we assisted in human rights violations, but there's nothing we can do if we're going to bring the Internet to the Chinese people. One recent quote:

"You have to balance the risk of not participating," he said. "And people don't realize that being in the market every day there, and being on the ground, we are seeing changes, on the whole, for the positive."

Tell that to the family of Shi Tao who is in jail for 10 years.  Jerry Yang should meet with them and tell them to their faces just how sorry he is, but that Shi is being sacrificed for a noble cause. I'm sure they'll understand...

Yahoo! executives keep framing this issue as black and white: Either you're in there and do everything the Chinese authorities tell you without question, or you can't do business in China at all. That is false. Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to do certain kinds of business. Yahoo! has placed user e-mail data within legal jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China. Google and Microsoft have both chosen not to do so. Why did Yahoo! chose to do this?  Either they weren't thinking through the consequences or they don't care.

Based on my conversations with people in the Chinese dot-com world, I get the impression that initially, they weren't thinking through the full implications of their business plans. But given that they are now doing nothing to help the families of the dissidents who are in jail thanks to Yahoo!'s cooperation with the Chinese police, and they are doing nothing to prevent more such convictions with Yahoo!'s assistance in the future (or the assistance of it's Chinese partner Alibaba under the Yahoo! brand), one must conclude they also don't actually care very much. If Yahoo's disingenuousness annoys you as much as it annoys me, Amnesty International has a letter writing campaign with all the addresses you need to let Jerry Yang and his colleagues know what you think. They have several recommendations for action which I have updated and modified below.

If Yahoo! wants to convince their users worldwide that the company actually cares about user rights, and that Yahoo! deserves user trust, Yahoo! should:

•    Use its influence to secure the release of Shi Tao, Li Zhi, and any other people who simply exercised their universally recognized right to political dissent and whose arrest and sentencing was aided by Yahoo!
•    Stop any actions that could undermine human rights in any country in which you operate
•    Take immediate steps to ensure that all its units – the parent corporation and subsidiaries – uphold human rights responsibilities for companies, as outlined by the UN Norms for Business
•    Develop an explicit human rights policy, ensuring that it complies with the UN Norms for Business.

Note: There is no mention here about disengagement with China. Jerry Yang, and other Yahoo! executives, please stop claiming that your critics are advocating disengagement. Most of us aren't. Stop treating the public and your (increasingly former) users like morons.  It's really bad for business. You've certainly lost my trust.

UPDATE: Note I have added Yahoo!'s ticker symbol to my title. Thanks to Kathryn Cramer for pointing out that if you include a company's ticker symbol on your blog posts, they'll show up in Google Finance. Very cool.

 

links for 2006-03-29

• Detained Chinese blogger Hao Wu
  "I interviewed Wu a few weeks before the police detained him. This was when the debate was raging in the U.S. about Google, Yahoo et.al. and their role in facilitating censorship of China's Internet. Wu was surprisingly upbeat."
  (tags: freehaowu china chineseinternetresearch humanrights freespeech)
• China not giving details about filmmaker
  "Chinese police last month detained a documentary filmmaker who met with an outspoken lawyer and have refused to tell his family where he is being held or on what charges, his sister said."
  (tags: freehaowu freespeech humanrights china chineseinternetresearch)
• Google Joins the Lobbying Herd - New York Times
  "For a company that takes pride in being the quintessential outsider, Google is moving quickly into the ultimate insider's game: lobbying."
  (tags: google)
• » The IT Commandments: Put thy users first, above all other things | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
  "if you're not going to put them first, they will provide for themselves. A quick search for the right online application and bang, they plug themselves, and the value they create, into someone else's IT system. Not that you were even harnessing much of
  (tags: trust internet humanrights)
• China Confidential: China's Internet Cops on Lookout for Leftists
  "From Marx to Mao, Communist keywords constitute potential red flags in the eyes of the hyper-sensitive e-police--thousands of trained analysts armed with the latest (American made) censor- and spy-ware."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet censorship)
• Good Morning Silicon Valley: Go forth and bloviate
  "The freewheeling days of political blogging will roll on thanks to a Federal Election Commission ruling that grants media exemptions to bloggers and other pundits, allowing them to politick online without fear of federal interference. "
  (tags: blogs politics)
• Iran hard-line regime cracks down on blogs
  "Despite the crackdown, most Iranian bloggers say the government is not interested in eliminating blogging. Instead, they believe authorities want to use blogging to further their own goals. Farid Pouya, a Belgian-based Iranian blogger, notes the governm
  (tags: iran globalvoices gv-press)
• Yahoo defends building a firewall for China
  "Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang on Tuesday defended the Internet search engine's cooperation with Chinese censorship of the Web, saying that it was necessary to reach out to new users. "
  (tags: yahoo! humanrights china internet chineseinternetresearch freespeech censorship bullshit)
• Oops! Google accidentally deletes its blog | News.blog | CNET News.com
  "Despite earlier concerns that the site was hacked, Google's mea culpa clears anyone of wrongdoing."
  (tags: google blog)

