A Risky Business: Whistleblowing in China

In a bid to bolster it's image in China and abroad, Xi Jin Ping is leading a crackdown on corruption, but the consequences that some whistleblowers face might take the wind out of the CCP's anti-graft sails. 

The English voice of Chinese party propaganda, The China Daily, could hardly contain itself when Ed Snowden went public with details of the NSA’s PRISM project.  “This is not the first time that U.S. government agencies’ wrongdoings have aroused widespread public concern,” it bellowed.  Certain that political Armageddon would follow, “experts” painted a picture of “strained” US-Chinese ties, with the reassurance that hardworking Chinese diplomats would once again ensure world peace.

The news came after a testing time for the Chinese.  A PLA backed hacker group had been identified and publicly exposed by US cybersecurity analysts, Google accused the Chinese of hacking into it’s servers, and Hilary Clinton had singled out China especially her Internet freedoms tour.  Thankfully, news of the NSA spying on it’s own citizens, using services that had long been demonized in the Chinese press, broke in the nick of time.  Fueling the fire further, the whistleblower had sought refuge in Hong Kong, prompting a slew of amusing tweets, one noting that a freedom of speech hacktivist seeking asylum in China would be akin to a religious rights activist seeking refuge in Tibet.  State media wasted no time in using the story to reiterate China’s commitment to cybersecurity, while neatly sidestepping any suggestion that it’s government actively censors Internet content and selectively blocks sites based outside of China.

Blocking social media sites in China has a number of benefits for the country’s ruling Communist Party.  First, there’s little chance of a copycat Jasmine Revolution, Facebook being blamed for everything from Tibetan self-immolations to riots in Xinjiang.  Secondly, and possibly more importantly, the Chinese start-ups that would ordinarily face competition from the likes of Twitter, Youtube and Facebook are free to flourish with millions of users being served millions of ads.  The systems operate within Chinese cyberspace, and are therefore subject to the filtering, deletion and blocking that is part and parcel of Internet life these days in China.

Chinese spokespeople repeatedly cower behind a variety of excuses to justify it’s blocking of “harmful content”.  The Internet in China isn’t censored, it’s carefully managed “in accordance with relevant laws and regulations” - dissenting voices are quietly shut down, and unfavorable news coverage from overseas is blocked by what has become known as The Great Firewall of China.  When an investigation by the New York Times revealed former Premier Wen Jia Bao had a personal fortune of $120million, the entire NYT website was blacklisted and blocked lest his incredible wealth become common knowledge amongst the Chinese.

Tackling corruption, especially with Bo Xi Lai’s trial looming, is top of the CCP’s agenda.  It’s not the first time that the government has tried to get a grip on backhanders in the People’s Republic.  In 2009, the government set up a website that allowed citizens to report anyone suspected of graft, traffic was so high that hours after it was officially launched, it crashed, unable to cope with the huge volume of traffic.

Events took a more sinister turn earlier in the July of this year, when a well known anti-corruption crusader, Li Jian Xin was attacked, kidnapped and doused in acid.  After being hacked at with knives, he was left in a pool of his own blood to be discovered by a local woman in a park several hours later.  Using the pseudonym “Uncle Ou of Huiyang”, Li had posted several reports on a website that embarrassed local officials.  Li was left blind in one eye and had to have two skin grafts in Huizhou Municipal Hospital following the attack.

Despite publicly calling for more whistleblowers like Li to report cases of corruption, and the technical provision of whistleblower protection established, the law doesn’t provide adequate protection when it comes to revenge crimes.  The maximum sentence that can be handed down in such a case is seven years.  As is common in China, the law exist, but they’re just not enforced by anyone.  Those who make legal challenges are often hounded and victimized.  Earlier last month, after signing an open letter that demanded certain officials disclose their assets, eight people were placed under house arrest in Beijing.  Their lawyer, Xu Zhi Yong had his computers and mobile phone confiscated.

Journalists who try to expose the misdeeds of the Party elite.  Lei Zhengfu, a cadre in Bo Xi Lai’s former stomping ground of Chongqing was filmed having sex with his 18-year-old mistress and was subsequently arrested, imprisoned and kicked out of the Communist Party.  The blogger and amateur muckraker Zhu Rui Feng who came into possession of the Lei’s sex tape.

