RConversation

Yahoo! in China: Lessons for all of us, everywhere.

I've written an article for this month's Far Eastern Economic Review titled Asia's Fight for Web Rights.  It takes a look at how Yahoo! went from assisting in the imprisonment of four dissidents in 2003 and 2004, to being yelled at in Congress in 2006 and 2007, to Jerry Yang's apology and recent establishment of a human rights fund administered by human rights activist Harry Wu.

The article also examines how at least some other companies are trying to learn from Yahoo!'s early mistakes. It explores the different approaches and disagreements over how (or whether) Internet and telecommunications companies are capable of respecting their users' rights to free expression and privacy in markets like China - or in any market for that matter.

Respecting users' rights to free expression and privacy, I argue, should be an integral part of corporate social responsibility - along with respect for the environment, sustainable development, and humane labor practices. But don't sit around waiting for your rights to get respected:

Meanwhile, the rest of us should not simply sit around and wait for our Internet and email service providers, Web-hosting services, and mobile-phone carriers to do the right thing on their own. Technology users around the world have an interest in joining together to insist that the products and services with which we increasingly entrust our careers, our beliefs and the most intimate parts of our lives, will not sell us out because they feel they have “no choice” since all their competitors are selling out their users too.

Click here to read the full article. Feel free to leave your reactions in their comments section.

Also be sure to check out the award-winning article by my colleague David Bandurski, Pulling the Strings of China's Internet, from the December 2007 issue. Now free online.

(Note: for an archive of posts I've written over the past few years about the Yahoo! China case, click here.)

Hu Jia, Tiananmen 2.0, and the SchizOlympics

(From Global Voices: A near-blind friend of Hu Jia - later arrested herself - collects signatures for his release; close-up of the petition.)

The Olympics may be athletic competition, but this year it is also a contest of alternative realities. If you think things are strange or disturbing now, just wait.

Today Hu Jia was sentenced to three and a half years in jail plus an extra year without "political rights," found guilty of "subverting state power." His alleged "crimes" according to his lawyer involved comments made in interviews with foreign media and articles posted on Boxun.com, a Chinese-language U.S.-based website that is banned in China. Here is the official Xinhua report on his sentencing.

Hu has been under arrest since December, and under house arrest for much longer. His wife Zeng Jinyan and newborn baby have also been under effective house arrest since his formal arrest - despite the fact that neither has been charged with any crime. (The TIME blog has a video of their recent attempt to visit Zeng... crime scene tape was deployed outside the entrance to her building.) The small but vocal politically-edgy part of the Chinese blogosphere has for months been rallying in support of Hu and Zeng. There have been online and offline petitions calling for Hu's release. After several bloggers were blocked by police from delivering milk powder to Zeng and the baby, one guy who clearly plays a lot of video games or something finally succeeded after a thoroughly planned overnight  commando-style "mission" (Read John Kennedy's translation of the blogger's account of how he got around the cops.. titled "Hack Into Freedom City"... it's quite something).

If you search for Hu Jia's Chinese name on Baidu, China's largest search engine, all you'll get is information about an Olympic diver who happens to have the same name.  But as John Kennedy writes on Global Voices, "in the China of today, though, someone like Hu Jia just doesn't quietly disappear." Websites hosted overseas that talk about Hu Jia the activist may be blocked by the Great Firewall; blog and chatroom postings about him posted on websites inside China are taken down by administrators on orders from above; but that hasn't stopped many people from sending around links to the BBC Chinese-language report on his sentencing through their Twitter and instant messaging networks, and e-mail threads between trusted friends. The way that Zeng continues to speak out from her house arrest, and the way that people continue to support her online, is what some are now calling "Tiananmen 2.0" - a phrase which Ariana Huffington coined in her 2007 piece about Zeng for TIME magazine, and which is now the title of a cyber-activist blog.

Among the things Hu Jia wrote that authorities didn't like was criticism of the International Olympic Committee for not pushing Beijing to live up to its human rights commitments. (Mind you, he never called for a boycott or said he opposed the Olympics, contrary to what some people on the internet have been claiming.) Human rights groups like Amnesty International, which just came out with a well-timed report about all the ways in which Beijing has falied to live up to its Olympic committments, have been quick to point out that Hu's conviction is an example of Beijing's failings in the human rights department. The head of the Prague-based Olympic Watch said: “The Chinese government is ignoring its commitments of human rights improvements and testing how far it can go just as IOC executives head to Beijing.”

The IOC for its part made a big show of securing guarantees from Chinese authorities that the Internet will be "open" for journalists in the special Olympic coverage press centers. English-language Wikipedia and BBC English have been unblocked with much fanfare - meanwhile censorship of the Chinese language Internet (including the Chinese versions of those sites) continues the same as ever, and rest assured the net will be filtered as usual - at least the Chinese language content - for Chinese people accessing the Internet outside of the special press centers and major hotels. But the IOC doesn't notice the former and doesn't appear to care about the latter.

