Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
China’s rules are building a divide with the rest of the world, similar to the Berlin wall Russia started to build last century, says China veteran Ian Johnson in news.com.au. “Speech is more restricted than ever. Community activities and social groups are strictly regulated and monitored by the authorities,” he explained.
News.com.au:
“China’s rulers seem to be building and perfecting their own 21st-century version of the Berlin Wall,” said Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Ian Johnson.
“Using the tools of the digital age, Xi transformed China’s wall from an ad hoc assembly of rules and regulations into a sleek, powerful apparatus.
“In doing so, however, it may instead be repeating the mistakes of its Eastern bloc predecessors in the middle decades of the Cold War.”…
The CFR’s Johnson argues China’s “economic problems are part of a broader process of political ossification and ideological hardening”.
“Speech is more restricted than ever. Community activities and social groups are strictly regulated and monitored by the authorities,” he explained.
“And for foreigners, the arbitrary detention of businesspeople and raids on foreign consulting firms have – for the first time in decades – added a sense of risk to doing business in the country.”…
The end result, added Johnson, is Xi’s own version of Nikita Khruschev’s Berlin Wall, which was put up in 1961 to isolate the Soviet Union from the West.
“Even though he had recently won an unprecedented third term as party general secretary and president and seemed set to rule for life, public mistrust was higher than at any previous point in his decade in power,” said Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Ian Johnson.
“But none of that happened … Beijing has clung to a strategy of accelerating government intervention in Chinese life.”
“The deeper effects of this walling-off are unlikely to be felt overnight,” said Johnson.
Creative, well-educated and dynamic people still fill China’s universities, corporations and bureaucracy. But they’ve lost the incentive to be such.
“To visit China today is to enter a parallel universe of apps and websites that control access to daily life,” Johnson added.
“For outsiders, ordering a cab, buying a train ticket, and purchasing almost any goods requires a Chinese mobile phone, Chinese apps, and often a Chinese credit card.
“On one level, these hindrances are trivial, but they are also symptomatic of a government that seems almost unaware of the extent to which its ever more expansive centralisation is closing the country off from the outside world.”
Former China correspondent and author Ian Johnson was forced to leave the country in 2020 and revisited China earlier in 2023 for Foreign Affairs. He found a country in stagnation, that was used to double-digit growth, but lost its economic glamor, the former power base of the Communist Party. Strict government regulations changed China he knew. Also, information on his latest book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future.
Ian Johnson:
In the early months of 2023, some Chinese thinkers were expecting that Chinese President Xi Jinping would be forced to pause or even abandon significant parts of his decadelong march toward centralization. Over the previous year, they had watched the government lurch from crisis to crisis. First, the Chinese Communist Party had stubbornly stuck to its “zero COVID’’ strategy with vast lockdowns of some of China’s biggest cities, even as most other countries had long since ended ineffective hard controls in favor of cutting-edge vaccines. The government’s inflexibility eventually triggered a backlash: in November 2022, antigovernment protests broke out in Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, an astounding development in Xi’s China. Then, in early December, the government suddenly abandoned zero COVID without vaccinating more of the elderly or stockpiling medicine. Within a few weeks, the virus had run rampant through the population, and although the government has not provided reliable data, many independent experts have concluded that it caused more than one million deaths. Meanwhile, the country had lost much of the dynamic growth that for decades has sustained the party’s hold on power.
Given the multiplying pressures, many Chinese intellectuals assumed that Xi would be forced to loosen his iron grip over the economy and society. Even though he had recently won an unprecedented third term as party general secretary and president and seemed set to rule for life, public mistrust was higher than at any previous point in his decade in power. China’s dominant twentieth-century leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, had adjusted their approach when they encountered setbacks; surely Xi and his closest advisers would, too. “I was thinking that they would have to change course,” the editor of one of China’s most influential business journals told me in Beijing in May. “Not just the COVID policy but a lot of things, like the policy against private enterprise and [the] harsh treatment of social groups.”
