RConversation

China and the Internet: change goes both ways

Latest censorship news: Wikipedia has confirmed reports from bloggers and others that the online peer-produced encyclopedia has been blocked in China.  At the same time, as Tom Friedman reports in the NYTimes Select (I won't provide a useless pay-only link) podcasting is taking off like crazy in China.  Censorship and information crackdowns on one hand, proliferation of user-generated online content in China at the same time. What gives?

I've been thinking and writing quite a lot over the past few months about such contradictions, and China's impact on the internet more generally.  Today I gave a talk at Pop!Tech in Camden Maine about how China may change the internet as much as the internet will change China - and how these changes help explain seemingly contradictory trends.

My notes for the talk are here (not a transcript of what was actually said in the live talk), and the Powerpoint slides are here (large ppt file). The audio will eventually be available here.

Thanks to Ethan Zuckerman, Dina Metha among others for blogging the talk. In 25 minutes I tried to explain the paradox of the internet in China today: On one hand, the internet has been a tremendously empowering and liberating force for many Chinese - economically and culturally. On the other hand, a business and regulatroy model is emerging that enables censorship to work in a way that is actually tolerable for most Chinese internet users (except for political dissidents who are - to put it mildly - out of luck). As a result, China's extensive system of censorship and internet controls doesn't hold businesses back when it comes to innovating and making money from products and services that enable users to create media (blogs, posdcasts, etc.). We are also looking at a future in which soft censorship will be "baked" into a new generation of software and online services coming out of China. And these products and services will prove very attractive not just for the Chinese government but for many other governments - including some that call themselves democratic.

Taishi Village and The Guardian's big error: Western media discredited in China

A number of people have reacted to my last post, in which I expressed concern that the furore over The Guardian's colossal journalistic mistake in reporting the fate of activist Lu Banglie will overshadow the core issue of Taishi village and the villagers' struggle for democracy there. ESWN insists that the Guardian's error is important. He writes:

The Taishi village affair did not begin on the day when Benjamin Joffe-Walt walked in.  There was a small and dedicated group outside mainland China following the case.  Trust me when I say that I know who my allies are and who the vultures looking for a dead body are. Google and Technorati remember who they are.  Even if most of the world didn't care, we thought that it was important enough to track the developments and try to tell the story.  All the time, we asked what, if anything, can we do for the villagers? ...

After giving some examples, he concludes:

Throughout all this, we all recognize the tristesse. Freedom of press does not exist in China today, so a full story of Taishi village will not be told in the Chinese media.  It is up to the international media to reveal the truth of the matter through their privileged status and that may make a real difference.  Yet, there was very little about Taishi village that appeared in the western media until the moment came when the myth of the power of the western media to speak the truth was ruined in the case of Benjamin Joffe-Walt and The Guardian.  None of us want to see that happen.  We want to return to that status quo and all that is required is a very simple mea culpa from The Guardian.

The Guardian has now added a correction to its original erroneous story which described the grotesque beating-to-a-lifeless pulp of activist Lu Banglie - who then appeared in one piece giving interviews the next day.

UPDATE: (Sunday PM EST) The Guardian now has a full editorial by readers' editor Ian Mayes describing the 25-year old journalist's state of post-traumatic stress and its result: "Joffe-Walt had lost touch with reality."

But ESWN's post highlights some serious issues. It's true, that in the eyes of many Chinese bloggers - and ones like Michael Anti who are quite critical of their own system to begin with - The Guardian has managed to badly damage the Western media's reputation in China. ESWN translates part of Anti's criticism:

When Benjamin Joffe-Walt reported about happened to Lu Banglie, our immediate reaction was to believe him because we have believe in foreign media all along. We even started to prepare to donate money, voice support, sign petitions and make protests. But suddenly we were told that this was just a fantasy of Benjamin Joffe-Walt. You must realized what a major shift it is for us. Even though this does not destroy all of the trust by the civilian sector, it is for sure that the next time that The Guardian or any other foreign media reports on an exclusive about an incident, we cannot be naturally trusting.

Another vein of criticism - also sparked by Anti - about the way Western journalists sometimes bring trouble upon their Chinese sources and allies (as Joffe-Walt is criticized for taking Lu into danger) has even led to some public soul-searching by journalists, including this piece by Newsweek's Melinda Liu. 

But I want to return to the point ESWN makes. He's absolutely right: for most consumers of mainstream media in the West, the Taishi story didn't exist until Lu was believed to have been beaten to death. If you do a search on "taishi" in Google News and Yahoo News you will find this to be true. And even so, most of the reporting in English is in Asia-based or Asia-oriented media, and lot of those stories focused on the beating of journalists... not the core issues at stake in Taishi, or why the villagers' foiled attempts to recall corrupt officials through democratic elections had become such a cause celebre on the internet in China.