Are we actually surprised by any of this? Everyone is playing out their designated roles. And anybody who truly thought that the Olympics would change the Chinese government's human rights practices was smoking something really great. 

Responding to the reality wars that continue to rage online and in the media over what the recent Tibetan unrest was really about, Dave over at Mutantpalm produced early on the best characterization I've seen of this year's "SchizOlympics." I've quoted him before but it's so good I'll quote him again:

Watching the build up to the Olympics has been, for me, like watching the world’s biggest, slowest traffic accident. For a while now its been pretty obvious that alot of contentious issues about China were going to come to the front as we approach August 8th, but the problem is that there are two completely separate parallel worlds on these issues: the Chinese one, and the rest of us. Westerners have been exposed to rhetoric and information about Tibetan discontent, Darfur’s international and Chinese dimensions, and of course old chestnuts like Tiananmen provide a larger context of long term, ongoing problems. Meanwhile, Chinese mainlanders by and large have no knowledge of these events or issues. While for the rest of the world the Olympics will be largely a referendum on China’s ability to deal with what everyone else has talked about for years, for Chinese citizens it will be about China winning a beauty pageant of sorts.

Two Worlds, Two Dreams: prepare for the SchizOlympics.

There are a few Chinese and a few Westerners who are trying to quietly create spaces for rational conversation and information exchange. But it's hard for most people on all sides to get past the emotions, the nationalism, long-cherished ideological frameworks, stereotypes, over-generalizations, demonizations, cultural superiority complexes and longstanding national chips-on-the-shoulder. Lots of Chinese people now view the Western media, human rights groups, and Western leaders' criticisms of their country as part of the Racist Western Conspiracy to Stop China From Being Successful. Many Westerners continue to harbor a wishful missionary fantasy that the Chinese people must naturally welcome outsiders to help "save" them, and that all expressions of the opposite can only be the product of brainwashing and fear.  In my experience, the most unsuccessful way to win a person over to one's point of view is to start out by telling him he's brainwashed - second only in effectiveness to telling someone that she is part of a grand conspiracy. But this is how the conversation is currently going. Is this inevitable? Reading through the comment at the bottom of this recent post I wrote about the Tibet mess, I'm not optimistic.

Tudou survives with a spanking

Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei reports that China's State Administration for Radio Film and Television (SARFT) has included Chinese YouTube clone Tudou on list of 35 "slightly unhealthy" a websites that will be punished and fined. He points out: "None of Tudou's real competitors like Youku.com or 56.com are on the list: the rest of the websites mentioned are small and unknown players." SARFT has also published a list of 25 "extremely unhealthy"  websites ordered to be shut down.  He observes: "all the websites in the list seem to be fly by night video downloading BBS and small, relatively unknown video sites. Many of them have names that imitate other, more popular websites, e.g. Xunleicn.com whose name is ripped off from the popular Xunlei.com."

Jeremy concludes: "Despite being named on a list of insignificant and mostly lousy websites, this seems like good news for Tudou, as long as the fine is not too severe." Certainly beats being shut down, which was recently rumored to be Tudou's impending fate.

Pacific Epoch also reports on the lists, noting that Tudou's content filtering has increased dramatically:

Users of Tudou.com have noticed an uploading slowdown since Tudou shutdown its site for a full day on March 14, reports 21st Century Business Herald. According to users quoted in the report, the entire process from video uploading to publishing now takes about 24 hours. After the temporary closure, Tudou recommenced user-generated content uploading on March 17. Filters at Tudou.com competitor Youku.com can publish videos within half an hour after uploading, according to Youku CEO Victor Koo.

Interesting. So I guess they're taking extra precautions to vet everything before it gets published. So the question is: does Youku have better censorship technology, more staff to handle content control, better official guanxi, or some combination of the three?

Previous posts on the subject:

• Tudou's 24-hour shutdown
• Tudou shutdown reports: What's going on?
• China's new online video regulation: reading the tea leaves

 

Online Free Expression Day

Reporters Without Borders is holding a 24-hour protest against Internet censorship today. You can click here to create and avatar and banner and join virtual protests against Internet repression in Burma, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam. RSF has also released an updated version of their Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents, and issued a new list of "Internet Enemies" (Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam - I'm not sure why some of them aren't included in the online protest.)

While the countries named by RSF may have jailed the most people for Internet writing and may be blocking the most websites, they are not the only countries of concern when it comes to Internet censorship by any means. The Open Net Initiative has found systematic Internet filtering in 25 countries and in their new book, Access Denied. Researchers point out that the practice is spreading fast. We can expect the list to grow.

