Archive for the 'Government' Category

on the BBS: cohabitation and the law

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 19, 2007
in BBS, Dating, Government, Home and Politics
. 4 Comments

Sina_bbs

One of Sina BBS’s "HOT" threads last week: "People’s Congress Delegate Advocates Repealing Concept of Illegal Cohabitation, Do You Support?" It was posted by "eastinred," who kicks things off with a long response titled, "This People’s Congress delegate’s proposal puts the incidental in front of the fundamental," some of which I translate below. Eastinred reads a bit like a hired Internet commentator trying to influence public opinion.

The main post notes that a People’s Congress delegate, lawyer Han Deyun, recently pointed out that unmarried cohabitation only became seen as illegal in 1989 and is not actually against the Marriage Law.  Since that time, according to Han, people have seen the practice as both immoral and illegal. Eastinred then responds to this news with a long, reasoned, essay.  Selected excerpts:

"eastinred": As seen by the common people (note, I’m not talking about legal experts), cohabitation can be divided in the following ways:  1.  Both parties are single; 2. One party is single, one party is married; 3. Both parties are married, but are not each other’s spouse; 4. Other kinds of unusual situations….Situations 2 and 3 are clearly going against our current law, and are already deemed illegal by the current marriage law because this kind of behavior is harmful to society…My personal opinion is that situations 2 and 3 must be defined as illegal cohabitation! What’s more, it should be cracked down on by the law!…As for situation 1, two single parties, we must focus on whether it’s voluntary.  If one party is being forced it appears to be illegal behavior.  Mostly it is men who force women, and here we must continue to fight against this kind of behavior.

Now I will discuss two single parties who are living together voluntarily. In this situation there is basically no harm to society, in fact it could play a stabilizing role…Some people are even just about to go through the marriage procedures…I think that the People’s Congress delegate was probably talking about these kinds of people when he said we should not label them [as illegal]. But our marriage law also protects common-law marriage, that is to say, although the couple may not have a marriage certificate they are still protected by law in many circumstances. This kind of situation used to be very common in the countryside, and has to do with tradition and educational level, and one thing about this kind of situation is that people surrounding the couple all see the couple as husband and wife, without any suspicion.

Because society is changing too quickly, the intensity of work (mostly the intensity of intellectual labor) is increasing daily for city people, especially in large cities, and there’s a huge volume of information. Marriage becomes a question of choice (people can’t make up their minds), dread increases (the fear of failure); add in the increasing mobility of the population and some pessimists adopt a kind of "having it once is better than never having it at all" 曾经拥有、别无所求 attitude. The two parties don’t care about the past and have no specific plans for the future (actually this is a kind of distrust in society), which naturally means an increase in casual husbands and wives. There’s something we feel sympathy towards in these kinds of people.  At present we should increase safeguards and later lead them in the right direction.  Increasing social safeguards will decrease the numbers of this group and this kind of precarious lifestyle, so that living a true married life will be more than just a dream for them.

Some of the over 200 comments had more to say:

My personal opinion? This kind of delegate is useless.

What a lame delegate, who knows who asked you to be a representative, social morals are falling apart just like that, perhaps it’s you who are living with someone illegally and that’s why you raised the issue.

  I support this strongly.  What is the law protecting in my relationship with my girlfriend, nothing. The law should protect those who are in situations against their will.

five-year plans, the official history

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 14, 2007
in Government, History and Translation
. 0 Comments

If you’re curious about how the new Five-Year Plan compares with previous Five-Year Plans, you can browse China Mapping Out the 11th Five-Year Development Guidelines, which reminds us that the 1st Five-Year Plan’s (1953-1957) goals were pretty different than today:

to concentrate efforts on the
construction of 694 large and medium-sized industrial projects,
including 156 with the aid of the Soviet Union, so as to lay that the
primary foundations for China’s socialist industrialization; to develop
agricultural producers’ cooperatives to help in the socialist
transformation of the agriculture and handicraft industries; to put
capitalist industry and commerce on the track of state capitalism so as
to facilitate the socialist transformation of private industry and
commerce.

