Yahoo! lied in Shi Tao's case

Shi Tao

Rconversation points at new material found by the Dui Hua foundation that proves Yahoo! legal counsel has been lying in a congressional hearing when he said that his company did not know why the judicial authorities in Beijing wanted to go after the journalist Shi Tao.
Shi was - with the help of Yahoo! - convicted to ten years of jail for giving state secrets to foreigners.
The Dui Hua foundation has translated the original document. Rconversations links to it all.

Update: The Dui Huai foundation comes with additional prove in other cases Yahoo knew why the police was after journalists and internet users.

Tough days for Li Changchun

Li Changchun

Propaganda Czar Li Changchun has a day-job in stifling debate. Coming from the Jiang Zemin school, that would have been an easy job, but if we can believe this report in the Washington Post, Li has been regularly at odds with his current boss, Hu Jintao.
The latest problem occurred when Li wanted to ban the July issue of the academic magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, because it carried an articles saying that the power monopoly of the Communist Party lays at the root of many of China's current problems:

Although Hu has generally shown a restrictive attitude toward free speech, he counseled tolerance this time, the report said, advising Li that it is healthier to have such debate out in the open than to let it ferment under the surface. The magazine remains on the stands.
The incident was only the latest in a string of setbacks for Li and China's propaganda bureaucracy. An explosion of negative news -- tainted food exports, slave labor at brick kilns, political challenges and even supposed cardboard dumplings -- has pained party censors and renewed demands for ideological and political discipline among China's journalists.

More at the Washington Post.

Print censor eyes online publications

Time for code orange as the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP) announces it will try to regulate online publications. According to the China Tech News Kou Xiaowei, a deputy director of the print censor, his organization is preparing a system of approval and permission for online publications.
China's regulatory system for media is highly segmented and the different regulators one by one try to get involved in the online media, who are breaking down the traditional segmentation of the media. At the end of last year the State Administration of Radio, TV and Film (SARFT) tried to get hold on the video sharing market, but basically got nowhere, at the time.
When the regulators are fighting to hold or even expand their turf they are up for a fight with colleague censors, the industry and the audiences, who increasingly turn to the internet. My prediction is that GAPP will not get very far, but might still be out to kill some chickens to scare off the monkeys, as the Chinese saying goes.

Killing Dragon TV news

Just heard a story of an incident that happened two weeks ago while I was in Europe, but is rather telling for the current media relations in China. Dragon TV of the Shanghai Media Groups has been competing successfully with the national news of CCTV at seven o'clock. Traditionally all Chinese watch the news at seven.
The news of Dragon TV was broadcasted from 6:30 to 7:30 and was doing very well, because it was unlike the CCTV propaganda show more like a news program. Last year it won a prize as the best news program in China. But two weeks ago Shanghai's new party chief forced the Shanghai Media Group to toe the old line. Since then Shanghainese can enjoy each day at seven the national news. The Dragon news program has been killed.
Of course, this step caused quite some bad feelings at the Shanghai Media Group and was widely discussed on the internet. But as always: politics does prevail.
None of the official media was allowed to publish about the incident and - even more remarkable - non of the foreign media actually noticed it.

The lagging online ad market, more

Kaiser at Ogilvy reports about a meeting he had with 50 Tsinghua EMBA-students, all senior executives of Chinese companies. He asked them about their explanation for the fact that consumers spend a huge percentage of their time online, while ad companies keep on pouring most of their marketing budgets into TV-stations.

The answers were intriguing, honest, and often very funny: One gentleman basically said that at least in China, people in a position to determine ad spend spend all their days actually running their businesses, and their evenings getting drunk at Karaoke parlors, and they can’t be bothered with learning about the Internet. Others said that marketing decision-makers extrapolate from their own Internet use, which is very purpose-driven: they hunt for specific bits of information and never bother to look at ads. Most boiled down to “it’s a generational thing,” and everyone was confident that the gap will close.