Not counting a couple of death threats that were probably made by disgruntled associates of Lei, Zhu was didn’t attract the attention that had traditionally accompanied such high profile exposes.  In an interview with the Washington Post, he reflected, “In the past, I’ve encountered a lot of threats, censorship and even kidnapping, but this time, my Web site wasn’t shut down. There was no blocking or attack.  I think maybe the sky really is changing.”  Two months later, the police, claiming to be from the Beijing Security Bureau were knocking on his door.  Worried that he might be “disappeared” by the authorities in Chongqing, Zhu has sent copies of other, unreleased sex tapes to friends overseas, with instructions that should he go missing, the tapes should be released.

The extramarital exploits create another, more unlikely, breed of whistleblower - the jilted lover.  Fan Yue, a deputy director at The State Administration of Archives, was due to marry a 26-year-old, Jin Yang Nan.  When she discovered that he had married long before they even met, Jin took to the Internet to get her revenge, posting photos and a detailed shopping list of the luxury goods that Fan had showered her with - luxury items that he shouldn’t have been technically able to buy on his “modest” government salary.

The first time “they went shopping, Ji said, the couple went to Prada and paid $10,000 for a skirt, a purse and a scarf. A month after they met, Fan rented an apartment for them that cost $1,500 a month and spent more than $16,000 on bedsheets, home appliances, an Apple desktop and a laptop, according to Ji. Then he bought her a silver Audi A5, priced in the United States at about $40,000, she said. ... 'He put cash into my purse every day,' said Ji in a letter to the Communist Party complaining about Fan's behavior," the story was originally that carried on The Washington Post revealed.

The photos, which spread across the Internet faster than Chinese censors could delete them show the kind of life that one can lead in the upper echelons of government.  After they had been engaged for a year, Ji repeatedly asked why they hadn’t started planning their wedding, and details of his existing marriage soon emerged.  Determined to get even, Ji published the photos on the Internet, and started handing out videos on DVD at the gates of Zhong Nan Hai - the secretive government compound in Beijing.

It’s apparent that the anti-corrupt campaign is nothing more than another PR stunt by the Chinese Communist Party.  When it was announced that Xi Jin Ping would be cleaning up the Party’s reputation, a number of anonymous editorials suggested that wiping out corruption completely would be impossible and that it would be best to focus on reducing it to a level that would be acceptable to the general populous.

State media has pounced on the court cases, proclaiming them China’s watershed moment, where the rule of law actually does mean rule of law.  Xinhua, the state run media organization reported on the trial of form Ministry of Railways chief, Liu Zhi Jun saying “The sentencing shows on one hand the judicial system and top leaders' resolve to target both high-ranking "tigers" and low-ranking "flies" in its anti-corruption efforts, and on the other hand the judicial spirit of everyone is equal before the law,” adding that the Party was “Ringing a renewed alarm to the 85 million Party members, especially officials, Liu's case reflects the CPC Central Committee's determination to investigate each graft case and punish any corrupt official.”  An editorial by the China News Service said that the indictment of Bo Xi Lai "tells the whole party and the entire society that in a country ruled by law," it said. "No matter who you are, no matter how high your ranking is, you will be seriously investigated and severely punished if you violate party discipline and state law."

Even officials who are standing trial for bribery and corruption, the off-center wonderland of Chinese politics means that despite earning illicit millions, many still have the support of the public. Neatly turning something that highlights the very worst in a corrupt, one party state, the crackdown on graft turned the murder of Neil Heywood and the imprisonment of Gu Ku Lai for his poisoning became the flagship of the "no one is above the law" rhetoric that the Party is so desperate to impress on the Chinese people.  However, given the actual good that Bo Xi Lai did in his home city of Chongqing, he still has his fans.

In a Marketplace China report last year, the housing plans and school reforms that we enacted under Bo’s leadership of the city meant that even after he was placed under house arrest, many Chongqing residents didn’t believe that he’d been arrested.  Indeed, there are plans for some of his more fervent supporters to protest outside the courthouse in Jinan when the trial begins.  Even in one of the most high profile (and damaging) anti-corruption cases, the whistleblower who blew the lid off the whole thing, Bo's former partner in crime, Wang Li Jun is serving a 15 year sentence for abuse of power.

