The CCP began it’s campaign to “purify the internet environment” with a crackdown on porn sites in April 2007. As AP reported, Zhang Xinfeng, deputy public security minister, was under no allusions as to where the roots of the darker side of the Internet reside, "The boom of pornographic content on the internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds. The inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control are to blame for the existing problems in China's cyberspace.". What followed was a few arrests for hosting “cyber strip shows” and a major clampdown on the myriad blogs and search engines hosting in China. Cai Wu, director of the Information Office of China's Cabinet, told Xinhua that "As more and more illegal and unhealthy information spreads through the blog and search engine, we will take effective measures to put the BBS, blog and search engine under control.”
Throughout the year, the government produces a list of guidelines for ISPs and Internet companies to follow. Most recently, China Digital Times published a translation of the latest set of rules, which said that posts the criticise the Chinese political system should be “absolutely blocked or deleted”, information about the tiger being skinned and beheaded should be deleted, and all sorts of other rather distasteful stuff, including the rather chilling “Strengthen positive guidance. Web sites should proactively guide public opinion in a positive way, highlight positive voices and create a pro-NPC online environment.”.
Blogging is huge in China, it’s a problem for the government which has blocked most overseas weblog hosting sites, but now it’s cracking down on Chinese blogs, especially those who don’t have nice things to say about China. For example, take the story of AIDS-activist Hu Jia, his wife Zeng Jinyan and her 2-month old baby Hu Qianci, all of whom are currently under house arrest. What’s interesting about this guy is that while under the eyes of the police and other public security officials, he’s managed to blog, post photos, make podcasts and even make a documentary film about his family’s life in “Bo Bo Freedom City”.
Their story is intertwined with the internet, Hu was actually arrested while in the middle of a Skype conversation, and the film he made is distributed (albeit without his permission) on Youtube, and the last of his podcasts have been uploaded to the internet. His blog was blocked, but another websites (subsequently blocked) appeared, his wife’s website was filtered, and then another fansite appeared. Since Hu’s arrest on subversion charges, although it’s blocked, Zeng’s blog somehow, magically keeps updating itself.
All of this to-ing and fro-ing has managed to catch the attention, not only of English language bloggers and journalists in China, but a writer at the New York Times who has written a two page article about the housebound couple. Interestingly, the reaction has been one of (natural) condemnation and, well, quite honestly, bemusement. The charges against Hu are vague - the subversion of state power - and we’ll probably never really know why he’s been arrested. All we do know is that anyone who causes trouble - and any parent will tell you the amount of political turmoil a 2 month old baby can wreak on your life - is being silenced before the Olympic Games. When he was dragged away on the 27th December, hu joined the 51 other online dissidents that have been slung into the slammer, and his website joins the 2500 other websites that have also apparently been subverting state power, or criticising, or disagreeing or something.
The one thing that is more annoying that anything else, and which drew me to my previous story about Lou Ye and Fang Li’s entanglements with the government film, TV and radio censor is that no one from the government tells people why they are being arrested. There’s an assumption by the CCP that everyone on China - all 1.3 billion of them - knows how to behave and what they need to do to toe the government line. With Hu Jia, it’s got to the point where people don’t believe the authorities anymore, his supporters have asked after his health (his condition is reportedly “normal”), but they want a lawyer to go in a see him to make sure that they are telling the truth. The situation has been exacerbated by the fact that the police have refused to take Hu any of his prescription drugs to him, wherever he’s being held.
The video mobile phone is a big problem for the Chinese government. As Beijing blogger Imagetheif remarked “no matter how China tries to control Olympic related news and imagery, anyone with a cell-phone will be a journalist come August.”. The now legendary video of Hu Ziwei splitting up with her husband Zhang Bin at a CCTV5 press conference prompted a rushed law that means any video hosting site in China has to have a special license. Licensing and blocking can only go so far, however, Frustratingly for the mandarins at The Great Firewall of China, a lot of websites aren’t actually hosted in the country, and are therefore outside the Chinese sphere of influence. All they can do is block, and even that system looks like it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either.
The whole point of the Great Firewall, or the Golden Shield as it’s known on the mainland, is to protect citizens from objectionable international online content. The project, is of course, shrouded in secrecy, but due to the nature of the internet infrastructure, it’s possible to learn about it through empirical analysis, which basically means poking it with a stick.
ConceptDoppler is a project established by computer scientists at the University of New Mexico, which is essentially looking for what keywords are being blocked by the Golden Shield, using an algorithm called Latent Semantic Analysis, which uses words and related words to test a firewall or filtering system. The idea is that understanding the how the ideas and the words related to the
ideas are filtered, then there will be a better understanding of how a government filters the Internet for it’s citizens - and let’s face it, the Chinese government isn’t exactly offering white papers on it’s filtering technology.
The initial findings of ConceptDoppler are surprising to say the least. Along with the normal words that you would expect to find blocked (democracy, massacre, etc) there are some quite unusual ones too. A search for Hitler’s Mein Kampf is blocked, another search term for “conversion rate” is also blocked. The other surprise was that the firewall isn’t like a wall, it’s more of a chain-link fence. A lot of the words managed to get through to the mainland, although these rogue words were trapped by routers deeper in the Chinese Internet. It seems that bombarding the Shield with terms, especially at time when Internet traffic is at it’s peak allows some search terms to get through, in fact, banned words get through 28% of the time.
The conclusions that the team has come to is that the Chinese government rattles is sabre to keep the masses in line. The firewall doesn’t need to catch all the search terms entered into Google, just some of them. Just enough of them need to be caught before people learn that there’s no point searching for them anymore, and stop searching.
Another strategy that researchers discovered was that it’s possible to circumvent the net censor altogether, simply by telling the two computers that want to talk to each other to ignore the messages that they are receiving from the Chinese filters.
When a search term or a page is loaded from a server to your computer, and it passes through the GFW, if there is questionable content in the page, then both your computer and the computer you are connected to will receive “reset packets”, which effectively close your connection for you. If the two computers are set up to ignore reset packets, then the information will get through, say, from Wikipedia’s server in California to my laptop here in Beijing. Richard Clayton and his team at the University of Cambridge has done experiments using this theory, and apparently things work pretty well.
For the first time in a long time, Chinese people have a chance to have their voices heard. Blogging is big in China, well-wishers and supporters gather outside Bo Bo Freedom City, trying to take baby formula into the house, and they wonder what will become of the man who once took part in an EU hearing about human rights.
The Golden Shield is regarded by the CPP as it’s most effective tool in maintaining political power, and repeatedly, it has been shown that it doesn’t work. When the firewall doesn’t work, they arrest the subversives and tarnish their international image even further. Given that the CCP has spent an estimated $800 million just to get the thing up and running, and the costs of upgrading and maintaining new hardware and software means that the cost of the biggest white elephant in China will continue to rise, and it’s usefulness will plummet.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Why They Do That Thing They Do
No other country has so many different opinions held about it than China. You may see a country that is gripped by a lethargic, outdated, backward communist dictatorship, you might see a country with a hideous human rights record, others may see a country steeped in history, now transformed to a commercial dynamo. One question that many ask is why the Communist Party of China does what it does, punishing apparently minor crimes with obscene penalties, often for the most unfathomable of reasons. Language complications don't help much, at best, Mandarin translates badly into English, and the complex, interwoven, multilayered nature of Chinese culture only serves to confuse the layperson even more.
