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Showing posts with label China. Show all posts
Showing posts with label China. Show all posts
Jun 27, 2010
Newsletter 54 | International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)
Jun 15, 2010
One year later, China's crackdown after Uighur riots haunts a homeland
By Lauren Keane
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 15, 2010; A01
URUMQI, CHINA -- A hulking shell of a department store towers over this city's Uighur quarter, a reminder of what can be lost here by speaking up.
For years, it was the flagship of the business empire of Rebiya Kadeer, an exiled leader and matriarch of the Uighur people. If Chinese government accounts are accurate, she helped instigate fierce ethnic riots that killed hundreds and injured thousands here last July -- an accusation she vehemently denies.
Still a prominent landmark even in its ruin, the Rebiya Kadeer Trade Center was partially confiscated by the government in 2006 when Kadeer's son was charged with tax evasion, although tenants were allowed to stay. After the riots, it was shuttered and slated for destruction. The government said the building had failed fire inspections, but it seems in no hurry to set a demolition date.
The forsaken structure makes for an effective deterrent. Last summer's chaos has been replaced with a level of fear that is striking even for one of China's most repressed regions. Residents are afraid of attracting any attention, afraid of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But they seem most terrified of talking.
"Every single family on this block is missing someone," said Hasiya, a 33-year-old Uighur who asked that her full name not be used. Her younger brother is serving a 20-year prison sentence for stealing a carton of cigarettes during the riots. "Talking about our sorrow might just increase it. So we swallow it up inside."
Fear is not unwarranted here. For years now, those caught talking to journalists have been questioned, monitored and sometimes detained indefinitely. More striking is that residents now say they cannot talk even with one another.
The Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs consider Xinjiang their homeland but now make up only 46 percent of the region's population, after decades of government-sponsored migration by China's Han ethnic majority.
The riots started as a Uighur protest over a government investigation into a Uighur-Han brawl at a southern Chinese factory. Several days of violence brought the official death toll to 197, with 1,700 injured, though observers suspect the casualty count was much higher. Most of the dead were Han, according to authorities. The government officially acknowledged detaining nearly 1,500 people after the riots. As of early March, Xinjiang had officially sentenced 198 people, with 25 death sentences. Of those 25, 23 were Uighur.
The events forced China's national and regional governments to address, at least superficially, taboo issues of ethnic conflict, discrimination and socioeconomic inequality. The central government in April named a different Communist Party secretary for Xinjiang, Zhang Chunxian, who promptly announced that he had "deeply fallen in love with this land." In May, the government announced a new development strategy to pour $1.5 billion into the region. It also restored full Internet and text-messaging access to the region after limiting or blocking it entirely for 10 months.
The riots "left a huge psychic trauma on the minds of many people of all ethnicities. This fully reflects the great harm done to the Chinese autonomous region by 'splittist' forces," said Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in the United States.
The ability to confront what happened last July, and why, still eludes people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang. White-knuckled, they hold their spoons above steaming bowls of mutton stew, poking nervously at the oily surface. They fiddle with their watchbands until they break. They repeat questions rather than answer them. They glance through doorways, distracted, and shift side to side in their chairs. Summer's full swelter has yet to arrive, but everyone starting to speak to a reporter begins to sweat. One man leaves the table six times in half an hour to rinse the perspiration from his face. He returns unrefreshed.
When asked what changes the riots had brought, Mehmet, a former schoolteacher who resigned last year because he opposed requirements that he teach his Uighur students primarily in Chinese, took a long glance around the room before pointing halfheartedly out the door. "They built a new highway overpass," he said.
Suspicion of fellow citizens is still common throughout China but seems especially acute here. Academics accept interviews only if they can avoid discussing the conflict's lingering effects. An apologetic professor backed out of a planned meeting after his supervisor discovered his plan, called him and threatened his job. A businessman said that he believed government security agents often trained as journalists, and asked how he could be sure that he would not be turned in.
"We're seeing increasingly intrusive modes of control over religious and cultural expression," said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. "They live in fear of being overheard."
The Kadeer Trade Center is at the center of a protracted conflict. The Urumqi government said that compensation talks with tenants were still ongoing, and that it had moved the tenants to a nearby location. A spokesman for Kadeer, who now lives in Fairfax, said she had not been offered compensation.
Although the government says it is striving for stability, getting there is uncomfortable. On a single street near this city's main bazaar, four types of uniformed police were on patrol one recent day -- not counting, of course, an unknown number of plainclothes security guards. They marched haphazardly along the sidewalks, the different units so numerous that they sometimes collided. Late into the evening, they perched on rickety school desk chairs placed throughout the bazaar, watching. On the corner outside Xinjiang Medical University, armed police in riot gear peered out the windows of an olive green humvee or leaned on riot shields under the afternoon sun.
"It's quiet here on the surface," said Yu Xinqing, 35, a lifelong Han resident of Urumqi whose brother was killed by Uighurs during the riots. He now carries a knife with him everywhere, avoids Uighur businesses and rarely speaks with Uighur neighbors he previously considered friends. He says he is saving money to leave Xinjiang behind for good.