Related articles

• Chinese whistleblower doused with acid, has fingers hacked off for embarrassing government


• Bo Charged With Corruption, Bribery, Abuse of Power: Xinhua


• Revenge of the mistresses


• Anti-Whistle Blower China Welcomes Snowden's Whistleblowing


• Whistleblowers pay price in China's corruption fight

Mixed Sex Education Messages From China

I'm at the age where most of my friends are getting married.  It's not really that depressing, but by the time that you hit 33 (as I will be this May), it becomes apparent that the number of women that are a) eligible, and b) my age is pretty small.  Many of those women are single for a reason, and because most of the single girls have been educated by TV shows and no-one else, it's fair to say that by and large, not all of their dogs are barking.  On paper, I'm pretty much perfect - rich, vaguely decent looking (certainly slim by modern Chinese standards) and I have a government job.  Ok, I work for a university, but I don't have to pay rent and all my meals are subsidized, leaving a fairly large monthly disposable income.  

 

The fact that I'm single is down to a number of factors.  The first is that I'm plainly no sleazy enough.  I do actually respect women, I find one night stands to be something quite pointless, and, as I get older, personality trumps the body.  Most of my contemporaries have pretty much the opposite view, you just needed to look at the crowds of confused men that scattered through the bars at Chao Yang West Gate in bewildered, pathetic groups when Maggies closed down in 2008 to see that.  Most of the girls are incredibly highly educated too, especially the ones that can speak English, and were probably learning French and German before they were on solids.  It's hard to treat a woman who was being taught stuff about particle accelerators in the last year of high school, and the only reason that she didn't complete a Phd was because she didn't have enough time as some samey pick-up in a bar.  Especially when she takes time out to write haiku in the morning.  And then translate it into Finnish.  

 

In Japan there wasn't much hope for me, since I really wanted to meet a girl who could engage me in a conversation, rather than nod and "mmm" in that annoyingly endearing way that Japanese women do, needless to say, I ended up with a Chinese girl instead.  

 

I had come to the rather racist conclusion that Chinese girls should stick to Chinese men, and Japanese girl should stick to Japanese men.  Chinese men have the right attitude, and it's probably why I hate the vast majority of Chinese men that I have to come into contact with.  I simply don't have the wherewithal to occasionally bring my bitch into line with a quick backhander, but I'm pretty sure that to a Chinese woman, three with the belt now and again, it's perfectly normal.  I'm just not that assertive.  Culturally, a westerner doesn't really tick all the subconcious boxes that a Chinese girl needs in order to commit to a long term relationship - most of the Japanese/western marriage that I knew about were falling apart, and the vast number of western/Chinese marriages that I know about aren't happy ones, or have caused massive, irreparable rifts in at least one of the families.   

 

Despite the apparent hopelessness of my situation, I'm in a better position than most Chinese men.  Since most Chinese men are raised in families that have typically overbearing mothers and distant fathers, they don't really have much in the way of a male role model.  Which is why a lot of them are single and desperate, and rather unable to converse on any level with a woman.  The bad news gets worse when the idea of "losing face" is added into the mix: the men can't really have a girlfriend who is less qualified than they are, and since the women regularly beat the men academically, there's a lot of single guys about.  

 

The situation has become so bad that people are advertising on the Internet.  Not to find a girlfriend, but to rent one out, especially over the Spring Festival where many of the guys go home only to be confronted with questions about when they plan to get married.  Oddly, if you're a Chinese guy, the philandering begins once you get married.  Mistresses are still a show of how wealthy and powerful you are (by those standards, I'm not very much of either).  "The practice of monogamy is only 60 years old in China. Before that the number of mistresses a man possessed was an indicator of his success," so says Li Yin He in the Global Times.  Liu Zhu Jun (pictured) alledgedly had 18 mistresses, each of them willing to cater to his uniform festish - and will all that sex going on, he still managed to be the Minister of Railways, until his dismissal in February 2011.   

 

The relative sexual inexperience of a Chinese girl isn't much of a help when it comes to finding a soul mate.  It's entirely possible, because I've been to lots of weddings betwixt westerners and Chinese women, but for the most part, these couplings seem to fall into one of three categories: 

 

1) Pregnancy - the couple get married to save face in the light of the impending patter of feet.  

 

2) Statute of Limitations - there comes a time when a couple live together for so long that getting married seems to be nothing more than a formality.  

 

3) Pressure from parents - the big one, since most Chinese thinking is about 25 years behind current thinking in the western world, most women would probably be pressured into marrying someone by the parents rather than having to put up with the shame of living in sin.  