Now I'm going to say something awful but which I think is true: If Lu had in fact been killed last week as Joffe initially implied with his reporting, the story of Taishi and the story of village democracy movements in China would be all over the Western press. But since he's not dead, they've moved on quickly - if they covered it at all. This is what I have always disliked most about my profession: often the best way for a "cause" to get media attention does not equal the best outcome for the actual human beings involved with that cause.  If it bleeds it leads. If it's not bleeding, and if the story is multi-faceted, complicated, and doesn't fit editors' neat good vs. evil paradigms, it's terribly difficult to get editors to care - and thus enable the public to be informed.

So when it comes to the Taishi information situation, we have the following picture: the Chinese media hasn't been allowed to report on the details of the fight over the Taishi village elections. Chinese internet bulletin boards disscussing the issue have been forced to shut down. Chinese blogs are angry about how the Western media has let them down, and the Chinese foreign ministry is making statements about how foriegn reporters have been going around flaunting the law (which I know from experience is impossible not to flaunt if you're actually going to succeed in covering any news and not turn yourself into a People's Daily clone). But the foreign mainstream media hasn't been following the story in any real detail either. The only people following it closely and fully outside of China have been HKInMedia, a Hong Kong Chinese-language independent media website, and when it comes to English coverage, no other source beats the Hong Kong-based media researcher-turned-blogger, Roland Soong of ESWN. As my colleague Ethan Zuckerman pointed out the other day:

Roland’s been doing exactly what skilled journalists could be doing with the Taishi story - collecting accounts online, via email and from media sources, translating from Chinese to English, and organizing them into coherent narratives, like this hugely useful timeline.

While I’m not generally a blog triumphalist - I believe there are stories that mainstream media can cover that bloggers cannot, and that bloggers usually follow, rather than lead the media - this is a case where bloggers and citizen journalists have been running circles around formal journalism.

Even with my decent (albeit slow) ability to read Chinese, I would have been at a total loss in making heads or tails of the Taishi story without Roland's tenacious work. I haven't come across any other good English-language source with such detailed and up-to-date information on Taishi - or on many other issues related to the internet and media in China. He is doing a tremendous service to the world's understanding of China - to the extent that the world will ever understand China. I know for a fact that a lot of Western journalists covering China have already come to depend on ESWN as a source of raw materials, free translations, and story ideas. Too bad most of them can't or don't link back to him and credit him the way  bloggers do.

Roland and ESWN is "exhibit A" for why blogs enhance the world's "information ecosystem," as I like to call it. I am not one who believes that mainstream professional journalism should be replaced by blogs. But news companies make choices of what to cover globally based on limited resources and personnel. They can't cover everything happening on the planet, and editors could give me a long list of reasons - many valid - for why they can't cover Taishi any more than they have. But thank goodness we now have a growing number of multi-lingual bloggers all around the world who won't let go of issues they believe have long-term importance and should not be allowed to die: bloggers who keep collecting information about places like Taishi long before and long after the mainstream media has come and gone with the story. They will influence history every bit as much as the best mainstream journalism does.

Taishi, China: Lu Banglie lives, will his cause die?

When Guardian reporter Benjamin Joffe-Walt last saw Lu Banglie, the activist beaten by local thugs for leading the journalist to Taishi village where villagers' demands for democracy had caused such a ruckus the authorities had sealed off the area, here is how Joffe-Walt describes Lu's physical condition:

He lay there - his eye out of its socket, his tongue cut, a stream of blood dropping from his mouth, his body limp, twisted. The ligaments in his neck were broken, so his head lay sideways as if connected to the rest of his body by a rubber band.

Based on such a description, it seems implausible that a person could survive. But he did. Radio Free Asia has interviewed Lu. Here is an English summary. Here is the original Chinese audio. Here is RFA's report on Lu's account of what happened:

“All of a sudden many people surrounded our car,” Lü told RFA’s Mandarin service. “We tried to put the gear in reverse but the mob would not let us go in reverse either. They were pointing at me as if they knew me.”

Lu, who was trying to accompany Guardian correspondent, was pulled out of the front passenger seat by several men by the hair, he said. “They started hitting me with their fists and kicking me with their feet. They pinned me to the ground and kept beating me. I fainted,” he told RFA reporter Zhang Min.

“Someone splashed cold water on me and I regained consciousness for a second but then passed out again. When I came to, I was in a moving vehicle. My head was hurting very badly. I started throwing up,” he said.