"We don't talk about these things, even within our families," he said. "But our hearts are overwhelmed; we hold back rivers and overturn the seas."
Still, every once in a while, when a resident is safely alone with a neutral observer, months' worth of stifled thinking tumbles out. That was the case for Ablat, a Uighur businessman who sells clothing near the main bazaar; he would not allow his last name to be mentioned. Ablat had been speaking in vague, evasive terms for three hours, and then -- ensconced in his car, speeding north out of town -- something finally released.
"Give us jobs, stop holding our passports hostage, and let us worship the way we want to," he said. "That would solve these problems. That is all it would take."
May 31, 2010
China pins food-security hopes on humble potato
PHOTOS
Farmers wash mud off just-harvested potatoes in Hunan province. (Lauren Keane - Twp)
By Lauren Keane
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 31, 2010; A01
JIUTIAOLONG, HUNAN PROVINCE, CHINA -- In the land of rice, China is looking at an unlikely tool for maintaining growth and social harmony: the potato.
The Chinese government has begun ramping up research, production and training related to the humble spud, and hopes are high that it could help alleviate poverty and serve as a bulwark against famine.
The challenge of feeding a growing nation on a shrinking supply of arable land while confronting severe water shortages has long been a major concern here. China has to feed one-fifth of the world's population on one-tenth of its arable land, and the nation's expanding cities are consuming farmland at breakneck speed. China estimates that by 2030, when its population is expected to level off at roughly 1.5 billion, it will need to produce an additional 100 million tons of food each year.
That statistical reality could change eating habits here. Potatoes need less water to grow than rice or wheat, and they yield far more calories per acre. In rice-cultivating regions of southern China, farmers can squeeze a round of fast-growing potatoes into their rice fields in between planting seasons. In some of the poorest parts of arid northern China, potatoes are among the few crops that grow.
"Potatoes have so much potential here," said Xie Kaiyun, a leading potato scientist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, a government think tank. "Rice, wheat, corn -- we've gone about as far as we can go with them. But not the potato."
Ever keen to seize opportunity, Chinese entrepreneurs are turning potatoes into forms more familiar to Chinese palates: buns, noodles, cakes. They are developing exotic varieties and have even sent seeds into orbit, saying that zero gravity makes them more nutritious and charging astronomical premiums for the seeds' offspring back on Earth.
Potatoes won't replace rice or wheat as mainstays of Chinese cuisine anytime soon, if ever. They are eaten as side dishes, and the government has not yet named them a staple, a distinction that would mean preferential treatment in domestic markets and would carry significant cultural weight.
But they are increasingly seen here as an underutilized resource.
With that in mind, the government in February signed an agreement with the International Potato Center, a research organization, to jointly launch a major potato research center in Beijing. Part of the center's broad mandate will be to develop varieties that grow quickly and dependably in specific regions throughout China. Last month, the State Council announced subsidies for farmers who grow high-yield seed potatoes. And government-funded pilot programs have been expanding in nearly every province, training farmers in innovative methods that raise crop yields and, with them, rural incomes.
Eye on the future"It's unusual to see a country explicitly name a commodity as an instrument of development," said Pamela K. Anderson, director general of the International Potato Center. "It shows how seriously the Chinese government is taking its commitment to food security."
China has a long-standing policy of food self-sufficiency, growing 95 percent of the grain required to feed its people. The country's sheer size means that a major crop failure or other food emergency here could have international ramifications, overwhelming world food markets with sudden demand. "Were China to need to import a large amount of grain, it would have a very dramatic impact on world food prices," said Anthea Webb, director of World Food Program China.
China produces and consumes more potatoes than any other country. But that's largely because of its huge population. The Chinese lag in per capita terms, eating one-third the amount of potatoes that Russians do and two-thirds the amount Americans eat.
The average acre of potato plants in China yields far fewer edible spuds than in other developing countries, mostly because farmers plant cheap, disease-prone seed. China's national and local governments are trying to change that by increasing potato funding, hoping the investments will raise rural incomes and help maintain social stability by keeping farmers on their land in the country's poorest areas.
Researchers from Hunan Agricultural University started working with the province's potato farmers in 2005 and last year used government grant funds to provide training and seeds. Farmers plant in rice fields during the winter, when the land would otherwise produce nothing; potato plants then improve the soil for the next season's rice cultivation.
It's a good time to be in the Chinese potato business. Wholesale prices increased 85 percent from November to April, thanks in part to a severe drought in the nation's southwest that has limited supply.
"We earn the same from one potato crop that we get from three rice crops" or 10 cabbage crops, said Huang Weihua, 40, the leader of the local farmers association. He pointed across a terraced field of flowering potato plants to his house, a two-story brick-and-tile structure. His son was hard at work remodeling the first floor -- potato money, Huang said.
Market potentialBut if potatoes are to become a key to China's food security, the market for them must expand even more.
