RConversation

In search of "Internet freedom"

At the end of the Global Voices Summit in Santiago, Chile earlier this month, Ethan Zuckerman and I led a session in which we asked everybody in the room to help answer a question: "How do we keep the Internet open and free?" In his blog post titled "How big is Internet freedom?" Ethan does a great job of summarizing the range of responses - and lack of agreement.  In the room that day were a diverse group of people: activists, citizen-bloggers, journalists, civil liberties lawyers, educators, and academics, as well as people who work for foundations, companies, international organizations and governments. Not all of these people felt comfortable about being in the same room with some of the others, as Ethan's post reflects, and as others like Andrew from EngageMedia have also commented. Yet everybody was united by the fact that they characterize their work to be related in some way to one or all of six things:

• building platforms that facilitate online expression, discourse, and/or organizing;
• fighting censorship and surveillance;
• working to shape laws and policies in a way that protects and facilitates people's ability to exercise their rights to free expression and assembly;
• informing the public about threats by governments, companies, or others to online free expression and assembly through various forms of research and reporting;
• educating the public about how to use technologies that can help us exercise our rights when they are threatened by censorship and surveillance;
• providing financial support for one or more of the above.

Debate centered around the following issues:

Government involvement: Some activists were very uncomfortable about the fact that a young woman from the U.S. State Department, whose job is to work on "Internet freedom" issues, attended our public conference - a conference that was free for anybody who registered before we ran out of space. Global Voices Advocacy Director Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian exile and grassroots activist, said he worries government money is poisoning the online activism space, causing grassroots causes to be hijacked or used by geopolitical actors who he feels are more interested in influencing the politics of certain countries in  certain directions than in the welfare and safety of specific individuals on the ground. He is also concerned that U.S. government money, inspired by the Obama Administration's new "Internet freedom" agenda, means that activists in politically "sexy" countries like China and Iran get lots of support and attention, while the problems faced by activists in countries whose Internet repression is less well covered in the global English-language media, from Tunisia to Russia to Thailand to Syria, are largely ignored. A lively debate about this issue ensued, with Bob Boorstin of Google (who once worked as a speechwriter in the Clinton Administration) called Sami's position "paranoid" and pointed out that like it or not, governments are players in this space. This could be a good thing, he said, if it leads to greater honesty and transparency among all governments about how they are trying to regulate and control various online and mobile spaces. An activist from Brazil argued that taking an "us vs. them" stance towards government is "b.s." "We can't keep government out of the Internet because government is part of the Internet," he said. Certainly, those of us who are citizens of democracies need to push our governments to be consistent and transparent about what they are doing in this space. We have a responsibility to make sure that our tax money is not being spent in a counterproductive, hypocritical, or duplicitous manner. That much we owe to Sami and the vulnerable grassroots communities around the world that he works with.

Corporate-owned platforms and services: Both Google and Yahoo were active at the conference and helped to fund it, along with a number of foundations. Google - along with Reuters - also funded a new Breaking Borders award for individuals or groups doing extraordinary work to promote free expression online. Google is in constant friction with a range of governments - from democracies to autocracies - seeking to regulate its platforms in various ways. While Google's executives have made a commitment to do the socially responsible thing for reasons that are honorable, it's also true that it's in Google's corporate interest to align itself with the global online free speech movement as it faces regulatory battles around the world.  As I reported in my last blog post, YouTube's Victoria Grand participated in a lively session dedicated to the human rights implications of content moderation. Yet a number of participants voiced concern about over-reliance on corporate-owned platforms and service providers. As Ethan put it in an important blog post back in March: "These entities have no more legal obligation to allow open, unfettered political speech in their spaces than shopping malls do to host political rallies."

Which brings us back to the issue of "netizenship." If we depend on commercial services and platforms for our expression and assembly online, then we have to stop acting like passive "users" and start acting like "citizens" of these spaces: organizing with others and pushing the companies to act in the public interest and to take free expression and human rights fully into account. Companies will only change their practices if they feel that their brand reputations and business success depend on it.

One could build open-source, non-profit, community administered web-hosting platforms, social networking services, and e-mail systems that would not depend on companies for the most part. Mozilla's Drumbeat movement aims to educate the broader public about non-proprietary and open source alternatives available out there - and seeks to build a robust "open web" that supports a thriving international community of content creators, programmers, and citizens who take responsibility for building and defending the Internet we want. Perhaps things will evolve in a manner similar to how, in many democracies, you have commercial media companies coexisting alongside non-profit public media funded by foundations and audience donations (and in some cases also government subsidies and tax money). In cyberspace both for-profit and non-profit spaces can coexist peacefully, each serving different needs of different kinds of people and communities. Society benefits from having both, as there are some social needs - and social groups - which companies may never have much interest in serving or respecting. The "open web" can also help to keep the commercial spaces honest.

This however still doesn't solve the problem of commercial carriers lower down in the stack: Internet Service Providers in many parts of the world are monopolies and we often have little choice about who provides our basic connectivity. One self-described "anarchist" from Brazil is working to build mesh networks that would enable people to access the Internet without going through a commercial ISP. If communities could create viable mesh networks as alternatives to commercial ISP's in cases where ISP's are non-existent, unreliable, or untrustworthy, that would be interesting, but it would require a great deal more public engagement and activism than we've seen anywhere thus far.

