RConversation

Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship

This is the opposite of a live blog post, despite the fact that I was listed as a live-blogger at last week's Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay (near San Francisco). I am now at the iSummit in Sapporo, which I will write about soon.  For some more timely reporting about what got said in Half Moon Bay last week, try here, here, here, here, and here.

Anyway. Since I don't live in Silicon Valley and don't visit it very often, attending the Fortune Brainstorm was a useful reminder of How "The Valley" views "The Rest of the World." It was pretty clear that the CEO's, tech entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists whose lives and businesses revolve around Silicon Valley really do view the world in two parts: The Valley and Everybody Else - with the latter in concentric layers of tech-unsavvyness, remoteness, non-English-speaking-ness and primitiveness. There was even a session titled "What the Rest of the World Wants." As if you can generalize about "The Rest of the World" beyond the implied Valley+the U.S.+some more advanced parts of Europe, vaguely defined.  (Wish I was talented enough to draw one of those New Yorker-style cartoon maps...maybe Gapingvoid can help us out here?)

As author Rebecca Fannin pointed out on the Huffington Post, even China was barely mentioned: "Why was China ignored in the panel discussions? First, it's far away. Second, and more importantly, Silicon Valley is in a state of denial."  She thinks that the Silicon Valley patrons of the Fortune Brainstorm are failing to take China seriously, and that this denial will cause them to be "blindsided" by a "truly disruptive force."

Denial? Probably. Hubris? Definitely.

I was struck by the assumption permeating many discussions at Half Moon Bay: that communications technology (mainly, the internet and mobile devices) combined with capitalism will inevitably make everybody in the world more free. Just by virtue of being deployed as broadly as possible. Thus, as these people continue to make millions, they are also saving the world. Which makes them all feel terribly good about themselves.

Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of people at the conference with strong and admirable sense of social responsibility. A new and very worthy Prize for Technology and Development was announced for entrepreneurs whose businesses do good things for poor and/or un-free people in The Rest of The World. I attended a very stimulating session on governance run by Daniel Kauffman of the World Bank and Ross Mayfield of Social Text - both great guys doing excellent work and thinking. In that session, while much general enthusiasm was expressed about the ability of mobile phones and twitter to make people more free and politics more transparent,  we also managed to have a brief discussion about technology and corporate social responsibility, and the issues of corporate involvement with government control and manipulation of populations.

But in several sessions, when I raised my hand to push back on blanket statements made by many people about technology and capitalism being inevitable forces of good, and to insist that whether technology or capitalism make people more or less free depends on specifically how they are deployed, by and with whom, and how transparently and openly that deployment happens, my comments were met by many attendees with rolled eyes and looks of annoyance.

It was thus a relief when Joi Ito and Larry Lessig had a chance to poke holes in the thick layer of self-congratulation. Lessig predicted that the U.S. government will eventually find an excuse (perhaps after some kind of "i-9/11" attack) to clamp down on Internet freedoms in the United States - with the implication that law-abiding U.S. Internet and telecoms companies will have little choice but to go along with it (nor can we be very optimistic that Congress will let us sue these companies for helping the executive branch infringe on our constitutional rights). Joi warned that not all kinds of capitalism lead to greater freedom or spread wealth and opportunities to everybody. "The capitalists aren't really that helpful, generally," he said. It depends on the business model deployed which really depends on the social intentions of the people running the business, and how much they care about long-term social and political repercussions. "We're forgetting that we had to fight to create an open Internet." Venture capitalists, he said, "assume that the Internet just works... that's very irresponsible," and they're not thinking about how specific business decisions impact overall levels of freedom, openness, and inclusion. "We have to do more than just run around chasing deals." (Watch a video of Joi's remarks shot by Tom Foremski at the bottom of this post.)

Which brings me to another conference held in London earlier this month which I didn't attend, OpenTech, and the keynote given by the EFF's Danny O'Brien, along with his companion series of blog posts. The talk is titled Living on the Edge. Here is the blurb summary he posted for it:

Living on the Edge (of the Network) When you want to make a private picture or note available only to your friends, why do you hand it over to a multi-national corporation first? What use is a mobile phone running Apache? Does IPv6 really exist? Can we be ecologically-sound and still run our terabyte home servers? Please? These, and other whining rhetorical questions answered by Danny O'Brien, ORG founder and EFF activist.