 

Between these three you'd think that either I would have been stupid enough to get a girl knocked up by now, OR, I would be in the same weary long term relationship for long enough that someone would've eventually complained enough for me to grudgingly go through the prolonged agony of a Chinese wedding, but no.  Sex education in China is somewhat lacking, especially for a country that has copulated it's way to 1.3 billion people, but statistics show that teenage pregnancies are on the increase, and, worse, many teachers are dismissing sex ed classes as unnecessary.  In Shanghai, there's only one helpline, run by Zhang Zhengrong which gets around 1,000 calls a day from distressed teenage girls.  3 percent of the 50,000 callers they've had since they were established in 2006 have have three or more abortions.  Another three per cent have had an abortion in an unlicensed (read "cheap") clinic.  While some parents believe that if their kids don't know about sex, they won't worry about it, but the Women of China website tells some horrific stories: 

 

Two years ago a father in Shanghai rushed his 19-year-old daughter to a hospital after she had given birth to a baby at home. In order not to be discovered by her parents, the young woman secretly delivered the baby herself in the toilet. Then she put the baby in a plastic bag and threw it in a neighborhood garbage can.  The father couldn't believe it and told me his daughter was a good student, hard-working at school and obedient at home," Zhang says. "The careless parents didn't know she was pregnant until she gave birth!"

 

At the end of last year, the government began it's "Steps of Growth" programme for high school students, which immediately triggered a mealstrom of controversy.  For a start, there was never any consensus as to what age the kids should start in the programme, and early in 2011, a school established rules that stipulated that boys and girls should stay 50cm apart when they are talking in public - the "distance for civilized communication" was rounded decried throughout the media, when the China Daily bellowed that local schools should follow rules passed by the Ministry of Education rather than making it up as they go along.   

 

I'm Swiss. I live here now, but I'm actually a Swiss... nationally.

It's been kinda difficult to be British in Beijing lately- first there was the spectacular Youku implosion of a video of drunken/stoned/retarded/possibly-all-three Briton attempting to rape a Chinese woman in Xidan.  Now we're even more in hock with the CCP because David Cameron met up with His Holiness The Dalai Lama.

With panther-like reactions, the Global Times churned out an op-ed that lambasted the UK and Norway for their arrogance (yes, that's Chinese men calling other countries arrogant, just in case you didn't get it first time around.  Incredible I know).  Like a lot of Chinese tub thumping, the actual content is questionable, and the article is one of those paper-rattling nationalist things that Chinese people like so much.

The speculation is probably correct. In both cases China's core interests have been offended. Proper countermeasures are necessary for a big country. If China takes no action, it would be tantamount to tolerating a vicious provocation. This indifference would be despised at home and in the world.

Er.  No.  Just at home, as it happens.  No one else cares.  Ok, so the anonymous author doesn't really point out why China has the right not to be offended.  Lots of countries and lots of governments are attacked by media outlets everyday.  China's just going to have to grow up and learn to take it's knocks like everyone else.

Since its reform, China has accepted some political concepts of the West, but that is not the same as unconditionally following orders from the West. Studying the West has to take place under the condition of resisting its pressure, otherwise, it is to accept being conquered by the West.

As I commented on the story itself, China didn't really "reform and open up", the government just stopped interfering with people's lives so much after Mao died.  A classic CCP maneovre of waiting and seeing and then taking credit for what happens next.  As far as anyone knows, the political system that China did take from the west was one of the worst political ideologies created that China's inept leaders of the time thought they needed in a deperate bid to modernise the country.  Almost every country that embraced communism (and most have subsequently discarded it) ain't exactly the type of place that you'd want to retire in.  With the exception of Cuba, but they've actually got a decent health system.

The UK and Norway are developed countries with relatively small populations. China is aware of their political advantages. However, governing a country of 1.3 billion people is beyond their imagination. It is naïve and arrogant to try and teach China what to do. 

It was only a matter of time before one of the Holy Trinity of Chinese excuses was trotted out.  Chinese people are immensely proud of their immense population, and their apparent inability to manage it properly.  Corruption running rampant?  Well, China has a large population.  Poison in your milk?  Well, China is a developing country, you know. 1.3billion people isn't beyond our imagination, it's just that the systems that the corrupt morons that run China can't scale up beyond the neighbourhoods of the politicians that dream them up over a baijiu soaked dinner.

 They must pay the due price for their arrogance. This is also how China can build its authority in the international arena. China doesn't need to make a big fuss because of the Dalai or a dissident, but it has many options to make the UK and Norway regret their decision. 

The way to build authority in an international arena is to stop personalising every little slight and stop making overblown puff pieces about how sensitive you all are and how we should treat you all with respect.  If Chinese politicians actually just stopped brown-nosing the CCP machine for just five minutes, and started doing things for the good of the people, rather than saying that they're doing stuff for the good of the people, we might be able to make some progress.