But none of that happened. Although the zero-COVID measures are gone, Beijing has clung to a strategy of accelerating government intervention in Chinese life. Dozens of the young people who protested last fall have been detained and given lengthy prison sentences. Speech is more restricted than ever. Community activities and social groups are strictly regulated and monitored by the authorities. And for foreigners, the arbitrary detention of businesspeople and raids on foreign consulting firms have—for the first time in decades—added a sense of risk to doing business in the country.
China’s internet censors took down a popular influencer showing a tofu tank, which suddenly made this year internet users aware of an issue that was mostly ignored: Beijing’s tank man on June 4, 1989. Political expert Shaun Rein explains how the censor shot into his own food at ABC News.
ABC News:
“I didn’t know before, but now I think I know,” said one user on Weibo, where self-censoring posts using vague language to refer to sensitive topics are commonplace to evade censors and prevent account suspensions.
The apparent censoring of Li’s show has had the contrary effect of drawing more attention to it and to what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, said Shaun Rein, founder and managing director of China Market Research Group in Shanghai.
“For many Chinese users, taking Li offline at this time could have the opposite effect of bringing attention to an incident that nobody in China usually talks about,” said Rein.
China’s internet censors have been cracking down on feminist groups because they are considered by the government to be extremist because they oppose traditional marriage. A wrong signal, says author Zhang Lijiain the South China Morning Post, and it will certainly not help the country in solving its demographic problems.
Zhang Lijia:
Is the idea of simply not wanting to have any relationship with men extremism? In most parts of the world, the answer should be “no”, but apparently not in China. In April, Douban, a Chinese social media platform favoured by liberal internet users, shut down several feminist groups that were associated with a brand of feminism known as “6B4T”. Originating in South Korea around 2019, adherents wish to exclude men from their lives and reject the institution of marriage, which they regard as the root of patriarchy. The “6B” stands for not having romantic or sexual relationships with men; not getting married or having children; not buying misogynistic products; and offering help to other single women. “4T” refers to their rejection of tight-fitting outfits, religions and idols. Douban claimed the online forums associated with these groups were erased because they “contained extremism and radical political and ideological thoughts”. In a country where women are arrested for protesting against sexual harassment in public transport, such censorship is not a surprise. Moreover, at a time when China’s population is shrinking, I can imagine the authorities don’t feel overjoyed by some women’s determination not to marry or to procreate. Are these women really radical, though?
RCEP has been billed as creating the “newest and largest free trade area” in history. This claim is over-stretching the truth. In two dimensions.
In terms of its scale, it is true that in terms of population (2.2 billion people or 30% of the globe’s inhabitants) and economic output ($26.2 trillion or 30% of global GDP), it is very big. However, assessing a change in the stance of a trade policy regime governing the span of economic transactions is determined jurisdictionally. China is obviously the most populated country on earth; but how its firms, consumers and workers vie in the international marketplace with those in other countries is condition by the set of rules determined by Beijing.
In this regard, it is probably more meaningful to measure the scale of RCEP (or of any other trade agreement for that matter) in terms of how many individual countries will, as a result of an agreement, operate under uniform rules. 15 jurisdictions are clearly many countries. By way of comparison, however, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has 164 member states (of which all RCEP countries are members).
Content-providers have been trying to lower costs for the notorious censorship in China, for example by introducing more AI-driven tools. But the government if fearing too much unwanted content if falling through the cracks, asks for tougher censorship, adding dramatically to the costs, says business analyst Ben Cavenderto MSN.
MSN:
In January, a government-appointed body released guidelines for short video platforms, requiring them to bulk up censorship and vet all content before it is posted. In November, the government released rules that ban online-video platform operators from using deep-learning to create fake news, an effort to address so-called deepfake technology and disinformation.
“The government feels that maybe too much unapproved content is sliding through the cracks” and is trying to address that, said Ben Cavender, Shanghai-based managing director at China Market Research Group.
