Posts tagged China

As in 1957, 1966 and 1989, Chinese intellectuals are feeling more or less the same fear as one does before an approaching mountain storm. The scariest [fear] of all is not being silenced or sent to prison; it is the sense of powerlessness and uncertainty about what comes next… It’s as if you are walking into a minefield blindfolded.

Hao Qun, as quoted in The Guardian. China Tries to Rein in Microbloggers.

The News, via The Guardian:

China has launched a new drive to tame its boisterous microblogging culture by closing influential accounts belonging to writers and intellectuals who have used them to highlight social injustice.

The strict censorship of mainstream media in China has made social media an essential forum for public debate, but authorities have shown increasing determination to control it. Previous campaigns have warned the public against spreading rumours – a theme that has recurred in this crackdown – and ordered users to register with their real names.

Now attention has turned to the country’s opinion formers. A recent commentary in the state-run Global Times newspaper warned that “Big Vs” – meaning verified accounts with millions of followers – had become “relay stations for online rumours” and accused them of “harming the dignity of the law”.

Somewhat Related: The South China Morning Post reports that the central government has ordered universities to stop teaching seven subjects, among them civil rights, press freedom and the communist party’s past mistakes.

China Forces Removal of Unapproved Satellite Dishes in Tibet

Via The Tibet Post:

Chinese officials continued their crackdown on access to foreign media in Tibet on March 10 through the dismantling of satellite dishes at the Labrang Tashi Kyil monastery in Labrang erea (Gansu province), Amdho region, eastern Tibet.

Observed as the official ‘Uprising Day’, March 10 is the 54th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising in Lhasa, rallies are held worldwide on this day n support of the Tibetan cause.  

Monastery administration was ordered to remove and then burn their satellite dishes. They were then told these should be replaced, alongside new receivers, with smaller state sanctioned ones. These new devices only receive state controlled programmes; thereby blocking Tibetans from obtaining international media.  

These new receivers are fitted with an automatic recorder and camera which are used as surveillance devices by the Chinese government television control office. If phrases such as “Free Tibet” of “His Holiness the Dalai Lama” are detected on this device then the officials are alerted and sanctions are carried out.

Earlier in January, Chinese authorities confiscated televisions and dismantled satellite equipment from 300 monasteries in the western part of the region. Cash rewards were announced for anyone informing the authorities about Tibetans holding back ‘illegal’ devices. Arrests and fines are imposed on those who are found to have such devices in their possession.

FJP: About 100 Tibetans have self-immolated themselves since 2009 in protest against human rights conditions and China blames foreign influence for the continued practice.

For example, in February, it accused the US-backed Voice of America of encouraging immolations. A charge the State Department denies.

Tibetan Jailed For Having Photos of Self-Immolators on Mobile Phone

Via Radio Free Asia:

A young Tibetan traditional artist was sentenced to two years in jail with hard labor for having photos on his mobile phone of two compatriots who self-immolated in protest against Chinese rule, according to exile sources Saturday.

Ngawang Thupden, 20, was detained in October last year in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), but relatives learned of the prison sentence for “subversion” only four months later, the sources said, citing contacts in the Himalayan region…

…Chinese authorities have been cracking down hard on any efforts by Tibetans to publicize self-immolation protests after steps taken by Beijing to stop the burnings failed. 

Thupden was accused of “subversion, propagating incorrect political messages, and  causing disharmony among ethnic minorities.”

Information is an existential threat to these regimes.

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert, to the Wall Street Journal. Chinese Hackers Hit U.S. Media.

Yesterday we noted that the hackers in China have infiltrated the New York Times’ computer systems.

Today, the Wall Street Journal reports that it — along with Reuters and Bloomberg among others — has also been hacked:

Chinese hackers for years have targeted major U.S. media companies with hacking that has penetrated inside newsgathering systems, several people familiar with the response to the cyberattacks said. Tapping reporters’ computers could allow Beijing to identify sources on articles and information about pending stories. Chinese authorities in the past have penalized Chinese nationals who have passed information to foreign reporters.