In the past couple of years countries that call themselves democracies have gotten into the Internet censorship game. Turkey censors Wordpress. Thailand censors extensively. Japan has been considering strict "regulation of online content" which is essentially censorship by another name. The U.S. airforce reportedly blocks all URL's with the word "blog" in them. And then of course abuse of surveillance powers is by no means limited to non-democracies. The U.S. certainly has a growing surveillance problem.

The point is, it's a bit misleading to divide up the world into "good" and "bad" countries. Some are certainly a lot worse than others, but we are all living along a continuum. No government can be trusted. They all have the potential to overstep their powers and censor content that adult citizens have a right to see, or to disrespect our rights to privacy, without serious oversight and vigilance by all of us. Ideology and nationalism get mixed up in global free speech discussions in very counter-productive ways. We need to find a way for people who truly care about free speech (as opposed to those who use free speech advocacy as a cover for other agendas) to transcend nationalism and ideology, discard defensiveness or sanctimoniousness, and work together for solutions so that we can ALL protect ourselves against abuse and manipulation.

I'd like to use this occasion to introduce a number of useful resources for anybody interested getting around censorship or protecting their privacy online.

This excellent guide to digital security and privacy written by Dmitri Vitalev of Frontline Defenders is labeled "for human rights defenders," but it's equally useful for journalists working anywhere that you need to protect yourself and your sources from reprisals by powerful people who don't want you doing stories about bad things they've done. Which is really any country on earth, pretty much. For more useful guides from FrontLine click here.

Global Voices Advocacy (the activist arm of Global Voices which I co-founded) has published several useful resources, with plans for more. So far they are:

• Anonymous Blogging with Wordpress and Tor
• Blog for a Cause!: The Global Voices Guide of Blog Advocacy

From the Citizenlab in Toronto we have Everyone's guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizen's Worldwide.

Not long after I started teaching online journalism I realized I had to put together a resource page for my students (half of whom are mainland Chinese) on censorship circumvention and e-mail security. It's tailored towards their particular needs but anybody is welcome to use it here.

Tudou shutdown reports: What's going on?

Late last week, several reports appeared on the Chinese internet claiming that Tudou, one of China's biggest YouTube clones, was ordered to shut down by the State Administration for Radio Film and Television. (See good roundups on the situation on Danwei, Poynter, and CNet among others.) This shutdown news - or rumor, if you will - came on the heels of a reported partnership between CCTV.com, Tudou and Myspace China to "provide an online platform for Olympics viewers to interact with athletes and each other." On Thursday folks over at Marbridge Consulting confirmed the shutdown order via their official sources, posting this report:

Sources say that the direct cause of the breakdown between Tudou and CCTV.com is the Shutdown Order Regarding Punishment of Tudou for Illegal Online Video Broadcasting issued by the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) to Shanghai broadcasting authorities on February 24.

The order states that Tudou is suspected of transmitting pornographic and other clearly proscribed content, and of continuing to be lax in its monitoring of content following the promulgation of SARFT's new regulations on online broadcasting. Tudou was ordered to shut down for an unlimited duration to reorganize its content. On February 26, word of the order, which had circulated throughout all levels of the broadcasting authorities, reached CCTV. An inside source revealed that Wang Wenbin, head of CCTV.com, saw the letter on that day - one day before the CCTV.com, MySpace China, and Tudou press conference. The next day Tudou CEO Wang Wei's speech was dropped from the press conference, and media at the press conference were told not to report this.

When contacted, Tudou's public relations department said that they had not received a Shutdown Order targeted at the company.

Editor's note: In a telephone interview with Marbridge, relevant authorities confirmed that such an injunction had been issued against Tudou. However, no confirmation was given concerning the details outlined in the article above. A check of Tudou's site (www.tudou.com) as of the close of business today found it still functioning normally.

Tudou continues to function normally as of this writing. On Saturday Steve Shwankert reported for PC World (via the Washington Post) that rumors about Tudou's closing "appear unfounded."

Kaiser Kuo cites sources who think that Tudou may be getting its hand slapped for not taking new online video regulations that went into effect on January 31st seriously enough. This is despite reports in early February that existing video websites would be "grandfathered in" to the new regulatory system. Kaiser writes:

Other industry insiders have intimated to me that Tudou had been somewhat cavalier in pursuing compliance with the new SARFT/MII regulations on Internet audio and video broadcast, but when the date of implementation, January 31, passed without incident, and when SARFT clarified the regulations in a statement the following week suggesting that non-compliant sites would be given a period to resolve problems and restructure so as to be compliant and would be permitted to apply for a proper license, most industry insiders believed the worst was probably over. However, in conversations with highly-placed industry insiders earlier this week, this reporter was given strong indications that another shoe was yet to fall. Without mentioning Tudou.com by name, these insiders intimated that a “black list” was making the rounds and some form of punishment would be meted out.

