Chinese Answers

On the outside, China's answer to Silicon Valley doesn't look the part: It's a crowded mass of electronics malls, fast-food joints and office buildings in northwest Beijing, bisected by congested highways.

Inside China's Version of Silicon Valley, Wall Street Journal, Dec 4, 2013.

Large parts of eastern China, including its prosperous and cosmopolitan commercial capital Shanghai, have been covered in smog over the past week or so. The provincial government has cancelled flights, closed schools and forced cars off the road – and also warned children and the elderly to stay indoors. A cold front arriving yesterday saw the pollution start to clear.

Users of Sina Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, also vented their outrage over the CCTV and Global Times’ comments.

Positive Spin on China's Smog Crisis Baackfires, The Scotsman, 11 Dec, 2013

Over 86,000 micro-credit practitioners, China's answer to Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi banker credited with pioneering the concept of micro-finance, have been going door to door to visit small business owners and farmers to offer them financial advice and services.

Rags to Riches Tales Expected from Micro Financing Growth, Xinhua Insight, 14 Dec, 2013

China Telecom’s subsidiary Jiangsu Telecom, in Jiangsu province on the east coast of the country, posted the offer on its website. Translated details were scarce, but it appears customers have the chance to use bitcoin instead of yuan to pre-order Samsung’s 2014 clamshell form-factor Android phone.

Payments are processed through BitBill, China’s answer to BitPay.

China's Third Largest Mobile Network Now Accepts Bitcoin, Coindesk.com Nov 29, 2013.

58.com, China’s answer to Craigslist, surged nearly 42 per cent to $24.12 in its debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, in a sign that sentiment towards US-listed Chinese companies could be turning after two years of accounting scandals and critical reports from short-sellers.

China's Answer to Craiglist Surges on US Debut, FT.com, Nov 1st, 2013

 

Human Rights Blighting China's Future

Sick and tired of having do-gooders like Europe and America slamming the terrible human rights record in China, China has once again pointed out that only Chinese people can really attack the terrible human rights record in China.  If they're not already in jail for doing so that is.

Yesterday was, of course, International Human Rights Day, according to the UN General Assembly.  You'd think that with their recent appointment to the UN Human Rights Council, China would've at least started to pull their punches when it  come to be dishing out beatings to the poor folks that trek to Beijing to file petitions against corrupt officials, and other grievances they might have.  Not so, according to a retired army officer, Gao Hongyi, who went to Beijing's UN offices.

"After I got there, the place was packed with people and large numbers of police," Henan petitioner Shi Yuhong told RFA's Cantonese Service. "We were all put onto buses and taken to the holding centers," he said. "I was put on the 47th bus [to Jiujingzhuang detention center]," he said.

So everything's going well in that department, then.  Fearful that Chinese people would criticise the Chinese stance on human rights, the authorities went even further, making sure that no one at the train stations wouldn't get a chance to file their petitions, or make their opinions heard on what was supposed to be a day of building awareness about human rights violations.

They detained a few more people near the southern railway station in Beijing," said a petitioner surnamed Liu from the northeastern province of Jilin. "A lot of people are planning to head up to the UN at Liangmaqiao and the new premises of China Central Television to call for better human rights," Liu said.

"I saw a lot of police and their vehicles by the southern railway station," he added. "They treat petitioners as the enemy."

All of this is, of course, par for the course, when it comes to dealing with complaints made by the little people in China, it doesn't say much for a government which claims to have fought a revolution in the name of the rural poor.  Over the past year, censorship and suppression of protestors have increased, ranging from high profile arrests of troublemakers on Weibo to the quiet detentions of activists placed under house arrest.  Treatment of minorities in places like Xinjiang have gone from bad to worse, with arbitrary executions taking place without due process or supervision.

China treads a fine line between presenting itself as a modern, rising economy and superpower, but the actual mechanics underneath the shock and awe PR haven't changed since tanks were ordered to clear Tiananmen Square.  Despite the best efforts of the Chinese government, they just can't get away from the thuggish tactics that haven't worked in the past, and continue to blight China's future.

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Chinese Declare Internet Victory

If you've every wondered what your dad would sound like if he was put in charge of cleaning all the porn off the Interwebs then take a look at what Ren Xianliang had to say when his office issued forth a proclamation that the Internet is now like Disneyland, with barely a bad word to say about the CCP.

A study by an Internet opinion monitoring service under the party-owned People's Daily newspaper showed the number of posts by a sample of 100 opinion leaders declined by nearly 25 percent and were overtaken by posts from government microblog accounts.