Journal sources on occasion have become hard to reach after information identifying them was included in emails. However, Western reporters in China long have assumed that authorities are monitoring their communications and act accordingly in sensitive cases…

…Among the targets were a handful of journalists in the Beijing bureau, including Jeremy Page, who wrote articles about the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood in a scandal that helped bring down Chinese politician Bo Xilai, people familiar with the matter said. Beijing Bureau Chief Andrew Browne also was a target, they said.

For its part, a spokesperson for the Chinese government rejects the allegation that it is behind the attacks.

UPDATE: Add the Washington Post to the list.

Hackers in China Infiltrate the New York Times Via The New York Times: For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees… The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings. Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing… …The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China… …Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family. Image: The Times’ Patrick LaForge keeping things positive in a post on Twitter.

Hackers in China Infiltrate the New York Times

Via The New York Times:

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees…

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing…

…The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China…

…Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

Image: The Times’ Patrick LaForge keeping things positive in a post on Twitter.

Chinese internet expert and Tea Leaf Nation founder David Wertime tells Harvard’s Berkman Center about China’s internet peculiarities.

From Nieman Lab’s summary:

In what ways is the Chinese Internet a better source for grassroots Chinese sentiment than traditional quotes and sources? In what ways is it worse? More broadly, what best practices can and should journalists use when mining social media for sentiment?

FJP: For more from us on China, you may want to see this post, and this one too.

In recent months, a team of researchers part of Canada’s Citizen Lab have been conducting network scans of public servers in countries on almost every continent. Today, they released their findings—which appear to show that networking technology made by Blue Coat, a Silicon Valley-based company, is being used in a host of countries with questionable human rights records.

The equipment in question can serve a legitimate purpose—like filtering out spam or malware. But in the hands of an authoritarian regime it can easily be turned into a tool for monitoring users or blocking content. Citizen Lab says it found Blue Coat filtering technology capable of censorship operating in countries including Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It also found Blue Coat technology that can be used for surveillance and tracking of Web users in Afghanistan, Bahrain, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela.

Ryan Gallagher, Slate. Report: Silicon Valley Internet Surveillance Gear Used by Authoritarian Regimes.

For more, see Citizen Lab, Blue Coat and the report itself. Bonus: a prior investigation on Blue Coat (via the article above.)

The Onion Picks Kim Jong Un as Sexiest Man Alive, China Believes It From China’s People’s Daily newspaper, largely quoting the Onion announcement, which describes the leader as follows: With his devastatingly handsome, round face, his boyish charm, and his strong, sturdy frame, this Pyongyang-bred heartthrob is every woman’s dream come true. Also of note: a commenter at Buzzfeed found the article reposted at The Korean Times. And of one more note: remember, this has happened before. H/T: Buzzfeed.

The Onion Picks Kim Jong Un as Sexiest Man Alive, China Believes It

From China’s People’s Daily newspaper, largely quoting the Onion announcement, which describes the leader as follows:

With his devastatingly handsome, round face, his boyish charm, and his strong, sturdy frame, this Pyongyang-bred heartthrob is every woman’s dream come true.

Also of note: a commenter at Buzzfeed found the article reposted at The Korean Times. And of one more note: remember, this has happened before.

H/T: Buzzfeed.

China to Businesses: You Will Help us Censor the Internet

Via the New York Times:

As the Chinese cyberpolice stiffened controls on information before the Communist Party leadership transition taking place this week, some companies in Beijing and nearby cities received orders to aid the cause.

Starting earlier this year, Web police units directed the companies, which included joint ventures involving American corporations, to buy and install hardware to log the traffic of hundreds or thousands of computers, block selected Web sites, and connect with local police servers, according to industry executives and official directives obtained by The New York Times. Companies faced the threat of fines and suspended Internet service if they did not comply by prescribed deadlines.

The initiative was one in a range of shadowy tactics authorities deployed in the months leading up to the 18th Party Congress, which is scheduled to end on Wednesday, in an escalating campaign against information deemed threatening to party rule. The effort, while spottily executed, was alarming enough to spur one foreign industry association to lodge a complaint with the government. Several foreign companies quietly resisted the orders, which posed risks to communications and trade secrets that they take pains to secure.

The Times article notes one local company was told it would be fined approximately $2,400 and lose Internet access for six months if it did not install the required hardware and software.