The first thing to remember is that largely communism in China is dead. The original ideas that fueled the civil war, resulting in the creation of the People's Republic has been superseded by a rampant free market, and a lust for money. One of my high level students came to her class one afternoon and showed me her application for membership of the CCP. I asked if she was a communist, and she said she wasn't, it's just that party membership is good when you are trying to find a job. Rather than being a commitment to a political ideology, the CCP is seen as something of an additional required qualification when job hunting, rather than a overt statement of belief.
It's here that we find something of a dichotomy. While the people themselves are probably as interested in politics as the average American or Briton, the Party does have control of all the media in the country, and therefore is able to create the illusion of a China built on a pure political, socialist motivations, and gives the impression that the country is highly politicized. This, as any long term visitor to the country will testify, is untrue.
A myriad of rules and regulations exist, some them conflicting, and over half of them pointlessly bureaucratic, almost all of them are bent or circumvented in some way. My experience with the visa agent is one incident: I was able to procure a business visa without having the proper paperwork or intentions. I then worked illegally at the local police academy.
For the most part, Chinese people see the government as an elderly grandparent. They tell them they are going to do something one way, and then go off to do it their way. The government is somewhat embarrassed by the gross liberties that are taken with the supposed law of the land, which explains the often used phrase "in accordance with Chinese law" - this is nothing more than an attempt to try to improve the image of the Chinese legal system.
The laws have done nothing to deter the determined money makers in China. Counterfeiting, as we shall examine later, is rife. A trip to the Silk Market, Pearl Market, or Dazhalan will reveal fake watches, clothes, underwear, consumer electronics, cosmetics, books as well as the perennial favorite, fake DVDs (a market rumored to be controlled by the Chinese army). Supposedly, since joining the World Trade Organization, China has strengthened it's intellectual property laws, unfortunately, no one has told the counterfeiters. There are probably more arrests, and there's definitely more publicity about the arrests, but the counterfeiters continue to flaunt the rules. During the Olympic Games, fake Olympic souvenirs were available to buy around Tiananmen Square.
The second point to bear in mind is that debate amongst Chinese people about the politics of their country is an exercise in futility. The two generations of adults that have known nothing but the rule of the CCP now exists in China, and from the complete and total control of the media that the party has, the party's philosophy, such as it is, is deeply and indelibly ingrained in the hearts of minds of the thirtysomethings and their parents.
When you look at it from their point of view, Chinese people do owe a lot to the CCP. Less people than ever live in poverty, the country has unparalleled economic growth, and more and more Chinese are studying abroad, taking on new ideas and broadening the horizons. The young adults in China, to praphrase Harold MacMillan, have never had it so good, and it's all thanks to the pragmatic and technocratic leadership of the Politburo.
Closer inspection, as always, reveals a somewhat different story.
After the excesses of Mao Zedong led to a paranoid, closed and nose diving Chinese society, the official line is that a policy of "Reform and Opening Up" was initiated by Deng Xiao Ping. The idea was to create “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. This in itself has presented a confused view of China. Essentially, the government maintains that it is essentially Marxist/Maoist, but that it has cherry picked ideas from Western capitalist nations to fit it's own ends. This demonstrates the first, most distinct characteristic of the Chinese Communist Party - big, new ideas are trumpeted, but the u-turn performed after the idea fails is kept quiet. The Chinese took the worst of all Western ideas in an attempt to rapidly modernize and unify the country, and ended up with a communist leadership.
The Chinese government basically rewrote the rules on what exactly they were supposed to be. Communism wasn't working, the country had been left in chaos after the Cultural Revolution, and China was heading back to where it started. The CCP would have people believe that this writing and rewriting is all part of the master plan that will create a harmonious, socialist society, but while they've acknowledged that the creation of the People's Republic was an irreversible change from the old feudal capitalist ways to the new socialist ones, they managed to hustle the Chinese people into believing that they're still dyed-in-the-blood communists, only this time with more money. Since the Chinese people are living the best lives Chinese people have lived for a long time, it's hard to disagree with them.
The biggest hustle has been the idea that everything that is happening now is a conscious, premeditated pro-action by the Chinese government, but empirical analysis shows a different truth: the Chinese government doesn't start doing things, they stop doing things. The CCP just stops standing in people's way, and then takes the credit for making a positive contribution to the lives of 1.3 billion people. The trend shows that they're more likely to do this when they're about to be pushed by the people.
This presents problem for the government. How to convince over a billion people not to march on Beijing and kick the Politburo out of The Great Hall of the People. Since communism is no longer a viable option, the powers that be have to find another way of keeping the masses in line. They had to find a way of convincing people that living in China wasn’t so bad, and that having a military dictatorship/kleptocracy in power was a good thing. The answer, as it turned out, was fairly obvious: nationalism.
Chinese nationalistic indoctrination begins at an early age for the people of China. A new song that kindergarten teachers wrote for their students to recite every morning recently turned up translated into English on the Internet. Entitled Go China! 2009, the song started off in village schools, and has spread to Chinese-only schools in Shanghai (adopted alongside the annual Anti-Japan Day).
It's been the long time goal of nearly every leader of China from the earliest dynasties to unify China and create a single Chinese country. Handily, China has had Tibet, Taiwan and Xinjiang separatists to either create problems to rally proud Chinese into defending the need for a unified China, or present golden opportunities for showcasing the elite Chinese security services. Ironically, before 1991, both the sides across the Taiwan Strait wanted the same thing – create a unified China - the problem was, of course, which kind of China – a plain old vanilla republic, or a communist people's republic.
In Taiwan's case, the general consensus at the moment is to support the status quo, occasional outrage and saber rattling comes from the mainland government to try to remind everyone who's actually in charge of the place (most recently the $6.5billion weapons deal between the US and Taiwan understandable angered Beijing because the weapons were sold to enable the island to defend itself from China"). At other times, steps are taken accompanied by typical communist pomp when something actually goes to plan. The biggest PR coup was the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997. After nearly 800 years, China was finally one nation under Jiang Zemin.
The use of euphemisms when talking about national embarrassments (or what are perceived as national embarrassment) are common in mainland China. “Mass incidents are protests or demonstrations and one of my students referred to the Cultural Revolution as a period of "silliness". Protests and riots are a source of embarrassment to the government because they show a loss of control by the police and party over the people. When a riot erupts in an already sensitive are of the country, like, say, Tibet, a swift and uncompromising effort to regain control is almost guaranteed. A media black out, followed by international confusion usually follows.
Immediately after the riots broke out in Tibet and the surrounding areas in Sichuan, the Chinese government locked down Tibet, interested in keeping foreign journalists out while they struggled to regain control over the rioting monks. The only reporter who was in the Tibetan capital at the time was James Miles, who had planned a trip there, which just happened to coincide with the "mass incident".
While Wen Jia Bao blamed the Dalai Lama for masterminding the rioting, Miles reported that he saw little in the way of organization, observing an eruption rather than a planned, premeditated protest. The media blackout included The Guardian website, Youtube, and parts of Yahoo! News. Footage of Tibetans rioting was playing constantly on new channels, and the People's Daily demanded that the CCP resolutely crush the 'Tibet independence' forces' conspiracy and sabotaging activities. When journalists were allowed into Tibet, translators were not provided for western writers, and it was up to the Taiwanese press to report on comments that were made in Chinese and Tibetan by monks. Premier Wen Jia Bao claimed that "there is ample fact and we also have plenty of evidence proving that this incident was organized, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique although none was ever presented, and none is unlikely ever to be presented.
