Archive for the 'Politics' Category

online memorial for slain Chinese UN peacekeeper

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on August 6, 2006
in News, Politics and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

Duzhaoyu_1

Peoples_heroes

"The people’s heroes will never fade"

Chinese UN peacekeeper Lieutenant Colonel Du Zhaoyu was killed in Lebanon by an Israeli rocket on July 25, along with three other UN peacekeepers. China was already not supportive (to say the least) of Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and Lebanese civilians, and this death only adds fire to an anti-Israel stance.

An online memorial has been set up for Du, with special sections on his military career, his lifestory, major events in his life, memories from family and friends, and media coverage.  Visitors can also leave notes, with or without virtual flowers (at August 7 at 10 in the morning about 3000 flowers had already been sent), as long as they post an email address and name.  I posted one in English and it didn’t appear. We can get a sense from the posts of what kinds of messages are deemed acceptable by the military and Party organizations that host the site.

The overwhelming feeling being expressed is one of pride and sadness.  Most posts are emotional, often sweet, messages about how proud
the writer is that Du was representing China as a peacekeeper for the United
Nations in a wartorn zone:

Life is short.  Your life was lived well! Go in peace.

You are the pride of the people.  I hope you are continuing to protect world peace in another world.

You are a hero.  You are a son of the Chinese people.  You are a model for us all.

Keep in mind, it’s easy to find extreme points of view represented online in any language. But there are a number of other notes that reflect some Chinese people’s anger at China’s inability to push through its own agenda in global settings. For instance, the first writer below sees Du as a martyr in China’s rise to significant global authority in the future:

The homeland is getting stronger. We will be righteous in the future. We will keep our promises. Our voice will be like a tsunami, we will command the attention of the world. We will command the attention of the United States/Japan/Israel. Then, you will lead our way. You will enlighten us as we continue gathering strength.

A martyr’s blood will not be spilled in vain!


popular Tibetan website

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on July 29, 2006
in Music, Politics, Religion and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

Websites by or about ethnic minority groups in China can be hard to find; and because we do not normally mention our ethnic background when we write posts or chat, it can be even harder to tell if the people who use these sites actually belong to a minority group themselves.

Phayul.com is a website that is popular among expatriated Tibetans, but unfortunately it cannot be accessed from inside The Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). Phayul is a Tibetan word that roughly translates into “Homeland” and the website mainly deals with issues that relate to the Tibetan societies around the world. The majority of the people who post on the site seem to be Tibetans.

Screenshot_005

The site has a news section, a variety of message forums, chat functionality, book and movie reviews, and a music/radio broad casting service. The message forum topics range from “Humor” over “Buddhism” to “Express Yourself”, but the topic “Issues and Causes”, where users can “bring burning issues to the other’s notice” is the category that most people use – it has over 22 thousand posts, the oldest thread dating from 2002.

Bilis on the BBS

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on July 20, 2006
in BBS, Government, News, Photos and Politics
. 1 Comment

Tropical Storm Bilis hit southern China over the weekend, killing over 200 people, flooding major
cities, sweeping away houses and cutting railways, power and water supplies. The BBS forums are full of first person reports and comments on the effects of the storm, as well as evaluations of offical responses.  You can clearly see how the BBS is acting as a space to trade concrete news about the status of specific areas, as well as about how to help those in need.

A few examples:

Daqi BBS reposted a Xilu BBS post titled "Bilis casualties not seen in the domestic media", which shows 3 photos from Getty Images Editorial, complete with watermarks.  Interesting that some Chinese are using services like Getty Images to find out about breaking news through photos that might not appear in the Chinese media.

