An exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.
The nail house incident blogged here earlier has made it way into the English blogosphere: BoingBoing linked to Ananova about it (before we caught it actually), ESWN linked to Danwei’s post, and Peering Into The Interior translated an interview with the owner.
Meanwhile, as Global Voices Online points out, it is also picking up steam on the Chinese BBS’s.
The latest item that’s caught my eye: netizens show support by mashing up headshots of the nail house owner’s husband.
Picture via GVO.
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.
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.
Jay Dautcher alerted me to the current number one video on Google Video. It’s been seen over 280,000 times, almost 100,000 of those in the last 24 hours. It’s a 77 minute video called The Rape of Nanking (Nightmare in Nanking), originally produced in English by a Dr. Rhawn Joseph and his Brainmind organization, and now voiced over in Mandarin. Dr. Joseph seems to have a fascination with the strange and macabre, and has produced such bizarre "classics" as Hitler’s Diaries, the Face and Pyramids of Mars, Alpha and Omega Antichrist, and a series of Brain Mind lectures. You can find the English version of Nanking Nightmare in several parts on Youtube, where it has been viewed 135,000 times in the last 3 months. The promo for the video has quotes such as this:
We had fun killing Chinese. We
caught some innocent Chinese and either buried them alive, or pushed
them into a fire, or beat them to death with clubs. When they were half
dead we pushed them into ditches and burned them, torturing them to
death. Everyone gets his entertainment this way. Its like killing dogs
and cats." –Asahi Shimbun, Japanese soldier, describing Japanese
atrocities during the Rape of Nanking.
This year is the 70th anniversary of the massacre. A quick Baidu search turns up a groundswell of attention in the last week or so for the film. For instance, China Youth Daily editor Qiu Haiping wrote an impassioned post on his blog on Feb 22, rallying Chinese viewers to see the film and to show it to their children as well. It was immediately reposted at forums, such as here at Tianya on the same day. Some comments on the Tianya repost:
The Americans see Sino-Japanese relations warming up
so they deliberately put out this film. Bush says to Japan,
look, you’ve got so much hatred with China,
China is not going to let it go. Just be good and let me piss on you.
That evil American government, there’s nothing they won’t think of.
The best teacher for Chinese youth’s anti-Japanese education is Japan itself! The Chinese government has actually been suppressing anti-Japanese sentiment inside China. In 2005, the explosion of anti-Japanese demonstrations was led by the Internet’s development in China. Thanks to the Internet, which has allowed us to understand more truths, and led us to throw away those ridiculous fantasies!
Actually, those Chinese who are familiar with the Japanese atrocities all hold a strong desire for revenge, and hope that China will punish Japan for it one day. Many Chinese don’t want to see any more propaganda from Chinese officials about "Sino-Japanese friendship." We are looking for an excuse for the second Sino-Japanese war. The short-sightedness, bullying and shameless nature of the Japanese are an opportunity for Chinese to get revenge!…
Watch this movie not to make us remember hate, not to make us take revenge, but to make us study history, so that both countries can peacefully coexist.
No matter what the U.S. does, they’re still different from Japan because they are still human. The Japanese will always be beasts.
Citizen journalist site Molive/Moobol 直播客 has a special section called "Chinese City Management in the Eyes of Netizens," which collects both positive and negative on-the-scene photos of policemen such as "Beijing City Official Steals Money from Beggar" and the follow-up story from the New Capital Daily in which both the policeman and the old woman he was accused of stealing from refute the accusation; photos of a group of police and social workers trying to get homeless people out of an underground pedestrian walkway; and a series of good deeds performed by Beijing city management.
Most common seem to be pictures of officials and police trying to maintain public spaces in the face of China’s urban beggars and homeless, who often show up in the photos resisting attempts to be taken away for "assistance." According to one story, a woman who wanted the police to stay away from her told them she was covered with lice and they’d jump on anyone who got too close. (The photographer said s/he had bites for the next week). The photos tell a complex set of stories about those on the front lines of the downside of Chinese reforms–that is, the poorest, the weakest, the crowd, and the police. You see the abject poverty of peasants who come to the city to beg, the difficulty of getting them off the streets, the abuse of the weak in broad daylight, and how Chinese citizens armed with camera-phones are practicing sousveillance — "watchful vigilance from underneath".