His point is that we have come to depend way too heavily on a small number of Internet and telecoms companies to conduct the most private and intimate details of our professional and personal lives. As long as those companies have values aligned with our own and are run by people we think have integrity, we don't see a huge problem. But what if the values cease to be aligned or political circumstances change? See the video embedded at the bottom of this post. Also see the PDF and Open Office presentation file.  In one of his companion blog posts he writes:

If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we've come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC3 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.

..and in another titled "Independence day" he continues:

There's also a pressing civil liberty reason to start leaning back towards holding your data close to your chest. Data held by a third-party in the United States just isn't safe. Terms and conditions deny you any recourse for leaked or lost data; courts and Congress both deny citizens the protections of the Fourth Amendment for *any* data that you share with others. That even means data you expect to keep private, or have no way of keeping to yourself (the key case here is United States v. Miller, where the court decided that you have no expectation of privacy in your bank records, because you *shared them with your bank*!) So here's the question: how much of our life that we share with the Web 2.0 giants do we really *need* to share? How much of these services can and should we be running from the comfort of our own homes?

...and finally:

It’s like if I was to concede that a benevolent dictatorship is a far more effective model for a political system than a liberal democracy. The problems you hit in that context is when the dictatorship slides from benevolence (or effectiveness), or you need a new dictator in a hurry. I love having Steve Jobs at Apple: I just can’t quite believe the odds that the next Steve Jobs will be at Apple too, and the one after that. I want to move my data seamlessly where the best ideas and implementation move.

The guys running Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies represented at the Fortune Brainstorm are the benevolent dictators of the global information and communications system. But can we assume they will always be benevolent? What happens when they roll out services in not-so-benevolent authoritarian regimes? We need to push our service providers to be honest, transparent and not screw us over, which is why I've been involved for the past two years in developing a corporate code of conduct for free speech and privacy (which is likely to go public sometime this Fall). But that's not enough. Power over our communications and identities is much too concentrated in the hands of people who are more accountable to v.c.'s and shareholders wanting profits than to users who want their rights and interests protected. We need to have more choices - which should include plenty of non-proprietary, grassroots, open alternatives. At the iSummit here in Sapporo, many conversations are taking place about how to build a global community devoted to incubating, nurturing and supporting services, tools, and platforms - things that will help ensure that the global information and communications environment really does continue to evolve in a freer, more democratic direction.

Videos:

On the Media interview: corporate responsibility and the Internet

An interview with me, talking about the role of multinational companies in Chinese Internet censorship, followed by a great exchange with Danwei.org's Jeremy Goldkorn, aired on On The Media last Friday. I was traveling and so I've only just listened to it. It's online here:

You can read the transcript here, I won't cut-and-paste the whole thing. Everything I say there, I've written on this blog somewhere before. But it was a good opportunity to sum things up succintly. (Also note: my collgeagues Qian Gang and David Bandurski said brilliant things in a previous OTM show here and here.)

Somebody called "super88" left this comment:

"American companies make the calculation..." Goes beyond that -- the very idea of firewalls, filters, tracking, and most other ways of technologically restricting or monitoring the Internet were peddled and still are from the Free World to the, er, less free (no offense, China!)!

China's governmental wants and needs are absolute market makers for Seimens, MSFT, Google, ATT -- and zillions of niche firms, many in Cali. And also a big thanks to Stanford, CalTech, MIT, the Fulbright Committee and the other institutions hived around China's best and brightest, some of whom are now experts in not expanding but killing free thought and discussion.

We can't blame the companies -- dollars are neither clean or dirty once spent again -- but I point this out to remind us that we cannot either rely on them to "do the right thing," or "do no evil" without making our own voices heard, via our representatives, our letters and/or our dollars.

That is absolutely true. If users act like they don't care very much, companies will tend to assume there's nothing wrong. Not just in China, but anywhere they operate. As I pointed out in the interview, this is a global problem.

Companies are pushed not only by governments, but also by other powerful corporate interests that are trying to impose their interests, unreasonably, on others. We've got both in the United States. Just read how a Judge threw YouTube users to the wolves, deciding that protecting Viacom's intellecual property is more important than users' reasonable expectation of privacy and free speech. Nor can Americans count on our elected representatives to protect us from illegal government snooping unless we yell a lot louder than we have done until now.

We can craft all kinds of global corporate codes of conduct, but unless users get more vocal and educate themselves better about how Internet and telecom services use their personal data and manipulate information at government behest, it will be hard to prevent a global race to the bottom.

