http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20081221_1.htm

The Internet As Unfinished Public Sphere

An interview with associate professor Hu Yong of Peking University, School of Journalism and Communication by Li Guosheng for the Tianya Forum

(Tianya’s Open-air Teahouse; Hu Yong’s blog)

[in translation]

Q: How are you, Teacher Hu?  I am interested in the turning points of your life.  For example, you began in the media industry, then you worked for a foreign corporation, then you returned to media and now you are in the education field.  Can you tell us about the reasons behind these turning points?

A: I majored in foreign languages at school, but I have always wanted to be a journalist.  Therefore, I became a graduate students at the Journalism Department of the School of Social Sciences.  At the time, reportage was a very popular form of journalism.  Although it is still controversial whether reportage is literature or journalism, it did have a unique social influence at the time.  Reportage was a powerful style of writing which influenced me at the time.  There were two main strands.  One of which was Liu Binyan who hit straight at reality on behalf the people.  Later came Su Xiaokong’s panoramic descriptions of China in order to come to a certain judgment about a phenomenon.  I was strongly attracted by this sort of thing.  So I left foreign language study and went into journalism.

At the time, I felt that I could affect many things, I could affect society and I could affect many people through doing this.  Today, people may think that I was naive.  But whether it was due to the atmosphere at the time or my personal quest, I was certainly moved by this and chose to go into media.  After 1989, the whole country went through a huge change and my personal career went through a huge change as well.  I basically could not do what I wanted to do.  I worked in a news organization for two years and it was not particularly meaningful.  Basically, I kept visiting the various ministries and departments.  I felt that this was not relevant to my original vision for journalism.  So I went to work for a foreign corporation.

Several years later, I discovered that I did not like this kind of white-collar work even though the salary was quite good.  But I did not feel that it was my path to climb from an ordinary white-collar worker to a senior white-collar worker to a senior manager within a foreign corporation.

It was 1995 by then.  I saw that there was a change in the media space.  <Southern Weekend> started to make an appearance, and magazines such as <Lifeweek> began to show up outside of the system.  There was a chance that the media would step out of the system of party publications.  When we were studying journalism, we expected to go to work for <People’s Daily> and Xinhua agency after we get our degrees, because those were the important places where we could realize our dreams.  If you didn’t not go to places like those, you had nowhere else to go.  All the media organizations were under this system.  But by the early 1990′s, another system emerged where we could realize our ideals.  I went to work at <Lifeweek>.

In 2008, I went through another career change.  I left the media organization and went to Peking University.  My ideals now are actually very simple.  First, I want to teach well.  Secondly, I want to read books.  Thirdly, I want to write books.  I want to distill my accumulated observations and write a few more books that I want to write.

Q: The book that you translated, <Digital Living>, was the book that initiated the Internet to many people.  This year, you published <Hubbub of Noises>.  In the years between, do you feel that the changes on the Internet have been like what you first envisioned?

A: At this year’s forum for Chinese entrepreneurs, there was a small forum just to discuss the Internet.  At the meeting, I said something that I felt represented what I thought at the time.  I was among the earliest people in China to advocate the Internet.  When the Internet first came around, we placed a great deal of hope on it because it could promote many things in China as well as give meaning.  Over the years, I felt that we seemed to have opened Pandora’s box where many of the things that flew out were bad.  But the box leaves you with hope.  I thought that many of the things were different from our initial ideals, and many of the things we expected did not materialize.  We felt that many of the things would not have negative influence, but they turn out to be very negative.  But I am personally still full of hope.  It is a matter of time before this hope will fly out because it cannot perpetually stay inside Pandora’s box.

Q: But the Internet also changed things that could not be changed before.  For example, the Sun Zhigang incident caused a huge change in society.  Do you think that the positive force of the Internet can produce even bigger qualitative changes in the future?

A: My speech at the forum for Chinese entrepreneurs was at the beginning of the year.  At the time, the big Internet story was the Sexy Photo Gate.  Nobody knew that the Internet would have such a big impact in 2008.