New rights or old rights?  Do we need a new Bill of Rights for Cyberspace as Jeff Jarvis and others have suggested? In Brazil they've already drafted such a document, now up for public discussion and comment. (The CPJ's Danny O'Brien provides some critical analysis of that draft, which might actually provide justification for more takedown of content without judicial oversight or due process, in the name of protecting the rights of people who are slandered.) Or do we simply need to work hard to make sure that existing internationally recognized covenants, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are fully applied to the Internet and upheld in both online and mobile spaces? A couple of efforts build on this idea. The Principles for corporate conduct developed by the Global Network Initiative are based on those existing international covenants. The Internet Governance Forum's Dynamic Coalition for Internet Rights and Principles is currently working on a document that seeks to elaborate on how existing human rights covenants should be applied by governments and companies to ICT's. That draft will be made public sometime over the summer. As a number of people at the Summit pointed out, most governments don't respect the existing rights covenants in "meatspace," and thus they're not terribly optimistic that such rights declarations will have much concrete impact. On the other hand, these U.N. documents are used by human rights activists worldwide as the moral baseline upon which to build their arguments against human rights violations. Documents clarifying how the UDHR and ICCPR should be applied to cyberspace might be helpful tools, but they are not going to lead to solutions in and of themselves.

Defining and coordinating goals across the global network  This is the toughest part. Cyberspace is a global network. What people do on and to it in the U.S. or Pakistan or China can have a global impact. "Freedom" in the context of cyberspace - or in the context of human civilization - does not mean "free for all." Nor does it mean that we won't pay for anything, depsite what some in the entertainment industry may insinuate. We don't want cyberspace to be a Hobbesian state of nature in which life is "nasty, brutish, and short." This is why modern governments gain their legitimacy from the idea of a "social contract," in which we give up some of our freedoms to do anything we please for the sake of the greater social good, and if we are in a democracy those laws, rules, and enforcement institutions are formed with our consent and supervision. So how do we work out a global social contract for the civilization we are building in cyberspace?

Back in March after Google withdrew its search engine from China,  British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote a column in The Guardian about how we urgently need a global debate and a global consensus around the idea that "everyone should be free to see everything, except for that limited set of things which clear, explicit global rules specify should not be available." He concluded:

It's in the infosphere that the world is coming closest, fastest, to a global village, so it's the infosphere that most urgently needs a global debate about the village rules. If we don't have that debate, and have it soon, then what you get to see on your screen will be the result of a power struggle between the old-fashioned power of the state in which you happen to be, the new-style power of the giant information companies, the insurgent force of novel information technologies, and the ingenuity of individual netizens. That's a likely outcome, but not the best.

But it's hard to find consensus - even amongst liberal internationalists with different cultural and religious backgrounds - about how to find the right balance between our right to free expression and assembly and our right to privacy and security. Even trickier is the question of what is "hate speech" and what constitutes justified criticism or even satire of one religion by members of another. The Global Voices community has come together around a set of common values around freedom of expression and communication. Our Manifesto begins: "We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech."  But all you need to do is to read this post about Pakistani reactions to the "Draw Mohammed Day" Facebook page, then read this post by another member of our community, to see how far we are from having a consensus about how civilized cross-cultural discourse should or shouldn't be managed on global Internet platforms.

Last August, Lisa Horner of Global Partners and Max Senges (then an academic, now at Google) published a paper titled Values, Principles, and Rights in Internet Governance, which called for a global, trans-cultural dialogue around two questions:
• Can we maintain cultural diversity while at the same time agreeing to universal values to underpin internet governance?
• Can we translate these values into practical guiding principles for different internet stakeholders, from the technical community through to regulators and users?

Looking at the world today, the answer would seem to be "No." But then we've not even attempted the kind of informed discourse that would be needed before ruling out "Yes" altogether.

Right now I see two fundamental obstacles to such a discourse. First, we don't have adequate global platforms on which to have such a multicultural discussion. As Global Voices continues to expand its multilingual translation community, and as we build capacity to translate conversations across different languages, maybe that could be a place to experiment.

Second, global publics don't have enough information to hold an informed discourse right now. People who follow global news and domestic politics in their home countries are not well informed about issues related to Internet governance, how software engineering and hardware design can affect our freedoms, how government regulations play out around the world, etc. Most news organizations cover technology as a business, cultural, and consumer phenomenon. Few journalists (I can count them on one hand) cover technology as a global political space. Very little technology journalism approaches stories with the goal of serving the interests of an informed global netizenry. We need global coverage of cyberspace as a new political space. This coverage needs to begin with questions like: "What do people need to know in order to be informed participants in shaping the future of our global network? What do people need to know in order to determine what their own interests are within the network, and to understand who and what is affecting those interests either negatively or positively? What do people need to know in order to figure out what kind of Internet they want? What do people need to know in order to understand and debate what is possible?  What do people need to know about the players, institutions, companies, and politics so that they can figure out how they as citizens of the network can take action?" We need hard-hitting, original, investigative stories that help to fill this void. Perhaps it's time for somebody to create such a news organization.

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Global Voices: building sustainable civilization in an information rainforest

(Image by FabsY)

The Global Voices 2010 Summit in Santiago, Chile brought together people from 60 different countries for a two-day public conference, followed by two days of internal meetings for people who work directly on Global Voices Online in some way. Our citizen media community is now five and a half years old. It has grown organically in ways that Ethan Zuckerman and I never imagined when we started the project back in late 2004 with a small meeting of bloggers from a range of different countries. 

Since 2004 the global information environment has changed dramatically. One of our board members, Rosental Alves, gave a presentation on Friday in which he compared the pre-Internet media environment to a desert. For most members of the public, there were very few sources of information about what was happening around the world. You had access to a handful of TV stations and newspapers. Your understanding of the world depended on the priorities and budget decisions of the editors who ran those news organizations. 

Then came the deluge. Now, in the Internet Age, the information environment has gone suddenly from a desert to a rainforest. We have moved rapidly from a problem of scarcity to a problem of over-abundance - at least for some kinds of information. Other kinds of information remain rare and harder to find amidst the rapidly proliferating dominant species. 

