The Olympic torch protests have caused quite a stir online and offline, and that on the whole, I’ve found a lack of balanced viewpoints or real voices from real people. So here is my attempt to mitigate that:
1
Famous Chinese Journalists Oppose the Carrefour Boycotts
“I would like to tell those friends who are sending SMS to call for the boycott of Carrefour that I happened to go into that supermarket yesterday and everything that I bought was made in China. This supermarket provides employment to several hundred Chinese employees. Behind the tens of thousands of products on the shelves, there has to be several million Chinese workers. If this boycott should work, China will be the first to experience the chaos!”
…he told the reporter that blind boycott of foreign countries will only harm China. This is the era of globalization, so why can’t we accept that point?
See full article from EastSouthWestNorth.
2
Being a Chinese, something I want to say
1) Most people, Chinese, American, French, whatever.. the ordinary ones, are not interested in political details. They just want to lead a normal and happy life. So it’s really a bad idea to say that “all the French people are evil” etc.
2) Due to some complicated reasons, we’ve met kinds of trouble. The Attacks to the Olympic Torch Relay in Paris really disobeyed the common goal of the majority. It’s not a good idea to mix sports and politics. If you are not a politician then you need to figure out enough truth before attacking the others or spamming everywhere on Internet. I have to admit that there are some Chinese people doing so in this post from my personal blog. I really feel sorry to see that all.
3) To boycott the western media / western companies is NOT a shortcut(in Chinese) for the Chinese people to be richer, NOR a shortcut for the China being stronger. As I will say later, to make our motherland be stronger and our people more richer, we’ve got a lot of things to do.
See full article from ifgogo.
(Latter link via Punk Planning.)
Headline image from 玩聚 on ju690 (with my translation in white):
The story goes that an officer within Chong Qing city administration (城管) looked up 城管 (city administration)”on Baidu Baike (= Baidu’s Wikipedia competitor) and found the following:
“City administration… A mafia (黑社會) that bullies storekeepers unable to pay their rent or economically challenged groups with problems with their licenses… Adjectives: Cruel, bloody, frightening… Verbs: Beat, smash, rob…”
This entry obviously distressed the poor officer, who himself was part of the city administration. It only hurt him more that Baidu Baike is supposedly written with the consensus of the greater netizen population.
What he may or may not know, however, is that he’s a victim of the greater egao (恶搞: spoofing/pranking) movement that is making its rounds on the Chinese internet.
Yet why did they egao city administration in particular? 王清 suggests on his blog that it’s a manifestation of the tension created by past incidents involving the city administration and small merchants. 王清 even goes as far as to say that it’s a call for reform and regulation on the role of city administration across the country.
And what happened to the entry in the end? Since the entry was first egao-ed on April 3, Baidu Baike has fixed it and erased the evidence of the egao edits (see deleted entries in their revision history)… but not before screenshots were captured for a Netease article.
Original story, sources and excerpts translated from 玩聚 on ju690.
In the wake of the clamor over Tibet… BBC News has been unblocked.
Image from BBC News:
I wonder if this move has anything with do with the anti-CNN sentiment* floating around the interweb.
Original BBC News story here.
*In case you haven’t been reading up: CNN has been blamed for their coverage of the recent incidents in Tibet because they a) cropped photos to suit their story, and b) used photos of Nepalese police arrests for their China stories. See ESWN for more details.
Dave’s experiment is brilliant. It probably takes this kind of situation to open up new practices across virtual spaces, which even though technically just a click away, tend to seem as far away as Mars.
In a nutshell, he’s got a tutorial for non-Chinese readers to sign up to a Chinese twitter-clone called fanfou, in order to start having a dialogue with Chinese folks who can speak English, regarding the current Tibetan protests. Imagine if conversations get started that will continue into the future.
I’ve signed up for fanfou and got myself a home page, but it’s not intuitive, even for someone who reads Chinese. Dave is now my only fanfou friend, and I used Twifan, which appears to search across multiple microblogging apps in Chinese, to search for tweets on Tibet and 西藏 (there are a lot more using the Chinese characters, but this will not help those who need to communicate in English). It’s not clear what could happen next. Maybe the problem is that it’s 4:30 in the morning on the mainland. We’ll see.