Using his Jedi powers, Zhu Huaxin, general secretary of an Internet opinion monitoring service (such a thing does exist, apparently) weighed in, assuring us that positive energy (The Party) has regained control of the Intertubes, defeating negative powers (everyone else on planet Earth).

"The positive force on the Internet has preliminarily taken back the microphone, and the positive energy has overwhelmed the negative energy to uphold the online justice,"

The impressive statistics mean nothing, as was pointed out by a number of overseas analysts.  The mere fact that people aren't stupid enough to go public with their dissenting views means that they're being unpatriotic on more secure platforms, being driven underground and ultimately radicalised.  But then, the politicians in Beijing have already thought of that, right...?

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One Child Policy Reform Already Boosting Stock

In the opposite way that the dearth of copulating couples in Japan is having a crippling effect on the kiddie entertainment industry, a number of companies that cater for kids have seen their stock rise, giving the Hang Seng is biggest boost in two years.

One of the biggest problems has been that the retiring elderly don't have enough of the younger generation to take over their jobs.  The size of the retiring population prompted analysts to predict that there would be a drop of 3.25% of China's annual growth rate.  While the uneven population demographics have made China look like a developed country, China has little in the way of most developed countries social welfare, which, you can imagine isn't a good thing to have happen.

Writing on a blog post for China Gaze, Kirsten Korosec of Smart Planet also pointed out

The country’s one-child policy initially provided an economic boost. China’s working age population rose in the past 20 years, pushing up incomes and productivity as young people headed into cities to work in factories. But the share of working-age folks has since declined and is expected to fall between 2010 and 2030 nearly as fast as in Japan, the U.S. and other developed, rich nations.

Not awesome.  The good news is that as younger couples become wealthier, they are more inclined to have a second child should the reforms go through.  Of 26,000 Weibo users surveyed, the vast majority responded that they would have more children, law permitting, some of the responses to the proposed reform were pretty lukewarm, citing rising living costs and the raging property bubble as other worries to consider when thinking about becoming a parent.

 

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Diaoyu Islands: A Very Dumb, Risky Move

Having thumbed through Zapp Brannigan's Big Book of War, China extended it's air defence zone, whatever that is, five days ago to included the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.

The new zone, which has been pretty much ignored by everyone, including that guy with the gyrocopter in Mad Max 3, is essentially nothing more than dick-measuring/pissing contest with China pitched in a battle of will against, er, China.

Technically, the ADIZ requires flight plans and radio frequencies to be registered with China when flights are routed through the airspace.  The deep sighs from the Pentagon were palpable when a spokesman reiterated American's non-compliance with the redefined zone.

Washington “continued to follow our normal procedures, which include not filing flight plans, not radioing ahead and not registering our frequencies”.

Of course, docking about diplomatically comes naturally to Chinese politicians, who have managed to pick the worst place in the world to play chicken.  The China Daily, usually so thoughtful and even-minded about such issues once again choked on it's own baozi writing that

“The Japanese and U.S. complaints that the ADIZ is a 'unilateral' move that changes 'the status quo' are inherently false.  The U.S. did not consult others when it set up and redrew its ADIZs. Japan never got the nod from China when it expanded its ADIZ, which overlaps Chinese territories and exclusive economic zone. Under what obligation is China supposed to seek Japanese and U.S. consent in a matter of self-defence?

The obligation of starting a war with two countries would probably be a pretty big obligation, but China must play the role of the victim in all of this, even though they're the ones that changed the rules in the first place.

Where Japan is involved, there's lots of complaining that nothing is fair, and that the evil Japanese devils will invade the motherland given half a chance, which given the rate at which China is claiming obscure islands in the area, won't be far off.  The China Daily piece goes on (and on and on) saying that the new zoning doesn't target any specific country, just like Homeland Security doesn't target any specific racial group.

The ADIZ is completely unenforceable, unless Xi Jing Ping plans to go a bit Kim Jong Il on y'all by shooting down commercial passenger aircraft, and taking potshots with anti-aircraft fire at US Air Force planes probably isn't going to secure a Nobel Peace Prize.

China complained (as loud as ever) that the US is taking sides, although with a large military presence in both South Korea and Japan, it was hardly surprising that the US couldn't give tinker's cuss about the new ADIZ.  Psychotically changing rules and regulations in the bi-polar way that characterises Chinese diplomacy might well bolster support for the Party with the Chinese, but I just get the feeling China really has to wake-up around to the idea that no-one  gets it's deal with posturing and preening instead of actually doing something.