Citizen journalism takes off at QQ

the Jinan-page at qq.com

The China Media Project points at a first experiment at Tencent's QQ in mobilizing citizen reporters. On July 18 Jinan was hit by a devastating flood that killed 26. At QQ of Shenzhen-based Tencent editors asked for input of their users:

how is it we have only this frosty [unfeeling] information about "26 dead", 6 missing and 171 injured? We want to know how those deceased passed away, and why ... ( in a translation by the China Media project)

In a few hours time, the dedicated webpage was flooded with material from local citizens, hinting a a failing local government:

Yesterday, the water flooded into our house. Our house is on the first floor. We were just sitting down to eat. Dad went off right away to find sand to fill up bags, but the water came too fast and washed the bags away. It looked like a dam had burst, and the water was putrid. Today Dad's busy building up the threshold. It's too thin and needs to be replaced. No one cares. Our government is just busy making money.

QQ is a highly successful internet service provider, belonging to the top-3 internet companies in terms of traffic and organizing a large portion of the now 162 million internet users in China. Because of that position they are very well positioned to experiment with this kind of citizen journalism and are likely to follow up after this initial success. Citizen journalism is here to stay, how to organize it, that is the question. Officially internet portals can only republish news that has been already in one of the censored traditional media, but this new feature could mean a diversion from those old restraints, if the regulators take it easy.

Update: Global Voices has a thorough overview of all the citizen reporting in China concering the floodings. Nice pictures too.

The South China Morning Post still does not get it

I just got the kind invitation from the publisher of the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post for a three-month free subscription on their website. He flatters a bit my weblog, but unfortunately illustrate to have no clue how these new media work.
Basically the paper remains behind a firewall and lifting it for me for three months does not help me to use one of the most important features of the new media: the link. As long as I cannot link to them, why should I actually bother to spend my time reading their paper or even pay for it?
The South China Morning Post has decided not to become part of the ongoing debate I'm happy to belong to. As others have said, survival is not mandatory.

Update: Danny Levinson builds further on the case on the poor performance of the traditional media going online in "Dow Jones gets what it deserves in Murdoch".

Can we believe news in the China Daily?

The issue if we can believe the news in the China Daily - or for that matter the Shanghai Daily - has come up in the past few weeks here in Europe more than once. Because the quality of the English language daily has gone up (well, it could not get worse from where it was at the beginning of the 1990s), quotes regularly also Western newswires and is reversely also increasingly quoted as a reliable source in Western media. It is now also online available, so more than once media outside China are inclined to use it as a source.

I think that is still a mistake: both are state-owned media and all they say fits the agenda of the government. So, it does not mean what they write is always wrong, it only means that on crucial moments you just cannot believe them.

How should we look for example at this article, reporting about the progress the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) in its fight against the rampant pollution? The article is even sourced from Associated Press. I think we can safely assume that SEPA indeed has issued such a statement. But what does it really mean? Very little, according to me.

SEPA is a rather powerless institution that has mainly some leverage on central level, but the English language media in China will never be able to say just that. Whether on a local level factories really have been closed is not that certain, and even less certain is whether they have not opened again after the inspectors have left the site again.

Most of the rest of the article consists of well-intended promises that might or might not be delivered. In most cases this is propaganda is being pumped around and the fact that also AP is part of that system does not really increase the trustworthiness.

For a nice inside view, do read this blog Positive Solutions, by a British copy-editor of the China Daily, who has unfortunately left his post recently. The China Daily can only be believed when it reports negative news about China, and even then you need to be alert for possible twists.

Dear Policeman Kang

Nick Young of the China Development Brief has - after the closure of the Chinese edition of his leading publication - published a statement and a letter he wrote to investigating police officer Kang. (In full here - courtesy of the WSJ).
Of course, policeman Kang probably does not care less, since it is for him an illegal operation. But it show a bit what kind of trouble he is heading for, when he or his superiors decide to push ahead with the closure.
The letter includes a list of organizations who have supported the newsletter:
Oxfam Hong Kong, Save the Children UK, The Worldwide Fund for Nature, The Ford Foundation, The Trace Foundation, The Kadoorie Charitable Foundation, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Great Britain-China Centre, The Japan Foundation, ActionAid, The British Council, The Canadian International Development Agency Civil Society Program, The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office Human Rights Project Fund, The Australian International Development Agency, The Charities Aid Foundation (UK), The European Union Beijing Delegation, CARE International; Voluntary Service Overseas, Save the Children UK, The International Fund for Agricultural Development, The United Kingdom Department for International Development, The University of Harvard Centre for Global Equity, JP Morgan Bank, HPBilliton

China Development Brief ordered to close

Authorities in Beijing have ordered the leading publication on NGO-activities in China, the China Development Brief, to close its Chinese edition. reports Time at its blog.