"Chinese don't know enough about potatoes and their nutritional benefits," said Xie, the potato scientist. "If they eat one more potato dish every day -- well, there are 1.3 billion of us. That's a huge new market."
Liang Xisen was dubbed China's "potato king" last year. The lifelong entrepreneur, who made it into a 2006 list of the nation's richest men, has poured his wealth into potatoes. His company churned out 150,000 tons of high-quality seed potatoes last year, assisted by government subsidies, and sold them to farmers nationwide for a profit of about $22 million, according to company statistics.
Liang has even opened China's first Potato Museum. An altar outside presents burned offerings to a giant plaster statue of a Peruvian potato god. A red banner pulled taut above the entrance proclaims: "Little potatoes, big industry."
Premier Wen Jiabao has joined the cause. He shared a meal of steamed potatoes with farmers last fall in Gansu, one of China's poorest and most significant potato-growing provinces. He donned tennis shoes to shovel out spuds, with the video footage running on China's most-watched nightly news broadcast.
In China, where government endorsements mean business, Wen's message has trickled down to the Hunan potato fields. On a recent afternoon, Huang stood calf-deep in an irrigation ditch, surveying his ripening crop in a downpour from under a blue polka-dot umbrella.
"Wen Jiabao said potatoes are important -- on national television!" Huang said, wide-eyed. "I figure that's a good sign for us, right?"
Researcher Liu Liu contributed to this report.
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May 29, 2010
Strike at Honda Plant Highlights Pay Gap in China
Joe Tan/Reuters
A security guard on Friday at a Honda manufacturing plant in Foshan, Guangdong Province, that was shut due to a labor dispute at a parts facility.
By KEITH BRADSHER and DAVID BARBOZA
FOSHAN, China — After years of being pushed to work 12-hour days, six days a week on monotonous low-wage assembly line tasks, China’s workers are starting to push back.
A strike at an enormous Honda transmission factory here in southeastern China has suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a symbol of this nation’s struggle with income inequality, rising inflation and soaring property prices that have put home ownership beyond the reach of all but the most affluent.
And perhaps most remarkably, Chinese authorities let the strike happen — up to a point.
In the kind of scene that more often plays out at strikes in America than at labor actions in China, print and television reporters from state-controlled media across the country have started covering the walkout here, even waiting outside the nearly deserted front gate on Thursday and Friday in hope of any news. All the Chinese reporters disappeared on Saturday morning, however, as the government, apparently nervous, suddenly imposed without explanation a blanket ban on domestic media coverage of the strike.
A worker at a factory dormitory said on Saturday afternoon that the strike continued, and police were nowhere in sight at the factory or the dormitory. The authorities have been leery of letting the media report on labor disputes, fearing that it could encourage workers elsewhere to rebel. The new permissiveness, however temporary, coincides with growing sentiment among some officials and economists that Chinese workers deserve higher wages for their role in the country’s global export machine.
And without higher incomes, hundreds of millions of Chinese will be unable to play their part in the domestic consumer spending boom on which this nation hopes to base its next round of economic growth.
“This is all because there is a major political debate going on about how to deal with the nation’s growing income gap, and the need to do something about wages,” said Andreas Lauffs, a lawyer at Baker & McKenzie who specializes in Chinese labor issues.
If wages do rise, that could bring higher prices for Western consumers for goods as diverse as toys at Wal-Mart and iPads from Apple.
The Chinese media may also have found it a little easier, politically, to cover this strike because Honda is a Japanese company, and anti-Japanese sentiment still simmers in China as a legacy of World War II. Certainly, the strike is hitting Honda hard, as the resulting shortage of transmissions and other engine parts has forced the company to halt production at all four of its assembly plants in China.
Honda has an annual capacity of 650,000 cars and minivans in China, like Jazz subcompacts for export to Europe and Accord sedans for the Chinese market. Because Honda’s prices in China are similar to what it charges in the United States, the cars tend to be far out of reach financially for most of the workers who make them.
A Honda spokeswoman declined to discuss specific issues in the strike negotiations.
The intense media coverage may evoke historical memories of the 1980 shipyard strike in Gdansk, Poland, that gave rise to the Solidarity movement and paved the way for the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. But the reality here is much different.
Instead of tens of thousands of grizzled and angry shipyard workers, the Honda strike involves about 1,900 mostly cheerful young people. And the employees interviewed say their goal is more money, not a larger political agenda.
“If they give us 800 renminbi a month, we’ll go back to work right away,” said one young man, describing a pay increase that would add about $117 a month to an average pay that is now around $150 monthly. He said he had read on the Internet of considerably higher wages at other factories in China and expected Honda to match them with an immediate pay increase.
Many workers at other factories in southeastern China already earn $300 a month, but they do so only through considerable overtime. And even that higher income is not enough to embark on the middle-class dream in China of owning a small apartment and subcompact car. Officially, though, the government is discouraging heavy reliance on overtime, and workers here said that Honda was not assigning much.