political sustainability of Chinese inequality

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on February 26, 2007
in Education, Gender, Government, History, Politics and Statistics
. 1 Comment

A very smart, balanced, readable report, "How Much Inequality can China Stand?" has just been issued by Nick Young at China Development Brief.  The report relies on Chinese scholarly and government data to give a succinct summary of some of the key areas of inequality in China today: gender, income (including intra-rural inequality), access to basic services and social protections such as education and health care, exposure to "externalities" such as the effects of urban congestion and pollution, environment and proximity to pollution, and land use deals. 

The report argues that market forces are unlikely to create greater income convergence in the short-term, that state involvement is necessary and that it does exist:

…the predominantly urban NGOs that have emerged over the last decade, the “public intellectuals” who have voiced their concerns and the more adventurous media that have reported those concerns, by no means constitute a coordinated, united or oppositional force. There are, to be sure, some angry individuals who denounce abuses in ways that invite confrontation with the authorities.  But the characteristic form of civil society advocacy in China is to call on government leaders to “pay more attention” to this or that social issue, to “hear the voice” of  this or that social group, and/or to consult more extensively with NGOs, intellectuals, and the general public….The central government has recently introduced a number of social, economic and fiscal policy measures to alleviate rural hardship. It is too soon to judge the effect of these palliatives but they do at least appear designed to address what was, by the turn of the century, beginning to look like a crisis in the countryside.

Q coins: Chinese virtual currency gaining value in the real world

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on January 2, 2007
in Commerce, Games, Government and Virtual China
. 5 Comments

Tencent, QQ.com’s parent company, is being sued by an angry user for impersonating a friend and getting him to link through to a contest site.  Damages sought: 40,000 Q coins, and 445 5-digit QQ numbers (see previous post on the value of QQ numbers).  Is this the first time that a court of law has been asked to award virtual currency in a settlement?  It all points to the way that Q coins are increasingly being used as an alternative to the RMB for online economic transactions. It makes sense, given that a) so few Chinese have credit cards with which to pay for online goods and services; b) the vast majority DO have QQ accounts and Q coins with which to purchase online goods and services; and c) You can accumulate Q coins by playing online QQ games. 

A 12/29 article in China’s International Finance News 国际金融报 reports that Tencent itself is suspected by some users of instigating Q coin robbery schemes.  According to a QQ user quoted in the piece, "Nearly every QQ user has felt the pain of having their QQ number and QQ coins stolen." "Little Wang" had 3265.15 Q coins in his QQ account, earned from playing a QQ game.  He was just about to buy a new suit of clothing for his QQ avatar, when he discovered his account only contained 265.15 Q coins.  He contacted Tencent directly, but in the meantime was robbed again and left with ony 5.15 Q coins. The company told him that they wouldn’t do anything for him until he reported the theft to the police.  Wang goes on to say that from what he’s seen in the QQ BBS forums on Q coin theft, other users have had the same experience as him–Tencent doesn’t do anything but offer tips on how to protect themselves from further theft, and doesn’t reimburse them.

Mr. Li, an unidentified "Chinese finance expert" goes on to say, "A lot of netizens are going online at home, with official-version anti-virus software installed.  QQ numbers should be very difficult to steal. Some netizens suspect Tencent…Every Q coin exchange has a record. Every QQ account has an IP address associated with it. It should be easy to find out whether a Q coin has been stolen in order to be spent, so why won’t Tencent do it?…"

For background, Kent Ewing has written the most informative piece on QQ coin in English that I can find, in the Asia Times on December 5 (my apologies if this is really old news to some readers!).  A few key excerpts:

Public prosecutor Yang Tao issued this warning: "The QQ coin is challenging the status of the renminbi [yuan] as the only legitimate currency in China." In an article published recently in the Nanfang Daily,the prosecutor wrote that the central government would act to "limit the application of QQ coins" and assure that their use is restricted to the virtual world.