An earlier July 17 Daqi post has many photos of the flooding in Guangdong’s Shaoguan and Lechang including this one from Phoenix TV:

Shaoguan_floods_2

 

Excerpts from the comments:

This happens once every four years, which means four years’ time to prepare.  That’s proof that the water management engineering is incomplete. A big flood is great–the officials can not only express great love for the people but also spend lots of government funds, they can not only receive people’s gratitude but also make lots of false accident reports…

[July 18] Several continuous days of storming, I went back and checked the text messages I’ve gotten during this time: 1) July 15 noon, from Shaoguan Electricity Bureau; 2) July 16 noon, from Shaoguan Third Defense; 3)July 17 10 a.m., from Shaoguan Tourism Association; 4) July 17 7 p.m., from Shaoguan Public Security Bureau; 5) July 17 7 p.m., from Municipal Party Committee. Don’t tell me that there wasn’t any news before the water invaded? This is a serious dereliction of duty on the part of the city government! What are the leaders doing? Resting over the weekend? This time we’ve clearly seen the level of Shaoguan city leaders–they’re good at talking on paper but when they knew that the flood was coming they did not make the necessary preparations. They didn’t even protect important places like the water works.  And they didn’t appear beforehand to announce the truth to the people.  Most of the news this time came from the Internet.

What are you making noise about? Lechang isn’t Indonesia! [this is a rare negative comment]

[July 19] The first thing I’m going to do to take action against the tragedy is to repair and clean my and my friends and neighbors’ homes. You have to rely on yourself for these kinds of things.  Others help has its limits.

[July 19] It’s not cold outside now–is there enough food and water?

Everyone can go here for more news about Lechang.

Baidu bias: nationalism and CCP hatred

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on July 8, 2006
in Blogs, Politics, Search, Translation and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

A Web 2.0 blog, TechCrunch, posted about a week ago on the upcoming launch of Baidu Space.  The post spurred a series of comments that reveal the craziness of commitments both for and against China’s leading search engine, Baidu. There are those who hate Baidu because it’s a mainland company and is seen as participating in government oppression of certain kinds of speech; there are those who love Baidu because it’s a mainland company and helps further the cause of strengthening China.  Both sides see things in black and white. Both can be virulent in Chinese and English.

Some excerpts from the comments:

wow,come on,you guys,please!!!I love techcrunch,dont let these
chinese shit profane techcrunch.I am a loyal fan of this site.Please
keep the purity and virginity of techcrunch.I am a loyal fan, of this
site.By the way,baidu is damn evil….I can smell the strench from hell when i surfing  baidu shit.:-(

In response to the post above:

不管怎么说.我都爱我们中国自己的搜索引擎  No matter what, I love our own Chinese search engine 可能我们的技术赶不上美国的GOOGLE和YAHOO  Maybe our technology isn’t up to Google or Yahoo 但是我们永远是百度的忠实拥护者  But we will always be faithful Baidu users 因为我们是中国人 Because we are Chinese

if u say”chinese shit”, you are cursing you and your parents as “shit “at the same time.Why do you call yourself “shit”?

Chinese people look down upon you,and people from other countries also look down upon you.

You made us sick!
你根本不配做一个中国人。  You are not worthy of being a Chinese.
你真恶心！ You’re disgusting!

link

Henan student riots

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 19, 2006
in BBS, News, Photos and Politics
. 0 Comments

ESWN has translations and photos from BBS posts about student riots (and yes, they really were riots) at Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College of Zhengzhou University in Henan last week. As ESWN notes, this is another clear case of mainstream media getting their reports directly from BBS posts. It also highlights the anger that many college and university students are feeling today as their years of sacrifice don’t result in clear job opportunities.

Excerpts:
The national Department of Education issued a document several years ago to require tier-two schools to state their status on the diplomas.  It is said that in the interest of fairness to students of all classes, the school hid the fact from the students so that the latter only found out when they received the diplomas.  Of course, they are angry.  Therefore, this riot occurred for cause.

But the infuriating part was that certain low-life students took advantage of the occasion to loot
  stores. The electronic stores especially suffered great losses. The public facilities were also severely damaged.

And from another student post:

This group of several thousand people rushed onto the street.  They walked down one street and smashed everything on the street: street lamps, telephone booths, bathhouses, banks, supermarkets … wherever they went, everything was picked clean.  The supermarkets and electronic stores were
  looted by some active students.  Wow!…The front gate of the school was overturned.  The statue of the founder was set on fire.  Several cars in front of the entrance were overturned and vandalized.   