In my closing remarks at the public conference, I pointed out that just because we have the Internet, and just because anybody can now create media, doesn't automatically mean that human society will be more democratic or peaceful. Life in the jungle is just as likely to be a Hobbesian state of nature, in which life can be nasty, brutish and short. In the offline world, this is why we build civilizations.

It is now up to all of us to figure out how to build a sustainable civilization within the new information rainforest - which provides sustenance and shelter, as well as poisonous plants and deadly predators.  Success is by no means inevitable. We - citizens living around the world who believe in our right to create independent online media  - need to make a concerted effort to build structures and systems that make it in people's interest to behave constructively, and which create strong disincentives for destructive behavior in this new environment. We need to help everybody understand how to participate constructively and responsibly in this new space, and protect the rights of minorities and dissenters. We are in uncharted territory, but we have to start somewhere. Global Voices is a community of people who are acting like real citizens - not mere passive "internet users" - and who are taking personal responsibility for the future of our information society.

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My chat with Anti-CNN.com

On Monday afternoon I did an online chat with these patriotic young people who run Anti-CNN, a website launched in the wake of the Tibetan unrest and crackdown last year by a group of young Chinese who felt that the Western media was presenting a distorted and inaccurate picture of China. They invited me to do the online chat after I interviewed Anti-CNN founder Rao Jin this past Saturday as part of my book research (more on that interview in a later post). My writings and talks have been a topic of discussion on the Anti-CNN website in the past, and given that I once reported for CNN in Beijing, it was not surprising that they were rather keen to offer me to up to their community.

Despite their website's unfriendly name, I found the founder Rao Jin and his core group of volunteers to be polite, friendly, smart, and professional, while also very passionate about their point of view. They're keen that the outside world not view them as brainwashed government agents. They want the world to understand that they're doing this of their own volition because they love their country and want their fellow citizens to think more critically about global media. The site is financed by Rao Jin's internet company. He insists that they take no government money.

The site has evolved from its CNN-bashing origins last year into a more general forum for media criticism - focused primarily on Western media. They do not, however, subject the Chinese media to the same kind of critical treatment. As Rao Jin said to me: "Our aim is not to challenge the government. We want to create a good space, a good platform where more people have a chance to participate in discussion. If the platform ceases to exist, then there are no voices at all, so first we have to guarantee its survival."

Moderator "Leslie" Liu Jing asked questions submitted in advance by members of the Anti-CNN community. Our conversation was videotaped. Meanwhile, as I answered, two volunteers summarized my answers in real time and posted them into the Anti-CNN forum. This morning I read through the whole thing. As one might expect with any "live-blogged" conversation, some details and nuances of what I said were lost, and sometimes the live-bloggers misunderstood what I was talking about. For instance, I referred to U.S. media coverage of Abu Ghraib as one example of how the interests of the U.S. media and government often do not coincide; the live-blogger typed it up in English as "Albert Grey," which I'm sure was an honest mistake. All in all, they did their best to record the substance of what I was saying. That is, with the exception of a couple of things that were completely omitted.

When I was asked to give examples of reasons why foreign reporters often don't trust what the Chinese government says, I cited my own experiences in which government officials lied about disaster casualties, and about the fate of people who I knew had been jailed. Those two examples were included. I also cited the fact that - while the exact number of deaths in the June 4th 1989 killing of protesters may be subject to dispute, it's a fact that the government refuses to acknowledge the deaths of many people who I know for a fact were killed - because I've spoken to the relatives of those people, who have proof that those individuals existed, and when and how they were killed. I said the fact that the government won't acknowledge their deaths amounts to refusing to acknowledge these people existed. This was not typed into the forum discussion. In response to a question I also discussed the imprisonment of AIDS activist Hu Jia, but no sign of that exchange appears in the forum, either.

After we finished, I was told that the videotape would have to be edited before they can post it online, because some of the content was too sensitive and would cause trouble for their website. I made an audio recording of the whole exchange. It is completely unedited. You can listen to it or download it here:

Due to time constraints, I'm not able to offer a full transcript and full English translation today. In future I may try to find somebody to help me out with that. Meanwhile, here is my summary of a few highlights:

The chat session opened with a question about Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's press conference at the closing of the National People's conference. In the press conference he criticized the Dalai Lama, among many other things he said. A community member wanted to know why the Western media seemed to de-emphasize that part of the press conference, focusing on other content instead. I said I wasn't at the press conference and wasn't in China when it happened, and didn't see the full transcript of the press conference, thus I don't remember precisely what Wen said about the Dalai Lama. However if Wen's remarks were substantively similar to things he has said in the past about the Dalai Lama, or a repetition of previous statements by the Chinese government or Xinhua News Agency, the Western media would not have considered it "news" because it wasn't "new."

Liu Jing then asked me why the Western media gave less attention to Chinese student demonstrators who came out in support for the Chinese Olympic torch relay than to the pro-Tibet independence demonstrations. I said that part of the reason has to do with the fact that the Western media tends to pay more attention to people claiming to be wronged or oppressed, and generally gives less airtime to people representing or supporting power-holders. I did also acknowledge that Westerners generally don't understand the patriotism of today's Chinese students abroad, the reasons for their patriotism, and the extent to which it's genuinely heartfelt.

The next question, from a community member, was whether Americans ever wondered why pro-Tibetan independence protestors appeared at the torch relay. I explained that Americans expect that protesters will appear at events involving a major world power, its leaders, or something representing that country's power. I said that if the Olympics had been held in the U.S. last year and Americans were going around the world doing a torch relay, no doubt all kinds of people would be showing up in protest. China is a world power now, so Chinese people are going to have to get used to seeing people around the world protesting against what China represents. It's part of life as a global power. It's not going to stop and you've got to learn to live with it. That said, I did agree that accosting the wheelchair-bound handicapped Chinese athlete in Paris was a very bad move on the part of the protesters. It showed the protesters' complete lack of understanding (or lack of interest) in how Chinese people viewed their protests.