…Tencent boasts more than 220 million users, and its QQ coins can be purchased with a bank, telephone or "QQ" card at an official price of 1 yuan (12.5 cents) per coin. Originally, the virtual coins were designed to pay for Tencent services such as electronic greeting cards, online games and anti-virus software. Now, however, they have reportedly developed into an alternative currency
traded on the black market and used for other, less savory services, such as online gambling and
private chats with "QQ girls".

…the operators of some Internet forums are now paid in QQ coins rather than the official currency. And there is evidence that other online sites not associated with Tencent also accept QQ coins.

If this is true, that’s what will tip the scale. 

Chinese urban life: city management online

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 8, 2006
in BBS, Education and Government
. 2 Comments

"The Ningbo City Managaers Welcome You!"
Ningbo_police_2

The ongoing experimentation in online governance and bureaucratic transparency continues. It would be interesting to do a comparison between municipal management department websites in China and elsewhere, to see what the categories of information are.  Ningbo’s site has news such as the prosecution of an illegal construction project, or the announcement of an investigation team to look at township beautification projects;  open tenders for construction projects around the city; announcements of successful bids; instructions for submitting bids; and customer service, such as the addresses and hours of official IC card purveyors (important to help citizens avoid buying fake cards).  It looks like a lot of what the city management does is allocate money to various construction projects, and like bureaucrats everywhere a lot of those contracts go to a small circle of familiar faces.  This is probably why there’s so much emphasis on transparency on the website.

But for a peek into pure officialese, we can’t forget the wonderful discussion forum, or BBS.  You have to love Virtual China for the ubiquitous BBS. It’s hard to tell who exactly is contributing to the Ningbo City Management website BBS, but there you find posts with commentary on anti-corruption regulations, or city events.  Here, one of the most-viewed posts: an angry citizen took photos of street peddlers setting up shop literally in the street, in the middle of the city, wondering where were the police? Comments focus on the Chinese project of raising the quality of the people, a favorite of the government AND everyday people:

This tells us two things: 1) that certain peddlers have absolutely no civilization consciousness 一点文明意识也没有, and 2) There’s a big difference between the presence or absence of city officials. Given Ningbo’s current situation, the city needs official management, and I support the city managers.

Talking about civilization consciousness to street peddlers is like playing the violin to an ox.  1, 2, even 3 officials there wouldn’t do any good.  There’s no way to rule them by law.

Raising the overall quality of the people is a comprehensive, complex, and systemic project of the entire society. It may be too early to request civilization from the petty merchants and peddlers. The proportion of people in the city who have a definite level of culture is way too small.

peasant webs 2

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on November 22, 2006
in Commerce, Food and Drink, Government and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

Number two on a Baidu search for 农民网 is Jiangsu’s Modern Peasant 现代农民, a site run by the provincial committee for implementing a policy called "万名科技专家兴农富民工程" — can’t quite understand it, but something like "Scientific Experts Promoting Rural Wealth and Rural Projects."  It’s a government site listing current policies, meetings, and projects.  Not much human interest here.

The next is more interesting: Jintan Peasant is a site run by the city of Jintan, also in Jiangsu province.  Apparently the Jiangsu governmental apparatus has a strong web presence.  This is state internet at its most typical: articles lauding such-and-such a township for its enthusiastic work in doing the latest survey of rural incomes; the progress in implementing "modernized model villages"; the establishment of a committee on fruit varieties; work reports on the progress of establishing new villages and new rural education.  There are also analyses of production and consumption numbers for various agricultural products, such as mushrooms and edible fungi. Interesting for those trying to understand rural reforms, implementation of central government policies, on-the-ground agricultural data, and those with a general interest in Chinese political slogans.  The site had 365 visitors today.