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Guangdong Police Tape Up Mouths of 23 Suspects

Thinking out of the box doesn't exactly come easily to the average Chinese, and given what happened when police in Huizhou arrested 23 men in connection with over 100 thefts, Chinese people are like the proverbial dog with two bones: An ingenious solution presents itself, but then creates more problems than it solves because no one thinks ahead.

Which is exactly what happened with the coppers realised that they couldn't actually understand what the suspects were saying because of their thick accent.  This kind of stuff happens and lot in China, for the uneducated western reader it's best to think of China as a collection of small countries grouped together under the banner of "The PRC" rather than a country that shares the same spoken language.  The solution?  Tape up the mouths of the prisoners rather than let them chat together and figure out what their story is when it comes to the interrogation.  Sadly, the pictures ended up on the Chinese intertubes, and then out onto the real Internet.  

Of course the idea that they have to improve their interrogation skills never actually occurred to the police, who will probably be releasing a statement soon saying "it's not our fault if we ask stupid questions during the interrogation of prisoners, this was the best way of not getting stupid answers.".  The actual excuse given wasn't far from the truth when the police claimed it was done to protect the rights of the prisoners to stop them confessing to the crimes "accidentally".

Here's hoping that no one on the UN Human Rights Council saw the photos.

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Sandra Bullock: Diplomat

Studio execs have been dribbling over the prospect that Gravity might just make everyone in Hollywoodland gajillionaires in China.  Projected revenues for the China release alone stand, at worst, at $60m, it stands to reason then that when the Chinese distributors wanted to have a chat with it's leading lady, on Ms. Sandra "there's a bomb on the bus" Bullock, the erstwhile producers didn't see much of a problem.

Ingratiating herself with the Chinese bean counters in Beijing, everything was going smoothly, until it came to an awkward moment when an invitation to visit China was extended to the starlet.  Gracefully declining as only she could, citing her demanding shooting schedule for the next couple of years, the short conversation proceeded quite cordially.  Until, that is, Ms. Bullock mistook a momentarily silent line to mean that the other party had hung up, whereupon she took the opportunity to confide to an aide that "at least now I don't have to visit fucking China.".

Hopefully the gaffe won't affect the box office performance, and the producers have a large fruit basket winging it's way to the offices at The Film Bureau.

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ProPublica's Weibo Censored Image Archive

Weibo, and the army of censors that police the platform is proving to be a valuable tool when it comes to penetrating the veil of secrecy that the state censorship machine operates behind.  For the last couple of years, institutions have been poking the Great Firewall with a stick to find out what makes it tick, and China has managed to create a market in exporting it's web monitoring tech.

Since May, ProPublica has been collecting and archiving the images that have irked the powers that be, prompting them to be purged from the Chinese Internet.  The interactive feature that they've put together allows you view the images by category and gives background on the whys and wherefores of the censorship.

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China Pot Calls US Kettle Black

If you want true idiocy, if you want really find those people who have a  face palming, woeful misunderstanding of how their own country operates, go no further than the China Daily.  To whit, the headline that grabbed out attention - "US Spying Agencies are Out of Control".

The China Daily, English language mouthpiece for the Chinese Community Party, the political party that has presided over the worst famine in human history, and the longest period of systematic human rights abuses in the world has taken it upon itself to slap the wrists of US spy agencies.

 

Why Chinese People Buy Empty Properties

The BBC reports on why exactly Chinese are buying not just second homes, but third and fourth homes - some of them haven't even been built yet.

Chinese Press Control: You Can't Have Your Cake and Eat It.

The biggest mystery behind China's repeated attacks on foreign media has always been why do they bother?  It's understandable that the BBC's Chinese language news service would be blocked, as well as other overseas Chinese news sites, but to block an English language site seems pretty pointless.

Joshua Keating at Slate makes the point that state-controlled media in China vastly out-numbers foreign news sources, and that Chinese people aren't too bothered about reading news in English anyway.   Any trip down any street in Beijing will take you past a newspaper vendor who seems to have an unimaginably wide range of publications.  In spite of efforts to improve the levels of English literacy in the country, there's still a relatively small proportion of the Chinese population that is actually able to read English news site without the aid of a dictionary.

So what's the deal with wailing on foreign press?