There were a lot of questions about how CNN operates, how it gets its information, and the extent to which media all over the world, including in the West, is manipulated by political and market forces. I talked about how commercial pressures create media bias which can have a political result - because media outlets looking to boost ratings and circulation are sometimes concerned about reporting too many things that make viewers angry and unhappy, prompting them to change the channel or cancel their subscription. I also talked about how it's an undeniable fact that war is good for the news business, and good for many individual journalists' careers, and that this aspect of mainstream journalism has always made me feel uncomfortable. (I've written about some of these things here and here (PDF).) I also talked about commercial astroturfing, as well as blogging by campaign employees - or by blogger "consultants" - which is increasingly part of any Western politician's campaign strategy. My interviewer tried to get me to say that these things are the same thing as the censorship and manipulation that happens in China. I said it's not the same. But at the same time, anybody who is consuming any news from anywhere should not trust it until that news organization or blogger earns their trust. And there are plenty of reasons in any country not to trust any given news source completely.

I also made the point that while the Chinese media has evolved and grown more sophisticated over the past couple decades, and while the Internet has created a very wide space for discourse and debate than ever existed in the past, the information environment is still very skewed. Chinese investigative journalists have told me about numerous stories their editors won't allow them to publish. This includes the poisoned milk powder story which a Chinese journalist had been ready to break last spring, but was not allowed to do so - with the result that thousands more babies were sickened, their parents unaware of the danger when they might have been informed. Voices critical of central government policies are censored much more heavily on the Internet than voices of patriotic young people like the Anti-CNN, community. This results in a skewed information environment, reinforcing itself in a positive feedback loop.

My moderator said that China's censorship system is a national reality and she believes it's necessary for national stability.

I was asked about my 2003 interview with the Dalai Lama. I described how he said he was concerned about human rights abuses in Tibet, and that he was not seeking independence, but rather autonomy. That he wanted to be able to negotiate with the Chinese government about this. Liu Jing asked me whether I had asked the Dalai Lama why he wanted to return to Tibet and "become Tibet's chief slave owner." I said that the Dalai Lama's point was not to return Tibet to exactly what it was like in feudal times. The point was to give today's Tibetans more say in their own affairs, and that his idea was to return as a religious leader, not a political leader.

I did not get into a debate with them about historical facts surrounding China's sovereignty over Tibet, as that would have made it impossible to talk about anything else. It was very clear that the folks at Anti-CNN have decided what the facts are, and what they believe the correct version of history is, and that a shared view about these facts is a strong underpinning of the Anti-CNN community. I did suggest that aside from arguing with Westerners about Tibet, perhaps they should do more to engage with Tibetan people, and that the problems in Tibet will only be resolved if more Chinese and Tibetan people engage with one another and try to work out solutions. Liu Jing told me that she has been to Tibet and that in her experience all the Tibetan people she has interacted with say they are grateful for the development that the Chinese government has brought to them. She thinks that Westerners don't understand the real views of real Tibetan people. Reading through the comments posted by community members during and after the chat, it's clear that many community members don't think there's a problem in Tibet itself; they appear to believe that the whole problem is caused by the exile community and by Westerners who are enamored of the Dalai Lama, interfering in China's internal affairs.

My purpose in doing this interview was primarily to understand the Anti-CNN community better as part of my book research. Communities of enthusiastic, patriotic young people like the Anti-CNN volunteers are part and parcel of the phenomenon I call cyber-tarianism.

It will be very interesting to see how the Anti-CNN website continues to evolve. Rao Jin has plans to develop an English-language platform - with a less provocative, more friendly name - through which his community can engage in dialogue and debate with the English-speaking world. I think it's great that they're looking to expand their dialogue and engage with the world. It's important that the outside world understand that China's patriotic youth, like young Republicans or young Tories, feel that they are acting on their own belief systems and get angry when characterized as brainwashed puppets. It will be fascinating to see how the outside world reacts to these efforts, and how the Anti-CNN website administrators handle conversations that foreigners want to have with them involving events, people, or points of view that Chinese websites are generally required to censor in order to avoid being shut down.

From Red Guards to Cyber-vigilantism to where next?

This is a 1976 Cultural Revolution poster from chineseposters.net. It celebrates Chairman Mao's 1966 call to arms: "bombard the headquarters." He egged on the Red Guards to go after corrupt and venal officials who:

"...have stood facts on their head and juggled black and white, encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, stifled opinions differing from their own, imposed a white terror, and felt very pleased with themselves."

One might be inclined to use similar words to describe the officials whose holiday video from a taxpayer-financed African junket recently got uploaded onto the internet. Click here for the full video.

When I watch China's human flesh search engines in action I often think of the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards. Unlike the Red Guards they're not really being manipulated by one charismatic leader (yet); they're just acting on their own. Like the Red Guards, the intent of today's cyber-vigilantes is idealistic; they believe in their absolute moral righteousness. Sometimes they expose corrupt and venal officials who deserve to go to jail. Other times they conduct moral witch hunts against people whose behavior may not be very admirable but what crime did they commit exactly and who is to be the judge?

It is very exciting that the Internet is making it increasingly difficult for Chinese government officials to behave irresponsibly, abuse taxpayer funds, or commit crimes without being exposed. The question is, where is this all headed?

 Mao was frustrated that he could not adequately control the Communist Party bureaucracy, who he believed had grown too fat and happy and "bourgeois;" so he unleashed the Red Guards on them. Today many Chinese complain that the central government has lost control over provincial officials to some extent, and county officials to a great extent. The central government is fairly well regarded by the public while local governments are widely hated. How will this loss of control by the center over the localities be handled? Via real reform of political institutions and mechanisms of justice so that government at all levels can be held accountable by the governed in a fair and systematic manner? Or through an updated form of cyber-populism (cyber-bonapartism?) in which people are empowered to speak out and to act against injustice in many cases when such actions don't hurt the power of the top leadership - but without the institutions or rule of law or real reforms that would underly a commitment to build truly accountable, transparent, and representative political institutions?