A homeless peasant in the city:
Other photos like this one from the Beijing policeman and the old woman beggar–whether or not he stole her money or not–bring the arrogance of authority into full view:
While still others, like this one from a Guangzhou crowd angered at a police beating of a street peddler, show officials and "crowd representatives" negotiating public acceptance of an apology:
The IT news site cnbeta has this clip on it today, from China Daily: "Purifying National Culture: Iran Shuts Down Popular Websites". The Guardian reports on the story here: Iranian government has blocked access to a wide range of sites, from the New York Times to Amazon, Youtube to Wikipedia and the BBC’s Farsi service. The China Daily Chinese=language version of the story on cnbeta follows the Guardian’s, pointing out the Iranian government’s concern with preserving "national unity", sensitivity toward "immoral Western values," and crackdown on satellite TV and publishing industry.
I tried Baidu’ing and Googling the story in Chinese to see if I could find more commentary, but couldn’t find it. Baidu gave me a "server connection reset" page each time I tried…From among the 33 comments from cnbeta readers:
China’s already almost the same.
What do you mean "almost the same"? It obviously already is the same!!! Can you get on Wikipedia? ! China has locked out who knows how many websites, and monitors a record of everything you do online no matter how obscure the website (不管网址多少冷门). As long as you are going there often enough, after half a year you can’t get on them anymore!!! I’ve got a handful of these kinds of websites!
Create a huge Intranet!!!! It’s the goal of our studies.
Those trashy countries with no human rights do things pretty much the same way.
They’re learning from China. Think they’ve bought the GFW? [Great Firewall]
Why report on what other people are doing? Why not report on how China blocks Taiwanese and overseas’ websites?
Iran’s filtering capacity is lame, all they’re doing is blocking a few websites, they’d better import the GFW fast!
At least Iran comes clean and tells you which sites boss is going to shut down. The GCD [CCP] is more shady, and doesn’t dare to admit to it.
Glorious Middle East ancient kingdom Government!! Glorious Iranian Government! It’s carrying on the fine traditions of highly reputed 5000 year-old ancient eastern Government. At this moment it’s not a Government that is closing down websites….It’s a part of the glorious spirit of ancient Government. The "dirty" websites are dead!! — [signed] a free person
Every country has an Internet monitoring system, it’s just that the mainland’s is too strict.
How many phone calls has Bush listened in on to catch Bin Laden? How many emails have been surveilled? How many unconscionable acts have been committed? And this is what some people call a democratic country. If you really want to protect your own interests you can consider becoming a ruler or you can think about going to live on Mars. No government is likely to allow too many things that deviate from its path. As Li An says, "Every ruler has a GFW in their heart."
Not bad, not bad! At least no-one has come out from the "Iranian Ministry of Information Industry" to announce, "We have not blocked any websites."
This excerpt from a submission to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, written in 2002, still stands strong for anyone trying to understand how the goverment affects the Internet in China. David Cowhig covered the Internet for the Environment and Technology Section of the US Embassy in Beijing for many years. Check out the entire piece–it’s readable and remains highly relevant.
China might be thought of as a decentralized de facto federal state
that lacks federal institutions that facilitate central control and
coordination such as the federal court system and regional offices of
central government ministries. China is best understood not so much as
a Big Brother state but as a loose collection of thousands of
provincial and local Party and government little brothers. Many of the
provincial little brothers have only nominal allegiance to Big Brother
in Beijing. Local officials want to control media not just for
Beijing’s purposes but also to prevent Beijing to know about their own
shortcomings. Many orders and regulations from the central government
are ignored from the outset or forgotten after only a few months.