For companies, it may mean rising costs to beef up its content-monitoring operations. “We should expect to see greater investment both in automated solutions as well as in content-management teams,” Mr. Cavender said.
The government also has toughened its stance on how companies deal with data privacy. Earlier this week, it said some of the country’s biggest tech companies—including Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Xiaomi Corp.—weren’t sufficiently protecting user data.
At the China Speakers Bureau we have started to explore WeChat Work as a social platform, next to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Are you interesting in following us on this journey? Check out our instructions here.
The successful social platform Tiktok got into hot water when it comes to its relation with China, now the company goes international. Former Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuo looks at The Ringer how Tiktok thrived, like others, in this climate of uncertainty, fuzziness and unpredictability that is key for China's internet.
The Ringer:
“I just remember it was like yesterday that we were all so disparaging of China’s ability to innovate,” Kaiser Kuo, a journalist who has worked in the Chinese tech industry and cohosts Sinica Podcast, told me. “Freedom was not only the necessary condition for being innovative, but it was also even, more hubristically, a sufficient condition.” But in recent years, China has gradually disproved that theory with its mastery of dockless bikes and mobile payments. The two countries are now competing to control the growing sectors of artificial intelligence and global telecommunications. And in May, the Trump administration moved to essentially ban the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei from the U.S. market...
From its launch, this lack of clarity has been apparent to TikTok users. Many teens have complained about being surreptitiously booted from the app. Others suspect their content has been intentionally kept away from the all-important “For You” feed. In late November, a 17-year-old Afghan American high-schooler named Feroza Aziz tucked a political message into a standard TikTok beauty tutorial. “Use the phone that you’re using right now to search up what’s happening in China,” she says in the clip, while curling her eyelashes. She then criticizes the Chinese government for keeping Muslim Uighurs in mass detention centers in the country’s far western region of Xinjiang. The video was briefly removed from TikTok, and Aziz was temporarily unable to access her account. But after the incident was picked up by news outlets, TikTok apologized, overrode her ban, and brought back the video, claiming these issues were due to a “human moderation error” and a separate, unrelated issue with Aziz’s account. Whatever happened, Kuo says this kind of lack of clarity keeps with standard Chinese censorship practices. When loading a forbidden website in China, users often encounter the same standard error page you might find with a weak Wi-Fi signal. “The line has always been sort of deliberately blurry,” Kuo said. “They deliberately keep it fuzzy so that the idea is if you’re not sure whether you’re going to step over it, you’re going to self-censor. You’re going to be more careful about what you say.”...
Kuo, who worked at the Chinese search engine Baidu, says companies’ willingness to censor is often just a means to an end. “When the Cyberspace Administration of China sends somebody over, or when they’re having these conversations about what videos, or search terms, or topics need to be censored, it’s not like these companies are saying, ‘Oh, hey, let me suggest a few more to add to this blacklist,’” he said. “They’re trying to comply as minimally as possible. What goes on that list will be different every time and it will change day to day.”
When Google entered the China market in 2006 it notified its users they are looking at a censored search engine. The government hated it, says Kaiser Kuo, former head international communication of competitor Baidu to the Go Tech Daily.
Go Tech Daily:
Central to that decision by Google management was a wager that by serving the market—even with a censored product—they could broaden the horizons of Chinese consumers and nudge the Chinese world-wide-web towards increased openness.
At initial, Google appeared to be succeeding in that mission. When Chinese customers searched for censored information on google.cn, they saw a notice that some benefits experienced been eradicated. That community acknowledgment of internet censorship was a initially between Chinese search engines, and it was not popular with regulators.
“The Chinese government hated it,” claims Kaiser Kuo, former head of global communications for Baidu. “They in comparison it to coming to my household for supper and stating, ‘I will concur to consume the meals, but I really do not like it.’” Google hadn’t requested the govt for permission just before employing the notice but wasn’t ordered to eliminate it. The company’s international prestige and technical knowledge gave it leverage.
