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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Rough Justice for China's Migrant Workers

China's migrant workers power the country's economy - working in shopping malls, factory production lines, expat bars and a myriad other diverse, low paid occupations. They help increase urbanization, seen by the government as a key factor in economic growth. Typically moving from villages and small towns outside the major cities, they travel to major cities, taking menial jobs and sending their wages back home. Recently, however, it's become apparent that these much-needed workers are on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, and seemingly are regarded as second class citizens in China's emerging class system.. Lacking any qualifications, and often  naive to the power-plays that have evolved in China's major economic and political hubs.

Earlier this year, Yuan Li Ya fell, or as some would have it, was pushed off the roof of a shopping mall in Beijing's Fengtai district. Officially recorded as a suicide, video footage emerged, along with accusations that the 22-year-old had been gang raped by six or seven security guards working at the mall.

Accusations of a police coverup, and general discontent stemming from the less than stellar treatment that migrant workers receive in the cities, culminated in a protest by workers from outside the city demanding answers from the Beijing authorities that brought the south of the city to a standstill. No answers were forthcoming, the local media doing little more than posting police briefings. The girl's family was eventually paid off with 40,000rmb, little consolation to Li Ya's cancer stricken father for the loss of his daughter.

On August 7th, a similar case was reported in Shenzhen, where a 13-year-old child had all allegedly fallen by accident from the roof of a factory dorm where she was apparently living with four other men. Since the legal working age in China is 16, questions were almost immediately being asked about what exactly the girl was doing sharing a dorm with four other men in a factory complex.

Local police have said that there had been no evidence of sexual assault, but questions still remain as to how the girl ended up in the factory, since she wasn't visiting friends, and how she came to fall out of the window to her death. Her father said that she had argued with a couple of other girls in the complex over laundry, there was nothing to indicated that the girl was suicidal.

Suicides aside, other cases, including the fire at a Jinan poultry factory highlight the low regard in which rural workers are held in. The fire, China's worst since 2000, claimed 119 lives, and injured over sixty other workers, who said that the emergency fire doors had been securely locked, leaving people on the factory floor no escape route. While accidents like this are on the decline, when they do happen, factory owners are often left unpunished.

Bar staff are particularly at risk from abuse, let alone the girls who find work as prostitutes in the pricey bars favoured by the sons of Beijing's elite. Commenting, like everyone else in the Chinese blogosphere, on Li Tian Yi, currently standing trial in Beijing for in yet another high-profile gang rape trial, Tsinghua University law professor Yi Yan You drew the wrath of Weibo by saying it was better to rape a bar girl than it would be to rape "a good woman". Presumably, a good woman being one who doesn't work for a living or get married to money. According to Yi, girls who work in bars area more likely to consent to sex than those fine, upstanding women like Gu Kai Lai, who probably don't get laid nearly as often, but definitely spend more time in prison.

Often both parents leave their rural home town in order to provide for their families, traditionally leaving their children in the care of their grandparents. Charity organizations estimate that 37% of all children living rural areas have parents working in a major city away from home. Reports have emerged of the sexual abuse that these "left behind children" suffer.

One such case in Ruichang, Jiangxi provoke national outrage in the press and in social media around the country. A teacher was arrested for molested seven pupils in his class, leaving them with STDs. In May this year, eight cases of sexual abuse were reported in a space of 20 days. Lack of any kind of sex education compounds the problem.

Speaking to the BBC, Wang Xingjuan, founder of the Maple Women's Psychological Counselling Centre said that "Some children are molested when they are about seven or eight, but they don't realise that they have been abused", observes. They are not comfortable with the situation; they are afraid and they know there is something wrong, but they put up with it". When faced with giving a sex ed class, many teachers do the bare minimum, and some even ask the students just to read their textbook at home. The legal code as it stands is far too lenient, providing little in the way of deterrent for would-be offenders. Having been found guilty of molesting four girls, a school principal recently had his sentence increased by six months to three years.

Numbering 262.6 million, the migrant worker population is something that the Politburo can ill-afford to ignore. The government has tried to placate them by announcing changes to make the draconian hukou system a little more flexible to allow people to work outside their home province and enjoy some social benefits.  In truth, the hukou is merely a membership card to a less than exclusive club.

It is, to say the least, not the most ideal of situations, especially considering the amount of blood that was shed supposedly in the name of the Chinese rural poor.  The communist system ideologically set out to ensure that all men are born equal, but the downtrodden migrant worker class in China is quickly finding out the hard way that some are born more equal than others.

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Human Traffic: China's Baby Sellers

A short sighted attempt at curbing China's exploding population has seemingly had more disastrous side effects than actual benefits.  Officially, the child trafficking problem in China is under control, and while there's patchy data to back that claim up, cases that outrage Chinese netizens emerge on a disturbingly regular basis.

Since the news broke of a Chinese doctor selling babies from her own maternity department there have been reports of nearly 55 similar cases, half of which involved the same doctor.  Her clients were willing to make just over three and a half thousand dollars for a child - she would dupe to parents into believe that their unborn children had serious health issues, congenital birth defects before passing the newborns to their new parents.

Despite repeated government crackdowns, the crime still persists, and in a testament to the size of the problem, more than 54,000 children have been rescued and 11,000 trafficking gangs “smashed” since 2009.  Previously, criminal gangs would focus on snatching young children, usually boys, from their homes and selling them on.  The new scandal, which implicates Zhang Shu Xia, the deputy head of the maternity department, compounds the distrust that Chinese people already have for the medical establishment.

The meager wages that government officials, including doctors, earn pushes the people who, in other countries, would be respected pillars of the community to commit such crimes.