One corollary of the China’s shortcomings in the rule of law area is
that local governments are not conscientious in obeying orders from
Beijing. The result has been that the central government implements
policies by national campaigns that are intense for a short time but
then swiftly fade away. New regulations are issued not as amendments to
old ones but as de novo regulations - apparently a tacit admission that
the old ones have faded from memory.
…What does this mean for the Internet? New tough rules are issued each
year but are not systematically enforced. Where enforced, enforcement
fades after a few months.
It sounds like a kind of guerilla statecraft.
For complete original text, per reader request, read on…and note, only 15 million Internet users in China in 2001.
Continue reading ‘not Big Brother, rather a loose collection of Little Brothers’
Just discovered China Daily’s wonderful treasure trove, Newscartoon site. Trying to puzzle through cartoon dialogue is a pleasurable challenge for me (Jason, however, seems to have no trouble!) — and it’s a really different way to understand what’s important in China at the moment, and how current events are being interpreted, at least from an official point of view. The site also includes links to homepages of many of its cartoonists. And at the very bottom of the site you’ll find links to dozens of other cartoon, Flash, and animation sites. Enjoy!
"Our research reveals that Chinese armor is just too thick!" [Document he's holding reads: Document on Trade with China] See artist Luo Jie’s other works.
"Son, where are you?" [SIGN ON WALL: BLACK NETBAR, i.e., illegal Internet cafe] By Ma Jiancheng.
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)
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!
If you read one book about the Chinese Internet this year (and, yes, there aren’t very many are there?), let it be Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China, by U. Wisconsin Madison’s anthropology professor Zhou Yongming (Stanford Press, 2006). The book is actually a good read–not always the case for an academic monograph–and juxtaposes the development and role of telegraphy in the late 1800s with the development and role of the Internet in the past two decades in China. Zhou concludes that Chinese nationalism, the relationship between China and the outside world, and domestic politics are the real drivers of inventive uses of both technologies–not the other way around.
I would not skip the first two-thirds of the book, which detail the history of the telegraph through delightful descriptions of local elites and their disagreements with the Qing rulers in the north, the suspicious view of the Qing government towards the new technology, and the use of the telegraph as a tool for an unprecedented, widespread, rapid dissemination of a genre of political speech known as the "circular telegram."
But if you’re pressed for time or not interested in history or not interested in reading whole books, you can focus on the last third of the book, which provides a nuanced view of various forms of "political participation" on the Chinese Internet in the past two decades. Zhou provides superb analysis of how the Chinese government has welcomed the Internet while at the same time regulating it as heavily as it can, not least through self-censorship by online writers. What I especially love about the Internet work is that Zhou takes a nice, long look at the people and ideas behind a number of important early websites, blogs, and BBS forums dealing with politics, some of which are ongoing such as V-War Forum 铁血社区 and the People’s Daily’s Strengthening China Forum 强国论坛 and others of which have been shut down such as, Michael Anti or recently, Century China Salon. A few of the key ideas from the book’s conclusion:
…the Chinese state has had to open up some online space to newly emerged netizens, while employing online tools to confront those who might use it for political purposes that go against its interests. In the meantime, Chinese intellectuals, marginalized minjian writers, and niche Internet surfers like the military fan groups have all made efforts to expand political participation, in which they have succeeded to a certain degree, especially in their own websites and BBS forums. Yet so far, the Internet has not been as influential and effective in shaping the public sphere as the circular telegram was a century ago (p. 234).
…the position of Chinese nationalists online is not explained by theorizing that they have been misled by the Chinese state and consequently do not "get it right." Rather, they are in fact well informed through the Internet and other media, but are responding in ways that are not congruent with the expected changes the information is supposed to exert upon its receivers, that is, by becoming pro-democratic opponents of the current regime (p. 239).
Zhou’s latest article appears in June 2006 issue of Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Twenty-First Century Review (二十一世纪, in Chinese), with two other articles under the heading of Freedom of the Press and Access to Information on the Internet. Zhou’s article is: "The Privatization of Regulation and the Reception Context of Internet Information," which looks to be a more updated discussion of some of the changes since research for the book discussed above was done in the early 2000s.
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