In the 1990's, some hopeful officials in the Ministry of Civil affairs advocated direct, competitive, secret ballot elections as the solution to social unrest and corruption. Programs to institute such elections at the village level were celebrated in the West as a sign that China might eventually be capable of democratizing. Studies at the time indicated that villages with fair and competitive elections had less unrest than those that didn't. But the efforts to bring free, fair and competitive elections to all villages throughout China were abandoned by the early 00's as China's top leadership transitioned from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao. Dreams that such elections might be possible at the county level or in the cities were also abandoned. Talk to officials today who were involved with village democracy efforts at the time and they'll tell you they see no hope of the local election efforts being revived under the current leadership.

Will the Chinese people rise above cyber-vigilantism and use the Internet to build a just and fair society governed by accountable leaders? Or will the majority be be happy to wield their new-found powers of online speech in random fashion? That's really up to them. People like Liu Xiaoyuan and Yang Hengjun and a number of others have been raising such questions. It's hard to know whether people beyond the elite intelligentsia will pay attention to such concerns.

This is why the suppression and censorship of Cultural Revolution history in China is so dangerous. If people could freely write and debate about what happened under Mao, history would have less chance of repeating itself.

The last two images in this post are part of a fabulous collection of Cultural Revolution posters belonging to this blogger.

UPDATE: Bill a.k.a. "niubi" was quick to point out on Twitter that he doesn't think the situation today could "go anywhere comparable" to where it went in the Cultural Revolution. I do agree. I apologize if I gave the impression that I think we're going to see an exact repeat of history. That's not the point I meant to make. The point I'm trying to make is that just because people have an expanded ability to speak truth to power thanks to new technology, that doesn't automatically lead to a more just society in the long run unless you have institutional change. I wonder whether people will be so distracted and excited about the ability to use the Internet to speak truth to power that they'll have less interest in such institutional change. Whether the latter scenario results in a desirable state or not is up to the Chinese people to decide, of course. If that's what a majority of Chinese truly believe works best for them - if there's a way of determining what the majority of Chinese people really want - well I guess that's their business. Like Yang Hengjun said today, if the Chinese people really want human rights, at the end of the day only they can give it to themselves...

FURTHER UPDATE: Before I wrote this post I hadn't seen Joel Martinsen's excellent post over at Danwei, Harnessing Human Flesh Search Engines for Government Use. That adds yet another layer of issues.

"Eluding the Cat" - Bloggers investigate Yunnan prison death

My friend and colleague Ethan Zuckerman gave a fabulous talk last year at O'Reilly E-tech titled The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. The essence of his argument:

The Web was invented so physicists could share research papers. Web 2.0 was invented so we could share cute pictures of our cats. The tools of Web 2.0, while designed for mundane uses, can be extremely powerful in the hands of digital activists, especially those in environments where free speech is limited.

On the Chinese Internet this week we have the ultimate marriage of cute cat blogging and political activism - with some official spin-mastering and government p.r. thrown on top. It's known widely as the "elude the cat" incident.

See Global Voices, the Guardian, ESWN, and ChinaDigitalTimes for lots of English-language details and translations, but here is the situation in a nutshell:

A man named Li Qiaoming died in a detention center in Yunnan province. The official explanation was that he had been killed in a rough-horsing accident while playing a game of "elude the cat" (a form of hide-and-seek) with fellow inmates. The reaction in local internet forums was skeptical to say the least, with netizens and even journalists in newspapers and political cartoonists chiming in that the whole thing seemed a bit too incredible. People began to post comments in blogs and chatrooms suggesting that the police were engaged in a cover-up. "Elude the cat" with its rich humor potential quickly became a buzzword all around the Chinese Internet.

Local Yunnan officials were worried about things getting out of control - as things did last summer in Weng'an when an angry mob trashed the police station, suspecting a murder cover-up after a young woman turned up dead in the river. So the Yunnan publicity department came up with an idea: they would invite journalists and bloggers to participate in an investigative team. A publicity notice was posted on Yunnan government and local media websites inviting bloggers to sign up. Here's the notice as translated by Roland Soong:

The injury and subsequent death of the Yuxi city Hongta district Beicheng town young man Li Qiaoming in a detention center has received broad media attention, especially on the Internet. The term 'eluding the cat' has become a hot Internet term in a very short time. In order to satisfy the public's right to know, the Yunnan provincial publicity departhment will form an investigative committee with other relevant departments and proceed to Kunming city Puning town on the morning of February 20 to find out the truth about the incident. We are presently looking for four netizens and other representatives from society to serve as members of the committee. You can register between now and 8:00pm on the evening of February 19, 2009." The notice also included a QQ account number and a telephone phone number.

So an "investigative committee" was formed. According to a Southern Metropolis Daily report translated by Roland:

...more than 1,000 netizens applied though QQ and telephone.

Eventually, the investigative committee consisted of 15 persons. There were four representatives from the province political and legal committee, the province procuratorate and the Kunming city public security bureau; three media representatives including the Yunnan Information Times; eight persons from the Internet and other social sectors. It is noted that five of the eight are local Yunnan media workers or have media industry background.

And so they went on February 20th to the jail. QQ has a whole special coverage page devoted to the investigation. Here are some pictures that Netease re-posted from Yunnan TV:

Local media was clearly all over the event which was touted as evidence of government openness and transparency, and willingness to submit to "public supervision." As Oiwan Lam reports in Global Voices, there was much debate online about the impartiality and independence of the bloggers who had been selected. Team members were subject to "human flesh search engine" treatment, with netizens crowd-sourcing and analyzing their backgrounds and identities online, and several of them felt compelled to defend themselves online.