The strikers said that Honda mainly hired recent graduates of high schools or vocational schools. And so, most are in their late teens or early 20s, representing a new generation of employees, many of whom had not been born when the Chinese authorities suppressed protests by students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 — a watershed event whose 21st anniversary falls next Friday.
The profile of striking workers seems to run more along the lines of slightly bookish would-be engineers — perhaps without the grades or money to attend college — rather than political activists. Besides their low wages, the workers seem focused on issues like the factory’s air-conditioning not being cool enough, and the unfairness of having to rise from their dormitories as early as 5:30 for a 7 a.m. shift.
Workers said that in addition to their pay, they also received free lodging in rooms that slept four to six in bunk beds. They also get free lunches, subsidized breakfasts for the equivalent of 30 cents and dinners for about $1.50.
The striking employees said that some senior workers, known as team leaders, had allied themselves with management. But they insisted that the rank-and-file workers were solidly in favor of walkout — a claim impossible to verify.
Although China is run by the Communist Party and has state-controlled unions, the unions are largely charged with overseeing workers, not bargaining for higher wages or pressing for improved labor conditions. And they are not allowed to strike, although China’s laws do not have explicit prohibitions against doing so.
Workers at the Honda factory dormitory said that the official union at the factory was not representing them but was serving as an intermediary between them and management. Li Jianming, the national spokesman for the All China Federation of Trade Unions, declined to comment.
The workers here have been on strike since May 21, with no resolution in sight. But the strike did not come to broader notice until Thursday and Friday as Japanese media began reporting the shutdown of Honda assembly plants, and as Chinese media and Internet sites were allowed to report extensively on those activities.
The unusually permissive approach of the authorities toward media coverage of the strike follows a decision to tolerate extensive coverage this month of suicides by workers at the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn factory complex in nearby Shenzhen that supplies Apple and Hewlett-Packard.
The official China Daily newspaper ran a lead editorial on Friday that cited the Honda strike as evidence that government inaction on wages might be fueling tensions between workers and employers. The editorial criticized the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security for not moving faster to draft a promised amendment to current wage regulations because of what the newspaper described as opposition from employers.
Zheng Qiao, the associate director of the department of employment relations at the China Institute of Industrial Relations in Beijing, said the strike was a significant development in China’s labor relations history and that “such a large-scale, organized strike will force China’s labor union system to change, to adapt to the market economy.”
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May 23, 2010
Bangkok Crackdown Is No Replay of Tiananmen
| By ALEXA OLESEN / AP WRITER | Saturday, May 22, 2010 |
BEIJING — Before the military crackdown on Red Shirts in Bangkok this week, one Thai protester ominously claimed: "This will end as our Tiananmen Square."
It was a dire warning that did not come true. The clashes Tuesday between the Thai military and the so-called Red Shirt protesters left at least 15 people dead — compared with the hundreds or more believed killed when People's Liberation Army troops stormed into central Beijing in June 1989 to break up student-led pro-democracy demonstrations.
 |
| Thai army armored personnel carriers (APCs) guard along the Lumpini Park inside the Red shirt anti-government protesters' camp in Bangkok on May 19. (Photo: Getty Images) |
Both were military missions to clear entrenched protestors who had paralyzed a key downtown area in the capital—but the political realities behind the two incidents have little in common, analysts say.
Thailand is a democracy, albeit one now in crisis and long prone to military coups, while China was and is staunchly authoritarian.
"Tiananmen in China in 1989 was really a black-and-white story, a black-and-white confrontation, the authoritarian government with the People's Liberation Army crushing the pro-democracy movement," said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University.
Thailand's protesters are angry because they see their democratic rights are being frustrated: the parties they voted for won the election but were then ordered dissolved and the politicians they voted for were banned from politics.
"In Tiananmen, they didn't have rights. In Thailand, the rights have been usurped, manipulated and disenfranchised," Thitinan said.
The Chinese military's bloody crackdown brought an end to weeks of largely peaceful demonstrations that at their height drew a million people to Tiananmen and saw students erecting a makeshift statue of liberty. In one famous moment of resistance, a lone man holding shopping bags defiantly stood in front of a column of tanks on a street near the square.
Tiananmen's resonance as a clear fight between good and evil was invoked this week by Sean Boonpracong, a spokesman for the Red Shirts.
"The people are defiant," the Guardian newspaper quoted him as saying. "They do not trust the government. They don't want violence, but they are prepared to fight with their bare hands. The government does not want to negotiate, so I think many more people will die. This will end as our Tiananmen Square."
Huang Shan, the international editor of one of China's most daring news publications, Caixin Weekly, said Chinese who grew up during the Tiananmen era would likely have the same associations.
He said he thought immediately of Tiananmen when he heard how the Thai military was clearing the Red Shirts out of downtown Bangkok.
"It's like how they cleared Tiananmen Square in the late 1980s," he said.
Beyond the superficial similarities however lies a world of difference. Tiananmen was a clear battle between dictatorship and democracy, but what's happening in Thailand today is more nuanced and less radical, said William Callahan, professor of international politics at the University of Manchester in England and an expert on Asian politics.