There were two important events on the Chinese Internet this year.  The first one was that the number of Chinese netizens surpassed the number of American netizens.  The second one was the guest appearance of Hu Jintao at the Strong Nation Forum.  This act has a great deal of value.  Apart from anything else, from the viewpoint of the administrative system, when the highest leader of the administrative system takes such an action, what do you think the people who works underneath him would do?  Besides, Hu Jintao treated the netizens as his equals, at least during this exchange.

In the development of the Internet in China over more than ten years’ time, there have been actually two forces.  We might call the first force the top-down Internet.  The Chinese government invested a huge amount of money on the Internet, but we still cannot compare with the developed countries.  We can see it better by comparing with India.  The reach of the Internet and the reach of mobile telephony in India is farther behind us because the Chinese government invested a lot of money and effort into constructing the infrastructure.  Without the government laying down the Internet, where would the prosperity of today be?  Of course, on one hand, the government is also expecting that the Internet will lead to economic development.  But on the other hand, the government is also hoping that they can politically control all the bad things that the Internet brings about.  Therefore, apart from the investment on the infrastructure, the government invested a lot of money and manpower on the firewall.  The presence of the government is very clear in the top-down Internet.  But there is another force, which is the bottom-up Internet.  There is a quantitative relationship because there is a vast difference between having one thousand netizens versus having 100 million netizens.  When so many netizens interact on the Internet, many unthinkable things happen.

These two forces have shaped the Internet in their own ways.  They sometimes conflict with each other.  Other times, they coalesce with each other.  In 2008, the upper and lower levels of the Internet have begun to be connected.  Hu Jinatao visited the People’s Daily website and said “the Internet has become the amplifier for the dissemination of culture ideas and information and public opinion.”  He elevated the Internet to a very high.  Those words represent the awareness of the leaders of China about the Internet.  Hu recognizes the importance of the Internet.  He wants to use the Internet and he must connect with the netizens.  When the two forces in China made contact in 2008, the result was that everybody must reach the consensus that the Internet belongs to everybody.

Q: In your book <Hubbub of Noises>, you introduced the concept of the public sphere.   You said that the public sphere must fear two things: the intrusion of political power and the intrusion of commerce.

A. Our public sphere is in such difficulty because we are under double pressure.  There is the pressure from the political powers and then there is the pressure from the businesses.  It is hard for us to develop the public sphere.

Let us look first at the impact of commercialization on the Internet.  The Internet is able to reach this stage with a lot of help from commercialization during the early stages.  The Internet was promoted earlier through the commercial angle.  Without the businesses, the Internet would not have developed so rapidly in China.  But the government and the businesses do not share the same ideas.  If the government were the only ones trying to promote the Internet, things would not have this far.  During the early stages of the Internet, the positive effects of the businesses were far bigger than the negative effects.  But things are opposite now because the commercialization is eroding many things in the media and the Internet.

Q: The notion of networking communities has been very hot over the last two years.  Then there is a commercial model known as “word-of-mouth marketing”  What do you think?

A: I have seen many users doing this.  For example, the state enterprises are spreading all sorts of misleading information.  I think this is terrible.  The private enterprises are also doing this.  All the companies are using the confusion in information for their own gain.  Our ability to process information do not seem to have increased too much as more information becomes available.  Therefore many public relations firms are exploiting these weaknesses.  Of course, there are even worse things than that.

Q: What do you mean by even worse things?

A: The worse things are what is normally referred to as the “fifty cent gangs.”  They are similar to the so-called “word-of-mouth marketing” from the public relations companies.  They are all trying to mislead netizens and make gains for themselves.  They are more pernicious because they affect the future of China.  A civilization that lacks debates on important matters is a civilization that is heading towards totalitarianism and extinction.  The two outcomes are particularly scary.  We should be holding debates on the various important issues in China.  But you will find today that such debates cannot be held.