However while some of the inspection team members apparently asked to see the surveillance video tape of the scene, detention center officials refused to allow viewing of surveillance tapes or allow interviews with key witnesses. Liberal bloggers like Yang Hengjun and Liu Xiaoyuan have written critically about the process and outcome, questioning whether the investigation team and the media coverage surrounding it was little more than a dog-and-pony show aimed at defusing public anger building up online. As Oiwan comments: "My opinion (via inmediahk.net) is that the propaganda department is trying to prevent a public opinion bomb from being exploding but it in turn challenges the credibility of police and justice department."

It seems that the authorities have succeeded to some extent, and that enough of China's netizens were impressed by the government's decision to invite bloggers into the investigation. Oiwan translates a BBC Chinese story:

According to Sina's online poll, up till midnight of 20, 87.1% netizens found the explanation of “eluding the cat” incredible, and believed that it must be a lie; 8.2% found the explanation incredible but believed that it might be the truth; only 1.3% believe d the explanation should be the truth.

As for the invitation of Yunnan Netizen to participate in the investigation, 49.7% netizens believed that it is probably a show and it is yet to see the effect of the participation. 45.5% said that the arrangement is creative and can further develop democracy, it shows the investigation is open and transparent.

On this blog I've written before about the idea of "authoritarian deliberation:" The Internet has enabled vastly more social discourse and deliberation on public affairs in China than anybody could have imagined ten years ago; but at the same time China's political institutions are no more democratic than they were ten years ago. Nor has the legal system grown more independent. I've argued in the past that one can imagine a scenario in which, if the Chinese Communist Party is clever and flexible enough to evolve, they may be able to use the Internet to stay in power longer than would have been possible if the Internet did not exist. They would do this by convincing a critical mass of ordinary Chinese people through publicity stunts like the "eluding the cat" investigation that the people's voices can be heard and that "public supervision" of government is possible without needing democratic multi-party elections. I'm not arguing that this would necessarily be a successful long-term strategy, but in the medium term it could generate enough evidence for nationalists to argue in the government's favor, things for the chattering classes to do, combined with sufficient public argument about who is a government patsy, and who is in cahoots with whom, who is telling the truth etc etc., that criticism becomes too diffuse to mount a meaningful challenge - especially when you combine that tactic with sufficient censorship and astro-turfing to skew the conversation in the CCP's favor, plus the arrest of people like Liu Xiaobo and Hu Jia who might otherwise be capable of bringing together the disparate issues surrounding all these local incidents and becoming leaders of national opposition movements. Whether this scenario actually does prevail, or whether another less cynical scenario prevails, ultimately depends on the Chinese people themselves, as Ai Weiwei put it to me in January:

We will never have a real civil society, a democratic society, unless people take responsibility. ...I believe the desire for justice and equality is something that people must have in their own hearts. This isn't something that one person can give to another. This is a right that must be exercised. If you don't exercise your right society will be in a difficult state.

UPDATE: Over at the China Media Project, David Bandurski's post on the subject, How Control 2.0 found its poster boy in Yunnan, is a must-read. He concludes:

In the government handling of the “eluding the cat” case we can glimpse an eerie phenomenon emerging in China: the rise of virtual political participation as a proxy and foil for real political empowerment. Notice, political rights are not on offer to China’s citizens. But if we believe the hype China’s state media are selling us, China’s “netizens” are in political ascent.

If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

Live Blog and Live Chat: Media as Global Diplomat

This is the live blog for Media as Global Diplomat, an event starting at 9am EST in Washington, D.C., organized by the U.S. Institute of Peace. Click here for the live webcast and to participate in a live chat. Be sure to log in if you want to identify yourself. We will be feeding comments from the chat into the discussion. You can also participate via Twitter if you use the hashtag #usip.

Media as Global Diplomat? Join a live webcast & chat on Tuesday

President Obama says he intends to listen to others as he formulates U.S. foreign policy. I've proposed that as part of his China policy,  the Obama administration should use the Internet to engage in conversation with the Chinese people, not just its leaders and elites.  What do you think? How should the Obama administration engage with the world in the Internet age? How should public diplomacy be upgraded?  How can the U.S. government stop lecturing and start having a conversation?

An event on Tuesday morning in Washington D.C. (Tuesday evening Asia time) called Media as Global Diplomat, organized by the U.S. Institute of Peace, will explore "how the United States can best use media to reinvigorate its public diplomacy strategy and international influence in order to strengthen efforts to build a more peaceful world."

It's unclear to me whether they really just want to explore how to use digital media to get the world to like the U.S. better - or whether they're truly open to a paradigm shift: moving from broadcast "messaging" mode to conversation mode, in which the U.S. would be listening and learning as much as informing others.

Join me to find out. Watch the live webcast and join a live chat here. I will be live-blogging the event here on this blog. Sign up via the box on the left to receive a reminder before the event begins. Global Voices Executive Director Ivan Sigal will be online to moderate and follow the live chat, bringing your views and questions from the live chatroom into the event. That way, we hope the conversation can be expanded beyond the room to include everybody watching and reacting remotely.

Naturally, if you have views in advance that they'd like to express, please post them in the comments section of this post.

Looking at the program, my initial reaction is that the only panelists who might be considered "new media" people are Google's Andrew McLaughlin and Mika Salmi of MTV's Digital Networks. And they work for huge Internet and media companies. No citizen media or grassroots voices are speaking on the panels at all.  Lots of "old media" and/or establishment foreign policy elites. Will there really be any new ideas coming from this crowd? Hard to know. Maybe you can help thorough your remote participation?

Below is the full program and schedule, taken from here.