He said the Red Shirts are opposed to the top-down authority of Thailand's "network monarchy," a system which favors wealthy elites with links to the Thai king, but they are not asking for a new political system. Instead they demand new elections, which they hope will bring their people back into power.
"Their stated goals are within the system," he said. "So, they are working within the system but they don't see the system as working very well."
Perhaps the clearest sign of how little the struggles have in common is the free rein Chinese media have been given to report on Thailand's political turmoil. Though Beijing routinely censors news and ideas it considers potentially destabilizing, there seems to be little concern that the chaos in Bangkok will revive the ideals that drove Tiananmen.
Huang, the Caixin Weekly international editor, said so far there's been no gag order from Chinese authorities on covering the Thai crisis. Like other Chinese television and print media, Caixin has reported extensively on the situation and plans to continue doing so, he said.
Li Datong, a veteran Chinese journalist who was forced from a top editing job at a national state-run newspaper for publishing reports that were too probing, said the government is probably allowing plentiful and objective coverage of Thai crisis "because it poses no threat to China."
Thailand today and Tiananmen 20 years ago "were very different situations. In fact, they have nothing to do with each other," Li said. He said the Chinese student demonstrations were spontaneous and largely peaceful while the Red Shirt protests have been relatively organized and sometimes violent.
If anything, he said, the situation in Thailand offers Chinese authorities another negative example, like the occasional fist-fights in Taiwan's rambunctiously democratic legislature, to fend off those clamoring for faster political reforms on the mainland.
"The mouthpieces of the Chinese Central Propaganda Department can point to democracy in Taiwan and democracy in Thailand as cautionary tales," Li said. "They can say: 'You think democracy is good, well have a look at Thailand, see what kind of trouble they've got there?'"
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May 21, 2010
China Aims to Stifle Tibet’s Photocopiers
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Published: May 20, 2010
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
BEIJING — The authorities have identified a new threat to political stability in the restive region of Tibet: photocopiers. Fearful that Tibetans might mass-copy incendiary material, public security officials intend to more tightly control printing and photocopying shops, according to reports from the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.
A regulation now in the works will require the operators of printing and photocopying shops to obtain a new permit from the government, the Lhasa Evening News reported this month. They will also be required to take down identifying information about their clients and the specific documents printed or copied, the newspaper said.
A public security official in Lhasa, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the regulation “is being implemented right now,” but on a preliminary basis. The official hung up the phone without providing further details.
Tibetan activists said the new controls were part of a broader effort to constrain Tibetan intellectuals after a March 2008 uprising that led to scores of deaths. Since the riots, more than 30 Tibetan writers, artists and other intellectuals have been detained for song lyrics, essays, telephone conversations and e-mail messages deemed to pose a threat to Chinese rule, according to a report issued this week by the International Campaign for Tibet, a human rights group based in Washington.
“Basically, the main purpose is to instill fear into people’s hearts,” said Woeser, an activist who, like many Tibetans, goes by one name. “In the past, the authorities tried to control ordinary people at the grass-roots level. But they have gradually changed their target to intellectuals in order to try to control thought.”
Ms. Woeser said she was also a target of the authorities for her views. She lost her job in Lhasa after her book “Notes on Tibet” was banned in 2003. She now lives in Beijing, but she said she was carefully watched by the authorities.
China’s leaders contend that their only goal is to guarantee stability, ethnic unity and better living standards for Tibetans. Officials say that as long as separatist leaders are kept firmly in check, continued economic development will win Tibetans over to Chinese rule.
But the International Campaign for Tibet’s report contends that the authorities are not merely punishing separatists, but also dissidents of all stripes who dare to criticize the government and defend Tibetans’ cultural and religious identity. A 47-year-old writer named Tragyal was arrested in April after he published a book calling on Tibetans to defend their rights through peaceful demonstrations, the report states. His current whereabouts is unknown, it said.
A popular Tibetan singer, Tashi Dhondup, was sentenced to 15 months at a labor camp in January after he released a new CD with a song calling for the return of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, according to the report. He had been arrested on suspicion of “incitement to split the nation,” the report states.
The Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against the Chinese authorities. He says he supports greater autonomy for Tibet but not secession. China says the Dalai Lama’s goal is an independent Tibet.
The authorities in Tibet apparently see printing and photocopying shops as potential channels through which unrest can spread. One Chinese print shop operator in Lhasa, who is of the majority Han ethnicity rather than Tibetan, said that her husband had been summoned to a meeting last week on the new requirements.
“You know sometimes people print documents in the Tibetan language, which we don’t understand,” said the woman, who gave her last name as Wu. “These might be illegal pamphlets.”
Tanzen Lhundup, a research fellow at the government-backed China Tibetology Research Center, which typically follows the government line on Tibet, said in an interview that “the regulation itself is not wrong.” But he said that it should have been put before the public before it was put in place.
“They have never issued such a regulation before,” he said. “On what grounds do they want to issue it? I think citizens should be consulted first.”
