Posts tagged china

Loving the Future in Chinese - how, sometimes, absurdism online is the best way to make sense

(Inspired by the Guardian’s Battles for the Internet series)

We all know that China has the world’s largest online population, and its government is among the most intrusive when it comes to censorship.

But what we may not is that on China’s domestic sites, posts about sensitive issues — Tibet, ousted officials, and occasional village rebellions — are often deleted quickly, and searches for similar terms are usually blocked. So how do people get around them?

With humor. via Offbeat China:

The most interesting of all is the case of “Teletubbies vs. Master Kong”. This is not a new cartoon and surely not meant for kids, either. That is the argot for what might be happening or have happened in a rumored “coup” in Beijing.

Almost overnight, everybody on Sina Weibo becomes part of a “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” reality show – they look for traces of truth in every rumor, and in their hands lies a secret code book.

“According to unreliable resource, the 18^th tug war has a winner. The winner is the team of dragon led by carrot and his team mates Teletubby, Subor study machine and wood son Li. The team led by Master Kong beef instant noodle was defeated because they lost tomato and it was a great loss.”

Total nonsense? Not if you know the ciphers.

Carrot: 胡萝卜(hu luo bo), a vegetable = 胡锦涛 (hu jin tao), President of China

Teletubby: 天线宝宝 (tian xian bao bao), popular cartoon character = 温家宝 (wen jia bao), Prime Minister of China

Subor study machine: 小霸王学习机 (xiao ba wang xue xi ji), famous brand of children electronics = 习近平 (xi jin ping), one of China’s 9-member Politburo and who has been speculated as China’s next President

Wood son Li: 木子李 (mu zi li) = 李克强 (li ke qiang), one of China’s 9-member Politburo and who has been rumored to be China’s next Prime Minister

Master Kong: 康师傅 (kang shi fu), famous instant noodle brand = 周永康 (zhou yong kang), one of China’s 9-member Politburo and who has been rumored to be a supporter of Bo Xilai

Tomato: 西红柿 (xi hong shi), a vegetable = 薄熙来 (bo xi lai), fallen political star that has been the center of recent political dramas in China

Outrageous? Yes. Inventive? Yes. Necessary? Yes.

This one is a bit less silly: Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous artist and government dissident, who was jailed for several months last year and remains under close watch at his house in Beijing, has long been a human rights icon for Chinese people. But he’s scarcely mentioned online due to censors and rules, and so netizens have slightly altered the three Chinese characters in his name to give the sounds new meaning.

via the Atlantic:

Term: Love the Future.

Definition: “‘Love the future’ is a coded reference to Chinese artist and dissident, Ai Weiwei (艾未未) that began to be used after Ai’s disappearance in early 2011. Ai’s surname sounds the same as the word ‘love’ in Chinese, and his given name ‘Weiwei’ can be converted into the word “future” by adding two small strokes to the second character.” 

For more on this weird but not inaccessible phenomenon, see the China Digital Times’ lexicon of Chinese terms used online.

Photo: The Atlantic

China Says no to Artist’s Self-Surveillance

On Tuesday, Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and activist, set up five surveillance cameras in his studio and streamed the footage to Weiweicam.com. The goal was to let friends and fans know how we was doing on the one year anniversary of his last arrest.

It was also to let authorities check in on him.

Via the Guardian:

“It is the exact day, one year ago, that I went missing for 81 days. All my family and friends and everyone who cared were wondering where this guy was. So on the anniversary I think people may have worries. It’s a gift to them: I’m here and you can see me,” he said…

…”This is also a gift to public security because they follow me, tap my phone and do what is necessary to get ‘secrets’ from me. I don’t have secrets,” Ai said, poiting out there were now 15 surveillance cameras within a 100m stretch of road outside his home, making it the most-watched area of Beijing.

Today, Weiweicam.com is down after authorities objected to the live feed.

“There was no clear explanation, but there was no clear explanation of why I was detained for 81 days, so it would be ridiculous to ask them,” Ai tells the Guardian. “When I turned the cameras on myself and on to my privacy — which is exactly what they did to me when I was in detention — they got scared and didn’t know how to handle it.”

Image: Marble Surveillance Camera, by Ai Weiwei. The 2010 sculpture mocks the 15 surveillance cameras outside his home. Via Minimal Exposition.

Anonymous Hacks Hundreds of Chinese Government Sites

Via International Business Times:

The Anonymous hacking collective has landed in China, home of some of the most tightly controlled internet access in the world, and defaced hundreds of government websites in what appears to be a massive online operation against Beijing…

…The defaced homepages carry a statement against the Chinese government along with the traditional Anonymous banner and the generational anthem Baba O’Riley by The Who played in background.

“All these years, the Chinese communist government has subjected its people to unfair laws and unhealthy processes,” reads the statement. “Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall.”

It contains also a message directed at the Chinese people: “Each of you suffers from the tyranny of that regime which knows nothing about you,” reads the message. “We are with you. […]The silence of all other countries highlights the lack of democracy and justice in China. It’s unbearable.”

The defacements also provide a link with tips on how to bypass state censorship.