Bloomberg Accused of Killing China Report

Making money in China ultimately means that at some point, you're going to have to kiss some serious ass.  If you're a news site you really have to knuckle under.  Get down on all fours and seriously lick boot.  The CCP are in charge around here, and they're used to getting all their own way.  Putting the frighteners on the foreign reporting community by administering a few sound beatings (back in the good old days) has given way to denied visa applications and the occasional website block as a surefire way of making sure that hacks think twice before following up a lead.

China rattles it's visa sabre just to remind all the foreign devils who write nasty stories about all those Mao-fearing politicians.  If you really piss someone off, your website gets blocked.  Pavlovian system of punishment and reward has meant that ISPs and websites do a lot of self-censorship to keep the Politburo happy.  Occasionally bulletins from the Ministry remind journos who exactly is in charge, but by and large, the censorship machine hums along quite nicely all by itself.

The problem is getting foreigners on board.  Foreign journalists have all sorts of righteous beliefs concerning the freedom of the press and serving the public interest, and other related nonsensica.  The New York Times and Bloomberg have paid the price for publishing non too flattering pieces about the upper echelons of Chinese government.

In an effort to get it's groove back in China, and prevent it's Beijing bureau from being forced to close, accusations have surfaced that senior editors at Bloomberg quashed a story that linked Wang Jianlin with the relatives of top government officials in Beijing.  Bloomberg have flat out denied that the story was dropped because of it's already precarious position in China.  Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler was adamant that there was no threat from the Chinese government that they would kick Bloomberg out of China if they ran the piece.  

“The reporting as presented to me was not ready for publication,” Mr Winkler told the Financial Times, adding that Laurie Hays, a senior editor, and other top editors agreed with that assessment.

The person familiar with the discussions dismissed Bloomberg’s comments that the story was not ready for publication, saying it had been approved and just needed a Chinese government response. “We had crossed the Rubicon,” the person said. “The story was fully edited, fact checked and vetted by the lawyers.”

Kowtowing through gritted teeth has become par for the course in Hollywood, who are more that happy to insert a couple of ingratiating yet completely irrelevant pro-China scenes in their movies.  If the allegations are true that the Bloomberg killed a report purely based purely on speculation that the Chinese wouldn't like it, they may as well just shut up shop anyway.

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Backlash over Picasso Purchase

What better way to connect with the common people than spending $28m on a Picasso that they'll never see?  Well that's what Wang Jianlin's Wanda Group seems to think, and it faced the tide of public outcry today, as Chinese people figured out that money could be better spent elsewhere, and the artwork wasn't Chinese.

"Only an enterprise with culture can understand art and collect the best artwork in the world," said Mr Wang, as tucked into a Bald Eagle egg omelette (so we're told), which did little to quell jibes that collected on Weibo (where else?).

"With that money, how many sick people could receive treatment? Why not give something back to society first?" said one person posting on China's hugely popular microblogs, adding: "China's nouveau riche are short of nothing except conscience."

Perhaps they're all just angry that Wang didn't even bother getting a discount - he paid twice the estimate of $12m.  He may not know art, but he knows what he likes.

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Mainlanders are Locusts Even At Home

When a group of well meaning Hong Kongers took exception to the behaivour of certain mainland Chinese people acting like mainland Chinese people (i.e., doing whatever the hell they liked despite numerous public signs saying "don't do whatever the hell you like") they took out an ad in a newspaper that branded Mainlanders "locusts".

Whoever runs the official Beijing Subway Weibo account got pretty miffed at people leaving sunflower seed husks and endless flyers for real estate agents lying around the carriages, posting a particularly nasty message:

Beijing Subway V: #Civilization hand in hand with you# [Subway civilization discussion]  The Line 10 is scattered about in mess after “locusts” have left. The capital city of Beijing is well praised for its tolerance, but sometimes is also criticized for its over-tolerance. For those that intentionally destroy Capital Beijing with bad behaviors, what we can say is only that You are not welcome!

The ever touchy Chinese netizens descended on the tweet like....er....um....in their hundreds, taking exception to the word "locusts".

脱线的胖子：You are disqualified to choose the object of service as a public service provider.

Humpy：Locust, although used in a pair of quotation mark, is still an extreme insult to compatriots. You can not conduct personal attack at the passengers even if they behave badly. We ask Beijing subway authority to apologize to the public and punish those responsible.

张修茂：Beijing Subway is wrong if they refer locusts to strangers and migrants, but uncivilized behaviors should be condemned.

带上柳岩去日本：Is there any trash bin in the carriages?

 

As the writers of the original report at HugChina pointed out, there'll probably be nothing like the outrage that erupted after Jimmy Kimmel's "kill all the Chinese" skit.