It smells as though some kind of substantial power struggle must be going on for control of online content, broadcast content, and beyond... resulting in all kinds of mixed signals. Don't forget that some members of the Chinese media openly opposed the new SARFT regulations. Perhaps certain parts of the Chinese media are being used as proxies - or are maybe even taking sides - in this battle? If the shutdown order was indeed issued (which seems very likely) and Tudou is ignoring it, they must have some strong backing in the bureaucracy somewhere to push back against SARFT, no?

I've heard all kinds of strange and wild rumors from various people over the past few months, including one especially wild rumor claiming that there are arguments being made in some quarters to abolish SARFT altogether...  or that there is likely to be some kind of major reorganization of the various regulatory bodies that regulate and control entertainment and news content. But who knows. Often times such rumors reflect wishful thinking of certain players within the bureaucracy and nothing much more. The tea leaf reading continues. But if anybody out there has any concrete information to add to this mystery, it sure would be great to know about it.

More Chinese dissidents sue Yahoo!

Last week, in response to an appeal by Jerry Yang, Condoleezza Rice raised the cases of Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao with Chinese authorities on her visit to Beijing.   A Chinese version of Jerry Yang's letter to Rice is circulating around the internet.  It's unclear whether Rice's intervention will result in an early release for the two men. But in the past, getting one's case raised by the U.S. Secretary of State has tended to boost a person's chances of early release. The Chinese have also agreed to resume a stalled human rights dialogue. This is no doubt tied to concerns about international criticisms in the run-up to the Olympics.

Another development that surfaced in the English-language media on Thursday and Friday this past week is a new lawsuit against Yahoo!. It was filed on February 21st in San Francisco by two men, Guo Quan, a Nanjing-based scholar and acting chairman of the underground New People's Party, and Zheng Cunzhu, head of the Western U.S. branch of the Democratic Party of China.

They are suing Yahoo! for a couple of reasons. Guo Quan says that Yahoo! China has removed  his name from their search results without any legally valid reasons, after Guo published an open letter calling for political reform. Zheng Cunzhu claims that he cannot return to China for fear of arrest - because Yahoo!'s handover of e-mail records to the police also implicated him - and as a result has lost property.

According to Zheng who gave a press conference in Los Angeles on the 21st, the previous lawsuit against Yahoo! resulted in a secret settlement with the relatives of Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao. However that lawsuit, Zheng says, claimed to include over 60 people who had been harmed by Yahoo!'s disclosure of personal e-mail information to Chinese authorities. These people included China Democratic Party Li Zhi, who is now serving an 8-year sentence. See Zheng's open letter to Jerry Yang in Chinese for more details about the reasons behind the lawsuit. For more Chinese-language reports on the lawsuit click here, here, and here.

Note that some of the English-language reports about this case have gotten facts wrong. A Computerworld story picked up by the Washington post erroneously reports that Guo Quan's part in the lawsuit relates to the handover of e-mail records. However the more detailed Chinese reports on the case make it clear that he is suing because search results about him were removed, and that this has an adverse impact on his business.  Businessweek got the story right - also pointing out that Li Zhi (doing 8 years in prison thanks at least in part to a Yahoo! e-mail handover) is not a plaintiff, while the Computerworld story (amplified by the Washington Post) says Li Zhi is a plaintiff.  Ars Technica has a more well-informed and detailed version of the story which are consistent with the Chinese reports I've seen - plus some decent analysis.

A few more useful bits of information not included in English reports about this lawsuit:

First, about Li Zhi: Li Zhi's case is more complicated than Wang Xiaoning's and Shi Tao's. Li Zhi wasn't convicted on evidence supplied by Yahoo! alone. In addition to Yahoo!, the Chinese e-mail service SINA also handed over e-mail records that were used as evidence against Li.  This subtlety and a few other details were glossed over in the initial reports and press releases in 2006 about Li Zhi's case, leading Roland Soong to question the extent to which journalists and human rights activists care about facts. (In my response to Roland at the time, I agreed people messed up, but didn't think that meant Yahoo! was off the hook.)

About Guo Quan: One thing that the English reports over the past few days haven't mentioned is that Guo Quan recently announced the founding of the Chinese Netizens' Party. In January he launched the New People's Party, which caused him to lose his teaching job. He is a historian known for his work on the Nanjing Massacre. Jane Macartney interviewed him for a Times of London story in early February. At the time he was threatening to sue Google in addition to Yahoo! for removing his name from search results on Google.cn. However, Google soon resolved the problem and you now get results when you do a search on his name - though any dissident overseas websites mentioning his name don't appear in those results while they do appear in a Google.com search. Meanwhile, as of this writing you still get nothing when you search Guo Quan's name on Yahoo! China. Ironically, even Baidu does actually return results.