 

Rising Voices: toward a more inclusive global conversation

(Photo courtesy Patrick Philippe Meier)

The public part of the Global Voices Summit is over, and the blog posts about it are piling up around the web. But the meeting continues for GV project participants, website contributors, editors, and others who are actively involved with our growing citizen media community. We're nearing Day 1 of two days of internal planning and brainstorming meetings in which we try to figure out where to take the project in the future. Ethan has a great post about the techniques David Sasaki, Georgia Popplewell and Solana Larsen have devised to unearth ideas and foster discussion amongst this multi-cultural, multi-lingual group.

I was almost brought to tears yesterday during the first panel, devoted to work by members of the Rising Voices project. Led by David Sasaki, Rising Voices is funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. It gives micro-grants to promote blogging among groups of people who are - for various reasons, cultural, economic, linguistic, gender - not taking advantage of the opportunity to express themselves online. After Global Voices was created, there has always been concern by many people in our community that blogospheres in most countries are dominated by wired elites - and that unless we conduct more active outreach, Global Voices is really "Global Elite Voices."  Rising voices it our first stab at addressing that problem. Ethan writes that he is "blown away" by the work being done by Rising Voices grantees. Click here for summaries of all the projects and here to watch videos of all the projects. Also see the RV Introduction to Global Citizen Media. But before you click on any of those links, watch this video:

 

"Authoritarian Deliberation" on the Chinese Internet

Earlier today in Beijing, Chinese President Hu Jintao did a webcast with staff of "Strong China Forum," an online forum run by the People's Daily Online. See the English transcript here and the Chinese here.

More than 300 questions for President Hu were posted in advance by forum members. He only answered two softballs.  One thread on Tianya reflects some people's dismay that the whole thing was "over as soon as it started."  There has been some web chatter saying that not many people were able to get into that chatroom. The questions at Strong China Forum are supposed to be here, but so far I've been unable to access the page from my internet connection in London, even when I use a Chinese proxy.  Fortunately the folks at China Digital Times got on, and provided this summary:

"Some complained, “Old Hu, lots of government money has been wasted by officials on feasts. Why don’t you stop it?” ” Why haven’t our salaries been increased while the prices of everything else are skyrocketing? “; “The stock market and housing market are collapsing. It is hard to find a job…”"

Some asked about policy and political issues, including some tricky ones: “What do you think of Taiwan’s democratization?” ; “How would you deal with wrong but well-intentioned opinions on the Internet?”

Despite the whole thing being gimmicky and generally content-free, I found the final part of Hu's webcast interesting:

Hu Jintao: We pay great attention to suggestions and advice from our netizens. We stress the idea of "putting people first" and "governing for the people." With this in mind, we need to listen to people's voices extensively and pool the people's wisdom when we take actions and make decisions. The web is an important channel for us to understand the concerns of the public and assemble the wisdom of the public.

Forum: Thanks you, Mr. General-Secretary. Dear friends, General-Secretary Hu Jintao's communication must conclude now as he has other things to do.

Hu Jintao: It is a pity that I cannot communicate more with the netizens today due to the time constraint. However, I will read and think carefully the comments and questions posted for me by our netizens.

As the BBC put it: "Mr Hu's appearance on a chat forum suggests that the party at least knows the importance of listening to the public." (UPDATE: More from Danwei.org here.)

As it happens, I just finished reading a book by Zheng Yongnian of Nottingham University titled Technological Empowerment: The Internet, State, and Society in China. It's an academic book which means that it costs an outrageous US$50 and is also dry and not written in a particularly entertaining style. But for anybody trying to make sense of how the Internet is changing Chinese politics and society, it's well worth a read if you can afford it or get somebody else (your institution's library or your company) to pay for it. 

Zheng argues that while China is making no meaningful progress toward democratization, the Internet is nonetheless causing "political liberalization." The Internet in China, he believes, is enabling greater public deliberation about policy (within limits to be sure) as well as forcing the leadership to be more responsive to public opinion - or at least that segment of public opinion that is able to appear on the part of the Internet that you can access in China, which despite its limitations still gives Chinese citizens a conduit of expression that was not available before. Zheng points to several cases where public reaction to and discussion of information posted online led to policy changes: outrage over Sun Zhigang's death in detention led to abolition of the "Custody and Repatriation" system; outrage over the detention of outspoken rural business tycoon Sun Dawu created pressure on provincial governments and the central government  to change policy practices that discriminate against the private sector. During the SARS outbreak, information, concerns (and wild rumors) posted on the Internet and sent through mobile SMS eventually broke down government attempts at tight information control. He also points to wildly unsuccessful cases: use of the Internet by the outlawed FLG and the opposition China Democracy Party to criticize the regime and call for an end to one-party rule by the CCP. What's the difference?