In it's current form, the CCP is more similar now to American neo-conservatives, creating and providing solutions to what amount to wildly exaggerated problems. Wen Jia Bao says that the Dalai Lama masterminded the rioting and violence through a complicated communication system from India (a system that was detailed by the government's media mouthpiece, Xinhua), while on the other hand, the Dalai Lama has repeatedly called for autonomy rather than independence, and has been jilted at the conference table by the Chinese delegates.
One of the hurdles that both westerners and the Chinese government have to overcome is the idea that there are insurmountable cultural differences between the two that will forever cause friction and misunderstanding. Where the western media sees a brutal crackdown, the Chinese see the maintenance of law and order. The big problem comes when Chinese try to sell western media the same thing they've already sold to the Chinese people. For example, the idea that the Dalai Lama is in fact, an international terrorist mastermind is easily assimilated by the local populous, but a more sophisticated audience would and does dismiss the idea as ridiculous.
The CCP is caught in an unenviable situation where it needs to project it's international image as a modern and progressive country, satisfying the new generation of wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs and taking care of it's aging population who both fought for a New China, and lived through the worst of Chairman Mao's excesses.
Criticism is a cornerstone of Maoism. The only problem is that when the CCP is criticized, or even worse, thinks it's being criticized, they don't take too kindly to it. What the CCP is most worried about, and most anxious to remove is not just direct criticism, but the implication that there is a problem that isn't being addressed.
There are two important concepts that are difficult to grasp for Westerners living in or visiting China. The first is the idea of "face", which equates closely to public appearance. If one person gets angry with another, then both people lose face, the person who instigated the fight loses out because he is seen as being unable to control his feelings, and the guy being yelled at loses face too as the target of those feelings. This idea extends into the realm of international politics too.
While the CCP excelled at banning independent media so that it could monopolize images for it's domestic audience, it's the lack of independent reporting that has created a credibility gulf between the CCP and western media. As Beijing based PR guru Will Moss put it, "China is much better at dictating ideas to a captive audience than at selling them to an open one.".
The first thing to remember is that largely communism in China is dead. The original ideas that fueled the civil war, resulting in the creation of the People's Republic has been superseded by a rampant free market, and a lust for money. One of my high level students came to her class one afternoon and showed me her application for membership of the CCP. I asked if she was a communist, and she said she wasn't, it's just that party membership is good when you are trying to find a job. Rather than being a commitment to a political ideology, the CCP is seen as something of an additional required qualification when job hunting, rather than a overt statement of belief.
It's here that we find something of a dichotomy. While the people themselves are probably as interested in politics as the average American or Briton, the Party does have control of all the media in the country, and therefore is able to create the illusion of a China built on a pure political, socialist motivations, and gives the impression that the country is highly politicized. This, as any long term visitor to the country will testify, is untrue.
A myriad of rules and regulations exist, some them conflicting, and over half of them pointlessly bureaucratic, almost all of them are bent or circumvented in some way. My experience with the visa agent is one incident: I was able to procure a business visa without having the proper paperwork or intentions. I then worked illegally at the local police academy.
For the most part, Chinese people see the government as an elderly grandparent. They tell them they are going to do something one way, and then go off to do it their way. The government is somewhat embarrassed by the gross liberties that are taken with the supposed law of the land, which explains the often used phrase "in accordance with Chinese law" - this is nothing more than an attempt to try to improve the image of the Chinese legal system.
The laws have done nothing to deter the determined money makers in China. Counterfeiting, as we shall examine later, is rife. A trip to the Silk Market, Pearl Market, or Dazhalan will reveal fake watches, clothes, underwear, consumer electronics, cosmetics, books as well as the perennial favorite, fake DVDs (a market rumored to be controlled by the Chinese army). Supposedly, since joining the World Trade Organization, China has strengthened it's intellectual property laws, unfortunately, no one has told the counterfeiters. There are probably more arrests, and there's definitely more publicity about the arrests, but the counterfeiters continue to flaunt the rules. During the Olympic Games, fake Olympic souvenirs were available to buy around Tiananmen Square.
The second point to bear in mind is that debate amongst Chinese people about the politics of their country is an exercise in futility. The two generations of adults that have known nothing but the rule of the CCP now exists in China, and from the complete and total control of the media that the party has, the party's philosophy, such as it is, is deeply and indelibly ingrained in the hearts of minds of the thirtysomethings and their parents.
When you look at it from their point of view, Chinese people do owe a lot to the CCP. Less people than ever live in poverty, the country has unparalleled economic growth, and more and more Chinese are studying abroad, taking on new ideas and broadening the horizons. The young adults in China, to praphrase Harold MacMillan, have never had it so good, and it's all thanks to the pragmatic and technocratic leadership of the Politburo.
Closer inspection, as always, reveals a somewhat different story.
After the excesses of Mao Zedong led to a paranoid, closed and nose diving Chinese society, the official line is that a policy of "Reform and Opening Up" was initiated by Deng Xiao Ping. The idea was to create “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. This in itself has presented a confused view of China. Essentially, the government maintains that it is essentially Marxist/Maoist, but that it has cherry picked ideas from Western capitalist nations to fit it's own ends. This demonstrates the first, most distinct characteristic of the Chinese Communist Party - big, new ideas are trumpeted, but the u-turn performed after the idea fails is kept quiet. The Chinese took the worst of all Western ideas in an attempt to rapidly modernize and unify the country, and ended up with a communist leadership.
The Chinese government basically rewrote the rules on what exactly they were supposed to be. Communism wasn't working, the country had been left in chaos after the Cultural Revolution, and China was heading back to where it started. The CCP would have people believe that this writing and rewriting is all part of the master plan that will create a harmonious, socialist society, but while they've acknowledged that the creation of the People's Republic was an irreversible change from the old feudal capitalist ways to the new socialist ones, they managed to hustle the Chinese people into believing that they're still dyed-in-the-blood communists, only this time with more money. Since the Chinese people are living the best lives Chinese people have lived for a long time, it's hard to disagree with them.
The biggest hustle has been the idea that everything that is happening now is a conscious, premeditated pro-action by the Chinese government, but empirical analysis shows a different truth: the Chinese government doesn't start doing things, they stop doing things. The CCP just stops standing in people's way, and then takes the credit for making a positive contribution to the lives of 1.3 billion people. The trend shows that they're more likely to do this when they're about to be pushed by the people.
This presents problem for the government. How to convince over a billion people not to march on Beijing and kick the Politburo out of The Great Hall of the People. Since communism is no longer a viable option, the powers that be have to find another way of keeping the masses in line. They had to find a way of convincing people that living in China wasn’t so bad, and that having a military dictatorship/kleptocracy in power was a good thing. The answer, as it turned out, was fairly obvious: nationalism.
Chinese nationalistic indoctrination begins at an early age for the people of China. A new song that kindergarten teachers wrote for their students to recite every morning recently turned up translated into English on the Internet. Entitled Go China! 2009, the song started off in village schools, and has spread to Chinese-only schools in Shanghai (adopted alongside the annual Anti-Japan Day).
It's been the long time goal of nearly every leader of China from the earliest dynasties to unify China and create a single Chinese country. Handily, China has had Tibet, Taiwan and Xinjiang separatists to either create problems to rally proud Chinese into defending the need for a unified China, or present golden opportunities for showcasing the elite Chinese security services. Ironically, before 1991, both the sides across the Taiwan Strait wanted the same thing – create a unified China - the problem was, of course, which kind of China – a plain old vanilla republic, or a communist people's republic.