Nick Young, founder of the publication that has been around since 1996, keeps hope:

"My hope is that these actions have been precipitated by zealous security officers," he says, "and that more senior figures in the government and Communist Party will realize that actions of this kind are not in China's best interest."

The publication was, according to the local security officials both "illegal" and conducting "illegal surveys". The closure, last week, comes at a time when China seems busy in trying to control non-governmental activities by foreigners, one year ahead of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Earlier a US group also accused China of deporting over one hundred foreign missionaries from China.

While those acts are obvious going to be an embarrassment for the central government, zealous local official might have their own interpretation of what is needed in the country.

Nick Young remains faces a 5-year ban from China, but remains optimistic for the time being:

One irony of the moves against the publication is that the China Development Brief, whose motto is "to enhance constructive engagement between China and the world," has editorialized against what Young describes as "more or less openly hostile" Western criticism of China. "I do consider myself to be friend of China," he says. "I think it's a serious problem if the state cannot distinguish between friends and enemies."

Update: I just learned from a press release that the servers of this online publication are based in the UK, making it - if it has any nationality - a British publication that should adhere to British laws and regulations. When the authorities have any misgivings about an online publication, they can block it.
That is most likely why Public Security in Beijing got the local statistics bureau involved and included "illegal surveys" as another offense. I'm not sure how much meat is on that one. Anyway, even if the accusation by the Beijing authorities are illegal, it would not make the life of Nick Young much happier.

Upcoming: online ad revenue

I'm preparing a new media training I will be giving next week in Shanghai. The sluggish online ad market has been passing by at this weblog more than once. So, it is nice to report some positive trends that have been showing up at my radar screen during the preparation.
First, last year the online market was according to ACNielsen/Netratings between four and five billion Renminbi worth. They only started to measure online activities last year, explaining why the real interesting figures will only show up this year.
While the figure is still small compared to the always leading TV ads (25.6 billion Rmb over 2006) it had already passed the ad revenue stream going to the magazine market (3.1 billion Renminbi), according to again ACNielsen.
What is really interesting are their figures about the first quarter of 2007. The online ads are good for 1.4 billion Renminbi, an increase of 40 percent. Leading is Baidu, holding 21% of the market, followed by Sina (19%). Those figures are for sure encouraging.
What the online media need is more creativity to make it worthwhile for the advertisers. Like here what happened for a French internet provider. Really well done.

China Daily starts to see Buddha's

Only this morning I explained a Belgium colleague, who relied for his China information too much on the China Daily, that what he was reading was basically the political line of the central government, how critical those articles could be nowadays. And now this (h/t Shanghiist).

It brought back some fine memories on a investigative trip I made in the 1980s as a journalist to Ballinspittle, Ireland where the faithful (of the Catholic denomination) gathered to watch a moving Mary statue.
I wrote down the statements of those - I thought - pretty silly people who had all kinds of explanations for the reasons behind the movements of the virgin Mary. Some, with tears in their eyes, admitted they had not yet seen the statue move and vowed to stay on until they say it happen.
My journalistic work and job as an amateur psychologist then got a nasty twist as I saw the statue move myself. With my friend and photographer Jan Banning we have spent the rest of our stay in Ireland to find an explanation, we never found.
The China Daily still sounds a bit sceptical, but they can see it too.

Modern missionaries - the WTO-colum

(later in Chinabiz)

What have media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and US trade union leader Any Stern in common? Both of them came to China with a mission, and both have seen some - but it limited - successes. Murdoch wanted to introduce modern media to China, Stern wanted to help the Chinese trade union to organize Wal-Mart and maybe more. In both cases the question is: what will happen to their heritage when they have obtained Chinese characteristics?

China has a pretty mixed reputation when it concerns receiving foreign guests. Early Jesuits were gladly offered a place to stay in Beijing, but in the 19th century the heads of foreign missionaries occasionally were chopped off. Both gentlemen seem to fit excellent in that missionary tradition that has dominated the relations between China and the rest of the world for centuries. Mr. Murdoch came closest in getting his head chopped off, at least in the early 1990s when he denounced authoritarian governments like that in Beijing. Those days are long forgotten and after some years of unease, Mr. Murdoch became good friends with those same people he sought to overthrow earlier in his life.