Challenge
We are in a disruptive period in media, the result of an explosion in digital distribution, social networking, and user generated content. And with disruption comes opportunity. This summit, moderated by Ted Koppel and entitled Media as Global Diplomat, is a forum to ask key public and private sector leaders how the United States can best use media to reinvigorate its public diplomacy strategy and international influence in order to strengthen efforts to build a more peaceful world.

Agenda [All times EST]

(9:00 a.m.) Welcome and Framing the Day
Sheldon Himelfarb, Associate Vice President, Center of Innovation for Media, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, U.S. Institute of Peace

Hosts Remarks
Ambassador Richard Solomon, President, U.S. Institute of Peace
Sally Jo Fifer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Independent Television Service

Media & Public Diplomacy: The Challenge at Hand
Ted Koppel will address the dramatically changing global media landscape and its implications for public diplomacy and peacebuilding.
 
(9:30 a.m.) Public Diplomacy 2.0: Rethinking Official Media
In this new era of digital distribution, social networking, and user generated content, what is the role of government-funded media in bolstering America’s global influence and ability to manage conflict? This panel will discuss where traditional strategies for media-based public diplomacy are effective and where they need to change.

Panelists:

• Kathy Bushkin Calvin - Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, The United Nations Foundation; Former President, AOL Time Warner Foundation
• Ambassador Edward Djerejian- Founding Director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
• Abderrahim Foukara- Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief, Al Jazeera International
• Ambassador James Glassman - Former Under Secretary of State Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State
• Andrew McLaughlin - Director of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google
• James Zogby - Founder and President, Arab American Institute

(11:15 a.m.) The Global Media Marketplace
What is the responsibility of free market commercial media to serve the greater public good in the global media age? This panel will consider the role of “unintended” stereotypes in shaping the image of the US abroad and the perils of uninformed citizens at home due to declining news coverage of international events.

Panelists:

• Edward Borgerding - Chief Executive Officer, Abu Dhabi Media Company
• Carol Giacomo -  Editorial Board Member, The New York Times
• Mika Salmi -  President of Global Digital Media of MTV Networks
• Smita Singh - Director, Global Development Program, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• Sydney Suissa - Executive Vice President of Content, National Geographic Channels International

(12:30 p.m.) Lunch

(1:15 p.m.) Special Screening: Waltz With Bashir
Ari Folman's animated documentary on the horrors of the 1982 Lebanon War. Academy Award nominee and winner of 2009 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. Waltz With Bashir is part of the ITVS International initiative and will be introduced by introduced by Calvin Sims, Program Officer, Media Arts & Culture, Ford Foundation.

(2:45 p.m.) Independent Documentary and Participatory Media
In discussing the film, this panel will consider the potential of film and video to connect people around the world and transform conflict. How can this powerful content be deployed as part of a more effective US public diplomacy strategy?

Panelists:

• Tamara Gould - Vice President of Distribution, Independent Television Service
• Yvette Alberdingk Thijm - Executive Director, Witness

Dear President Obama: in talking to China, remember its people

(Cross-posted from the Huffington Post)

Dear President Obama,

Welcome to U.S.-China relations! You didn't even mention China in your inaugural address, but the Chinese censors still took it personally. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's remarks in his confirmation hearing about currency manipulation have got everyone in a tizzy. We're off to a rollicking start!

People in China are watching closely -- and starting to debate -- whether your administration's pursuit of America's economic interests will help or hurt their own.

China is obviously not a democracy. Even so, if you really want to take U.S.-China relations to a new strategic level that rises above the day-to-day issues, you need to find new ways to engage the Chinese people themselves -- not just their government.

Normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979, combined with economic reforms and opening, transformed the Chinese people's lives. Chinese of our generation understand this. But their children take their opportunities and comforts for granted. They don't necessarily see the U.S. as a symbol of hope or a target of aspirations the way their parents did.

It is this young generation born after 1980 who were most vocal on the Chinese Internet last year, lashing out against Western critics and Western media coverage of their government's crackdown in Tibet. In response to international pressure, the Chinese government negotiated with the Dalai Lama, but it didn't feel the need to concede anything meaningful. In maintaining a hard line, the Chinese leadership could feel doubly secure in the fact that, not only did they have the strength of the People's Liberation Army and the People's Armed Police on their side; China's majority Han-Chinese public had no sympathy for the idea of Tibetan autonomy.

Chinese leaders listen selectively to public opinion, and sometimes those opinions actually give them an extra excuse to tell the U.S. where to shove it. While Americans tend to think of the Internet as the medium that will inevitably free the Chinese people of authoritarian rule, Chinese leaders have -- for many years now -- been going there for proof that the public wants them to be tougher with the U.S. Back in 2001 a U.S. spyplane made an emergency landing on Hainan island after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet which crashed into the sea. If people in the Chinese Internet chatrooms had gotten their way, the U.S. crew would be in a Chinese jail today. In a recent interview with The Atlantic's James Fallows, the President of the China Investment Corporation Gao Xiqing pointed out that his P.R. department is inundated with public comments calling for him to sell U.S. dollar assets.

The point is that while these people are not citizens of a democracy, they are by no means an undifferentiated mass of brainwashed drones. Despite often crude censorship of the Internet and state-run media, despite manipulation, intimidation of dissidents and political astro-turfing of the blogosphere by paid commentators, there is no unity of thought in China today. Civic minded citizens manage to hold wide-ranging debates on the Chinese Internet, in living rooms, dormitories, office break rooms, and classrooms about many public issues. Reading the Chinese blogs I've found all kinds of views about you and your new administration. Many are inspired by your personal story and the idea of truly equal opportunity that you represent. Others hope that you will be more forthright and principled on human rights issues than the Bush administration was. Others are very concerned that you will be protectionist in order to help the American people in the short run, and that this will hurt the Chinese people economically. Others lament cynically that no matter what happens, the rich and powerful in both countries will be the relationship's main beneficiaries.