Spending thousands of RMB on banners saying that Chinese people are 文明 doesn't actually do anything to change people's minds.  Becoming civilised and not acting like a dick in public is not something that people can osmotically achieve simply by being bombarded with thinly veiled propaganda day and night.

Oh, and by the way, outside of Bond villians, no one "must pay the price" for shit these days.

China-UK cooperation will have to be slowed down. Free trade agreement talks between China and Norway have also been upset. The ensuing loss is a small one for China. 

Free trade won't be upset, the sky will not fall, and the worst that would happen is that China goes a sulks in the corner for a while.  No one likes a cry baby and you have to stop playing the victim.

It's not easy to have Chinese society's sympathy on China's sovereignty issues. The West has presented various honors to Chinese dissidents, and Chinese people won't be fooled into believing it is a simple coincidence.

Shockingly, what happens in "the West" is that people that try and change things actually get recognised for trying to change things.  We don't give out random gongs to people just because we want their job when they retire (with the obviously exception of the British Civil Service, naturally).  To get a pat on the back, you need to do something other than get fat and smoke cigarettes and retire to go die of cancer, it's just doesn't work like that.  The Chinese government has to stop looking at everything as though governance is one long gaokao.  There are certain things that you can't be taught, and as long as current status quo exists, it never will be.

Good, Good Study. Day, Day Up.

Education has famously been part and parcel of Chinese culture for millennia.  While the Japanese were relying on their social standing and the prestige of their families to ensure a decent salary, the Chinese were introducing standardized testing, and encouraging children to get at least as far as their parents got, so that the parents could live in relative comfort during their retirement.  The idea is that you spend whatever is needed on your child to make sure they get the best job, because you’ll be relying on that job to provide financial support after you finish working.  

Most universities, indeed most high schools, focus on learning by rote, usually in classes of about 30 to 40 students.  The teacher stands at the front of the class, tells the students how to do things.  The problem is that, for some unknown reason, the Chinese look towards the top 5% of successful Chinese, and deduct that because 5% made it, the system must work.  Of course, since the system fails people 95% of the time, one can also deduce that something is terribly, terribly wrong with the education system in the PRC. 

This week, Chinese high school students will take the gaokao - the national college entrance exam where 9.15 million students will compete for 6.85 million university places.  It lasts for three straight days, and will ultimately determine the entire future of a student’s life.  Students regularly study sixteen hours a day in order to get the all important perfect score.  Competition, is, as you can imagine, pretty tough.  It’s so tough in fact that the university have instigated a kind of upgrade/downgrade system that you usually find on airlines: if the  places on a particular course have been filled, the students simply get bounced to another course - whether they like it or not.    

As part of the modernization drive to educate it’s people into the 21st century, the Chinese government has made English lessons compulsory up to the second year of university - so students typically go through nearly 7 years of language instruction, and still manage to level out at a mediocre level of second language ability.  Conversations with a Chinese English student are riddled with Chinglish - a particular blend of directly translated English that grates on the nerves after six months in the country - and other fossilized errors that students apparently show little intention of making any effort to eradicate.  

That’s not to say that some people make it.  The laws of chance dictate that at least some of the unfortunates that are forced through the Chinese higher education system make it to a decent level of fluency, but for most, speaking English is a tool, something that will get them a certificate that will get them a job - job that many thousands of other similarly qualified Chinese graduates will be competing for.  

The obsession for learning English is such that with only 59 “schools” in China, Wall Street Institute - a private language school - was bought by publishing giant Pearson for $92 million.  And it’s the money that is increasingly dictating the quality of education one receives - if you have enough you can send your child abroad to an American or, more commonly, a Canadian university (the visa application is a little less stringent in Canada), if you don’t have enough hard cash for that, you’ll have to settle for a “top-tier” university.  Chinese students are enrolling in US universities in droves, but the rote style of education isn’t preparing them for the Socratic methodology used in western countries, inevitably leading to friction between the American and Chinese students.  

Zhao Jun, in an interview with The Atlantic, says that he supports his son's decision to study in the US - and he's the editor-in-cheif of a government produced education journal.  He gave a fairly damning description of the current Chinese educational system, "the course design is too rigid, the method of teaching is too mechanical, and the standard for measuring talent is too one-dimensional."  He's not the only one, either, Gaokao applications have declined by 700,000 students since 2009, many of the students favouring the best education that money can buy - outside China

Money and Cigarettes

I'm a great smoker.  When I was looking for advice on how to be a successful writer, I was told that to take up smoking is a must.  “No non smoker is worth reading”, AA Gill once wrote, “And writers who give up become crashing bores.”