In Taiwan's case, the general consensus at the moment is to support the status quo, occasional outrage and saber rattling comes from the mainland government to try to remind everyone who's actually in charge of the place (most recently the $6.5billion weapons deal between the US and Taiwan understandable angered Beijing because the weapons were sold to enable the island to defend itself from China"). At other times, steps are taken accompanied by typical communist pomp when something actually goes to plan. The biggest PR coup was the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997. After nearly 800 years, China was finally one nation under Jiang Zemin.
The use of euphemisms when talking about national embarrassments (or what are perceived as national embarrassment) are common in mainland China. “Mass incidents are protests or demonstrations and one of my students referred to the Cultural Revolution as a period of "silliness". Protests and riots are a source of embarrassment to the government because they show a loss of control by the police and party over the people. When a riot erupts in an already sensitive are of the country, like, say, Tibet, a swift and uncompromising effort to regain control is almost guaranteed. A media black out, followed by international confusion usually follows.
Immediately after the riots broke out in Tibet and the surrounding areas in Sichuan, the Chinese government locked down Tibet, interested in keeping foreign journalists out while they struggled to regain control over the rioting monks. The only reporter who was in the Tibetan capital at the time was James Miles, who had planned a trip there, which just happened to coincide with the "mass incident".
While Wen Jia Bao blamed the Dalai Lama for masterminding the rioting, Miles reported that he saw little in the way of organization, observing an eruption rather than a planned, premeditated protest. The media blackout included The Guardian website, Youtube, and parts of Yahoo! News. Footage of Tibetans rioting was playing constantly on new channels, and the People's Daily demanded that the CCP resolutely crush the 'Tibet independence' forces' conspiracy and sabotaging activities. When journalists were allowed into Tibet, translators were not provided for western writers, and it was up to the Taiwanese press to report on comments that were made in Chinese and Tibetan by monks. Premier Wen Jia Bao claimed that "there is ample fact and we also have plenty of evidence proving that this incident was organized, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique although none was ever presented, and none is unlikely ever to be presented.
In it's current form, the CCP is more similar now to American neo-conservatives, creating and providing solutions to what amount to wildly exaggerated problems. Wen Jia Bao says that the Dalai Lama masterminded the rioting and violence through a complicated communication system from India (a system that was detailed by the government's media mouthpiece, Xinhua), while on the other hand, the Dalai Lama has repeatedly called for autonomy rather than independence, and has been jilted at the conference table by the Chinese delegates.
One of the hurdles that both westerners and the Chinese government have to overcome is the idea that there are insurmountable cultural differences between the two that will forever cause friction and misunderstanding. Where the western media sees a brutal crackdown, the Chinese see the maintenance of law and order. The big problem comes when Chinese try to sell western media the same thing they've already sold to the Chinese people. For example, the idea that the Dalai Lama is in fact, an international terrorist mastermind is easily assimilated by the local populous, but a more sophisticated audience would and does dismiss the idea as ridiculous.
The CCP is caught in an unenviable situation where it needs to project it's international image as a modern and progressive country, satisfying the new generation of wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs and taking care of it's aging population who both fought for a New China, and lived through the worst of Chairman Mao's excesses.
Criticism is a cornerstone of Maoism. The only problem is that when the CCP is criticized, or even worse, thinks it's being criticized, they don't take too kindly to it. What the CCP is most worried about, and most anxious to remove is not just direct criticism, but the implication that there is a problem that isn't being addressed.
There are two important concepts that are difficult to grasp for Westerners living in or visiting China. The first is the idea of "face", which equates closely to public appearance. If one person gets angry with another, then both people lose face, the person who instigated the fight loses out because he is seen as being unable to control his feelings, and the guy being yelled at loses face too as the target of those feelings. This idea extends into the realm of international politics too.
While the CCP excelled at banning independent media so that it could monopolize images for it's domestic audience, it's the lack of independent reporting that has created a credibility gulf between the CCP and western media. As Beijing based PR guru Will Moss put it, "China is much better at dictating ideas to a captive audience than at selling them to an open one.".
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Love and Sex in the Middle Kingdom
The societal pressures in Asia are tough for the kids. Like most things, they don’t really hit home until someone you know is directly affected by them. While the newspapers have been all over the fact that Chinese boys outnumber the girls by a staggering 32 million, for me, the realization only came when I met up with one of my old students to give her some coaching on her IELTS exam. We’d sat in a trendy café in Wu Dao Kou for around 2 bladder-straining hours, brainstorming topics for the conversation test. Josie had revealed that the only reason that she’d been allowed out by her parents was because she’d convinced them that she was going to a private tutor for a while to study.
The place was quiet and pokey, and the air conditioning wasn’t working properly. There was a familiar smell of Chinese cigarettes in the air (after the Olympic smoking ban, smelling cigarette smoke inside a café was something of rarity). We took a table in a corner, and Josie stroked the cat that was lying unhelpfully on a six person table. The air conditioning unit was blowing out clouds of frosty air over my left shoulder, and I still barely felt a thing. Somehow, as these things often go on a roasting summer afternoon in a cold coffeehouse in Beijing, we got talking about differences between Chinese and western ideas of what girlfriend and boyfriend meant to Chinese people and foreigners.
“My boyfriend asks me to marry him everyday.”
I was a little confused. I had gotten used to the idea of people marrying young in China, but for Mimo, young marriage didn’t seem right, she had too many plans and ambitions to fulfill before she even began thinking about marriage.
“How how is he?”
“21.”
A year younger than she was. She leaned in conspiratorially.
“You know when you send me messages, and I don’t reply?”
I nodded, I had these baffling non-replies before. Usually that means that a girl isn’t interested in meeting up, but with Josie, I had a barrage of text messages, then days of silence, then another barrage of messages.
“Well, that’s when I’m with my boyfriend. He doesn’t let me talk to other men. He thinks I should stay at home all day.”
What was emerging from Josie, the girl who wore short skirts and knee length boots for a class at my school, was an idea of the pressure that is piled onto the nation’s youth, demands of good school grades, marriage and, eventually grandchildren are at odds with the county’s rapid modernization and the massive influx of liberal western ideals. Such ideals are at direct odds with the traditionalism that China is steeped in - and the traditionalism that the government espouses with unbridled gusto to the rest of the world. I realized that the school was really the only place that she got time to spend with people who were interested in what her opinions were, and what she wanted to do with her life, rather than live in a household where she was largely told what to do.
With the attempts to purge the Internet of pornography, virginal purity is venerated and actively promoted on the mainland.. A chastity belt has recently been patented, which, the inventor hopes will bring couples closer together, and put the hookers out of work. Parent’s want their children to be virgins till their wedding night, but there’s a dawning realization that the wedding night may never come. In the Southern Weekly, Shen Fan, a 25-year-old philosophy student at Nanjing University preached about the many and varied benefits of a chaste Chinese girl. She told reporter Shen Liang, “losing virginity before marriage is losing competitiveness, which may lead to losing an opportunity of a good marriage”. These days in China, young unmarried girls (and boys) need to work every angle to find an agreeable spouse. Aging parents are taking photos and their offspring’s vital statistics to parks in the hope capturing an eligible bachelor that will capture their daughters hearts. The marriage marts have spread throughout China, and can be found in any park in any major city in the country.
The advertisement are depressingly desperate: "Boy - 28 yrs, has own apartment in Fuxing district, no mortgage, Communist Party member" reads one battered paper, another is for a daughter: "Girl, 35 yrs, 1.6 meters tall, PhD, University teacher". Some of the adverts show a preference for people born in a certain year (one initially baffling paper reads “Rat preferred”), while another shows that a 28 year old IT professional avoids gambling. Some parents are getting old and don’t care anymore, one white haired woman says that "I don't mind if the girl is Chinese or foreign. She must have a good heart and be in a good job," with the reporters who interview her, she leaves her mobile number in case they run into someone who might be suitable.