China may well be a promising current market, but it was nevertheless dependent on Silicon Valley for expertise, funding, and know-how. Google required to be in China, the contemplating went, but China wanted Google...
“[Chinese officials] have been truly on their back foot, and it appeared like they could possibly cave and make some sort of accommodation,” says Kuo. “All of these folks who apparently did not give significantly of a damn about world-wide-web censorship right before have been really offended about it. The total internet was abuzz with this.”
China is considered by many as a difficult market for foreign players even without taking into account hindrances caused by government policy. In the case of Amazon, however, analysts said the reasons for its poor performance lie in its not being able to localize to meet the requirements of the market.
Shaun Rein, managing director of Shanghai-based China Market Research Group (CMR), said Amazon's Chinese platform could not survive because it did not have a strong and stable management team. He does not think Amazon was hampered by government policy.
"I don't think it is a problem of government protectionism," he said, adding, "They (Amazon executives) didn't have the necessary relationship in China and were unable to build the right ecosystem for people to sell on Amazon."
Getting a large number of local sellers is crucial for an e-commerce platform to provide goods at competitive prices and in sufficient variety to customers...
Foreign internet-based businesses have very little presence in China, which has the biggest number of web users in the world. This is partly because a large number of U.S.-based sites including Google, YouTube and Twitter are banned, while e-commerce companies have walked away. Amazon's departure will likely only make it harder for other foreign retail companies to succeed there.
"I think it would be very hard for large e-commerce players from foreign countries to build in China. It is still possible for niche players like there are opportunities in luxury space and cross-border trade," Rein said.
American and European brands will have to depend heavily on local e-commerce companies like Alibaba and jd.com to see their products, analysts said. Although Amazon will continue to sell foreign-made goods, its reach is limited in China because local companies dominate the cross-border trade as well.
"Unfortunately, Alibaba is almost a monopoly in some ways and they have way too much power because they control the eyeballs," said Rein, adding, "They (Alibaba executives) control traffic so they are able to force Western brands to discount even if Western brands do not want to,"Rein said. "Alibaba controls the relationship with the customer rather than the brand controlling the relationship with the customer."
You published regularly in the Hong Kong-based magazineThe Initium. It’s blocked in China but were you able to circulate the articles inside China?
I have my own public account on [the popular Chinese social media app] WeChat, but basically every time I publish something, it’s deleted. And now it’s deleted faster and faster! It used to take them a day to delete, but now it’s gone in an hour or faster. And The Initiumis collapsing. They have no money anymore.
What can you do now?
I can’t do really big investigations because I don’t have the budget to travel widely. But I’m doing profiles of people who resist. And more about artists, too.
You don’t know if you can publish them but you still write them?
Yes, I just write them anyway. I feel I have to write them. As an independent journalist, if I think it’s important, I can write; so I do. In the past, you were always being told you can’t write about this or that. Now, I can write.
But you can’t make a living.
For the past few years, I didn’t consider money. I just felt it was important and I’d do it. For years, I had a good salary and so I have savings. We own our apartment.
How long can that go on for?
I’m not completely divorced from reality. It’s coming up on three years and I think I might have to find a real job. I might go back to find work, but then I wouldn’t be able to write about sensitive things.
One of the few bright spots in Chinese social movements has been the rise of a new generation of feminists, including the Feminist Five. They were detained, but women’s issues still seem to be discussed, at least in some circles. How do you view it?
Feminism is important. Those five young activists, the Feminist Five who were detained in 2015, attracted a lot of attention. It wasn’t really a radical action—just something in the subway in Guangzhou—but the way the police acted was radical, especially in Guangzhou, which we always considered as having more space [for dissent than the more tightly controlled Beijing].
I think they attracted a lot of attention because they could publicize their cases well, as young people on social media. And their actions were different from those earlier generation of people who struggled. It was more modern. This event was unusual, especially given the deterioration of the atmosphere here recently.