Back when Jerry Yang first made his appeal to Rice on behalf of Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning, Elinor Mills wrote on CNet:

Yahoo wasn't necessarily any worse than Google or Microsoft; Yahoo was just the first to have been publicly caught in the moral quagmire that U.S. companies face when dealing with repressive governments. It's unfortunate that several men were arrested and thrown behind bars before Yahoo changed its mind.

Actually, that's wrong. Yahoo was much worse. Neither Google nor Microsoft set up local Chinese-language e-mail services with the user data sitting on computer servers inside the People's Republic of China, under PRC legal jurisdiction. Gmail and Hotmail data are not subject to Chinese police order the way Yahoo! Chinese e-mail is. Google and Microsoft have said in public statements that the reason why they're not doing e-mail in China is to avoid being complicit in sending dissidents to jail. Also, as I found out when doing test searches for Human Rights Watch in 2006, Yahoo! Chinese search censors much more heavily than Google and MSN - and as we can see from the Guo Quan case, sometimes they even censor more heavily than Baidu! 

For fun, here's the screenshot of the search I just did on Yahoo China with Guo Quan's name (click to enlarge):

Here's Baidu:

For everything I've ever written about the Yahoo! China cases click here.

How to ruin your Olympic image: suppress your critics

Blogger "lao jiang" has posted this humorous flash file: a clock counting down the days till the Olympics are finished. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of viral jokes - many people it seems aren't against the Olympics being held in China per se, they just can't wait for the games and all related insanity to be over. Mind you, a lot of people in Sydney, Athens, and Atlanta felt the same way.

Jim Yardley has a story today in the NYT titled Dissident's Arrest Hints at Olympmic Crackdown. He mainly talks about Hu Jia's case, but mentions others as well. Zeng Jinyan, the famous human rights blogger and Hu Jia's wife, remains under house arrest with their two month old baby in their apartment. While the government claims they've relaxed controls on journalist interviews, Yardley was prevented by police from interviewing Zeng. In his article he describes how the police hastily put up "crime scene" tape around the area. I'm quoted in the article saying that the Chinese government is shooting themselves in the foot by behaving this way.

What Olympics host city or country hasn't had critics?  A quick Google search turns up plenty of information about dissent and protests surrounding previous games.  Do any of us remember hearing much about these things in the international media at the time? I don't. Why?  Because the host governments treated dissent as a normal thing and didn't go around throwing everybody in jail or suppressing their publications. And guess what? The international media didn't pay too much attention to the dissenters and protestors anyway. What the Chinese government doesn't get is that the mainstream international media views protest and dissent as a pretty normal thing which often isn't newsworthy in it's own right about 80% of the time - that is, unless you make martyrs out of the protestors and dissenters and put their 2-month old babies under house arrest. Then it becomes a big story, regardless of whether or not the dissenters are even making a coherent or logical point, or whether they have much of a following.

Why can't China accept that dissent and argument are part of being a normal country? Why behave in such an insecure manner that violates international human rights norms, damages China's international image, and distracts media attention away from the Chinese people's genuine accomplishments over the past 30 years - as well as from the excitement of the sports competition itself?  The only rational conclusion can be one of the following: a) China's security and law-enforcement apparatus is out of control, unaccountable, power-hungry, and can't be reined in by the other branches of the government; b) the Chinese government really is on the verge of losing its grip at any moment and thus really has more reason than we realize to fear all of its citizens.

The other problem is that the Chinese government acts like it views pretty much all criticism as anti-China, intended to drag the country down and deny the Chinese nation the global status it deserves. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody from the Foreign Ministry complains to the NYT about Jim's article - not that the NYT will heed the complaint. But foreigners who publish things highlighting criticism of how Beijing is handling the Olympics, or who point out that maybe some citizens aren't so happy about hosting the games, or that some think the money might have been better spent elsewhere, tend to be considered "not friends of China."  This is false, and sad.  A couple years ago, after Hu Jia was released from detention the first time around and when my friend Wu Hao had gone missing, I wrote about how outsiders like myself who've spent a lot of time living and working in China want the Chinese people to succeed, want them to be recognized and rewarded for their successes, and believe that the international community should engage with China. The Chinese people deserve no less. The point is not to "demonize" China or treat it like an enemy who should be prevented from succeeding. But how can we respect this  regime when people we know to be good people are jailed, and their children and spouses harrassed, for no good reason we can see? Somehow Beijing needs to stop shooting itself in the foot. The leaders in Beijing should be proud of their intelligent, hardworking people who naturally hold a diverse range of ideas and opinions. Stop fearing them, or you'll turn more citizens who originally supported you into opponents.