Zheng says that the difference between success and failure comes down to an online movement's strategy and objectives. The most spectacularly unsuccessful online movements (and the ones leading to the most brutal crackdowns both online and off) tend to advocate what he calls the "exit" option - i.e. that the Chinese people should exit one-party CCP rule, or that a particular group or territory might have the right to do so. The Chinese bureaucracy and leadership contains reformists and conservatives. However "when the regime is threatened by challengers, the soft-liners and hard-liners are likely to stand on the same side and fight the challengers."  Successful online movements in China tend to use what he calls the "voice" option, or what other political scientists call the "cooperation option." The key to a successful effort to change government policy in China is to find a way to give reformist leaders and bureaucrats at all levels of government the ammunition they need to win out in arguments and power-struggles with their hard-line conservative colleagues. Reformists can point to what's being said in the chatrooms and blogs and in the edgier newspapers and argue that without change, there will be more unrest and public unhappiness - thus change is required to save the regime. Zheng writes: "the voice does not aim to undermine or overthrow the state. Instead, through a voice mechanism, the state can receive feedback from social groups to respond to state decline and improve its legitimacy." 

In a similar vein, at the Chinese Internet Research Conference last week Jiang Min, an Assistant Professor at UNC-Charlotte, presented a paper titled Authoritarian Deliberation: Public Deliberation in China. Her argument centers around the idea - oft overlooked by Western punditry - that it's possible to have substantial amount of public deliberation about policy within an authoritarian state. Different authoritarian states have different levels of deliberation, and it's no substitute for the "democratic deliberation" in democratic countries when it comes to the ability of the governed to influence their government. Thus political deliberation needs to be divided into two categories: democratic and authoritarian.  Within the "authoritarian" category, China is seeing growing amounts of deliberation taking place thanks to the Internet. Click here for a live-blogged summary of that session.

Immediately following her presentation came talks by Xiao Qiang of China Digital Times and Ashley Esreay of Harvard's Fairbank Center and Middlebury. (Click here for the blog summary.) Xiao (whose paper will be made available on the circ.asia website in the coming week) described numerous examples of how the Internet is enabling the powerless to challenge the powerful. Esreay, in his paper titled Political Discourse on Chinese Blogs presented the findings of his empirical research. (See the WSJ writeup of his presentation here.) He compared content on blogs and newspapers discussing news events in 2006 and found that 61% percent of blog posts analyzed contained "some form of criticism", compared to 19% of all newspaper articles analyzed. 36% percent of blog posts contained "pluralism" or discussion of more than one point of view, while only 5% of newspaper articles did. Thus he was able to empirically confirm the unscientific impression of most people who follow the Chinese Internet: "Compared to the content of mainstream, traditional media, blogs are much more likely to contain opposing perspectives and criticism of the state."  I found his findings about blogs as economic watchdogs particularly interesting: "Another important finding was that bloggers criticize corporations five times more frequently than journalists, whose role in democratic societies has been to protect the interests of the public from transgression."

Here's a breakdown of the kinds of criticism found in the Chinese blog posts (click to enlarge):

...Which brings me to Roland Soong's presentation on Day 1, A Psychographic Segment of Chinese Bloggers. Using survey data about Chinese Internet users collected by the media research company he works for, Roland "created a 3-segment solution based upon 32 psychographic statements about personality, motivation, society, culture, technology and so on by the K-means algorithm" Here is how Roland describes three different kinds of people now coexisting in the Chinese blogosphere:

Segment 1: Not interested in latest technology; not interested in latest fashion; not interested in other people's opinions; don't want to told what to do ... Who do they sound like?  Fenqing (angry young people)?

Segment 2: Easily swayed by other people; want to be told what to do; first to buy latest technology; follow western lifestyle; lesser respect for tradition ... Who do they sound like?  These are groupies who follow whatever is au courant as reported on the Internet.

Segment 3: Interested in a lifestyle filled with challenges, novelties and changes; more interested in spending time meaningfully than just making money; ready to pay extra for environment-friendly products; appreciate companies which support public causes; willing to volunteer personal time for good causes ...