After he had vomited several times, the men offered him food, and then dumped him at the Zhijiang Hotel, contacting the Zhijiang parliament as they left. Two parliamentary officials then took Lu to hospital, suggesting to him that he should blame Taishi villagers for the attack.

But Lu won't blame the villagers:

“I don’t know who beat me. They were wearing plain clothes. But later I was told by people from the Zhijiang People’s Congress that they were villagers. They even asked me, ‘Don’t you think the farmers down there are violent and barbaric?’ I was still in a daze at the time, but I remember replying, ‘It’s not the peasants who are barbaric. It’s the government.’ They smiled.”

Lu said he was convinced that those who beat him did so on behalf of local government officials, who villagers say have launched a concerted campaign of psychological pressure, threats, and unattributable violence to prevent the recall of village chief Chen Jinsheng since a dispute blew up in July over a U.S.$12 million land deal.

“The government has adopted heavy-handed tactics to deal with those who are only trying to defend their rights according to the law. It chills my heart,” Lu said.

Chinese government efforts at media blackout continue. According to ESWN all attempts to post comments about Taishi on Chinese online forums are blocked by censors. A few Chinese blogs are commenting. The focus has more to do with the Guardian journalist's responsibility and role in the incident. The Chinese blogger Anti has a scathing post about Joffe-Walt, ESWN translates it here (scroll down a bit). Anti declares: "The Guardian has no conscience: are Chinese lives worthless?" He then continues:

As for The Guardian's   Benjamin Joffe-Walt, how the fuck did he still have to nerve to write this   kind of report?  Perhaps he is young and does not yet know that reporting   in certain areas of China is just like in a war zone.  He should not have   gone there against the advice of others, and he should not have brought Lu   Banglie to the village.  Since he was being taken out by the police, why   didn't he insist on rescuing Lu Banglie as well?  It is alright to beg   for mercy when it happened.  But the more important thing is that you   have a duty and you must assume responsibility for your companion.  Or is   that Chinese person just a guide dog?  

Thus, we the Chinese people are treated like   dogs by the government and we are also treated like dogs by certain arrogant   and ignorant foreigners.  I have no idea how this tragedy can be changed.

Shanghai-based Dutch journalist has his own views on the subject here.  China Digital Times has a translation here of another Chinese journalist's views on the situation, focusing also on the risk that Lu took by taking a British reporter into the hot zone.

There are indeed some serious issues about a Western reporter's responsibility for endangering and/or protecting the safety of their sources, interpreters, and guides. There were many times, when I was working in China, when I opted not to report certain stories because doing so would endanger the lives of people involved.

At the same time, I hope this question of a foreign correspondent's responsibility will not become a convenient way of distracting people from the core issue: one of human rights and the suppression of a democracy movement in Taishi.

Will Chinese netizens be successfully manipulated into foreigner-bashing as an acceptable alternative to communist party-bashing?

UPDATE (Tuesday AM EST): The Guardian has an update plus interview with Lu here.

Chinese activist bludgeoned in front of journalist

UPDATE & CORRECTION (Monday evening EST): Despite the journalist's first-hand account below (describing eye out of socket, neck ligaments broken, etc: i.e., description of somebody who could not have survived), Lu Banglie is now reported to be alive. ESWN had the info from a Hong Kong Chinese website first. Now there is also an interview with Lu posted at the Radio Free Asia website. More updates in a new post, coming soon.

Here his how the chilling account by the Guardian's Benjamin Joffe-Walt begins:

The last time I saw Lu Banglie, he was lying in a ditch on the side of the street - placid, numb and lifeless - the spit, snot and urine of about 20 men mixing with his blood, and running all over his body.

I had only met him that day. He was to show me the way to Taishi, the hotspot of the growing rural uprisings in China. It felt like heading into a war. Taishi is under siege, I was warned. The day I arrived a French radio journalist and a Hong Kong print journalist were rumoured to have been beaten somewhere around Taishi.

The Taishi election had also been scheduled for that very day, and news of a hunger strike by one of the two most famous figures in Taishi had just come out.

Joffe-Walt describes how Lu got in a taxi with him to take him to Taishi, when their car was surrounded by men in uniform and some men in plainclothes. After the men in uniform left here's what happened:

The men outside shouted among themselves and those in uniform suddenly left. Those remaining started pushing on the car, screaming at us to get out. They pointed flashlights at us, and when the light hit Mr Lu's face, it was as if a bomb had gone off. They completely lost it. They pulled him out and bashed him to the ground, kicked him, pulverised him, stomped on his head over and over again. The beating was loud, like the crack of a wooden board, and he was unconscious within 30 seconds.