UPDATE:

Somebody just pointed out to me that Jinyan's blog has a new post, showing a picture of her 2-month old daughter followed by the caption: "In the Harmonious Society, the World's Smallest Political Prisoner - Hu Qianci" (Jan.31 update: name is corrected - I wrote the pinyin wrong yesterday). Ironically the baby's given name means "modest and compassionate". Seriously, if the Chinese security apparatus intentionally wanted to subvert state power, they couldn't be doing a better job.  Jinyan also points us to the memorial website for a baby martyred in 1949 for the cause of China's Communist revolution.

China's new online video regulation: reading the tea leaves

There is a lot of press today about China's new regulation which appears to decree that only state-owned or state-controlled companies can show or stream online video. As usual, there's the literal reading, then there's the reading of the tea leaves.

Geoffrey Fowler at the Wall Street Journal has a solid story.  As Andy Greenberg points out on Forbes.com, its unclear whether the rules will actually be enforced, or how, or whether they are a "shot across the bow."

Note that Marbridge Consulting published an English translation of the rules on Dec. 29th. The original Chinese is  here.

For in-depth and informed analysis of the situation, be sure to read today's piece by the China Media Project's David Bandurski: Internet censors move to quiet debate on new online video and audio regulations. He reports that many Chinese journalists and news editors are strongly opposed to the new regulations, quoting two strongly worded editorials in Chinese newspapers (one of them already censored). With so much open opposition, chances are that the regulation is likely to get watered down in the way it's enforced.

Also be sure to read this analysis by Danwei's Jeremy Goldkorn, who feels that much of the Western media coverage has been guilty of "gross exaggeration." He agrees with Kaiser Kuo who wrote in late December: "My gut take on this is that it’s more about holding these video sharing and P2P companies responsible for naughty content than about trying to shake- or shut down the industry."

Reading Marbridge's summary of the regulations, it seems that the regulation's main thrust is threefold: First is to regulate all kinds of streaming video sites - some of them live - that have popped up with all kinds of content that you'll never see on officially sanctioned TV. Second is to regulate P2P video sharing which as Kaiser points out has a lot to do with porn. Third relates to Web2.0 "user-generated content" sites: Chinese YouTube clones like Tudou, Youku.com, 56.com.  The regulations seem intended to create more uniform standards for censorship on Chinese online video-sharing sites, combined with a more uniform enforcement and "reporting" structure with SARFT  (State Authority for Radio, Film, and Television) as the main government body to which these sites must answer.

All video sites hosted inside China will have to obtain licenses from SARFT and the MII (Ministry of Information Industry) in order to be legal. Thus it becomes easier to shut them down if they violate the terms of their licenses which would include stipulations about content control. The regulations also state that video sites are required to have either state ownership or state investment - however my hunch is that this element will likely be met with creative work-arounds. I would imagine that the larger companies with foreign investment and established brand names will still be able to operate as long as they make adjustments to the way in which their ownership and investment structures look on paper, obtain the required licenses, and adhere to the required censorship systems.

Its not as if China's video sharing sites haven't already been censoring content. All the established ones have been employing whole divisions of people whose job it is to monitor their services for objectionable content (porn and politically sensitive material), taking down anything that could cause trouble for their company. As John Kennedy of Global Voices reported during the Yilishen "ant farmer" protests, a lot of the protest videos uploaded onto Chinese sites got taken down quite quickly after being uploaded. Some people took it upon themselves to download and re-upload these protest videos to YouTube before they disappeared. This is all part of China's rapidly-evolving and increasingly sophisticated Web 2.0 censorship system, in which the private sector is expected to do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to censoring user-generated content. For more on how this system works see my recent blog posts Censorship 2.0 and Is Web 2.0 a wash for free speech in China?

Most press reports have been asking about YouTube. It is hosted outside of China and is thus subject to the whims of the Great Firewall. It has been blocked before, it can be blocked again. The only way for YouTube to avoid being blocked in China is to do a deal similar to the one they did for Google.cn, their Chinese search engine hosted inside China. and agree to censor content. So far, while Google agreed to censor its search engine, it has drawn the line at user-generated content and opted not to create a censored version of Blogspot.com, which tends to be blocked in China. If they plan to be consistent, they would refuse to censor YouTube as well... and just put up with being blocked. It will be interesting to see how they decide to proceed.

Yahoo!, the Shi Tao case, and lessons for corporate social responsibility

Human Rights in China has launched a new campaign for the new year titled "Incorporating Responsibility 2008." Each month they're focusing on the case of a different person "who has been imprisoned for exercising his or her human rights."