The data was collected before the Sichuan Earthquake, but in his talk, Roland suggests that it is this third group who came into their own and made their presence felt in the aftermath of the earthquake. Deborah Fallows suggested that the earthquake may have been a "break through" moment for the way in which people use the Internet, as 9/11 was for people in the U.S.

In his Sunday afternoon talk, Isaac Mao repeated his core view that the Chinese people need free-thinking before they can have free speech.  He also believes that the Internet is facilitating the evolution of an increasingly sophisticated "social brain", which he believes "will be the key in the future of this country." 

USC graduate student Peter Marolt, in his PhD dissertation, is attempting to create a new conceptual framework to help us understand what is going on in China. He is working to map how "spaces of dissent" come into being, and what is the linkage between deliberation and action.

...Which brings me back to  the beginning of my last post and Lokman Tsui's argument: that cold-war paradigms, based on the information environment and state-society relations in the countries that once comprised the Soviet Block, are not only hindering the outside world's understanding of China but are contributing to misguided policies.  This is not to say one shouldn't support efforts by many people in China to obtain greater freedom of speech and the right to choose their leaders. Of course we should.  The point is, strategies and approaches should be grounded in actual facts rather than over-simplified, romantic cold-war notions, or these efforts will not only fail but will also be rejected and denounced by the people you're ostensibly trying to help.

Next week at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest, we'll be spending the first day talking about how free speech advocacy can be improved and upgraded for the Internet age. I hope we'll be addressing some tough questions about what works - and what no longer works so well - when it comes to the strategies and tactics of today's human rights organizations and movements. What can the Chinese people do to convince Hu Jintao to pay attention to their concerns? Is there anything that well-meaning outsiders who care about China can constructively do to facilitate that process (or at least not hinder it) and if so what is it?

Help China's quake victims!

I just donated US$500 to help Chinese earthquake victims. I plan to give more if you also help out.

I've got a bunch of information sources going simultaneously: I switch between the BBC and CNN International, I watch my Google Reader aggregator to see what all my subscribed news sites are reporting and what the bloggers I know In China are saying. QQ is aggregating citizen video reports from the quake zone. The Global Voices China team have been linking to a lot of blogs inside and outside of China who are aggregating quake information. And I've also been keeping an eye on Twitter. There is an extremely active community of people on Twitter trading links in Chinese and English from blogs, mainstream media, official sources, secondhand information from friends and colleagues, first-hand eyewitness experiences etc. etc. Quite a number of journalists seem to be lurking there and using Twitter to find English-speaking eyewitness sources who live in Sichuan. I agree with Kaiser Kuo, Twitter doesn't replace the excellent journalism being done by Chinese journalists, citizens, and international reporters who are on the scene in Sichuan; but it is providing a valuable platform for rapid group discussion and information-trading on the quake - amplified by uber-blogger-twitterers like Robert Scoble. If the Olympic torch protests divided East and West, this disaster is bringing people together again.

Meanwhile, for serious China-wonks out there here's an interesting factoid: Wang Zhenyao, who currently heads disaster relief for China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, used to be in charge of village elections in the Chinese countryside during the 1990s. (See this Washington Post article from 10 years ago: "A Quiet Bureaucrat, Promoting The Vote One Village at a Time")

(And yes.. I'm back online... still recovering from something called an abdominal myomectomy: a pretty major operation to remove a bunch of tumors that had caused so much blood loss and anemia that by late March I was not very functional. I'm still pretty weak, have dizzy/nauseous spells, and get completely exhausted after walking for an hour and can't lift anything heavy, and my doctor wants me to take a full 6 weeks off from work, but I've started working from home and will probably make forays into the office soon.)

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.)

Anti-CNN and the Tibet information war

Today for some unknown length of time, CNN.com was running a "quickvote" poll asking readers to vote "yes" or "no" to the question: "Should the Olympics in China be boycotted?" CNN.com is not my regular source of global news, and when I do read it I check their RSS feed not the website, so I found out about their online poll from this post on the Chinese tech site DoNews, which reposted an item from the blog dengjin.com. The blogger instructs readers how to vote "no" and urges them to do so in large numbers:

The blog post was published some point today, and DoNews republished it at around 5pm Beijing/Hong Kong time. I checked the CNN.com website at 10:30pm Hong Kong time and found they've replaced that poll with this thing:

OK... right. [UPDATE 9am Weds HKT: somebody has accused me of implying that the poll was hacked. That's not what I meant. The point is that CNN.com replaced the poll quickly after Chinese netizens started all voting "no" in big numbers...or perhaps somebody complained.]