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May 15, 2010
China Lifts Xinjiang Internet Ban at Last
By EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Full Internet service was restored to the vast western Chinese region of Xinjiang on Friday, 10 months after it was blocked following deadly ethnic rioting that convulsed the regional capital, Urumqi. The blockage was the longest and most widespread in China since the Internet became readily available throughout the country a decade ago.
The announcement was made in the morning, and many residents in cities across Xinjiang took the day off from school or work to rush to Internet cafes, where they pored through months of unread e-mail messages or chatted via instant messaging. Some also dived back into online gaming, one of China’s most popular pastimes (“World of Warcraft” imitators being the most played).
In the violence in Urumqi on July 5, 2009, ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people that is the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, rampaged through the streets after security forces tried to break up a protest over social injustices. The government says at least 197 people were killed and 1,600 injured, most of them ethnic Han, the majority in China. Many Uighurs resent discrimination by the Han, who are migrating in large numbers to Xinjiang and hold the top positions of power.
The Chinese government blamed overseas Uighur groups for using the Internet to stir up hostilities, and in particular they pointed at Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur exile living in the Washington area. Ms. Kadeer has denied the accusations. After the initial rioting, the government cut off Internet service and cellphone text messaging across Xinjiang, which makes up one-sixth of China’s territory.
On Friday, the regional government Web site carried a brief statement on the restoration of service: “For the stability, economic development and the needs of people from all ethnic backgrounds of the autonomous region, the Communist Party and the government of Xinjiang decided to fully resume Internet services beginning May 14.”
The restoration of Internet service comes before a major central government meeting this month that is aimed at setting new policy in Xinjiang. In late April, the government announced it was replacing the most powerful official in Xinjiang, Wang Lequan, who had been regional party secretary for 15 years. A hard-liner on ethnic issues, he has been widely blamed by Uighurs and Han for creating a poisonous atmosphere.
Mr. Wang’s replacement, Zhang Chunxian, party secretary of Hunan Province, is nicknamed the “Internet secretary” for his use of online tools to communicate with people.
One travel agent in Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road oasis town, said he came into his office Friday morning to find all his co-workers on Yahoo.
“Yes, I am excited, but I have already forgotten all my passwords,” the travel agent, Kasim, said in a telephone interview.
He said he knew people who had moved out of Kashgar — even as far away as Guangdong Province in southeastern China — to ensure they had Internet access. This was especially true of those who needed to use e-mail for their jobs or businesses, Kasim said.
“I’m happy to know that I can recover my old friends, I can finally write to all my friends,” he said.
Late last year, the Xinjiang government slightly relaxed the ban on the Internet, first allowing access to some propaganda-heavy news sites created for the region’s residents. After that, some Chinese e-mail services were reopened. Last month, the government began allowing limited text messaging.
The Internet in Xinjiang, however, is still subject to China’s complicated censorship apparatus, nicknamed the Great Firewall, which blocks social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as a vast number of Web pages devoted to delicate subjects (the Dalai Lama, Falun Gong or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre).
The Chinese government has taken a hard line against Internet freedom in the last year. This spring, Beijing created a new department, Bureau Nine, to help police social networking sites and other user-driven forums.
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May 3, 2010
Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish - NYTimes.com
Jackson Lowen for The New York Times
Shanghai has been trying to harness English translations that sometimes wander, like “cash recyling machine.” More Photos »
SHANGHAI — For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.
Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday’s opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, drawing more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.
Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.
Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “Teliot” and “urine district”), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.
The campaign is partly modeled on Beijing’s herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the replacement of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus and such exemplars of impropriety as the Dongda Anus Hospital — now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Gone, too, is Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been rechristened Minorities Park.
“The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing,” said Zhao Huimin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States who, as director general of the capital’s Foreign Affairs Office, has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization and sobriety.
But while the war on mangled English may be considered a signature achievement of government officials, aficionados of what is known as Chinglish are wringing their hands in despair.
Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter who may well be the world’s foremost authority on Chinglish, said he believed that China should embrace the fanciful melding of English and Chinese as the hallmark of a dynamic, living language. As he sees it, Chinglish is an endangered species that deserves preservation.
“If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind,” said Mr. Radtke, who is the author of a pair of picture books that feature giggle-worthy Chinglish signs in their natural habitat.
Lest anyone think it is all about laughs, Mr. Radtke is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinglish at the University of Heidelberg.
Still, the enemies of Chinglish say the laughter it elicits is humiliating. Wang Xiaoming, an English scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, painfully recalls the guffaws that erupted among her foreign-born colleagues as they flipped through a photographic collection of poorly written signs. “They didn’t mean to insult me but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable,” said Ms. Wang, who has since become one of Beijing’s leading Chinglish slayers.
Those who study the roots of Chinglish say many examples can be traced to laziness and a flawed but wildly popular translation software. Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, said the computerized dictionary, Jingshan Ciba, had led to sexually oriented vulgarities identifying dried produce in Chinese supermarkets and the regrettable “fried enema” menu selection that should have been rendered as “fried sausage.”