First up is Shi Tao, whose case I've been following rather closely for a while. HRIC provides an succinct summary of his case for bloggers to use:

Shi Tao (b.1968), a journalist, headed the news division at the Dangdai Shangbao (Contemporary Business News) in Changsha, Hunan Province prior to his arrest. On April 20, 2004, Shi attended a staff meeting where a Chinese Communist Party Central Propaganda Bureau document about security and preparation for the fifteenth anniversary of the June 4 crackdown was discussed. That evening, Shi reportedly used his personal Yahoo! e-mail account to send notes about this meeting to the New York-based website, Democracy Forum. Shi was detained on November 24, 2004. On April 27, 2005, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for illegally providing state secrets overseas. He is currently held at Deshan Prison and is due for release in 2014. For more information, please see http://www.ir2008.org.

Also see the World Association of Newspapers' "Free Shi Tao" campaign. WAN is calling on all its members to "exert serious pressure" on Beijing in the run-up to the Olympics to hold the Chinese government "to its promises of reform." The association passed a resolution in November. Here is an excerpt:

The WAN Board believes the end of 'business as usual' in China is necessary to effect belated and needed reform, and it encourages all partners in the Games, and all companies doing business with China, to speak out about China's human rights abuses," said the resolution, part of a global campaign by WAN to draw attention to Chinese press abuses and help free jailed journalists in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

By all accounts, the Beijing Games are shaping up to be a showcase for China. But these events should not be allowed to take place without active opposition by participants -- the IOC, athletes, sponsors, media partners and others -- to the repressive conditions that surround the Games. Turning a blind eye to these violations of human rights would be a scandal.

HRIC is calling on concerned members of the public to take action on Shi Tao's case by writing blog posts and letters to Chinese authorities making the following points:

• Calling for the immediate and unconditional release of Shi Tao and others imprisoned for exercising their right to freedom of expression;
• Urging ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), guaranteeing the right to freedom of expression;
• Calling for the implementation and fulfillment of the right to freedom of expression, including by installing greater protections for members of the press; and
• Urging the provision of immediate and appropriate medical treatment for Shi Tao's deteriorating health; and treatment of Shi and all other prisoners in a manner consistent with the People's Republic of China (PRC) Prison Law and numerous international standards.

Last month I gave an presentation titled "Shi Tao, Yahoo!, and the lessons for corporate social responsibility" at the International Conference on Information Technology and Social Responsibility held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The presentation is based on a long paper - which is actually a modified draft book chapter. A revised version of it can be downloaded here (PDF 523.4K).

The paper attempts to document somewhat definitively all the main developments and issues surrounding the Shi Tao case, Yahoo!'s role in it, the impact that the case has had on the global debate over corporate social responsibility, and explores questions about where we go from here. It's still very much a draft, so I welcome comments, corrections, and criticisms.

My main argument is that the Shi Tao case highlights the complex challenges of corporate social responsibility for Internet and telecommunications companies: They are caught between demands of governments on one hand and rights of users on the other – not only in authoritarian countries such as China but in virtually all countries around the world. While Yahoo! may have been legally "off the hook" as far as Chinese and perhaps even U.S. law was concerned, it is not off the hook in the court of global public opinion. Moral imperatives aside, the Shi Tao case proves that Internet and telecoms companies seeking to establish trustworthy reputations across a global customer base cannot afford to ignore the human rights implications of their business practices. Customers and investors need to leverage this reality and demand that user rights be respected.  I conclude that if we cannot count on the private sector to respect user rights, the need to develop non-commercial, grassroots alternatives will become all the more critical.

Here's the powerpoint of the short presentation I gave about the paper:

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"Nailhouse blogger" detained & interrogated, web crackdown on "ant farmer" story continues...

Zhou Shuguang, aka "Zola," reports that he is home safe in Changsha after being detained in Shenyang, interrogated, made to write detailed reports on everybody he met and everything since arriving in Shenyang to blog about the Yilishen "ant-farmer" protests, had his ID and money confiscated (correction: the ID was retunred), punched around the head and neck a little when he objected to being forced to return by air (and pay for his own ticket) rather than travel by train, and then escorted by two state security police on the plane back to Changsha. He has been told not to go far, that they hope he will focus on his vegetable-selling business, and to report to the local police if he needs to go anywhere. 

Also known as the "nailhouse blogger," Zhou has been celebrated in the media and around the blogosphere since he led the effort by bloggers to cover the story of a couple resisting eviction by real-estate developers in Chongqing despite government efforts to stop media coverage of the issue.  Since then he has come under fire for accepting money to blog about other people's eviction problems, among other things. He has also blogged from the anti-chemical plant demonstrations in Xiamen last March and even from the July 1st pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong.  At the Chinese Blogger Conference last month in Beijing, he declared his intention to stop blogging and return to his home in Changsha, and to his old job as a vegetable-seller. But its hard to stop once you get the blogging bug. As the Shenyang ant-farmer protests began to heat up in late November, and as a media blackout quickly followed, his fans urged him to go investigate what was going on up there. So he bought himself a hard seat train ticket to Shenyang and arranged to meet up with a local blogger on the other end.