What Stern and Murdoch have in common with the earlier generations of missionaries is that making money is not topping their agenda, but more a more ideological drive is bringing both to China. Mr. Stern is educating China's trade union in grass root organization skills, skills they first applied last year when they organized the US retailer Wal-Mart. In the end a better-organized trade union in China might help to raise the Chinese wages and that might indirectly be beneficial for Mr. Stern's members back in the US, but that seems a target for the long haul. Most business people are more driven by quarterly figures and that makes them rather different from the missionaries, modern or old.

Mr. Murdoch is equally in the media business for the very long haul, if any, as he has discovered the hard way. While much of his efforts to educated the state-owned news media had been gratefully accepted, earning money himself has - possibly forced by the difficult circumstances for foreign media to work in China - obtained a lower position on his agenda too. Each of his media projects in China was seen as a sure winner but invariably ran into problems with backstabbing regulators, lackluster attention from the consumers or a combination of both. The recent launch of his elsewhere successfully social network MySpace has not been the instant success in China it was expected to be.

What both gentlemen have in common with the earlier generations of missionaries are their sky-high expectations on how they can change China. Changing China was high on the agenda of missionaries, as it seems to be on the agenda of Stern and Murdoch. Both work in industries that are heavily dominated by government-driven political agenda's and in both cases it looks very unlikely they might even make a dent in China's spurt forward. At best China will reuse some of the tools they offer and use it for their own purposes. They might leave behind some nice churches and maybe that is rewarding enough.

The illusion of being able to make a change in China keeps the missionaries running and makes them sometimes admirable people. It does not mean they will be successful.

Fons Tuinstra

Foreign correspondents increasingly source from weblogs

Foreign correspondents covering China rely increasingly on weblogs, writes Rebecca MacKinnon, assistant professor at the journalism school of the Hong Kong University, in a paper for the World Journalism Education Conference this week in Singapore. From Singapore she writes:

Many people here at the conference found it surprising that blogs are already having such a substantial impact on foreign journalists' China coverage. Another finding that surprised people was that a lot of working journalists (unlike most people who study or write about journalism) find it useless to ask whether blogs in general are more or less "reliable" or "credible" than some other medium. Journalists evaluate each blog according to its individual merits, depending on what is known about the blogger's background and track record.

Her paper illustrates the argument that webloggers and professional journalists are not at loggerheads, but increasingly complement each other. There are specific reasons why weblogs have a larger influence on the China coverage than possibly elsehwere in the world, MacKinnon acknowledges, for example:

- The China story in the international media is not dominated by military conflict or any one obvious single storyline;
- The China story is not generally a "breaking story," but rather a "process story" about how this complex and geopolitically important country is changing, and what that change means for the rest of the world;
- There is strong demand for specialist insight, information and analysis on a range of subjects;

More arguments at her weblog. The full paper can be downloaded here.

Rupert's history in China

Rupert and Wendi

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and his China ventures are the center of a decent piece of history writing at the International Herald Tribune, originally at the New York Times. While thorough and comprehensive, it hardly does offer any new insights, so we wonder why his News Corp. decided not to cooperate with the NYT and issued this statement:

“News Corp. has consistently cooperated with The New York Times in its coverage of the company. However, the agenda for this unprecedented series is so blatantly designed to further the Times’s commercial self interests — by undermining a direct competitor poised to become an even more formidable competitor — that it would be reckless of us to participate in their malicious assault. Ironically, The Times, by using its news pages to advance its own corporate business agenda, is doing the precise thing they accuse us of doing without any evidence.”

I could not see directly what triggered off that reaction. Anybody else?

Another Xinhua move on data-providers

When the words "media" and "crackdown" come in one sentence, I always feel an allergy coming up, as regular readers might have noticed. The Securities News asked me to comment on the latest "crackdown" by Xinhua on foreign data-providers, suggesting the state-owned news agency wanted to set up a monopoly.
Since Xinhua has already a monopoly, that would be very hard to do, so I already suspected that there was no real crackdown taking place. The Wall Street Journal (available for subscribers and Google-users) was the basis of the story, focusing on "Xinhua 08", a new service to compete with Dow Jones and other financial data providers.
This was my - unedited - comment:

Ah, what you see here is a typical way how a state owned service provider and regulator tries to misuse its function as a regulator to enhance its business. This is really more about business than about politics, bad business to be precise, since it is obvious misuse of its position as a regulator to enhance its own news operation. Xinhua and others have tried this more often and mostly cannot get away with it.
Foreign data-providers will of course protest against this unfair business practise, but that is more for legal reasons than for operational. Xinhua has only jurisdiction over China, so foreign companies and Chinese companies with foreign entities (including those in Hong Kong) will have no problem in subscribing to any foreign data provider.
Interesting will be the position of Xinhua Finance, since they were established a decade ago to leverage the data of Xinhua and bring it on an international level. If it has an effect, they might lose some of their business. I do not think this has a
real effect on foreign businesses.

The problem with Chinese media

Positive Solutions praises a list of requirements for investigative journalists in China in the aftermath of the slave scandal. He adds a few requirements of himself:

China Daily:
OK, publications like China Daily. Too much of China’s media has no interest in investigative reporting as it is far beyond its Party-prescribed remit. The purpose of government media is controlled information release and public relations, not detailing as accurately as possible what is really happening.

A fairly comprehensive set of bullet points for change. Unfortunately, there might be some problems in implementing this all.

Operational guide for China's newspapers

For its thirteen character ad in support of the Tiananmen Mothers on June 4 on the Chengdu Evening News had already a huge effect. ESWN now translates from the New Century Media an account by an old hand of the paper who meanwhile gives a good overview of the way newspapers in China operate.

A very useful overview.

It is so sad for China. The Chinese Communist are so vulnerable that they are afraid of "a thirteen word advertisement that is the size of a cigarette." They are even more afraid of the voices of old people like us trying to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Can a history written in blood be purged and forgotten?
The people in charge of compiling dictionaries have a huge problem. Six cannot be placed next to four, rightists cannot be mentioned and the Cultural Revolution cannot be reported. If all the disasters in history are not allowed to be mentioned, then can this still be called a nation? The value of history is that it can be handed down, which meant that memory is essential. Presently, the Chinese authorities are most afraid that the people should have memories. What can this idiotic action possibly achieve?

China's internet users make fast more money

Not only poor students in internet cafes

For a media training I'm checking some of the firm assumptions I have on the Chinese internet users. For that purpose I have been comparing the CNNIC reports that were published in January 2002 and January 2007 for the demographics of the internet users. Some interesting conclusions.

First, everybody knows the basic figures: the number of internet users has grown dramatically, from 33 million in 2002 to 137 million in 2007. But despite those changes, many of the demographics remain rather stable. The division between men and women, married and unmarried. Also the educational level does not show a big shift in terms of percentages. The percentage of high school students goes up a bit but not dramatically.

What is shifting dramatically is the earning capacity of internet users. I have clustered the income-groups CNNIC into four and then you get this (annual income in Rmb per month)

• - 1,000 drops from 61.2% to 47.6%


• 1,001-4,000 goes up from 35.4% to 43.3%


• 4,001-10,000 goes up from 2.6% to 7.5%


• 10,001+goes up from 0.8% to 1.6%

That means that the argument for not investing in online marketing tools is still there: a fairly large amount of internet users in China has very little to spend. But the number of people that does make money increases fast, both as a percentage of the internet users and of course also in absolute numbers. Nine percent of 137 million people earn more than 4,000 Rmb per month and that is only bound to go up faster.

Only good news on China's slaves

China Digital News translated the latest censorship order on the discovery of hundreds of slaves, sometimes children, in the kilns of Shanxi province - issued by the central government, so not only the local government trying to protect itself.
We only want good news on our slaves, says the order:

All External Communication Offices, Central and Local Main News Websites:
Regarding the Shanxi “illegal brick kilns” event, all websites should reinforce positive propaganda, put more emphasis on the forceful measures that the central and local governments have already taken, and close the comment function in the related news reports. The management of the interactive communication tools, such as online forums, blogs, and instant messages, should also be strengthened. Harmful information that uses this event to attack the party and the government should be deleted as soon as possible. All local external communication offices should enhance their instruction, supervision and inspection, and concretely implement the related management measures.
The Internet Bureau, CPC Central Office of External Communication June 15, 2007

In stead of addressing the real issue, next will be the hunt for the person who leaked this news: Yahoo might get a visit again. This is exactly what happened when Shi Tao distributed a similar order.