Of course, the desperation isn’t limited to out-and-out lying, parents will show their sons a fake photo in the hope of at least getting them a date, and the children are becoming more and more wary of meeting up with anyone their folks unearth at the local park.
It’s on thing to hook up with someone in the marriage market, and another matter completely when it comes to the idea of till death do us part. The sad fact of modern china is that Chinese couples simply do not have the social awareness needed to maintain a long term adult relationship. There’s some rather simple psychology at work here - 'little emperors" are doted on by their mothers, but have a distant father figure. As the boys grow into men, something of an identity crisis develops because no one, least of all their fathers, has been on hand to show them how to act like a man, resulting in hyper-masculinity, essentially the men violently overcompensate for...well, nearly everything. This coupled with the unhealthy psychology of being an only child results in a serious lack of social skills that people need in order to deal with the modern world.
And the reason as to why more foreign women don't have Chinese boyfriends? That all comes down to losing face. The foreigners who come to work in China, must, by law, hold a degree certificate, which is more than most of the men looking for brides has in China. When the women start their jobs, they will, invariably, be earning much more than their male, Chinese counterparts. Not wanting to be embarrassed by the cleverer, richer foreign women, the men look for someone more deferent, respectful...in essence, more Chinese. Also, there's the small matter of the husband's mother probably wanting someone to look after them 24 hours a day – an idea which most western career women will understandably turn their noses up at. The men of Japan and China are facing something of an identity crisis.
The problem is that the women are usually more open-mined and accepting of new western ideas, the man, finding that his wife is more independent than he expected her to be, and his traditional samurai/hunter gatherer role. In all my time in China, it’s the men who have been the most stubborn, most proud, and most traditional, the women have been completely the opposite. In Japan, this phenomenon has given rise to the Narita Divorce - a Japanese couple heads off for their honeymoon in a European country, and it’s the woman who adapts to Western ways better than her husband, who finds himself relegated to lowly bag-carrier, rather than katana brandishing protector of his defenseless young bride. Because the marriage license is only signed after the honeymoon, upon their return to Narita Airport in Japan, the once happy couple go their separate ways.
Money is an important issue for Chinese women. A recent news story in the UK Daily Telegraph supports the theory that Chinese women see foreigners as walking ATMs - as the financial “crisis” rages, Chinese women are seeing foreigners as a less attractive bet - at least where money is concerned. A survey conducted by Hongniang.com, an online dating site revealed that only 16.8% of the 6600 women polled wanted to date a foreigner - in September, the number had been almost over twice that - 42.5% said that they were looking for a foreigner to date.
The misanthropic attitudes that many western men having when it comes to bedding Chinese girls isn’t helping matters. The infamous Chinabounder, who wrote at length of his various amoral sexual conquests on his blog led to a witch hunt initialed by a professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. On the other side of the coin, ChinaSmack.com translated an essay written by a girl at Jiaotong University - is apparently a lead cheerleader for the football team - who claims that there are no suitable Chinese men for her - she can either be a mistress or the wife of a rich, uncouth coal digger from Shanxi.
In Japan, which has the world’s fastest aging population ( by 2015, one in four Japanese citizens will be 65 or older), the hardcore porn industry caters for the dissatisfied Japanese man, leaving the jobless women without children and stuck in a sexless marriage. The Japanese statistics are appalling, 34% of all couples responding to a survey say it’s been over a year since they had last sex with their partner, and more and more women are turning to sex volunteers to get laid.
Japan is on the verge of a demographic disaster with the birth rate hitting record low of 1.29. In 2000, 70% of all Japanese men were unmarried, and the ones that were think of their wives more as substitute mothers than lovers. There are repercussions on nearly all aspects of Japanese life, exam hell is less of an ordeal because of the reduced competition (which drives school fees higher because there are no students), divorces blamed on sexual inactivity have skyrocketed, amusement parks are closing across the country, and once-prosperous baby-clothes manufacturers are shutting their doors.
More and more socially inept children being raised by the TV and Nintendo are suffering from extreme social withdrawal known colloquially as hikokimori. One extreme case tells of one Japanese teenager who shut himself away in his room for 13 years, unable to cope with the pressure cooker of exams and society’s demands of achievement. The inability to vent sexual and social frustrations can turn bloody, with young men going on knife wielding stabbing sprees in the middle of Tokyo, or otherwise, throwing themselves in front of train on the loop line - “accidents” often delay local services during the day.
Japan is one of the most sexually tolerant countries in Asia - where else would you see middle aged businessmen kissing their goodbyes to their husbands on the late train home? Yet, in a country where love hotels are on virtually every street, where bikini idols adorn the thick manga magazines, and where pornographic DVD shops have six packed floors (so I’m told...) the young girls of Japan are reduced to dressing themselves up in bandages feigning serious injuries. Known as the kegadoru, young, single, attention seeking girls now sport clinical white bandages and eye patches. For some - for most - it’s the only way to get boys to talk to them.
The place was quiet and pokey, and the air conditioning wasn’t working properly. There was a familiar smell of Chinese cigarettes in the air (after the Olympic smoking ban, smelling cigarette smoke inside a café was something of rarity). We took a table in a corner, and Josie stroked the cat that was lying unhelpfully on a six person table. The air conditioning unit was blowing out clouds of frosty air over my left shoulder, and I still barely felt a thing. Somehow, as these things often go on a roasting summer afternoon in a cold coffeehouse in Beijing, we got talking about differences between Chinese and western ideas of what girlfriend and boyfriend meant to Chinese people and foreigners.
“My boyfriend asks me to marry him everyday.”
I was a little confused. I had gotten used to the idea of people marrying young in China, but for Mimo, young marriage didn’t seem right, she had too many plans and ambitions to fulfill before she even began thinking about marriage.
“How how is he?”
“21.”
A year younger than she was. She leaned in conspiratorially.
“You know when you send me messages, and I don’t reply?”
I nodded, I had these baffling non-replies before. Usually that means that a girl isn’t interested in meeting up, but with Josie, I had a barrage of text messages, then days of silence, then another barrage of messages.
“Well, that’s when I’m with my boyfriend. He doesn’t let me talk to other men. He thinks I should stay at home all day.”
What was emerging from Josie, the girl who wore short skirts and knee length boots for a class at my school, was an idea of the pressure that is piled onto the nation’s youth, demands of good school grades, marriage and, eventually grandchildren are at odds with the county’s rapid modernization and the massive influx of liberal western ideals. Such ideals are at direct odds with the traditionalism that China is steeped in - and the traditionalism that the government espouses with unbridled gusto to the rest of the world. I realized that the school was really the only place that she got time to spend with people who were interested in what her opinions were, and what she wanted to do with her life, rather than live in a household where she was largely told what to do.
With the attempts to purge the Internet of pornography, virginal purity is venerated and actively promoted on the mainland.. A chastity belt has recently been patented, which, the inventor hopes will bring couples closer together, and put the hookers out of work. Parent’s want their children to be virgins till their wedding night, but there’s a dawning realization that the wedding night may never come. In the Southern Weekly, Shen Fan, a 25-year-old philosophy student at Nanjing University preached about the many and varied benefits of a chaste Chinese girl. She told reporter Shen Liang, “losing virginity before marriage is losing competitiveness, which may lead to losing an opportunity of a good marriage”. These days in China, young unmarried girls (and boys) need to work every angle to find an agreeable spouse. Aging parents are taking photos and their offspring’s vital statistics to parks in the hope capturing an eligible bachelor that will capture their daughters hearts. The marriage marts have spread throughout China, and can be found in any park in any major city in the country.