The Chinese government will have greater incentive to work with you on creative solutions to complex problems if your diplomats can do a better job of reassuring ordinary Chinese that you do actually care whether U.S.-China policy outcomes will benefit them -- not just China's commercial and political elites. Right now, frankly, they're not convinced. One-way monologues through the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia don't have much street cred with China's Internet generation, to be honest. It's time to upgrade your public diplomacy strategy for the 21st Century.

Just as you have used new technology to engage with the American electorate, your China policy can be greatly strengthened if you conduct a real conversation with the Chinese people. Listen as much as you talk; provide a much-needed platform for open discussion. The U.S. embassy in Beijing should build a Chinese-language website modeled after change.gov, focused not just on U.S.-China relations, but on the range of concerns and interests - from environment, to food safety, to factory safety standards, to education and real estate law -- shared by ordinary Chinese and Americans. Some linguistically talented State Department employees should start blogging in Chinese. Open up the comments sections, see how the Chinese blogosphere responds, then respond to them in turn. Translate some of the Chinese conversation into English for Americans to read and react, then translate it back. Sure there will be censorship problems on the Chinese side, but if enough Chinese find the conversation important and relevant to their lives, the censors ultimately won't be able to stop it. Nor should they want to if they're wise - because the resulting conversation would help both governments build a more stable and rational relationship that would truly benefit the people of both countries.

Bullog.cn goes down.. unlikely due to smut

China's edgiest blogging platform, Bullog.cn, was shut down this afternoon.

Authorities launched an anti-Internet smut crackdown on Monday. Bullog was not among the websites cited for failure to control "low and vulgar" content.

A line about today's shutdown has already been posted on the Chinese Wikipedia entry for Bullog :

2009年1月9日下午，牛博网国内服务器被关闭，牛博国际目前也无法登陆，部分人士认为此次关闭牛博可能与近日的大规模整顿网络有关，标志着中国政治气候向左转。
Translation: "On the afternoon of January 9th, the domestic server for the Bullog network was shut down, and Bullog international was also inaccessible. Some people believe this shut down of Bullog may have to do with the recent major Internet rectification, signaling that China's political climate has turned to the left." (Here's the correct edit history page in case it gets removed.)

On a Bullog fan page in the social networking site Douban, people have been buzzing with outrage and annoyance.

Bullog has been the favorite home for China's edgiest public intellectuals and counter-culture types - as you can see from the links on Bullog's still-visible Google cache page. I follow a lot of Bullog bloggers in my own aggregator. For a good introduction to Bullog and its founder Luo Yonghao, read this Blog Herald story. As writer Wang Xiao put it:

"Not everyone in China knows Bullog, but anyone who knows Bullog clicks it everyday. When I first time clicked the site half a year ago, I said: “Wow! I can get access to almost every China’s famous blogger’s posts. With only one website!” Since the first time I opened it, I fell in love with this site."

From the Global Voices archives, see John Kennedy's coverage of Bullog's 2006 ballsy launch. John translated a lot of material from Bullog bloggers since then. For a sampling click here, here, here, here, and here. I am also reminded that Bullog endured a one-month shutdown back in 2007, launched an international site in the meantime, then came back domestically. Will "Fatty Luo," as his fans call him, manage another Bullog comeback?

Many foreign journalists I've talked to about Chinese blogs over the past few months don't appear to know about Bullog. Thanks to this crackdown, the international fame of this edgy network of bloggers and its charismatic founder is going to grow.

The Web's Benevolent Dictators

Jeffrey Rosen has a great article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend titled Google's Gatekeepers. In it he deals with the question of whether we are becoming too overly dependent on a few big web companies like Google - and whether it's wise over the long run for us to trust their team of (currently) very nice, well-meaning people who are trying hard to do the right thing when faced with government censorship demands and surveillance pressures. He writes:

Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.

He quotes Columbia Law professor Tim Wu who says: "To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king...One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.”

Tim is not the first person to make this point. Danny O'Brien at EFF wrote and spoke about this issue at great length over the summer. I re-quote:

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.

One effort to place collective limits on the absolute power of the web giants, and to create a framework for greater transparency and accountability, is the Global Network Initiative, with which both Danny and I have been involved. But the GNI is just one step. Danny also advocates a more grassroots solution if people want the same independence online as they have in the physical world (or at least in democracies):

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.

I've been writing, speaking and attempting to think about these issues as well, in particular, what are the implications when you go beyond the democracies of North America and Western Europe? What are the concrete implications in the Middle East? In China? At the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit last month, I tried to provoke my web industry audience to rethink common American assumptions that the internet plus capitalism will inevitably equal democracy, without too much need to worry about the details. Here's the video of my talk, with slides overlaid:

   

Isaac Mao came right after me, talking about his idea of "sharism." Unfortunately he was asked to shorten his talk because the conference was running behind schedule and Al Gore had to catch a flight:

   

How do we create viable grassroots, distributed alternatives to Google and Twitter so that if they get shut down, or turn evil, we're not left in the lurch - or in jail?  At the iCommons Summit in Sapporo in August, I gave a longer version of the my O'Reilly talk, and called on the global free culture community to work together to make sure that there are enough grassroots, distributed, non-proprietary spaces for people to communicate and express themselves so that we won't be so dependent on the web's benevolent dictators.

The question I have not yet managed to answer is: how do we succeed in breaking our dependence on the benevolent dictators? Or how can we help at least some of our web and telecoms dictators evolve from being monarchies to something more accountable, transparent, and participatory? Figuring out the answer should, it seems to me, be a major priority of free speech activism in the 21st century, and thus a major priority for the foundations and governments who fund them.