It soon became one of the few things that I do well.  I enjoyed the privilege of an unrepentant, unapologetic, shameless and guilt-free nicotine habit.  

Or rather, I did.  

Today marks the end of day four of my smoke-free life.  It’s not been too bad, since I was never a hardcore smoker (I was what Malcolm Gladwell would call a “chipper” - I enjoyed a smoke, but I never smoked enough to become completely addicted), it was mostly the fact that beer and cigarettes went very well together, and the smoking culture in China meant that there was always a cigarette to be had.  

Part of my desire to quit was my new found love of running, and the fact that while my liver may be able to renew itself in between baijiu binges, I’d be pushing the boundaries of science when fantasizing about growing a new lung.  

Cigarettes are everywhere in China, and I’ve no idea how sharing a pack of cigarettes became a sign of enduring friendship.  It’s pretty impossible to do business in China without giving the gift of, er, death to the keep the local officials happy, and you’re not a true man unless you can buy someone a pack of 45rmb fags - and those aren’t the cheapest to be had.  Good Cat Cigarettes sell for nearly $900, and Deng Xiao Ping’s favoured Panda cigarettes are nearly $110 per pack.  a pack of Marlboros will set you back nearly a tenth of the price of a pack in the UK, and the cheapest on will cost you about 2p.  

The prices of the smokes is just one of the endlessly jaw-dropping statistics in the Middle Kingdom - nearly half the male population smokes, two thirds of doctors smoke, no smoking signs are routinely flaunted and people think that its ok to smoke in a subway toilet.  A million Chinese every year die from a smoking related disease, and the bank balance of China National Tobacco keeps on raking in the cash - in 2011, profits were up a mindboggling 17%.  

Efforts to fight back haven’t been successful, with a smoking cessation clinic at the Sino-Japanese Hospital closed down after a couple of months due to lack of interest.  In 2009, officials in Hubei were ordered (yes, ordered) to smoke more cigarettes in order to boost the economy.  Ash trays were inspected for rival brands, and those who were found smoking brands manufactured in rival provinces were punished.  Teachers at a local school were given smoking quotas (public minded officials subject the poor folk at the school with random spot check, sifting through ashtrays and bins to make sure teachers were smoking Hubei branded cancersticks), and officials light up nearly 230,000 cigarettes worth in excess of four hundred thousand pounds.  

So you can imagine that it’s not easy to give up the evil weed completely.  Cigarettes, fake cigarettes and cigars will be around for a long time here, much longer than the people who smoke them anyway.  

 

Microwaves Make Headline News

When Attaturk wanted to modernize Turkey, he wanted to ban the use of the veil by women. He didn't ban the veil outright, as a boring, conventional thinker might have - he made the veil compulsory for prostitutes. Since China can't really avoid the encroachment of the Internet and social media, some lateral thinking will be needed if the CCP wants it's citizens to toe the line online.

China has embraced capitalism in all it's glory, unfortunately, in their scramble to get their hands on as much money as possible as soon as possible, they tend to clone what they deem to be successful in another country (usually America) and set it loose on an unsuspecting population. A false sense of "if you build it they will come" is the chronic mindset, Chinese English school owners despair that people aren't falling over themselves to throw buckets of cash at them and shameless clones of western websites get themselves into endless amounts of trouble with their user bases because they delete messages and search results from their databases.

There's a reluctance to embrace new ideas here. The people have a strange way of making one feel that they've made an important contribution to a discussion, or proposed an effective solution to a problem, but at the same time, there's a lurking sense the idea has been pretty much instantly dismissed in favor of what you might term an old school solution. The closed-shop boys club of the government departments doesn't really help, and the yes-man mentality compounds matters, all you can really do is sit back and watch them fail, hoping against hoping that someone somewhere learns their lesson.

The Chinese people have figured out one pretty safe rule in life: if it gets blocked on the Internet, it's probably worth gossiping about. This week, quite a few things, despite the hugely popular microblog service instituting it's real-name registration, have been blocked: A mysterious crashed Ferrari, the fate of politician Bo Xi Lai, and now, images of tanks rolling down Chang'an Avenue as an alleged military coup gets underway.

Of course there was no such thing as a coup d'tat in Beijing - surely a Beijing correspondents wet dream - and the whole thing started with a single tweet.