They continued for 10 minutes. The body of this skinny little man turned to putty between the kicking legs of the rancorous men. This was not about teaching a man a lesson, about scaring me, about preventing access to the village; this was about vengeance - retribution for teaching villagers their legal rights, for agitating, for daring to hide.

They slowed down but never stopped. He lay there - his eye out of its socket, his tongue cut, a stream of blood dropping from his mouth, his body limp, twisted. The ligaments in his neck were broken, so his head lay sideways as if connected to the rest of his body by a rubber band.

We were probably in the car another five to eight minutes. The front windows were open and various men were reaching in to unlock my door. I held my hand tight to the lock. They punched me, twisted my wrist, tried everything possible with a quick grab to get me out. But I wouldn't let go, and I defended myself while watching Mr Lu get beaten through the window.

Eventually, my translator got out. I followed. They opened my pen, searched my pockets, underwear and socks, asked my translator if his watch could record anything. They asked what we were doing in Taishi. They found my Chinese press pass. "You foreigners you are ruining Taishi," they screamed. "You write write write so much about what's happened here that all these businesses have fled the new industrial zone."

Read the whole thing. The Guardian's Jonathan Watts has more background. More from Reuters and Interfax, which reports:

In a separate incident, reporters with French Radio and the South China Morning Post were also severely beaten after trying to visit Taishi, which is situated in the Panyu district of the Guangdong provincial capital, Guangzhou.   

The villagers sought to exercise the rights enshrined in China's village democracy statutes, which allow them to petition for the recall of the elected local village head.  They were angered by the lack of consultation surrounding the 133-hectare land development project, and also made allegations of corruption and the embezzlement of local funds. 

After securing the required number of signatures and submitting the petition calling for the recall of village Party Committee chairman Chen Jinling at the end of July, the villagers became subject to reprisals from gangs hired by the local government.  The intimidation and arrest of residents escalated into a series of bitter protests and violent crackdowns. 

The Beijing-based human rights lawyer, Guo Feixiong, was arrested last week after serving as the legal representative of Taishi residents in the attempt to remove Chen Jinling.  Guo is now believed to be on a hunger strike.

Despite an official media gag, the Taishi protests have become something of a national cause celebre. A number of prominent bulletin board websites have been forced to close down after running extensive discussions of the issue. 

Although the central government has been pushing for the extension of grass-roots rural democracy, village and county governments have been reluctant to relinquish their stranglehold on local decision-making.  Legislation to force local authorities to consult local people has met with only mixed success.

When I worked as a journalist in China, usually the thugs - and certainly the police - were too smart to let these things happen in front of foreign journalists. Not this time.

Despite a press blackout, events over the summer in Taishi gained nationwide attention in China through the internet. A popular online forum was forced to shut down all discussion of Taishi, then later the whole forum website got shut down.  Hong Kong-based blogger and media analyst Roland Soong has been documenting the Taishi developments and related media/internet crackdowns on his EastSouthWestNorth blog.

Internet bulletin boards and forums (not blogs, interestingly) have made Taishi a cause of nationwide concern.  The government will now do everything it can to stifle all online discussion of the events surrounding the villagers' quest for more democratic representation. China's top leaders ought to do the right thing: they should make sure that the perpetrators of Lu's murder and other unlawful beatings are arrested and tried. I am not holding my breath.

South Asia Earthquake: Tsunamibloggers on the case

The bloggers at The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog, who rose so heroically to the cause during the Southeast Asian tsunami disaster, are rising once again to bring us information and updates on today's earthquake in Pakistan and India.

Over at Global Voices, Neha Viswanathan also has a good roundup of firsthand earthquake reactions from South Asian bloggers.

SUNDAY UPDATE: Neha has another post on earthquake blogging.  Also note the tsunami bloggers have now formed a new blog: South Asia Quake Help.

Virtual World Journalism: implications for the real world?

Last night I was co-moderator of a panel on "virtual world journalism" at New York Law School's annual State of Play conference (co-organized by my Berkman Center colleagues). The panelists were all people (all men) who report about what goes on in virtual worlds like Second Life, Sims Online, etc.

One of the panelists has quite the cool job: Wagner James Au is an "embedded journalist" in Second Life - and his job (salary paid by Second Life) is to report on events, people, and phenomena in that one particular virtual world.

As a somebody who has spent no time in these worlds (although some would argue that the blogosphere is another virtual world), I asked why the panelists think news editors ought to care about coverage of virtual worlds. The answer: increasingly, things that happen in virtual worlds are having a real-life impact. One example: people are actually making real incomes by selling virtual goods created for other members of their virtual worlds to buy with virtual cash, which actually translates into real cash. There are also fund-raisers to help fund real-life causes - albeit sometimes done in more, er, outlandish and creative ways than you would see in the real world. As people's activities in virtual worlds increasingly have real-life impact on people's economic and social situations in the real world, coverage of virtual events will become more important.