The Tsinghua University professor Liu Yu [see my 2015 NYR Daily interview with her here] criticized the MeToo movement for using public denunciations instead of legal processes. She thought it was too much like the Cultural Revolution.
In that article, Liu Yu maybe didn’t quite understand MeToo and what it was. She’s not that old, but she might not have been paying attention to Feminism 2.0, so perhaps she was a bit out of touch. She said, Why did those women have to protest? Why didn’t they go to the law? A friend said that Liu Yu should go with a student who’s been harassed and try to report sexual harassment. Then she’d see how hard it is.
But the criticism of Liu Yu was terrible. She was cursed horribly online. This was far out of proportion.
In your recent essay “You Look Like an Enemy of the State,” you wrote, “You and I are both in prison. Before, the prison was visible; now it isn’t.” How do you deal with this sort of hopelessness?
There’s a term in Buddhism called chulixin. It means you don’t consider this time, or a lot of things in life, as that important. That has helped me.
State TV has been pulling a set of historical dramas from their channels because they were having a negative influence on their audiences, according to state media. Journalist Zhang Lijia, the author of Lotus, a novel, a bestseller on prostitution in China, understands the ratio behind this action, she tells in the South China Morning Post.
The South China Morning Post:
Chinese social commentator Zhang Lijia said she understood the concerns of the people and the authorities.
“I do see some points that the article [critizing the historical dramas] made. To go far in life, you have to play tricks and be ruthless and nasty to each other. Already there’s moral decline in today’s China,” she said.
Zhang also saw the article’s criticism as a reflection of the current general crackdown, recalling that some conservatives had made similar noises in the past when the political atmosphere was tightened.
For example, a few years ago a senior retired official had criticised young girls with dyed hair clad in sexy outfits on a talent show for being out of line with socialist values.
“These costume dramas are hugely popular and therefore money makers. I’d be very surprised if they are banned. Then, who knows. The top leaders have become less predictable,” Zhang said.
WeChat has its own rules and regulations related to external links and specifies ten types of content with external links that may be blocked. Here is the English translation:
Content that forces or entices users to share something (e.g. a WeChat article) in order to proceed to the next step, like getting information, winning a prize or taking part in a campaign; sometimes with benefits provided, including but not limited to cash, coupons, discounts and prizes
Content that forces or entices users to follow an official account in order to proceed to the next step, like getting information, winning a prize or taking part in a campaign
H5 games and tests that entice users for interactions, including friend Q&A, personality tests, online fortune telling or prediction games, etc.
Fraudulent content, including fake red packets or campaigns, and content that imitates the style and domain name of otherWeChat articles and accounts and may cause confusion
Rumors or false information that may cause harm to individuals, corporations, or other institutions
Spam, ads, and junk content, including information about counterfeit goods, ads making fraudulent claims, ads for cryptocurrencies, etc.
Content with sensational, exaggerated, or misleading headlines that don’t match the content as well as pornographic, erotic, and vulgar content
Content designed for the collection of users’ personal data or information without the user’s knowledge or consent
Content soliciting donations to religious organizations
Content offering payment for votes
According to WeChat’s regulations, once found, these external links will be blocked immediately and the related official account may also be sanctioned. In the worst case scenario, this can lead to a permanent ban.
China's internet authorities have strengthened the rules on VPN's - popular tools to jump the country's online censorship. Nevertheless, getting online with a VPN is still relatively easy, says internet expert Matthew Brennanto The News Lens, but he is not giving a guarantee that will still be the case in one year time.
The News Lens:
There have been many fears that China would tighten its VPN enforcement in the past – with rumors circulating of bans on Jan. 11 and Feb. 1 – but this one is backed up by official statements. The MIIT announcement came less than two weeks after the state-run Global Timesdenied that a ban was in the works, quoting a “China Telecom staff member.”