Almost 10,000 people were shouting in front of the flag staff.  It was loud and impressive.

a ticket to Shangri La

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on June 19, 2006
in Commerce, Government, Politics, Religion, Travel and Virtual China
. 5 Comments

We’ve got a wonderful new contributor at Virtual China — Kathrine Hoersted, Danish social anthropologist. Kathrine is going to be exploring non-Han (something like 90% of mainland China identifies as belonging to the Han group) Chinese virtual places and spaces.  Think Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur, Naxi, and more.  We’re trying to map out where non-Han online activity and expression shows up, and how much of it is created by non-Han Chinese themselves. Kathrine starts by trying to find Shangri La –Lyn 

It used to be an imagined place, but now it has been rediscovered as a physical location on earth, and is even promoted in the virtual world.

To the Tibetans "Shamba La" is a mythical imagined place where people are said to live peacefully for all eternity. "Shangri La" entered the Western imagination via James Hilton’s bestselling 1933 novel Lost Horizon.  In the fictional book he described a physical place in Tibet which he called Shangri La, where people of all religions and ethnicities coexist in happy harmony and live to be hundreds of years old.

In today’s cash-driven Chinese tourist market, competitive discussions have arisen between counties in Sichuan and Yunnan about where Shangri La was really situated. Many arguments and intents to prove the exact location have been based on descriptions from Hilton’s fictional novel. Recently, the local government in Zhongdian town was given official permission by the Chinese authorities to rename their town and County Shangri La. So the modern Shangri La now exists in The Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Dechen (Diqing in Chinese) located in the northern part of China’s Yunnan Province.

Zhongdian itself is the subject of many an English-language travel site and blog, 6,550 images via Google, over 1000 images at Flickr. Shangri La can be taken in on a number of Chinese-operated tours. Local Tibetans, however, continue to refer to this location as Gyalthang.

Shangri_la_3

 

China’s “denied access” doll

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 9, 2006
in Blogs, Government, Politics, Search and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

Reporters Without Borders: The Chinese authorities seem to have stopped blocking access to the
international version of Google’s search engine, Google.com. Tests
carried out by Reporters Without Borders show that it is again
accessible in Beijing and Shanghai. Google’s unblocking tends to
confirm the theory that online censorship was stepped up for the
anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June.

IT blogger Keso says Chinese laws are like Zen–reaching enlightenment will take a long time.  Especially for foreign companies, who keep thinking that there is some clearcut set of rules to follow.  Keso joins other bloggers in posting the "denied access" doll whose heart gets pierced every time someone tries a Google.com search and gets a blank page. 
Google_doll

Rebecca MacKinnon says: 
The text on the top left says: "This person has made it impossible to access Google." The text on the bottom right says: "A click on this website equals one needle prick." 

At the bottom, Keso adds: "I’m an atheist, but I do believe that there’s a hidden force that can help us.  That force is true public opinion." 

more on online housing protest

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 5, 2006
in BBS, Blogs, Home, News, Politics and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

Notbuyhouse2

Notbuyhouse
It will be very interesting to see where this goes.  China Digital Times tagged a longer Pacific Epoch Epoch Times article here. Zou Tao, the founder of the NotBuyHouse movement, has a blog here and a general website for the NotBuyHouse Alliance here.  A couple of important points.  First, Zou Tao is a longtime political activist.  His latest blogpost helpfully reviews his background in this regard. He describes himself as a social activist and volunteer working on the social problems of the weak and poor. He lists some of his previous campaigns, beginning in 1999 with "Open Letter on Volunteering to Campaign for the People’s Congress" and "Open Letter to Society on Being a Real Citizen" [that's not a good translation, frankly, but it's a tough phrase to render in English].  He has also been a consumer representative on a number of Shenzhen forums on digital television costs and rising parking costs.  In short, an active figure in municipal politics. 

Second point: Zou’s political experience has shaped a sophisticated use of the internet to drive his movement.  He has logos of varying sizes for people to copy onto their own websites, and a specific strategy for how people can help disseminate the word online.

Unknowns: Zou’s current whereabouts, according to Epoch Times Pacific Epoch. Personally, I’m always sceptical about the accuracy of Pacific Epoch’s Epoch Times’ reporting, but they say that Zou was detained on his way to deliver a letter to top Chinese leaders in Beijing.  He then became reticent while talking to PE ET reporters, though one can understand why that may be since PE ET is known to be linked to the Falun Gong. [Note: I got the names mixed up.  Apologies to Pacific Epoch, which is a consultancy and research firm whose work I admire]. 