The reason why the “fifty cent gangs” emerge is that we have a major problem with our educational system over the past several decades.  Our education has successfully concealed many things in our history.  Our previous education was an utter failure.  The several generations of education eventually created fertile soil for the existence of the “fifty cent gangs.”

We don’t have anything more to say.  It comes back to the issue of education.  No matter how hard education is or how much time it takes, we have to do this.

Q: How would you rate the Internet as a force of enlightenment?  Do you think it will accomplish the unfinished missions of the May 4th movement and the late 1980′s?

A: I think that it is overly optimistic to turn the mission of enlightenment over to a technical tool such as the Internet.  We never expected that a new technology will change reality.  We have attempted to bring in new technologies to reorganize reality in China.  Back then, Zheng Guofan and them failed.  They erected munitions factories and they built warships.  They were routed during the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895.  It was then that people realized that the problem was with the system.  That was when Kong Youwei and Liang Qichao started their Constitutional Reform.  This was part of the evolutionary process in modern China.  When Kong and Liang failed, people said that the problem was culture and not the system.  Then came May 4th and the New Culture movement.

Although it is too optimistic to hope that enlightenment can be attained through the Internet technology, the Internet is a catalyst that can trigger many things.  But we will have to slowly modify the things that the Internet triggers.  Nothing ever happens in one step.  We can only do this gradually one day at a time.

Q: You mentioned that at a deeper level, there is a big  problem with our education system.  Do you think that the government will change things on their own?  What can the Internet do in terms of education?

A:  The education problem is complicated because we can discuss it from various aspects.  But it is not enough to rely solely on the government to change things.  The government is unlikely to change the education system, including the contents, because this system suits their needs and interests.

I think that the education purpose of the Internet is to continuously give various kinds of lessons to the Chinese people.  Such education is impossible in an era without the Internet.

Let us take the case of Yang Jia, in which seven people paid with their lives.  We learned so much.  Before Yang Jia acted out, we must ask the following questions based upon the law enforcement record of the Shanghai police.

1. Do citizens who can walk freely on the city streets of China have to carry identification on their persons?

2. Can the police intercept any pedestrian on the street, and then take him down to the police station because he did not cooperate with the inspection?

3. At the police station, can the police spend several hours to “patiently educate” a citizen who has been traveling regularly all over China?

4. Yang Jia who is aware of his rights and the law tried many times through letters and emails to complain to the Shanghai city public security bureau and the Zhabei public security bureau’s superintendent department.  But are the police capable of rectifying their own mistakes?

After Yang Jia committed the murder, we must call out louder about how the Shanghai prosecutors handled the case:

1. We have to change the way in which the interrogation of criminal suspects by the investigative agency is kept secret and unmonitored, because the rights of small citizens have to go up against the powerful state authorities;

2. We must establish a system where the lawyer of a criminal suspect must be present during interrogations, so that the lawyer can monitor, prevent and witness forceful coercion;

3. We must relieve the family members of the criminal suspects from the duty to assist in the police investigation, in order to prevent family members from having to testify against each other;

4. We must remove the belief that prosecutors, judges and lawyers are one big family, and guarantee that the lawyers are independent legal workers who protect the rights of citizens;

Without the proper legal procedures, the law can only be tools that are used to torment the people.  If you don’t believe this, you can imagine how the lawyers act in these situations:

* When you bring the appointment letter from the family to see the suspect, you are told that the suspect does not want a lawyer as indicated by his signed note; when you bring the verdict document from the first trial and you ask to meet with the defendant in order to prepare for an appeal, you are told that the defendant does not wish to file an appeal as indicated by his signed note.