peasant webs

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on November 19, 2006
in Commerce, Design, Government, Portals and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

Just finished the eye-opening Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of Chinese Peasants, the English translation of The Chinese Peasant Investigation 中国农民调查, originally published in 2004 and banned two months after publication.  It’s a fast, good read, and sounds awfully familiar if you’ve read any Chinese history–case after case of Chinese peasants trying desperately to make end-runs around violent, corrupt local officials.  So I decided to check out the online peasant presence, beginning at the most obvious place: a Baidu search for "peasant net" 农民网.  It yields 38,300 sites (next stop Google.com, which yields 162,000).  I’ll review some of the top-ranked sites over the next couple of weeks.

Zhongguo_nongminwang

ChinesePeasantNet中国农民网 looks like it is maintained by a government body in Hebei province, perhaps in Zhangjiakou municipality (it’s a bit hard to tell: the "About Us" at the bottom of the page is not a hyperlink).  At first glance one is struck by the relative "clean-ness" of the site.  It’s uncluttered by Chinese standards, with fewer menu choices and more white space.  As fits a .gov site, the focus is on communications from the topdown–including the texts of laws and regulations.  Will the Boat Sink the Water points out how important it is for rural people to have access to these texts, as they can use them to force official recognition of illegal activities, once they know exactly which activities ARE illegal. Front and center on the page is "Agricultural News." Overall impression: this is a one-way communication site. BBS or photo forums are absent.

At the bottom of the page is something rather intriguing–links to township and village level websites.  Click through to Maoshan Village, for instance, where you’ll begin with an official statement:

Continue reading ‘peasant webs’

keeping up with conferences: Internet governance; Chinese bloggers

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on October 31, 2006
in Blogs, Government, Internet governance, Politics and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

If simply keeping up on the virtual world weren’t enough, there’s the real world as well!  Here’s a quick update on a couple of recent/ongoing important meetings shaping the future of Virtual China:

The first ever Internet Governance Forum (IGF), defined by Wikipedia as "a global venue under the auspices of the United Nations, established to
accommodate multi – stakeholder policy dialogue in the field of
internet governance. It purports to bring together all stakeholders in
the internet governance debate, whether they represent states, the
private sector or civil society, on an equal basis and through an open
and inclusive process."

Over 1500 attendees representing governments, companies, organisations and themselves are attending the 4 day meeting in Athens, running from October 30 through November 2. At the IGF website there are instructions for accessing the live video stream from the conference, participating in chat rooms, and even texting in questions to specific panels (but only in English, Spanish, or French). It also tells you what sessions are happening in real-time. 

The IGF helpfully provides highlights of panels, such as this morning’s panel on Openness, at which "A Chinese government representative from the audience (who insisted
that he had no problems accessing the BBC Web site from his office in
Geneva), insisted with a straight face that there were no restrictions
on access to Internet content in China, provoking derisive laughter
from the audience."   

Also check out the BBC’s excellent Reporters Log from the IGF.

(via Jack Linchuan Qiu on ChineseInternetResearch)

Cnbloggercon_1

Second, there was the high-powered Chinese Bloggers Conference 2006 (or, CnBloggerCon), which took place in Hangzhou over the weekend of October 28 and 29. The conference blog (in Chinese) includes downloadable presentations on Internet Trust (by Dr. Cheng Lihua, psychologist, Zhongshan University) and on the Internet, Blogging, and the Creative Spirit (by Fang Xingdong, head of blogging service Bokee.com, also with Chinalabs.com and Beijing Normal University). 

Partners Deb Fallows at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Berkeley School of Journalism, and Professor Ashley Esarey, Political Science, Middlebury, launched their online survey of Chinese bloggers, which will give us Pew-quality data on the Chinese blogging population.   

Rebecca McKinnon attended and, as usual, provides coverage no-one else does in English at her blog  RConversation. She writes:

The people in this room are not socially disruptive revolutionaries.
They are people who would like to get on with the business of finding
ways to use the Internet to improve people’s lives.  To the extent that
politics won’t prevent them from doing so, they would prefer not to be
involved with politics.