A couple of the panelists made another rather interesting point: that virtual world journalism as a genre is much more experimental, interesting and creative than real-world journalism, because people are free to do whatever they want and must be inventive to capture the attention of their fellow gamers.   Might virtual world journalism start influencing the techniques of real world journalism?   Perhaps we shouldn't dismiss that possibility.

James Au made another interesting point: virtual world games like Second Life are worlds created and built by the users. There is no set plot or set endgame: the people who join create their own avatars (personas), homes, neighborhoods and countries - through which online societies evolve. He believes this is the ultimate form of "user created content", and is thus ties in with the world of blogs and other forms of participatory media.

As somebody who hasn't played a video game since Tetris in the early 90's, the session certainly gave me a fresh angle on the future of citizens' media, broadly defined.

We Media: Activism & Democracy

Thanks to Andy Carvin for his detailed blogging of the Activism & Democracy session I moderated this afternoon.  (I'm so braindead right now I'll be lazy and just let you read his account.)
...but WAIT! THERE'S MORE! He also posted a full podcast.

Also check out Andy's post about Craig Newmark's views on trust.

We Media tidbits: "Respect my intelligence"

Craig Forman of Yahoo! says the key for the future is how media companies will respond to the demand from the public: "respect my intelligence". This is especially the case in gaining the trust of younger people.

Andrew Heyward of CBS uses an interesting phrase: "early adopters of authenticity."  The public will need to be weaned away from the current media model to a more complicated, authentic model.

We Media

We Media: From Talk to Action

This afternoon I'll be moderating a panel called "Activism & Democracy." The point will be to look at how online and mobile wireless media are impacting the way in which citizens not only inform themselves and communicate, but organize and act. We've got a great group of people participating.

Yesterday I met somebody who I wish could be joing us: Tom Steinberg of Pledgebank.com.  His site has created a way for people to easily mobilize people to act, connecting online organization and mobilization with offline activity. Anybody can do this by creating a "pledge" and inviting others to join. As the site explains:

Pledgebank is free and easy to use. Once you've thought of something you'd like to do, just create a pledge which says "I'll do this, but only if 5 other people will do the same".

Check it out.   Pledgebank is built by Tom's non-profit UK organization MySociety.org. The even cooler thing about it is that the tool is completely open, so anybody can duplicate this system, in any language on their own server. I can see great uses for this by activist and dissident organizations in a number of countries.

We Media

Al Gore on America's public discourse

Audio of Al Gore's speech is now available in full on PaidContent.

UPDATE: transcript is here.

A few notes from what he said:
* It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. Something has gone badly wrong in the way america's fabled marketplace of ideas is now functioning. "Serial obsessions"  take over our airwaves for weeks at a time.

*If the rich-poor gap is widening why is our apathy as citizens also widening?

* The Senate was silent on the eve of war with Iraq because what people say on the Senate floor no longer counts - all were out fundraising to pay for tv commercials

* KEY POINT: The marketplace of ideas effectively no longer exists in this country. It is the destruction of the marketplace of ideas that accounts for the strangeness of america's present public discourse.

* SELF-GOVERNMENT: requres rule of reason undergirded and strengthened the rule of law. The American people need to be able to exercise reasoned collective judgments. Our current media universe no longer enables that. The absence of 2-way conversation means theres absence of marketplace of ideas.

* He cites a media study in which the U.S. was found to have the 27th freest press in the world.

*The subjugation of news by entertaiment seriously harms democracy. When people are not informed they cannot hold government accountable.

* As long as the only means of engaging in serious political dialogue is through the purchase of tv advertising, most Americans will be excluded from the conversation. The pervasive advertising environment has warped our democracy.

*Current TV: (Al Gore's new venture): is reaching out to individuals and asking them to co-create programming. The purpose is more and better informing of the american public: "Viewer created content."

*As exciting as the internet is, it still lacks the most basic component to be a truly successful mass medium. The internet still does not support the realtime mass distribution of full-motion video. Full-motion video is what makes TV such a powerful medium.

(That's true. When I worked for CNN, it was always the images that people remembered. They rarely remembered what I actually said.)

CONCLUSION: We must ensure that the internet will be open and accessible to all people without any limitation. We cannot take this future for granted. Some of the same forces of consolidation and control who consolidated the television market place are trying to do the same thing with internet access.

We Media