Although improved translation software and a growing zeal for grammatically unassailable English has slowed the output of new Chinglishisms, Mr. Mair said he still received about five new examples a day from people who knew he was good at deciphering what went wrong. “If someone would pay me to do it, I’d spend my life studying these things,” he said.
Among those getting paid to wrestle with Chinglish is Jeffrey Yao, an English translator and teacher at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation in Shanghai who is leading the sign exorcism. But even as he eradicates the most egregious examples by government fiat — businesses dare not ignore the commission’s suggested fixes — he has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”
He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.”
Mr. Yao read off the Chinese equivalents as if savoring a Shakespearean sonnet. “How lovely,” he said with a sigh.
He pointed out that this linguistic mentality helped create such expressions as “long time no see,” a word-for-word translation of a Chinese expression that became a mainstay of spoken English. But Mr. Yao, who spent nearly two decades working as a translator in Canada, has his limits. He showed a sign from a park designed to provide visitors with the rules for entry, which include prohibitions on washing, “scavenging,” clothes drying and public defecation, all of it rendered in unintelligible — and in the case of the last item — rather salty English. The sign ended with this humdinger: “Because if the tourist does not obey the staff to manage or contrary holds, Does, all consequences are proud.”
Even though he had had the sign corrected recently, Mr. Yao could not help but shake his head in disgust at the memory. And he was irritated to find that a raft of troublesome sign verbiage had slipped past the commission as the expo approached, including a cafeteria sign that read, “The tableware reclaims a place.” (Translation: drop off dirty dishes here.)
“Some Chinglish expressions are nice, but we are not translating literature here,” he said. “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”
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Apr 19, 2010
Entertainment Trumps Politics on Chinese Web Sites - NYTimes.com
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI — The daily Web habits of a typical 18-year-old college student named Li Yufei show why American Internet companies, one after another, have had trouble penetrating what is now the world’s most wired nation.
He writes a blog, downloads Korean television shows, manages two Web sites devoted to music and plays an online game called Rongguang Hospital, at Baidu.com.
“I started doing a lot of this when I was about 11 years old,” says Mr. Li, a freshman at the Shanghai Maritime University. “Now, I spend most of my leisure time on the Internet,” he says. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
Google’s decision last month to remove some of its operations from China has overshadowed a startling dynamic at work in this country, a place where young people complain that there is not a lot to do: the Internet, already a potent social force here, has become the country’s prime entertainment service.
Even though Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by censors here, Chinese social networking sites like QQ Zone, Tianya.cn and Kaixin001.com are flourishing in surprisingly inventive ways.
A study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group found that people in China (which now has nearly 400 million Internet users) are far more connected than Americans, and that globally only the Japanese spend more time on the Web.
Analysts say Google struggled to gain market share in China partly because the company had failed to build a big enough online community around its search engine, unlike its chief rival here, Baidu.com.
The surprising power of online communities in China has Communist Party leaders worried about the ability of online social networks to spread viral messages that could ignite social movements, and pose a challenge to the party and its leaders. They saw what happened to Han Feng, a midlevel party official in southern China, when his private diary was recently posted online.
In the diary, Mr. Han catalogued not just the hefty bribes he was taking, but detailed his sexual escapades with co-workers and mistresses. The ensuing online uproar led to his sacking and a criminal investigation.
“For the government, the scary part of the Internet is the unpredictable power of its organization,” said Yang Guobin, an associate professor at Barnard College and author of “The Power of the Internet in China” (Columbia University Press, 2009).
“Although people are there socializing, it can provide a platform for lots of other activities, and even turn political,” he said.
But young people in China say they are excited about the Web not because it offers a means to rebellion, but because it gives them a wide variety of social and entertainment options.
One of the more remarkable developments in the Internet in recent years has been the informal network of young people who volunteer to produce Chinese subtitles for popular American television series like “Prison Break” and “Gossip Girl.”
The Chinese subtitles are often translated within hours of the program’s showing in the United States, and then attached to the video and made freely available on Chinese file-sharing sites.
Chinese Internet companies have gleaned a lesson from this: entertainment trumps politics on the Web in China.
“The Web is really a reflection of real life,” says Gary Wang, founder and chief executive of Tudou, one of China’s biggest video-sharing sites. “What people do in real life is they go to karaoke rooms, they go to bars, they get together with friends and they shop. And that’s what they do online.”
Baidu is one of the companies that recognized the link. Founded in 1999, Baidu — which got an early investment from Google — quickly established itself as China’s largest search engine.
By the time Google sold its stake in Baidu and set up its own Chinese-language search engine in 2006, Baidu was already expanding its site in the hopes of building a community that would stick around longer on the site.
One of the company’s most popular offerings is the Baidu Post Bar, an online bulletin board of hot topics that now accounts for nearly 15 percent of the site’s traffic. (Among the most popular topics in recent weeks was a television anchorwoman’s ties to a corrupt official).
There is also Baidu Knows, Baidu Space (for blogs) and Baidu Baike, a Chinese version of Wikipedia.