China Blocks Google China’s blocked pretty much all of Google as its 18th Party Congress to choose new leaders takes place. Services down include Mail, Maps, Docs, and Google Analytics among others. Via the Washington Post: Google and many of its most popular subdomains, including Google e-mail, have been blocked by a “DNS poison” in China, according to Chinese Web monitoring site GreatFire.org, an extraordinary step in Web censorship even for the Chinese government. Attempting to access the Google services in China leads to a vacant IP address. Via GreatFire.org, which monitors online censorship in China and reported the block: We’ve argued before that the authorities didn’t dare to fully block GMail since it has too many users already. Fully blocking Google goes much further. … According to Alexa, it’s the Top 5 most used website in China. Never before have so many people been affected by a decision to block a website. If Google stays blocked, many more people in China will become aware of the extent of censorship. How will they react? Will there be protests? Image: Twitter screenshot from GreatFire.org

China Blocks Google

China’s blocked pretty much all of Google as its 18th Party Congress to choose new leaders takes place. Services down include Mail, Maps, Docs, and Google Analytics among others.

Via the Washington Post:

Google and many of its most popular subdomains, including Google e-mail, have been blocked by a “DNS poison” in China, according to Chinese Web monitoring site GreatFire.org, an extraordinary step in Web censorship even for the Chinese government. Attempting to access the Google services in China leads to a vacant IP address.

Via GreatFire.org, which monitors online censorship in China and reported the block:

We’ve argued before that the authorities didn’t dare to fully block GMail since it has too many users already. Fully blocking Google goes much further. … According to Alexa, it’s the Top 5 most used website in China. Never before have so many people been affected by a decision to block a website. If Google stays blocked, many more people in China will become aware of the extent of censorship. How will they react? Will there be protests?

Image: Twitter screenshot from GreatFire.org

Like any editor in the United States, I tweaked articles, butted heads with the sales department, and tried to extract interesting quotes out of boring people. Unlike my American counterparts, however, I was offered red envelopes stuffed with cash at press junkets, sometimes discovered footprints on the toilet seats at work, and had to explain to the Chinese assistants more than once that they could not turn in articles copied word for word from existing pieces they found online. I also liaised with our government censor…

…I was told that we could not title a coal piece “Power Failure” because the word “failure” in bold print so close to the Olympics would make people think of the Olympics being a failure. The title “The Agony and the Ecstasy” for a soccer piece was axed because agony was a negative word and we couldn’t have negative words be associated with sports. We couldn’t use the cover image I had picked out for a feature on the rise of chain restaurants, because it was of an empty bowl, and, [our censor] told me, it would make people think of being hungry and remind them of the Great Famine (a period from 1958 to 1961 when tens of millions of Chinese starved to death, discussion of which is still suppressed). Even our Chinese designers began to roll their eyes when I related this change to them, and set them to work looking for images of bowls overflowing with meat.

Eveline Chao, Foreign Policy. Me and My Censor: A reporter’s memoir of what it’s like to tell the truth about today’s China.

Chao was Managing Editor for an English-language magazine called China International Business and writes about the ins and outs of censorship in the newsroom despite, as she writes, “Business content is not censored as strictly as other areas in China, since it seems to be understood that greater openness is needed to push the economy forward and it doesn’t necessarily deal with the political issues Chinese rulers seem to find the most sensitive.”

In 2003-2004 I worked for an English-language paper in Saudi Arabia and while the censorship mechanics there are different from what Chao illustrates, her anecdotes had me nodding at their familiarity. — Michael

Skating China’s Ghost City

Ordos, China has been a fascination the last few years. In particular, a nine-year-old district within it called the Kangbashi New Area.

Located in Inner Mongolia, Time had an article and photo essay about it back in 2010. So too the New York Times. Reuters chimed in in 2011. The BBC followed suit in 2012.

Created to house upwards of a million residents, almost no one lives there. Apartment, office and government buildings stand mostly empty. Convention centers are unused. Global economists fret this indicates a property boom ready to go bust.

But you can, evidently, skate.

Charles Lanceplaine, a French videographer based in Shanghai, recently visited with a group of riders to take advantage of the empty plazas and streets.

Bonus: Like people doing things in unexpected places? Check out four-time Irish women’s surf champ Easkey Britton riding waves in Iran near the Pakistan border.