The advertisement are depressingly desperate: "Boy - 28 yrs, has own apartment in Fuxing district, no mortgage, Communist Party member" reads one battered paper, another is for a daughter: "Girl, 35 yrs, 1.6 meters tall, PhD, University teacher". Some of the adverts show a preference for people born in a certain year (one initially baffling paper reads “Rat preferred”), while another shows that a 28 year old IT professional avoids gambling. Some parents are getting old and don’t care anymore, one white haired woman says that "I don't mind if the girl is Chinese or foreign. She must have a good heart and be in a good job," with the reporters who interview her, she leaves her mobile number in case they run into someone who might be suitable.
Of course, the desperation isn’t limited to out-and-out lying, parents will show their sons a fake photo in the hope of at least getting them a date, and the children are becoming more and more wary of meeting up with anyone their folks unearth at the local park.
It’s on thing to hook up with someone in the marriage market, and another matter completely when it comes to the idea of till death do us part. The sad fact of modern china is that Chinese couples simply do not have the social awareness needed to maintain a long term adult relationship. There’s some rather simple psychology at work here - 'little emperors" are doted on by their mothers, but have a distant father figure. As the boys grow into men, something of an identity crisis develops because no one, least of all their fathers, has been on hand to show them how to act like a man, resulting in hyper-masculinity, essentially the men violently overcompensate for...well, nearly everything. This coupled with the unhealthy psychology of being an only child results in a serious lack of social skills that people need in order to deal with the modern world.
And the reason as to why more foreign women don't have Chinese boyfriends? That all comes down to losing face. The foreigners who come to work in China, must, by law, hold a degree certificate, which is more than most of the men looking for brides has in China. When the women start their jobs, they will, invariably, be earning much more than their male, Chinese counterparts. Not wanting to be embarrassed by the cleverer, richer foreign women, the men look for someone more deferent, respectful...in essence, more Chinese. Also, there's the small matter of the husband's mother probably wanting someone to look after them 24 hours a day – an idea which most western career women will understandably turn their noses up at. The men of Japan and China are facing something of an identity crisis.
The problem is that the women are usually more open-mined and accepting of new western ideas, the man, finding that his wife is more independent than he expected her to be, and his traditional samurai/hunter gatherer role. In all my time in China, it’s the men who have been the most stubborn, most proud, and most traditional, the women have been completely the opposite. In Japan, this phenomenon has given rise to the Narita Divorce - a Japanese couple heads off for their honeymoon in a European country, and it’s the woman who adapts to Western ways better than her husband, who finds himself relegated to lowly bag-carrier, rather than katana brandishing protector of his defenseless young bride. Because the marriage license is only signed after the honeymoon, upon their return to Narita Airport in Japan, the once happy couple go their separate ways.
Money is an important issue for Chinese women. A recent news story in the UK Daily Telegraph supports the theory that Chinese women see foreigners as walking ATMs - as the financial “crisis” rages, Chinese women are seeing foreigners as a less attractive bet - at least where money is concerned. A survey conducted by Hongniang.com, an online dating site revealed that only 16.8% of the 6600 women polled wanted to date a foreigner - in September, the number had been almost over twice that - 42.5% said that they were looking for a foreigner to date.
The misanthropic attitudes that many western men having when it comes to bedding Chinese girls isn’t helping matters. The infamous Chinabounder, who wrote at length of his various amoral sexual conquests on his blog led to a witch hunt initialed by a professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. On the other side of the coin, ChinaSmack.com translated an essay written by a girl at Jiaotong University - is apparently a lead cheerleader for the football team - who claims that there are no suitable Chinese men for her - she can either be a mistress or the wife of a rich, uncouth coal digger from Shanxi.
In Japan, which has the world’s fastest aging population ( by 2015, one in four Japanese citizens will be 65 or older), the hardcore porn industry caters for the dissatisfied Japanese man, leaving the jobless women without children and stuck in a sexless marriage. The Japanese statistics are appalling, 34% of all couples responding to a survey say it’s been over a year since they had last sex with their partner, and more and more women are turning to sex volunteers to get laid.
Japan is on the verge of a demographic disaster with the birth rate hitting record low of 1.29. In 2000, 70% of all Japanese men were unmarried, and the ones that were think of their wives more as substitute mothers than lovers. There are repercussions on nearly all aspects of Japanese life, exam hell is less of an ordeal because of the reduced competition (which drives school fees higher because there are no students), divorces blamed on sexual inactivity have skyrocketed, amusement parks are closing across the country, and once-prosperous baby-clothes manufacturers are shutting their doors.
More and more socially inept children being raised by the TV and Nintendo are suffering from extreme social withdrawal known colloquially as hikokimori. One extreme case tells of one Japanese teenager who shut himself away in his room for 13 years, unable to cope with the pressure cooker of exams and society’s demands of achievement. The inability to vent sexual and social frustrations can turn bloody, with young men going on knife wielding stabbing sprees in the middle of Tokyo, or otherwise, throwing themselves in front of train on the loop line - “accidents” often delay local services during the day.
Japan is one of the most sexually tolerant countries in Asia - where else would you see middle aged businessmen kissing their goodbyes to their husbands on the late train home? Yet, in a country where love hotels are on virtually every street, where bikini idols adorn the thick manga magazines, and where pornographic DVD shops have six packed floors (so I’m told...) the young girls of Japan are reduced to dressing themselves up in bandages feigning serious injuries. Known as the kegadoru, young, single, attention seeking girls now sport clinical white bandages and eye patches. For some - for most - it’s the only way to get boys to talk to them.
Lost in SARFT
"I thought there would be some trouble, though not this bad. When I heard their decision, I couldn't help a bitter smile. It was the same thing that happened to me in the past, the same thing that many directors have experienced. I bet even the official who made the announcement was bored."
For someone who has been banned from making movies in China for five years, Lou Ye doesn't really seem too bothered about the decision. For the director whose trademark is combining the discussion of politically sensitive subjects (at least in the mainland), being told off by SARFT is something of an occupational hazard. Weekend Lover, Suzhou River and Summer Palace, all of which have the career-killing combination of covering sensitive political topics with a hefty dose of nudity, have earned the director the dubious moniker of the enfant terrible of Chinese cinema.
Summer Palace, described as the most controversial film to come out of China for the last 50 years, and Ye shatter sexual and political taboos of Chinese cinema – mixing the political upheavals of 1989, both in Germany and in Beijing around an sexually charged, and very explicit plot( which includes for the first time in a Chinese film, full-frontal nudity of both flavors). Now, I know that any French readers, raised on a diet of Betty Blue and the Emmanuelle movies would drag deeply on a Gauloises, and give a slight shrug of bemusement, but trust me, in China, this is a big deal.