Hu Jia released from detention

Congratulations to AIDS activist Hu Jia who was released from detention today. His wife Zeng Jinyan has been chronicling Hu Jia's ordeal on an MSN Spaces blog. Today she announced his release [in Chinese] on the blog with a 2-sentence post:

"Hu Jia cave me a phone call saying he has been released, but we still haven't met face-to-face. If there is more news, I'll announce it on the blog."

As of this writing the post has 37 happy comments.

I'd like to point out something very important here. Jinyan has been blogging all month on her MSN Spaces blog. It has not been blocked to readers inside China. 

I don't know whether Microsoft received any calls or requests from Chinese authorities to block her blog to access from Chinese ISP's (in keeping with their current censorship mechanism seen in action here). But in any case, it's a good sign that MSN is providing a space for human rights activism in China. I hope they will continue to do so.

links for 2006-03-28

• International News Article | Reuters.com: Chinese police detain documentary maker
  "Chinese police have detained a Chinese-born film maker who is a permanent U.S. resident, a family member said on Monday, weeks before President Hu Jintao visits the United States."
  (tags: freehaowu 释放吴皓 吴皓 china humanrights freespeech)
• The Blog | Larisa Alexandrovna: MSM Plagiarism Strikes Again – AP Welcome to the Party | The Huffington Post
  "There are many things that bother me about plagiarism, but nothing irks me more than when a mainstream reporter (or organization) with all of the resources of a small nation at their disposal lifts from the small press, freelance journalists, and blogger
  (tags: webcred journalism blogs&journalism blogs)
• Ethical Corporation: Columnists - Self censorship in China - The downside of the one billion dream
  "Just the threat of government disapproval is now enough for some companies to self censor in China, writes Paul French"
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch censorship freespeech)
• EastSouthWestNorth: More In The Li Xiguang File
  "One of these days, on one of Li's visits to the United States, an American interviewer ought to ask something like: " Professor Li, you have been called A Man With Two Faces. It seems that when you speak of us in English, you are a liberal espousing f
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch journalism freespeech censorship)
• Beijing's Netizen Base Hit 4.28mn
  "Beijing has outstripped Hong Kong and Macao in terms of the netizen base. "
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet)
• Investor's Business Daily: Breaking News - M&A rumblings around China's Net space and more
  "SHANGHAI (MarketWatch) -- TOM Online eyes a slice of Sina.com; reality TV looks for some real men; and Tencent finds a new way to keep kids in the cafes, this week in China."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet sina tom.com bokee fangxingdong)
• Shanghaiist: The Shanghai Daily on video blogging
  (tags: video china blogs chineseinternetresearch)

links for 2006-03-27

• A portrait of the blogger as a young plagiarist | Salon.com
  "As a college student Ben Domenech lifted arts criticism; as a GOP henchman, he was accused of fabricating a Tim Russert quote. What was the Washington Post thinking?"
  (tags: webcred blogs&journalism blogs news journalism)
• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Saving journalism (and killing the press)
  "This isn’t journalism against bloggers anymore. It never was, really. This is journalists and bloggers together in favor of news."
  (tags: webcred journalism blogs&journalism blogs)
• cybersoc.com: guest blogger Richard Sambrook: citizen journalism
  "What a difference a year makes. 2005 was the year the idea of citizen journalism entered the public consciousness - and moved on."
  (tags: CitizenJournalism blogs bbc journalism blogs&journalism webcred)
• EastSouthWestNorth: The County Mayor Netizen Without Any Sock Puppets
  "The following is a story about a Chinese county mayor who uses his real name on the Internet "
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch politics internet)
• RED HERRING | China’s Telco Titan Grows
  "Huawei is China’s big gun of wireless. Like China's economy, it’s growing fast."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch huawei internet wireless business)
• Digital Lifescapes | by David H. Deans: Google Seeks Patent for Wi-Fi Hotspot Ads
  "Google engineers have applied for a patent on a way to target ads based on the location of the wireless access point to which a user connects, among other factors."
  (tags: wifi wireless google FON)