Pan Shi Yi, a property magnate with 9.2 million followers has garnered a reputation for posting cryptic messages on his Weibo account. On Monday night, he posted "This evening Weibo was strange indeed, there were some words that could not be sent out on Weibo. I saw a line of commentary dropped several times from Weibo, but what I saw made my scalp tingle; was it gremlins? Better to turn off the computer and go to sleep.". Over 3,000 users commented on the post, some trying to figure out what exactly Pan was getting at, and others simply advising him to get some sleep.

On Tuesday morning, someone posted a message claiming that "According to reports, Beijing people said that last night the 38th Army was seen on Chang’an Avenue [which runs in front of Zhongnanhai] and an accumulation of police and military vehicles were in front of the Diayoutai State Guesthouse, signaling there will be big changes soon in our government.". The Epoch Times, a Chinese news portal with Falun Gong (a banned Chinese spiritual movement) published a photo that supposedly showed that there was indeed military action taking place in the capital. Research by Chinese netizens finally debunked the photos, showing them to be nothing more than night rehersals for the 2010 National Day celebrations.

Of course all this rational thinking didn't do much to stop the single tweet snowballing, turning it from a paranoid delusion limited to a small number of online freaks into stuff that people were gossiping about around the water cooler. One SMS message that I received about the strange case of the black Ferrari suddenly had two naked girls in it. Aside from the fact that the night the accident happened was so cold that snow fell in Beijing, the only details given to the press about the two female passengers were about their injuries and their ages, and since the crash happened at 4am in the morning in the northern part of Beijing, it's unlikely that there were many eyewitnesses. But we never let the facts - or lack thereof- get in the way of a good story

Rumors, gossip and unhelpful stories fanned by text messaging and microblogging are pretty much part and parcel of life in a country where government departments and spokesmen live in a walled garden sheilded from the people that they're actually supposed to be interacting with, and simply blocking out stuff that you don't want people to talk about isn't the best way to enforce any kind of rumor control, transparency and accessibility is the best way to go because even if you pull the wool over the eyes of the Chinese people, western audiences are much more sophisticated and cynical enough to flatly reject the "because we say so" attitude towards governace.

It's Been a Funny Old National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference

The Internet is almost inaccessible, dissidents, writers, bloggers and activists are "disappeared" - bundled off to black jails to be tortured, and an apparently unending stream of armed troops descend on restive regions of the country.  No, it's not a dystopian vision of the future, it just means that the NPC/CPPCC is in town.  Referred to as The Two Meetings, this the place were Five Year Plans are approved, the Beijing Police do their best to outwit foreigners and prevent them from getting up to anything subversive, like filming and taking photos.  And of course, there was the Bo Xi Lai Thing.

The drama that has been playing out since February starring Bo Xi Lai and Wng Li Jun was never really going to end happily.  Something of a mix between Nero and Warren G. Harding, Bo managed to economically cripple Chongqing, spending huge amounts of money importing ginkgo trees, and supporting the local satellite TV station.  Subsidizing the TV shows took at least 50% of the budget, and importing the ginkgoes (and watching them promptly die off in the unsuitable soil and climate) cost something in the region of 10% of the annual government budget.  Things came to boil when the head of the local PSB, Wang Li Jun spent the night at the local US Embassy, sparking rumours that he was ready to defect, and had amassed a documents that proved the connection between Bo and his dodgy deals with a local property tycoon Weng Zhenjie.

About a month later, The Two Meetings hit full tilt boogie, but Bo Xi Lai was the only member of the 25-strong ruling Politburo not to attend one of the first high-level sit-downs.  Later, towards the end of the gathering, Wen Jia Bao roundly rejected Bo Maoist efforts to force people to sing "Red Songs", saying that "Reform has reached a critical stage. Without successful political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform and the gains we have made in this area may be lost.  The new problems that have cropped up in China's society will not be fundamentally resolved, and such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution may happen again."

The day after, news broke that Bo Xi Lai has been removed of his government post.  But it didn't end there.  The week after his removal from the Politburo, unconfirmed reports now suggest that Bo has been placed under house arrest, and that he attempt to block a criminal investigation centered on his wife.

Little more than a rubber stamp parliament, the 2012 NPC saw several new toothless laws were passed, including one that addressed the problem of illegal detentions by the police.  Reforms to the Criminal Procedure Law were, at least on paper, intended to give citizens more protection and reduce the powers of the police.  That was the theory anyway, closer inspection reveals that while the law requires the police to notify the detainee's relatives, it doesn't require them to tell the relatives where the detainee is being held, as well as giving the police powers to deny the suspect access to a lawyer, and if the police deem that informing relatives of the arrest could impede the investigation, then they don't need to do it.