China Reflects on International Journalists Day

One of the great things about living and working in a nanny state is that whenever things go wrong, you can always blame the nanny.  Which is exactly what The Global Times does as it laments the lack of journalistic standards in the Chinese news community.  

More state regulation is needed, it concludes, failing to appreciate that the central news agency in China is actually state controlled to begin with, but we all know that the cure for all of China's ills is laws and yet more laws on the statute books.  Other newspapers agree, but then, they don't have much of a choice.

Central to the plot that many (state-censored) newspapers are spinning is the detention of Chen Yongzhou.  Identifying a scapegoat to point at and shout derisively  is a long tradition in China, and it certainly didn't happen when Xinhua or CCTV embarked on one of their many cock-ups.  A series of missteps that eventually led many to be believe that a secret experiment designed to discover if bloated, overfed, half-literate baboons could run a news agency.

Xinhua is adept at slinging mud of it's own, attacking CNN and the BBC over it's coverage of the two bomb attacks that hit the capital and Taiyuan.  The Chinese, eager to make the case that China is a world power has has Muslim extremists willing to bomb government buildings to prove it, have derided "Western media" in the quaint 1950's era commie rhetoric that it does so well.

Complaining that the US doesn't recognise the attacks as terrorist driven act is like complaining that a Iraq War veteran with no legs doesn't recognise your appendix scar as a legitimate injury.  The Politburo would be unlikely to sanction US or British boots on the ground in Xinjiang, so it's belligerence towards western media essentially boils down to grandstanding in front of it's own captive audience.

The air, the bloody air, is touted as one of the success stories of Chinese investigative journalism.  It wouldn't be Chinese news if there wasn't some horror story about how bad the pollution is in China.  Wily commentators have pointed out the amusing side note to the ongoing saga of China's AQI that the smog is rendering many of the closed circuit TV systems designed to stop people rebelling against the state and, er, bombing government buildings, completely and totally ineffective.

For many, including the poor eight year old unlucky enough to be diagnosed with lung cancer in Jiangsu, you don't really need to conjure up mythical terrorist threats when the government itself is quite happy to mortgage the health of it's own people in search of ever bigger profits.

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Mosque Raid Linked to Tian'anmen Crash

Asia Times Online postulates on the credible connection between a police raid on a mosque in Xinjiang and the car crash in Beijing last week.

The driver of the car Usmen Hesen who was killed along with his wife and mother had quite vocally declared his intentions to seek revenge for the raid on his local mosque after police tore down the courtyard that Hesen had contributed a large portion of the funds to.  The police in  Yengi Aymaq village in Xinjiang's Akto county had declared the courtyard an illegal extension and tore it down when they raided the mosque exactly a year before the car attack in Tian'anmen.

Hesen made the speech as he told the mosque community to stand down after they argued with the armed police.
"At that time, Usmen Hesen jumped in and persuaded the community to disperse by saying, 'Today they have won and we have lost because they are carrying guns and we have nothing, but don't worry, one day we will do something ourselves'," Turdi said.

In a masterstroke of obfuscation, the local authorities had said that even though building permits had been successfully applied for and the 200,000rmb mosque, an amount that took three years to raise, the proper paperwork for the extension and courtyard (another 30,000 kuai) hadn't been completed properly and was therefore illegal.  Bloody red tape, eh? 

Hesen made the speech as he told the mosque community to stand down after they argued with the armed police.

"At that time, Usmen Hesen jumped in and persuaded the community to disperse by saying, 'Today they have won and we have lost because they are carrying guns and we have nothing, but don't worry, one day we will do something ourselves'," Turdi said.

"As Usmen Hesen finished his emotional speech, [his mother] Kuwanhan Reyim went to him crying, and hugged and kissed his forehead because of her pride in him. The crowd was also moved to tears and retreated."

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China Debates Terror Attacks Online

"Dog fuckers", a little known term of affection (we presume) for government officials, is how one Weibo user described the intended targets of yesterday's bomb in Taiyuan.

With public confidence in government officials not especially high these days. Xi's crackdown on graft is continuing, and a steady stream of videos and photos continue to emerge online of civil servants caught in compromising situations with women who aren't their wives, reactions to the bombings have been a little different to what you might expect.

David Wertime's analysis of the "lone wolf" attacks on Foreign Policy, shows there seems to be some debate in the Chinese webspace of whether exactly violent protest against the government is acceptable or not.  Always a good sign the everyone's happy exactly the way things are.

 

 

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