WeChat expert and frequent technology commentator Matthew Brennan told The News Lens that these moves should come as no surprise: “The Chinese government's stance with regard to enforcing sovereignty over its citizens’ use of the internet has been consistent. This will become a game of cat and mouse between an increasingly sophisticated firewall and VPN service providers.”
A ban would be excellent news for the approved VPN providers, who happen to be the three state-run telecom companies, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, who advertise direct links to the outside world, a service geared towards corporate clients...
While privacy from prying Communist Party eyes has already been compromised, censorship will not be absolute. The restricted use of VPNs and which sites are blocked varies widely depending on location, the level of political tension, and a host of other reasons, and there is no reason to believe that this will change.
As Brennan said, “Right now, it's still relatively easy for anyone who is determined to do so to jump over the firewall. Whether that's still the case in a year's time, we'll have to wait and see.”
ByteDance, Toutiao’s parent company, will publish BuzzFeed’s videos to hundreds of millions of users across multiple platforms, according to a statement released Thursday. The financial details of the licensing deal have not been disclosed.
BuzzFeed, known for its fun and often viral content, will have to “jump through some regulatory hoops” to be successful in China, said Shaun Rein, founder of the Shanghai-based consulting firm China Market Research Group and author of the book “The War for China’s Wallet.”
“The risks are really high, to be honest,” Rein told Sixth Tone. In addition to creating eye-catching content, he added, BuzzFeed does not tend to shy away from tackling weighty political issues.
Western observers wrongly assume that China's rigid censorship is stopping the country from being innovative. As China is becoming a leader in global innovation, that misunderstanding should be dealt with, says China veteran and former Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuo to Time about Baidu's CEO Robin Li.
Time:
But in fact, business thrives inside the firewall’s confines–on its guardians’ terms, of course–and the restrictions have not appeared to stymie progress. “It turns out you don’t need to know the truth of what happened in Tiananmen Square to develop a great smartphone app,” says Kaiser Kuo, formerly Baidu’s head of international communications and a co-host of Sinica, an authoritative podcast on China. “There is a deep hubris in the West about this.” The central government in Beijing has a fearsome capacity to get things done and is willing to back its policy priorities with hard cash. The benefits for companies willing or able to go along with its whims are clear. The question for Baidu–and for Li–is how far it is willing to go.
Brancaccio: Now, international companies have a huge stake in figuring out how to crack this, and which companies are doing better do you think, Shaun, which are doing worse in understanding where China is going?
Rein: I think you see companies like Starbucks are doing really well. Apple's also doing very well. For both companies, China is their largest market out of the United States. Another great example would be KFC — over 50 percent of their global revenue comes from China. So these companies are keeping their core brand DNAs, but they are localizing to fit the needs of the Chinese consumers. So for instance, with Starbucks, in the United States, I believe about 80 percent of their sales are takeout. In China, about 80 percent of their sales are dining in, because Chinese like to go feel part of an American culture, feel like they're part of a globally sophisticated elite, and they're able to do that by having coffee. Luxury in a cup.
Brancaccio: Before we go, I want to bring up something Shaun, I don't know if it's a sore subject, but I remember a couple of books ago, you wrote the book "The End of Cheap China." That was not embraced in China, that book.
Rein: That book was actually banned in China. The Chinese government didn't like it because it talked about local corrupt officials that were protecting the red light districts and really stealing from everyday Chinese. So that book was banned in the country.
Brancaccio: Getting any feedback on the new one?
Rein: The state-owned media has gone quiet on me. When they first heard that I was writing this book, "The War for China's Wallet," they wanted to interview me and profile me. After they saw the advance media copies, they stopped returning my calls. So I'm expecting that this book is going to get banned, too. And I'll get a little bit of heat in the coming months.
Brancaccio: What do you think, what's so controversial from the Chinese perspective about what you've just been talking about?
Rein: I think that the government doesn't want people to know the framework that they punish other countries and companies if they don't follow what they want. So I mean, if you look at it, when Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, China blocked imports of salmon from Norway. Overnight, that dropped from about 80 percent market share down to zero percent.