Dave is translating Tibet-related tweets here.
So microblogging and online videos are being brought squarely into the fray. Roland Soong writes about what’s happening on Youtube:
There is a propaganda war going on
YouTube because this is clearly one of the top video news sites. In a
propaganda, you win the share of voice and then you can win the share of
hearts and minds. Therefore, you want the videos that favor your
narrative to dominate. You also want unfavorable videos to be drowned
out. Therefore, you mobilize your people to post as often and as much as
possible….The
point here is that using YouTube to track Tibet developments is low-yield,
high-maintenance work.
It seems that today Chinese users could visit YouTube again since it was blocked on Oct 14. It was really terrible when I heard YouTube was blocked half a month ago. Quite a lot of people considered that it was for the National Congress which was held from Oct 15 to Oct 21.
Mad that Youtube is BANNED in China Facebook group seems mostly to be expats, although not completely. It has over 700 members at present.
If you really cared about emerging Internet practices and their social impact in China, AND if you were trying to keep up with social media, AND if you didn’t have all the time in the world to read blogs, AND if you read Chinese…you might just check out or even subscribe to Chinese venture capitalist and social entrepreneur Isaac Mao’s Twitter stream.
Here’s Joi Ito’s Twitter stream in English, which helps give an idea of how the streams can create a kind of ambient intimacy among users. But Isaac is stepping it up a level, to something that is closer to IM + blog + IRC/BBS. Not only do you find Isaac’s ongoing thoughts throughout the day (such as the recent: What’s up with Air China’s service? The flight attendant on an international flight didn’t know whether the meat in the main meal was pork or chicken, and in the end everyone voted and decided it was chicken LOL), but Isaac is using some very cool little applications like Twitterfeed, which lets you read the RSS feeds he subscribes to (blogs such as mindmeters, Techmeme, and 我blog故我在), and Twitterfox, which lets you view his buddies’ Twitter updates (also known as "Tweets"). You can follow conversations across Twitter, kind of like comments back and forth on a blog or a BBS, but all on one page, and often referencing blog posts, news, and random experiences nearly as they happen.
It starts to feel extraordinarily exponential…people like Isaac are moving fast with this stuff and are creating new virtual experiences and spaces as they go.
The China Media Project, based out of the Hong Kong University, ran a recent blog article called QQ runs interactive feature page on the problem of “fake reporters” in China, which pointed out the wave of innovative news dashboards coming out of Mainland Chinese online news sites.
The screen below, taken from the QQ news page suggested by China Media Project, has a graphic-intensive title (roughly translated as "Uncovering the most fake reporter in history"), below which is a snippet of the latest news.
Then on the left are the previews/summaries of full articles accompanied by the respective photographs, and on the right are some primary sources that give a look inside the "fake reporter’s" world.
Then if you scroll down, there is an reader poll on the right and then a box on the left for reader’s comments (but in a format more reminiscent of BBSs than blog comments).
I find it interesting how they’ve managed to leverage the screen to put up multiple articles, viewpoints and pieces of evidence (rather than the typical one article per page format that most news sites take).
The feature article below, from daqi 大旗, uses a similar two column layout, with previewed articles on the left and reader comments on the right. What they also do is quote an excerpt from Baidu Post (the Baidu all-purpose BBS) as a way of putting up another viewpoint.
Note, however, that these are the dashboard views for feature news items that have had multiple articles written on them. So they do not replace the current single-page articles (which are linked to) but they do augment the currently article-centered news.
An email arrived this morning from IFTF’s Jason Tester with the subject header: "What if France is making a backup copy of itself in China?"
The email contained a link to a post on Super Colossal titled: "China: USB External HD to the French."
The scenario, laid out by Super Colossal, is this:
- In the town of Tianducheng in Zhejiang province, the Chinese people are hard at work replicating French architecture, complete with its own Eiffel Tower clone.
- So the Chinese are copying instead of innovating again, nothing new right?
- But what if France, not China, was responsible for this construction.
- What if France was backing itself up, physically, just in case?
Thanks to Reuters/Aly Song for the great photograph.
The New York Times has a wonderful interactive map on pollution in China.
Link: Mapping the Impact
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