Zhou arrived in Shenyang last Friday November 30th, and managed to publish two blog posts (here and here) before he was detained on December 3rd. Upon returning home he sent a message out on Twitter that he was ok, but that Twitter account appears to have been taken down. Zhou wrote an extremely detailed blog post about his entire trip and detention/interrogation experience. I hope somebody will translate it in full. In addition to going through his computer, cellphone, and other equipment and getting a full record of everybody he had been communicating with, security agents wanted to know his motivations for going to Shenyang to blog about a sensitive issue. Zhou said he had two motives: curiosity about a sensitive topic in the news, and desire to sell advertising. The cops also wanted an explanation about a blog post Zhou wrote at the beginning of the year titled "Against the communist party, against one-party dictatorship."  (Zhou's blog is hosted outside of China, because his original blog hosted inside of China was subject to censorship.)  The security agents in Shenyang kept him up all night - with a few short nap breaks - questioning him and making him write his reports and confessions. He describes in great detail what they gave him to eat and when.

Reading Zhou's detailed account, it's interesting to note what was negotiable and what wasn't as far as the security agents were concerned. They asked him to take down the two blog posts he had published while in Shenyang. He refused - insisting that they had to show him written proof of what laws the posts had violated. They were unable to give him such a document and eventually gave up insisting. As of this writing, those two blog posts still stand. Things got rough at the very end, however, when they said they were going to make him use all his remaining money to pay for his airplane ticket home to Changsha. He protested vigorously, insisting that he could only afford the train. At that point, he describes being punched in the neck a couple of times, and says he removed his glasses for fear they would be broken. He writes that at that point he remembered the case of Sun Zhigang - a young man who was arrested in Guangzhou for not carrying required ID, taken by police to a "custody and repatriation" center where migrants are detained, and ended up dead three days later - and decided not to argue any more.

Zhou's experience is likely to put a damper on the impulses of other Chinese bloggers who may feel inspired to engage in "citizen reporting" on sensitive subjects that the media has been told not to cover.  It comes, of course, in the midst of a crackdown on independent publications.

Censorship of Chinese blog-hosting services continues to tighten. Late last week the Chinese-language meta-blog Memedia got blocked. Authors think it's because of this post which includes a paragraph about the Yilishen ant farm protests. So last weekend I copied that paragraph and re-posted it on a bunch of different Chinese blog-hosting services. All the services run by domestic Chinese Web2.0 companies censored it in one way or another. Below are two examples.

When I copied the Memedia paragraph about Yilishen into a Tianya blog, it would not allow me to post, giving me an error message that said: "Your post contains sensitive words, please check it." (Click image at right to enlarge.)

One of the other services I tested was Sohu. (Click image at left to enlarge.) I was initially able to post the paragraph, but after about an hour, it disappeared from public view. Then when I went into the admin area to check whether it was still there, I found the post had been locked with an error message that begins: "Dear Sohu blogger-friend: Hello! We are very sorry to notify you that for certain reasons this blog post of yours is not suitable for open publication and has been locked." Then an explanation that you can still see your original text and pictures by logging in at the back end, and if you have further questions you can contact customer service at the following humber or email, etc.

Only one blog hosting service run by a Chinese company did not censor the post - either immediately or within a few hours. (I am not going to say who they are lest I bring trouble upon them, but they know who they are and they deserve a pat on the back.) None of the foreign-branded blog-hosting services targeted at Chinese users that I tested censored it however. That includes Windows Live, Yahoo China, Tom and MySpace China. It's important to note that Tianya, which censored in the fashion shown above, receives major investment from Google. I will need to do a lot more testing on a wide range of content before making sweeping conclusions about which blog-hosting services enable their Chinese users to speak most freely, and which services are most restrictive. But my initial impression from this test and from other experiments is that in general (with the exception possibly of one Chinese company) the foreign-branded services enable greater lattitude than their Chinese competitors. Will this result in more users migrating to the foreign-branded services? Enough to put pressure on Chinese domestic services to censor less? Hard to know yet. It may also be that politically-minded bloggers are not numerous enough to be commercially significant.

On the search-engine censorshp front, the Chinese word for "Yilishen" is definitely on the banned word list. Here's a search on Baidu (click image at right to enlarge):

...and on Google.cn (click image at left to enlarge).

...and finally, on Chinese Yahoo! (click to enlarge).