…If one extrapolates China’s future from this group of individuals, you
see a peace-loving, compassionate, humanistic, globally minded,
flexible, hard-working lot who are well poised to drive Chinese
innovation…. and to drive it in directions that the entire world
should certainly welcome. The Chinese government would be crazy not to
embrace them as poster kids for China’s future. If the government is
not capable of doing so, it will be to the long-term detriment not only
of China’s economy but also of China’s global credibility, which in
turn has an impact on China’s long-term global influence.

Rebecca also blogs IT guru Keso’s keynote speech, which is very helpful for those of us who were not there!

you just never know: the reappearance of Wikipedia

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on October 13, 2006
in Education, Government, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 2 Comments

Andrew Lih has an excellent post reminding us what’s important about the news that Wikipedia has suddenly, and unevenly, been "unblocked" in China: 

It’s important to know there is no monolithically operating Great Firewall of China, even though it is a cute and useful moniker.

The “GFW system” depends on a distributed system of checks and
filters that depends on the particular ISP, the type of connection
being used, and the geographic locale. A commercial connection in Hubei
is different than a residential DSL in Guangdong is different than an
academic network in Shantou. Something blocked in one area of the
country may be totally fine in another. A keyword that is filtered in
one place could be allowed in another.

A reader of Andrew’s blog, Elen Wu, supplies a link to the Wikipedia access monitoring taking place on cnBeta.com, an online community of IT people who post mostly very technical news such as PPStream upgrades to 1.0.4.601, but also items of interest to a more general audience such as this piece on Google’s Dr. Li Kaifu’s analysis of Baidu at Fudan University Google Camp, October 10.  Will definitely keep an eye on this homepage!

the difference between a spoof and an infomercial is…? Chinese bloggers on bureaucracy

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on August 27, 2006
in Blogs, Government, Meme, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

John Kennedy at GlobalVoicesOnline provides a fascinating set of translations on what some of China’s top critical bloggers are saying about the recent regulations handed down by China’s State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT).  The regulations represent, as Kennedy points out, a particularly visible split between bureaucratic and civilian outlooks on life.  One set of new rules deals with cutting down on fraudulent TV ads for medical and health products, a good thing given products like these breast enhancement injections. 

The other set of regulations attempts to crackdown on spoofs and spoofing culture (see William Moss’ thorough post at CNEt Asia for more). For SARFT (and many other non-bureaucrats, it must be pointed out), spoofing culture is a decadent gateway to all kinds of other disrespectful and unhealthy attitudes–think Stephen Colbert decimating George W. Bush onstage recently, in front of the whole world.  Kennedy’s GlobalVoicesOnline post includes this bit from Chinese blogger Han Han, who draws the connections for us between fraudulent ads, Internet spoofs, and the effect of official bans. Maybe the banned TV ads will now become online spoofs…?:

[SARFT has] issued a ban on parodies, and will begin administering online
video. What will the outcome of that be? Under SARFT’s administration,
I saw a commercial on television several years ago, which showed a
down-on-his-luck senior citizen. Someone asked, ‘what’s up with you?’
The old guy said, I’ve got cancer. The ticket-seller on the bus said,
‘that’s okay, a few years ago I also had cancer; got cured at that
hospital just up ahead, and now I’m okay. The driver said, ‘yeah, my
cancer was also cured there. Then one-by-one the bus passengers said
‘we all had our cancer cured there.’
    Politics talk not allowed, within three days your breasts can grow as
big as your head, in a month you can grow ten centimeters, as fast as
an animal, have all your zits gone in just ten hours, foreign cartoons
not allowed to show during prime viewing time, etc., all are the
masterpieces of SARFT’s management. Is this what internet video will
look like from now on? Seems that from now on video shorts will only
increase breast size.

(via ESWN)