It's well known by now that Chinese cyberspace for the past several days has been seething with anger against CNN and most Western media for what many Chinese netizens feel is blatant anti-China bias. If you haven't seen the anti-CNN website check it out. (The Washington post interviewed the site's founder here.)

The anger against CNN started after Chinese netizens discovered that CNN.com had cropped out a group of Tibetan rioters, who appear to be beating somebody up, from the original AFP/Getty Images photo. On the left is the cropped photo, on the right is the original image that Chinese netizens located on the internet:

As Roland Soong points out, CNN.com has quietly gone and replaced the photo in the original story with a new version that includes the mob violence in the background. But of course the old version still lives in the Google cache.  He writes: "This is a self-inflicted wound.  If CNN believed that it was right in the first place, then it should have stuck to that position.  Instead, it surrendered quietly.  Not only did this not appease the Chinese netizens, it only made it worse." Roland also links to this forum thread discussing the whole thing, in which one netizen announces that the new "hip phrase" of 2008 is: "做人不能太CNN a person should not be too CNN."  As Roland puts it: "This means that a person should not be too shameless and oblivious to the truth." Roland also quotes from an Associated Press article which reports:

CNN's bureau in Beijing has been deluged in recent days by a barrage of harassing phone calls and faxes that accuse the organization of unfair coverage. An e-mail to United Nations-based reporters purportedly from China's U.N. mission sent an Internet link to a 15-minute state television program showing Tibetans attacking Chinese in Lhasa.

A slideshow posted on YouTube accused CNN, Germany's Der Spiegel and other media of cropping pictures to show Chinese military while screening out Tibetan rioters, or putting pictures of Indian and Nepalese police wrestling Tibetan protesters with captions about China's crackdown.

Though of uncertain origin, the piece at least had official blessing, with excerpts appearing on the official English-language China Daily and on state TV.

Many of the examples of Western media anti-China bias posted at anti-cnn.com hone in on a series of agency photos that ran in various Western news outlets which were mislabeled as Chinese police arresting Tibetan protesters, when they are actually Nepalese or Indian police arresting exiled Tibetan protesters. Roland has been tirelessly documenting the conversation about the Tibet riots taking place on the Chinese Internet. He points out that RTL news in Germany has apologized for mis-reporting Nepali police violence as Chinese police violence, and that German station NTV is reviewing its coverage after similar mistakes appeared in their broadcasts. Also be sure to read Roland's post When Helping Becomes Hurting to see how Western protests are playing not only in China but amongst many Chinese around the world, who have unfettered access to Western media from outside the "Great Firewall."

Meanwhile with videos such as "Riot in Tibet: True face of Western media" and "Tibet Was, Is and Always Will be a Part of China" getting over 700 thousand and a million views, respectively, at the time of this writing, YouTube has been unblocked in China, though as the Shanghaiist points out access can be shaky at times. The BBC English-language website is also generally unblocked.

Perhaps the Chinese government is feeling a little less worried lately about losing public support? Perhaps they are less worried that people will turn against the Communist Party after reading something in the Western media, now that it is no longer fashionable in many circles to believe what the Western media reports?

It is also worth pointing out that alternative views - though not as loud - do exist in Chinese cyberspace. Lian Yue wrote the other day that the only way to prevent more violence is to allow the press to freely report in Tibet. Memedia also points out that some Chinese netizens have been spreading some fake news themselves - such as this blog post claiming that there was recently a Tibetan terrorist bombing in Chengdu, but using victim photos from a 2005 incident in Fuzhou. The Memedia editors observe that the Tibet issue has become like the South China Photographs incident: "An issue that originally is seen through simple logic, but through the course of debating it people start considering much deeper questions."

Hopefully most of China's netizens will draw the obvious conclusion: that in the end you shouldn't trust any information source - Western or Chinese, professional or amateur, digital or analog - until and unless they have earned your trust.

Addendum: Somebody e-mailed me this report from the Toronto Star containing chilling eyewitness accounts from Canadian tourists who were in Lhasa for the worst of the violence.

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.

The latest viral video iteration: No You Can't

(Hat tip Micah Sifry)

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.