Despite having his career stolen from him by the Chinese censor, Lou is remarkably upbeat about the whole, going as far to say that "The political system is more flexible, the economy is growing fast and the relationship between people is more equal.", he firmly believes that things in China are better than they ever were. He's adamant that his films are not political, although he has a harder time trying to explain why there is so much sex and nudity in the movie, he says that "I don't understand why the authorities are so sensitive about 1989. They shouldn't worry about it. The facts are out there already. Analysis of those facts still requires a lot of work. But I'm not trying to make a comment. This movie is just a love story set against that background.". Lou Ye is not alone is suffering the wrath of the Chinese censor, at the start of the year, Li Fang's Lost in Beijing was edited, submitted, re-edited, resubmitted. None of the adjustments to the story were good enough for SARFT, and, even after 20 minutes of footage was cut for Chinese audiences, the film was still banned, and then Li was banned from making any more films in China for 2 years. Shot in a realistic, documentary style, similar to that of Eric Zonka (the wonderful The Dream Life of Angels), the movie follows the stories of a masseuse, her abusive boss, her husband and her boss's wife.
Like Traninspotting, the first half of the movie is very funny, in fact, it's almost farcical. After her friend gets fired from the foot massage parlor, they go out and get drunk on their lunch hour, Liu then returns to have a short nap in one of the massage rooms. Her boss discovers her, and halfway through the physical act, they are caught by Liu's husband – who works as a window cleaner and was cleaning the wrong window at the right time to catch his wife and her boss at it on one of the beds. The plot thickens when Liu falls pregnant, and her boss makes a deal with the couple to unofficially adopt the baby – his wife is unable to bear children. The whole deal will depend on who the father of the child is.
The apathy that the film promotes, and the constant bombardment of unfinished apartment blocks, the squalor that Liu and her husband live in, is unavoidable, indeed the directorial style is such that the film grabs you but the throat and rams apathy and the emptiness of a city existence down it. Even something like Trainspotting had a message, and had some delightfully self-centered moments in it, but after watching Lost in Beijing, there's nothing but the empty, dreadful feeling that we're all going to die. The surprising thing about these two filmmakers is that they say they are both willing to edit their films so that they can be exhibited. Lou Ye says that while he's willing, the Chinese negotiations with the Chinese authorities have broken down, the government isn't interested in giving him a second chance: "I think the most fundamental reason is that they think movies are a form of politics. If that was their opinion 10 years ago, I could fully understand. But the reality today is not like that. In 2006, films are part of the entertainment industry.".
Fang Li made over 50 cuts and reedits to Lost in Beijing in an attempt to appeased the government regulators, even then, after working with them in what the producer feels was total compliance, the film has been banned. The reason for ban was that the authorities believed that the producers were deliberately choosing themes that they knew were sensitive and controversial in order to pick up international accolades. That the directors have all engineered this to garner public sympathy from abroad to promote their movies to the lucrative western markets is the crux of the whole debacle. The “bleeding hearts and artists” of course will leap to the filmmakers defense, and champion Lou Ye for deciding to oppose the ban and team up with a Hong Kong writer to work on another movie. Fang Li and Lou Ye have repeatedly said that they have worked with SARFT in order to get distribution approval, after all there's little point in making a movie if no one goes to see it. Lou Ye counters the accusations of sensationalizing the ban on on his film."I feel that western critics don't fully understand this film. They ignore a lot and focus only on Tienanmen and sex. But that is only a part of the story," he says. "What is more important is what is going on inside the characters. This is a journey of the soul of a female Chinese intellectual. Such a trip could only happen here." "I've never been antagonistic toward those official agencies. I've been feeling my way along. Where are the lines?", asks Li.
Whereas SARFT may well approve the script for Summer Palace, they then ban the distribution of the movie because of the sex and the political tone of the movie. If the sex and political tone of the script was a problem, then it should have been rejected at the script approval stage, rather than wasting the time of an entire film production crew, actors and other creative talent that went into getting the film made. In contrast to the claims made by the film makers, the film banned not only because of the subject matter, but also because the film was technically below par for exhibition. The Beijing News reports that "the picture was too fuzzy, and the sound was too low.”, which would have caused some embarrassment to the Chinese people and government if anything less than a slick, well produce movies should ever appear in movie theaters around the world. "Lou Ye tried out some new artistic methods in this film, but the committee of censors judged it as not being up to technical standards. This struck a blow to the director, and he cannot accept this result at present,” so says producer Nai An. With Lost in Beijing, it's a little different.
Obviously, Chinese cinema is a tool for exporting Chinese culture, and no-one wants to promote a culture that sees causal rape, child-selling and rapant sexual acrobatics when the Olympics is going to be held in your country in less than six months. The Hollywood Reporter was less than impressed with the movie, noting that audiences didn't walk out of the movie because of the sex, degradation and generally crappiness of life in an Olympic city that is presented in the film, but that it was actually pretty boring. The bans of these two films, and the controversy generated thereof comes at a rather unfortunate time for Chinese movie fans. In December, an unofficial halt of the import and approval of American films came into effect. The ban was never announced in writing, but many suspect that it's China's reaction to the rather vitriolic complaints from the already rabid intellectual property rightists in the US. While the ban doesn't seem to have originated from SARFT, "Enchanted," "Bee Movie,", "Stardust" and "Beowulf." have all been locked out from Chinese exhibition. Things understandably came to a head following the comments of Susan Schwab, US Trade Representative at the World Trade Organization, who said "inadequate protection of intellectual property rights". This was rather unfair as, on the 20th December, a Chinese court came down on Yahoo for deep-linking to MP3's on it's music search facility. IFPI applauded the rule, with John Kennedy saying that "The ruling against Yahoo China is extremely significant in clarifying copyright rules for Internet music services in China.".
One of the problems with the censorship in China is that there is no definitive list of rules. For the Internet censorship there is no list of what sites are blocked and what sites are acceptable, websites are blocked and unblocked on an almost ad-hoc basis. During my research into the Internet blocking, courtesy of the Golden Shield project, I came across an interesting theory which postulates that it is that exact strategy that generates self-censorship in mainland China. Occasionally, people are reminded that censorship is in place, but it's not always enforced. By making examples of individuals who do get caught, a reminder is sent that the government is watching.
While it's written in the constitution of China that Chinese citizens enjoy freedom of speech and expression, there is an abundance of evidence that that is not the case. It's true enough that other countries do censor films, my home country, the UK has one of the oldest and most controversial movie censoring bodies in the world. Countries where religion and politics meet also stringently scrub and cleanse media before the masses are allowed anywhere near it, the problem is that the Chinese government treats everyone the same, they make a decision and are so used to not having to explain the decision that everyone is left in the dark as to the reason why things work the way they work.
In October, when a group of Dutch marathon runners gathered to run around what had been promised as a tour of Beijing's best and brightest “modern and historical” sites, they were, in actual fact, given a tour of Beijing's wastelands – some of the buildings were so modern that they hadn't been finished yet. The marathon date had been set at least one year in advance with all the participants. After running through mile after mile of highways and building sites, the runners only had one thing to say to the gathered press at the finish line: "We won’t be coming back.”. The reason for the sudden changes in the itinerary? The announcement, three weeks before the start of the marathon, of the biggest political event in the country, National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
For someone who has been banned from making movies in China for five years, Lou Ye doesn't really seem too bothered about the decision. For the director whose trademark is combining the discussion of politically sensitive subjects (at least in the mainland), being told off by SARFT is something of an occupational hazard. Weekend Lover, Suzhou River and Summer Palace, all of which have the career-killing combination of covering sensitive political topics with a hefty dose of nudity, have earned the director the dubious moniker of the enfant terrible of Chinese cinema.
Summer Palace, described as the most controversial film to come out of China for the last 50 years, and Ye shatter sexual and political taboos of Chinese cinema – mixing the political upheavals of 1989, both in Germany and in Beijing around an sexually charged, and very explicit plot( which includes for the first time in a Chinese film, full-frontal nudity of both flavors). Now, I know that any French readers, raised on a diet of Betty Blue and the Emmanuelle movies would drag deeply on a Gauloises, and give a slight shrug of bemusement, but trust me, in China, this is a big deal.