It was only 50 years ago that the first few National People's Congress was performed to a select few, and behind closed doors.  In 2012, enterprising young Weibo members are combing through hi-res images taken in the conference hall to find out who's sleeping, texting and gaming their way through the proceedings. This year's NPC/CPPCC has been particularly entertaining, if not for the fact the while The Two Meetings were going on, air quality improved as clampdowns on car usage and making sure that while the politicians were in town, the factories toed the pollution line. This year we've had Tibetan representatives fleeing in terror at the sight of a foreign correspondent, the ongoing, epic saga charting the eventual downfall of Bo Xi Lai and Wang Li Jun that made Dr. Zhivago pale in comparison.

The Mystery of the Black Ferrari

For some reason best know unto themselves (or until CDT publishes a new version of it's Ministry of Truth Directives) all references to a car crash that killed it's driver and injured two female passengers are being scrubbed from Chinese language Internet sites.

Netease, Sohu, and Tencent have removed references to "black Ferrari" from their databases and the usual "in accordance with local laws" message is being displayed instead of search results.  According to the Global Times, the police "received the call around 4:24 Sunday morning. One injured woman, 31 years old, sustained a head injury and a fractured right leg, and she was sent to the [nearby] 306th Hospital of PLA for treatment."  And that's about all we know.  The PSB is refusing to comment on the case or on any progress that might be being made in the investigation, and thus online speculation is even more rampant, with many jumping to the right conclusion that the identity of the car's owner is the reason for the information clean-up.

The latest rumor is that  Jia Qing Lin's illigitimate son may have been in control of the car at the time of the crash.

Daisey, Daisey...

Fargo, the Coen brothers admit is not based on a true story, despite opening with"This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred."  If you change the date and the place to China, and 2010, the same could be said for Mike Daisey's monologue, and his subsequent report that was subsequently retracted on This American Life. 

He's never actually seen one on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on, unlock the screen, and pass it to him. He takes it. The icons flare into view, and he strokes the screen with his ruined hand, and the icons slide back and forth. And he says something to Cathy, and Cathy says, "he says it's a kind of magic."

According to those in the know, this was apparently one of the more emotional points in Mike Daisey's stage monologue, The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs.   Emotional, dramatic, the performance formed the basis of an NPR report, Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.  There was only one thing wrong with it - what Mike told NPR  wasn't entirely true.  Actually not true at all.  In fact it was so not true that This American Life not only retracted the story, but made a story about the retraction of the story.

I think that one takeaway from this particular China story is how American "news" broadcasters leapt on the monlogue and presented Daisey as a journalist rather than a performer who used dramatic license to tell a story.  About things that didn't happen.  NPR is guilty as hell, and they managed to take their own gullibility into a very well deconstruction of how they were duped.  Statistician guru Hans Rosling once commented that the worldview of his students at the Karolinska Institute corresponded with the reality of the year that their teachers were born, and it's that ignorance that Americans have of modern China that Daisey exploited with his stage show.  The story he concocted had almost everything you needed - illegal unions banned by the state, workers that made machines they could never afford to buy, child laborers, guns and mysterious Chinese woman called Cathy.  Or Anna.  Probably Cathy.  No wonder NPR smelled fresh meat.

Lots of other bloggers have pointed out that if it wasn't for Mike Daisey, then America wouldn't have taken notice of what was going on at Foxconn - the apparently endless suicides that plagued the company for a good long while, and the fact they did in fact hire around 91 underage workers in 2010 - then things wouldn't have improved at the factories.  The sad thing is that now the story isn't about factory conditions in China, it's about Mike Daisey, despite his protestations that we are losing sight of the bigger picture.  Daisey has returned to the stage with a modified version of his monologue, adding a disclaimer that the performance is only based on a true story, and actually isn't.  The odd thing is that by becoming the story, Daisey is just as guilty as Apple in terms of exploiting anonymous Chinese workers for his own gain.

Related articles

• Mike Daisey: I'm a storyteller, but my story wasn't far-fetched (thetechblock.com)


• The extent of Mike Daisey's lies (modeledbehavior.com)


• Mike Daisey urges focus on the 'bigger story' of global manufacturing (popwatch.ew.com)


• Foxconn won't sue for damning radio episode, Steve Wozniak supports Mike Daisey (venturebeat.com)


• Woz supports Mike Daisey's message and says you should too (news.cnet.com)