Another unknown is what Zou wants to do with the "alliance" and the "movement" that he has started.  There’s a strong current of populist anger at speculators, which clearly taps into widespread fear about the stability of housing supplies and the ability of blue collar workers to buy in.  All understandable on one level, yet surely quite threatening to the government.  Check out the NotBuyHouse Alliance’s goals, as posted on their website.

Our goals:

  • to express our extreme dissatisfaction with housing prices that are "higher than England and the U.S."!
  • through our actions, to generate action from the appropriate government bureaus, and to gain the attention of society!
  • let the [real estate] developers die in the toilets, let the houses rot in the speculators’ hands! [Note: no idea what "die in the toilets" refers to. Is there a particular issue with toilets and real estate in Shenzhen?]
  • unite all the forces that can be united, and through our practical actions, let the artificially high housing prices return to a rational position

Our actions:

  • absolutely do not buy a house for three years, unless housing prices come within an acceptable  scope
  • broadcast our objectives, let more people understand us, and join with us

Could this be the first deliberate Internet-organized protest campaign that has gained international recognition?  How far has it spread?  What will happen now? 

Olympics watch on Virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 22, 2006
in Government, News, Politics, Sports and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

808_days_to_go

link to the English-language official Chinese 2008 Olympics website

The 2008 Olympics watch on Virtual-China.org officially begins now.  Yes, we’re a bit late to the game (see more on years of efforts here), but our focus will, of course, be how 2008 plays out in virtual China, both in Chinese and in English.

A few things we can already say for sure: There will be an explosion of blog posts written by foreign journalists and tourists, adding to the virtual view of China in non-Chinese languages; there will be an explosion of Chinese chatter on the BBS, much of it proud much of it even nationalistic; there will be photo ops and tours and carefully manicured experiences manufactured for the press and tourists; there will be plenty of unscripted encounters between first-time visitors to China and genuinely welcoming Chinese residents which will be blogged and posted and captured on film; and of course, there will be the athletes and competitions themselves, partly experienced via online access of both foreign and Chinese TV broadcasts by audiences around the world. [related update: see recent news on Chinese p2p tech company Mysee and Shanghai Media Group providing streaming feeds of the 2006 World Cup.]

What would be new and possibly groundbreaking: Chinese blogging and BBS posting in English and Chinese on their encounters with foreign media and visitors, a kind of citizen diplomacy that could feed new voices back into the whole heavily mediated extravaganza.   

In the meantime: George Lessard on the Chinese Internet Research listserv points out a Guardian article (caveat: there’s a horrendous registration process to view) on what will sure to be a major part of the story and experience of the 2008 Beijing Olympics: the press and the Chinese government. 

The Committee to Protect Journalists encouraged the International Olympic Committee to raise the issue of how "free" the foreign press will be in reporting during the games.  The IOC did raise the issue, apparently, receiving the standard bland answer from Liu Qi, Beijing’s chief organizer, followed by the take-it-all-back statement: "…just as everywhere else reporters would have to abide by local law."

Baidu’s wikipedia: review

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on April 26, 2006
in Politics, Search, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 2 Comments

Baidu_baike2_1

Chinese blogger Xu Jie says Baidu’s Baike wikipedia (see earlier post on its launch) is a disappointment:

Baidu’s Baike [an alternate Chinese wikipedia] has finally formally launched.  but it’s nothing to get excited about…I looked around a bit and most of the articles are naked plagiarism.  They’ve hypocritically put links to reference material at the bottom…Basically there’s little of value here. When I looked carefully, this is the copyright contract: "Baidu owns all of the copyrights to material found on this website."  How shameless. 

As of 2:24 PST today, the site has over 48,000 articles.  I looked a bit more closely into some of the people who are ‘writing" the articles. I found that at least one of the most prolific authors seems to be posting articles out of another encyclopedia, as evidenced by the orderly entry of a series of articles all of which began with the Chinese word "two" 二. 

Could be a nice place for Chinese net users to find encyclopedia entries, but might not be a site for collective knowledge generation as Wikipedia is.

link (in Chinese)