On Pastebin, Anonymous lists the sites they’ve claimed to have hacked. And yes, Baba O’Riley does play if/when you go to them.

In China: Using the Internet to Get Rid of Your Baby?

via The Atlantic:

A Guangzhou woman contemplating divorce attempted to give away her baby on second-hand-goods website, according to a Sina News article.

The mother, age 30, said that she was not ready to raise a child alone. She reportedly listed her 2-month-old baby boy as a “99 percent new” item, 100 percent free, and attached the above picture of her child on the site. She still hasn’t found a taker.

FJP: Wait, really? 

Self Immolation Protests Rise in Tibet

Via the New York Times:

On March 3, a few days before the start of the spring semester, Tsering Kyi, 20, emerged from a public toilet at the town’s produce market, her wispy frame bound in gasoline-soaked blankets that had been encircled with wire, relatives and local residents said.

In a flash she was a heap of flames, her fist raised defiantly, before falling to the ground, residents said. She died at the scene.

Over the past year 29 Tibetans, seven of them in the last three weeks, have chosen a similarly agonizing, self-annihilating protest against Chinese policies. Of those, 22 have died…

…Tsering Kyi’s death has been widely publicized by Tibetan activist groups eager to draw attention to the self-immolations. The Chinese state news media, which has ignored most of the cases, reported that she was mentally unstable after hitting her head on a radiator. Her grades started to sag, the official Xinhua news agency said, “which put a lot of pressure on her and made her lose courage for life and study.”

In interviews, several Tibetan residents and relatives of Tsering Kyi’s contemptuously waved away such assertions. Instead, they were eager to discuss her devotion to her Tibetan heritage and the final moments of her life. When she emerged from the public toilets in flames, they said, the market’s Han Chinese vegetable sellers locked the front gate to prevent her from taking her protest to the street. No one, they claim, tried to douse the fire.

When the police arrived, they forced witnesses to remain inside the market and returned Tsering Kyi’s body to the bathroom. Then, after collecting everyone’s cellphones, they methodically went through the devices and deleted any photographs of the incident.

Related:

• Beijing-based Blogger Under House Arrest for Writing About Tibet, Committee to Protect Journalists.
• China Imposes Media Blackout on Sichuan, Qinghai and Autonomous Region of Tibet, Reporters Without Borders
• China Cuts Internet and Mobile Phone Service in Areas of Protest, Global Post

Image: Video still of a 35-year-old nun burning herself alive via a February BBC report on self-immolation protests in Tibet.

via Nieman:

China, for as much as we continue to learn about it — its future leaders, how it makes the gadgets we depend on, its human rights issues — remains an enigma for most Americans. What media coverage there is tends, as much journalism does, to focus on the official channels — government moves, economic shifts, and the like.

But what about day-to-day China, a subject difficult for many western news organizations to report on? Tea Leaf Nation is an attempt to get down to a more human level. That’s because the fledgling news site is sourced exclusively from social networks inside the country. Much in the same way online producers, curators, and other editors mine the depths of Twitter and Facebook for story ideas here — and how Global Voices assembles and amplifies citizen media around the world — Tea Leaf Nation’s editors use sites like Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and Tianya to search for what Chinese people are talking about.

Like any good curator, Wertime and his collaborators try to track trends and monitor what notable people are talking about during the day. “There’s all sorts of amazing, unbelievable, and heart-rending stories that come out of China on a daily basis. It’s an endless fount of news,” he said. “We don’t have a particular mechanical approach. We each have our own way of going about it.”

Check out some stories on Tea Leaf Nation.

Or, read this other story, not from tea leaf nation but also heart-rending, and also pulled from Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.

via The Atlantic:

A viral message spread on Sina Weibo, China’s popular micro-blog, encouraged Chinese female web users to observe Wednesday’s Leap Day as is done in the UK. Every four years, on February 29th, a tradition encourages British women to pursue men, in a kind of reversal of gender norms. “This day only comes once every four years,” reads the Weibo-based message, attempting to provoke a viral outbreak of love confessions, “What are you waiting for?”

Best part of the story:

The Sina Weibo Leap Day thread announced that if men refused the advances of Chinese women, the men should offer them a present as consolation. 

Foxconn Employees Threaten Mass Suicide

Foxconn, the world’s largest electronic component maker (think: Apple, Amazon, Nintendo, Dell, Panasonic… well, you get the point) is not a nice place to work. So rampant have the suicides been that last year the company made workers sign pledges not to kill themselves.

Via The Atlantic Wire:

As American consumers ogle over shiny new gadgets at this week’s Consumer Electronic’s Show, the workers that make those products are threatening mass suicide for the horrid working conditions at Foxconn. 300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times.  It’s not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven’t lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things. 

As The Atlantic Wire points out, this week’s This American Life features a trip to a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China where approximately 350,000 to 450,000 people are employed.

You can listen to the episode here.

Image: Workers at Foxconn via China Southern Weekly

Update: March 2012, Public Radio International and This American Life are running a retraction on their Foxcomm reporting. Information about that is here.