Despite having his career stolen from him by the Chinese censor, Lou is remarkably upbeat about the whole, going as far to say that "The political system is more flexible, the economy is growing fast and the relationship between people is more equal.", he firmly believes that things in China are better than they ever were. He's adamant that his films are not political, although he has a harder time trying to explain why there is so much sex and nudity in the movie, he says that "I don't understand why the authorities are so sensitive about 1989. They shouldn't worry about it. The facts are out there already. Analysis of those facts still requires a lot of work. But I'm not trying to make a comment. This movie is just a love story set against that background.". Lou Ye is not alone is suffering the wrath of the Chinese censor, at the start of the year, Li Fang's Lost in Beijing was edited, submitted, re-edited, resubmitted. None of the adjustments to the story were good enough for SARFT, and, even after 20 minutes of footage was cut for Chinese audiences, the film was still banned, and then Li was banned from making any more films in China for 2 years. Shot in a realistic, documentary style, similar to that of Eric Zonka (the wonderful The Dream Life of Angels), the movie follows the stories of a masseuse, her abusive boss, her husband and her boss's wife.
Like Traninspotting, the first half of the movie is very funny, in fact, it's almost farcical. After her friend gets fired from the foot massage parlor, they go out and get drunk on their lunch hour, Liu then returns to have a short nap in one of the massage rooms. Her boss discovers her, and halfway through the physical act, they are caught by Liu's husband – who works as a window cleaner and was cleaning the wrong window at the right time to catch his wife and her boss at it on one of the beds. The plot thickens when Liu falls pregnant, and her boss makes a deal with the couple to unofficially adopt the baby – his wife is unable to bear children. The whole deal will depend on who the father of the child is.
The apathy that the film promotes, and the constant bombardment of unfinished apartment blocks, the squalor that Liu and her husband live in, is unavoidable, indeed the directorial style is such that the film grabs you but the throat and rams apathy and the emptiness of a city existence down it. Even something like Trainspotting had a message, and had some delightfully self-centered moments in it, but after watching Lost in Beijing, there's nothing but the empty, dreadful feeling that we're all going to die. The surprising thing about these two filmmakers is that they say they are both willing to edit their films so that they can be exhibited. Lou Ye says that while he's willing, the Chinese negotiations with the Chinese authorities have broken down, the government isn't interested in giving him a second chance: "I think the most fundamental reason is that they think movies are a form of politics. If that was their opinion 10 years ago, I could fully understand. But the reality today is not like that. In 2006, films are part of the entertainment industry.".
Fang Li made over 50 cuts and reedits to Lost in Beijing in an attempt to appeased the government regulators, even then, after working with them in what the producer feels was total compliance, the film has been banned. The reason for ban was that the authorities believed that the producers were deliberately choosing themes that they knew were sensitive and controversial in order to pick up international accolades. That the directors have all engineered this to garner public sympathy from abroad to promote their movies to the lucrative western markets is the crux of the whole debacle. The “bleeding hearts and artists” of course will leap to the filmmakers defense, and champion Lou Ye for deciding to oppose the ban and team up with a Hong Kong writer to work on another movie. Fang Li and Lou Ye have repeatedly said that they have worked with SARFT in order to get distribution approval, after all there's little point in making a movie if no one goes to see it. Lou Ye counters the accusations of sensationalizing the ban on on his film."I feel that western critics don't fully understand this film. They ignore a lot and focus only on Tienanmen and sex. But that is only a part of the story," he says. "What is more important is what is going on inside the characters. This is a journey of the soul of a female Chinese intellectual. Such a trip could only happen here." "I've never been antagonistic toward those official agencies. I've been feeling my way along. Where are the lines?", asks Li.
Whereas SARFT may well approve the script for Summer Palace, they then ban the distribution of the movie because of the sex and the political tone of the movie. If the sex and political tone of the script was a problem, then it should have been rejected at the script approval stage, rather than wasting the time of an entire film production crew, actors and other creative talent that went into getting the film made. In contrast to the claims made by the film makers, the film banned not only because of the subject matter, but also because the film was technically below par for exhibition. The Beijing News reports that "the picture was too fuzzy, and the sound was too low.”, which would have caused some embarrassment to the Chinese people and government if anything less than a slick, well produce movies should ever appear in movie theaters around the world. "Lou Ye tried out some new artistic methods in this film, but the committee of censors judged it as not being up to technical standards. This struck a blow to the director, and he cannot accept this result at present,” so says producer Nai An. With Lost in Beijing, it's a little different.
Obviously, Chinese cinema is a tool for exporting Chinese culture, and no-one wants to promote a culture that sees causal rape, child-selling and rapant sexual acrobatics when the Olympics is going to be held in your country in less than six months. The Hollywood Reporter was less than impressed with the movie, noting that audiences didn't walk out of the movie because of the sex, degradation and generally crappiness of life in an Olympic city that is presented in the film, but that it was actually pretty boring. The bans of these two films, and the controversy generated thereof comes at a rather unfortunate time for Chinese movie fans. In December, an unofficial halt of the import and approval of American films came into effect. The ban was never announced in writing, but many suspect that it's China's reaction to the rather vitriolic complaints from the already rabid intellectual property rightists in the US. While the ban doesn't seem to have originated from SARFT, "Enchanted," "Bee Movie,", "Stardust" and "Beowulf." have all been locked out from Chinese exhibition. Things understandably came to a head following the comments of Susan Schwab, US Trade Representative at the World Trade Organization, who said "inadequate protection of intellectual property rights". This was rather unfair as, on the 20th December, a Chinese court came down on Yahoo for deep-linking to MP3's on it's music search facility. IFPI applauded the rule, with John Kennedy saying that "The ruling against Yahoo China is extremely significant in clarifying copyright rules for Internet music services in China.".
One of the problems with the censorship in China is that there is no definitive list of rules. For the Internet censorship there is no list of what sites are blocked and what sites are acceptable, websites are blocked and unblocked on an almost ad-hoc basis. During my research into the Internet blocking, courtesy of the Golden Shield project, I came across an interesting theory which postulates that it is that exact strategy that generates self-censorship in mainland China. Occasionally, people are reminded that censorship is in place, but it's not always enforced. By making examples of individuals who do get caught, a reminder is sent that the government is watching.
While it's written in the constitution of China that Chinese citizens enjoy freedom of speech and expression, there is an abundance of evidence that that is not the case. It's true enough that other countries do censor films, my home country, the UK has one of the oldest and most controversial movie censoring bodies in the world. Countries where religion and politics meet also stringently scrub and cleanse media before the masses are allowed anywhere near it, the problem is that the Chinese government treats everyone the same, they make a decision and are so used to not having to explain the decision that everyone is left in the dark as to the reason why things work the way they work.
In October, when a group of Dutch marathon runners gathered to run around what had been promised as a tour of Beijing's best and brightest “modern and historical” sites, they were, in actual fact, given a tour of Beijing's wastelands – some of the buildings were so modern that they hadn't been finished yet. The marathon date had been set at least one year in advance with all the participants. After running through mile after mile of highways and building sites, the runners only had one thing to say to the gathered press at the finish line: "We won’t be coming back.”. The reason for the sudden changes in the itinerary? The announcement, three weeks before the start of the marathon, of the biggest political event in the country, National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
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