New Statesman Tries to Bypass the Great Firewall The New Statesman’s current issue focuses on China and the magazine has created a Mandarin version of it as a PDF. Their hope is to get the publication around Chinese censors by using various torrent sites. Via the New Statesman: What will [Chinese readers] find inside? A story very different to the one they are told by the state-controlled press. Inside the issue, the former newspaper editor Cheng Yizhong speaks about how the Southern Metropolis Daily exposed the brutal “custody and repatriation” procedure used by the government on those without the correct ID, and the confinement and fatal beating of Sun Zhigang in 2003 (and subsequent cover-up). In 2004, Cheng was detained in secret for more than five months by the Guangdong authorities in 2004 for “economic crimes”, before being released. In an exclusive essay, Cheng recounts the stifling conditions of media censorship in China, opening up about a media culture bombarded by “prohibitions” and riddled with informers who report directly to the government, in which only a minority of journalists are brave enough to fight the system. Also in the issue is an interview conducted by activist artist Ai Weiwei of “a member of the “50 cent party” - a commenter paid half a dollar every time he derails an online debate in China”; Tibetan issues; persecution of human rights lawyers; and how artists of all stripes learn how to self-censor in order to succeed. To preempt their domain — and the articles — from being blocked within China, the publication has uploaded the PDF version of the issue onto file sharing sites, writing, “Here is a direct link to the PDF, here is a link to the torrent file, here is a magnet link for the torrent, and here is a mirror of the torrent on Kickass Torrents. Please share.” New Statesman, Taking on the Great Firewall of China. Image: Ai Weiwei on the cover of the current issue of the New Statesman. H/T: BoingBoing

New Statesman Tries to Bypass the Great Firewall

The New Statesman’s current issue focuses on China and the magazine has created a Mandarin version of it as a PDF. Their hope is to get the publication around Chinese censors by using various torrent sites.

Via the New Statesman:

What will [Chinese readers] find inside? A story very different to the one they are told by the state-controlled press. Inside the issue, the former newspaper editor Cheng Yizhong speaks about how the Southern Metropolis Daily exposed the brutal “custody and repatriation” procedure used by the government on those without the correct ID, and the confinement and fatal beating of Sun Zhigang in 2003 (and subsequent cover-up). In 2004, Cheng was detained in secret for more than five months by the Guangdong authorities in 2004 for “economic crimes”, before being released.

In an exclusive essay, Cheng recounts the stifling conditions of media censorship in China, opening up about a media culture bombarded by “prohibitions” and riddled with informers who report directly to the government, in which only a minority of journalists are brave enough to fight the system.

Also in the issue is an interview conducted by activist artist Ai Weiwei of “a member of the “50 cent party” - a commenter paid half a dollar every time he derails an online debate in China”; Tibetan issues; persecution of human rights lawyers; and how artists of all stripes learn how to self-censor in order to succeed.

To preempt their domain — and the articles — from being blocked within China, the publication has uploaded the PDF version of the issue onto file sharing sites, writing, “Here is a direct link to the PDF, here is a link to the torrent file, here is a magnet link for the torrent, and here is a mirror of the torrent on Kickass Torrents. Please share.”

New Statesman, Taking on the Great Firewall of China.

Image: Ai Weiwei on the cover of the current issue of the New Statesman.

H/T: BoingBoing

The internet and other social media are harder and harder to control. Smart propaganda people like they are, are going to keep finding ways to spin and doctor and frame the information that gets out. Sometimes this may include getting news out first in official media, or replacing blunt censorship with efforts to spin. But it doesn’t mean that the Party is lying down passively in front of an onslaught of free expression. And when it comes to topics that are deemed to be political threats — Tibet, Tiananmen, Falungong, multipartyism, certain issues in Party history, and things like that — then I see no prospect that the Party will change its policy of censorship and repression.

Andrew Nathan, professor of political science at Columbia University, to Index on Censorship. China will change leaders, but keep censorship.

The News: In the upcoming months China will hold its 18th Congress during which the communist party will appoint a new group of leaders. It has been expected that Xi Jinping will be become the country’s next president. However, there’s a growing mystery over where he actually is these days.