Now, the company is working on an online video site that would work much like Hulu.com, the site in the United States where several broadcast TV networks present their shows.
Every Chinese Internet company seems to be building its own online conglomerate to offer online games, shopping, blogs and bulletin boards. Few companies want to specialize.
Just like American TV networks, state-run networks in China are worried that entertainment is migrating to the Web and that young people are souring on television. So they are trying to jazz up their offerings with reality shows or programs modeled on “American Idol.”
Sometimes, though, network news divisions get even by investigating the follies of their Web competitors.
In 2008, for instance, China Central Television — the biggest state-run network — ran an exposé on how Baidu accepted money to bolster the search results of unlicensed medical companies.
Baidu reviewed its policies, but also cleverly managed its way through the scandal by paying more than $5 million to be a sponsor of the state network and by courting the Chinese press.
Several Chinese journalists say that soon after Baidu suffered bad publicity, the company offered to fly a group of journalists to Hong Kong for a leisurely weekend at a luxury hotel.
A spokeswoman for Baidu declined to comment on the Hong Kong press outing, but media coverage of Baidu improved.
Google’s late start in China made it difficult to keep pace with Chinese competitors, who were constantly rolling out new things to appeal to young Web users.
Analysts say Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, also has little chance of succeeding. Although Microsoft has spent years building a presence in China and working with the Chinese government, the company’s online offerings have fared poorly.
“I don’t think Bing will come even close to Baidu,” said Lu Bowang, president of China IntelliConsulting in Beijing. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on Bing’s China strategy.
Mr. Li, the Shanghai Maritime University student, says he surfs the Web to find or build his own community. A shy person with no siblings, he now has 300 online buddies, and says he turns to the Web to find what he cannot find anywhere else, particularly on state-run TV, which banned some Korean shows years ago.
“The State Administration shut down a lot of the popular Japanese and Korean series a long time ago,” he says. “So I have to go online to find things like this.”
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Apr 17, 2010
China Starts New Bureau to Police Web Traffic - NYTimes.com
By JONATHAN ANSFIELD
BEIJING — China has quietly formed a new bureau expected to help to police social networking sites and other user-driven forums on the Internet, which are proving harder for the government to monitor and control than ordinary news portals.
The new bureau marks the latest outgrowth to a morass of agencies tasked with regulating online business and communications in China. People informed of the expansion say the authorities are retooling their media apparatus to deepen their leverage over the Web, and regulators are jostling for the growing power and privilege at stake.
The new agency, officially called the Internet news coordination bureau, is part of this effort to better monitor the communications of Chinese Web users, who total nearly 400 million by official estimates.
Chinese officials consider tools like social networking, microblogging and video-sharing sites a major vulnerability. In the past year, they have been forced to block access in China of overseas video and networking giants like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, and suspend several upstart Chinese look-alikes, over information they deem subversive.
In turn, China has promoted the use of local alternatives on sites like Sina.com, QQ.com, and the Web site of the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily, which are more cooperative with official mandates to filter the Web. Both the new and pre-existing bureaus are under the auspices of the State Council Information Office, which acts as a leading daily enforcer over news-related content on the Web.
For weeks, the head of the newly established bureau has represented it in meetings with foreign diplomats and in official propaganda conferences and training sessions.
But public acknowledgment of the addition only came last week, after The New York Times submitted a question about the overhaul. The next day, the Information Office altered a page on its Web site to reflect the new Internet bureau. It also unveiled another new bureau, devoted to regulating foreign news and information outlets that conduct business in China.
This week, in a faxed response, the Information Office said the Internet news coordination bureau, which it also refers to as bureau nine, “is mainly responsible for ‘guidance, coordination and other work related to the construction and management of Web culture.’ ” It gave no further details.
China already employs a sprawling bureaucracy of government, party, and industry bodies, and local affiliates down to the neighborhood level, to screen, filter, and steer public opinion online and regulate various facets of the industry.
But in response to a series of events the past two years, particularly ethnic riots in Tibet and Xinjiang, the release of the democracy manifesto known as Charter 08, and opposition protests in Iran — all of which were seen as proliferating via mobile and Internet communications — the Communist Party leadership has taken stronger steps. It has unleashed a propaganda buildup of multimedia arms acquiescent to the government, and a policy clampdown on more unruly foreign and private firms.
Previously, the Information Office operated a single Bureau of Internet Affairs, referred to as bureau five. It supervises sites that publish news in China and operates in close contact with many of their top executives and editors. That bureau traditionally worked on circulating official information and censorship guidelines, but with the evolution of the Web, it has become more occupied with monitoring public sentiment over news developments on user-generated services.
Now two bureaus will divide the labor. The older one will retain a focus on promoting the official line to domestic sites and international media, while the newer one will be devoted more to enforcement over news-related content on interactive forums, say scholars, diplomats and editors familiar with the reshuffle.
“So just from the viewpoint of personnel, you can see that the government is putting more and more emphasis on managing the Internet,” said an editor at an official media organization, who requested anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject.
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