Local family planning organization have been known to keep tabs on families that already have one child, and are rumored to be expecting another, snatching the babies soon after they are born - the profits raised help to fill the coffers that the officials plunder.  Spending most of their times wandering around neighborhoods looking for baby clothes hanging on washing lines, and checking for unregistered newborns, the baby trade is a lucrative one, and one that down on their luck local officials can't resist.  The government crackdowns have forced up the prices for illegally traded children, the going rate being about 90,000rmb.

The high prices and almost limitless supply and demand often means that the gangs, usually based in rural areas enjoy the protection of the officials whose nests they feather.  It's in such areas where the flow of babies for sale is difficult to stem. Orphanages rarely check where the children come from, and DNA samples aren't routinely taken.

A useful revenue stream for the orphanage, traffickers make good money selling through for illegal international adoptions. Scott Tong reported on the moneymaking scheme for Marketplace.org: "To meet the demand, Duan says he enlisted his wife and sisters to locate more babies. They started buying infants from a supplier in Guangdong province 600 miles away. They say this woman systematically collected unwanted babies from local hospitals."

This weekend, Chinese police succeeded in tracking down and rescuing twin girls, allegedly sold by Zhang to traffickers. The People's Daily, a state-run organ has been keen to play up the faultless efforts of the Chinese police, providing emotive, wall-to-wall coverage of the moment the couple were reunited with their newborn daughters - puffing up the official line from the Chinese government that the problem is now less rampant.  Parents wept and fell to the knees in front of the police officers who confirmed the child's identity by way of a DNA test.  At the time of writing, two senior officials have been fired at the hospital

Strangely for the typically publicity-shy police in China, embracing the Internet is helping bring the numbers of trafficked babies down.  Turning to the massively popular social media platforms, parents and activists have access to resources that they previously could only dream about utilizing.  The  police official who heads the anti-trafficking division, Chen Shiqu, has his own account, with close to three and a half million followers.  Initially using a pseudonym, Chen expertise on the topic soon led to his real identity being revealed online. By retweeting stories and leads from amateur activists and charity organizations, Chen hopes to raise public awareness of the problem, and help return stolen children to their rightful homes.

As one might expect in black market trading, the safety of the people being trafficked is not one of the major concerns.  In 2004, one the first cases to come to massive public attention featured the deaths of several babies.  Guangxi police discovered no more than 28 baby girls in the back of bus, all were less than 3 months old, and all had been drugged to keep them quiet.  At least one of them died from suffocation, and the others had turned blue die to lack of oxygen - they were all to be sold in Anhui province for the princely sum of $24 each.  In 2005, the first convicted child traffickers were executed in China.

With so many cases being reported, couple who legitimately adopt children are being forced to ask themselves some searching questions - often having to entertaining the idea that their child may have been traded on the black market.  Papers are falsified and certificates are forged, on an industrial scale.  With adoptions of Chinese children by American couples in decline, it may become much cheaper for Chinese parents to get the male heir, by hook or by crook, that their families demand.

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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.

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Global Times Promotes "Freedom of Speech"

News comes from Fei Chang Dao that the Global Times is working hard to promote freedom of speech on the Chinese mainland.  Previously, the Chinese government has been relucantant to answer qustions about Internet and civil freedoms in China, but now seems to take a different tack, openly reporting that the Japanese version of the Chinese search engine Baidu  was blocked because of pornographic content.

As Chine wrestles with it's position in the global economy, the whimsical nature of the Chinese censorship system throws up the occasional blip in reality for Chinese consumers.  This month, while  Despicable Me 2 has been receiving coverage in Chinese language entertainment magazines, and has been heavily promoted on the Beijing subway video feeds, the movie itself has been deemed illegal by SARFT and is unlikely to be screened to Chinese audiences.

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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.

Nailing Jello to the Wall: What's Weibo Up To?

The much vaunted Weibo real name registration kicked in today, leaving pretty much everyone confused as to what the bloody hell people at Sina.com are playing at.

This morning, many users were reporting that even though they hadn't actually filled out their info - giving their state issued ID number and real name - were greeted with a thank you message informing them that they had indeed given their state issued ID number and real name.

Since I hadn't registered my ID number (I'm not Chinese, and don't have an ID card) I was pretty much locked out of the web interface.  I'd bought my phone pre-pay SIM card from an anonymous vendor in Dazhalan (which causes its own problems because the SIM card is tied to Hebei province and not Beijing) and Weibo steadfastly refused to send a confirmation SMS to my phone.   Whenever I tried to post a message, an alert box popped up over the text box informing me that I had to register to post.

Fortunately, both the Android client and my iPad client were working fine, and I could quite easily reply to threads started on Weibo, I just couldn't start any of my own.  For all its security theatre, the real-name registration hasn't actually prevented those who want to post subversive stuff anonymously.  In fact, they've probably compounded the issue, since mobile devices and tablets that are much easier to carry around and photograph Chinese policemen beating the hell out of a disabled beggar on the street than a laptop.

It's difficult to figure what's going on.  Most of the whistleblowers, commentators and dissenters who currently use Weibo  are usually the relatively well off middle class, most of whom can quite easily afford a smartphone or even an iPad, which currently allows you to circumvent the registration process. The other group of users are those who are reliant on using smokey Internet cafes that are routinely checked by the police, and you need to present your ID card in order to buy time on the computers anyway.

And how did I eventually register?  I used a false name and corresponding number that I found on an MMORPG forum.

China's Censorship: A Year in Review

William Farris is running a good retrospective on what gets censored in China complete with screenshots from major search engines from throughout the year

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We Hope For a Miracle

A cartoon currently doing the rounds on Weibo (thanks to Emma Lau for the link and the translation) - the last frame says "we can only hope for a miracle!" showing Ministry of Railways spokesman Wang Yong Ping tied to the train tracks as an out of control train hurtles towards him.