* Criminal defendants frequently reverse their testimony in court.  Frequently, they claim that they were beaten by the police during the investigative phase.  At the time, the judge will follow the law and ask the defendant: “Do you have any proof that the police beat you in order to extract a confession?”  The defendant then shows the wounds on his body right there in court.  The judge then asks whether there is any evidence that the wounds were caused by the police.  The defendant is of course outraged and wants to go after the policeman who assaulted him.  The judge then asks the public prosecutor: “Is there any evidence in the files about the police using force during the interrogation?”  The public prosecutor does not even have to think before saying that the interrogation was in full accordance with the law and that there was no evidence of the police using force to extract a confession.  The judge then instructs the defendant: “Defendant, you must show the evidence that you were subjected to forceful coercion during the investigative phase.  If not, you cannot bring this subject up.  Even if you do, we can still reject it under the law.”

The Yang Jia case taught us something very important: the authorities must be trustworthy.  The people harbor distrust about the judiciary, including its ability and ethics.  Not many people are really unscrupulous as to think that Yang Jia was justified in killing people.  People were objecting to the inability of the judiciary to disclose the motives of Yang Jia, to reveal the true facts of the case and to prosecute the case in accordance with the law.  When the authorities lose the trust of the public, how will the core values of “fairness” and “justice” of society be realized?

Q: Tianya and the Society Entrepreneur Ecology are jointly promoting an Internet platform for environmental protection, but public participation and enthusiasm are not high.  At the same time, the Internet hot stories are usually unimportant over the long term because they dissipate in a few days.  How do you view this phenomenon?

A: In China, civil consciousness has been emasculated by the government.  When something is not being used for a long time, it will degenerate.  Our citizens have been feudal subjects for a long time.  When it comes to something that affects the interests of everybody, nobody will actually try to push the case.  Conversely, this is what the government hopes because this is how it can be sustained.

For this kind of problem, the commercial forces and the government are cooperating to some extent.  The businesses hope that everybody becomes consumers and they don’t want people to have too much personal consciousness.  To this extent, the commercial forces have the same expectations as the government.

Therefore I say that our people are not citizens.  The nurturing of civic awareness will depend on the next the stage of the Internet.  I still feel that the Internet is only in the first stage when people went from a state of total silence to a hubbub where everybody wants to speak their minds as quickly as possible.  Although nobody can hear anyone else, it is at least better than the blanket silence before.  At the time, many people were happy simply to speak, even if it was not their own ideas and just something that they picked up from others.  I think that the Internet needs to go from the stage of speaking to the stage of organization.  Pure hubbub has no value.  After the hubbub phase, we have to reach some consensus on at least some of the larger issues, because there can be no action without some consensus.

We can have some discussion at this stage and hope that we will form some kind of consensus at the next stage.  These consensus will lead to some action.  During the action phase, the examples that you give are less likely to occur.  We can see some hints of the actions now.  I don’t feel that it won’t be like the civic action after the earthquake.  The reaction to the earthquake was unsual, because everybody thought that they had a sacred duty and it would be wrong to do nothing.  Therefore, the sudden explosion of civil volunteers could not be sustained for long.

So what are the hints of the next phase of the Internet?  For example, the citizens of Xiamen going out for a “stroll” or the taxi drivers of Guangzhou going for “tea.”  The PX project will not be carried out in Xiamen.  I read in <Beijing News> recently that the taxi industry association is thinking about revising the regulations.  It is not expected that there will be many changes and any change will probably be minor.  But without the “tea” session, would there be any change at all?

Q: Jürgen Habermas studied the public sphere and your book spend a lot of space explaining it.  Can you tell us about the section on the Internet and the public sphere?

A: Habermas wrote his book on the public sphere in the 1960′s, and it became a hot term in the academic field.  Later Habermas went through a big change and he no longer referred to the public sphere.  Later he went on to communicative rationality.  The reason is very simple.  When post-modernism came around, nobody talked about its premises.  Everything became relativism.  For example, religion might have been the basis from which people can discuss.  But today, religion is not longer such a basis.  There are all sorts of religions and many people are not even religious at all.  So that terminology no longer works.

Some people have said before that Habermas is a liberal and others say that he is a conservative.  But there are many factions within liberalism and conservatism.  The factions are fighting amongst themselves, and they don’t share the same set of terminology.  This is a fragmented age.  When we discuss problems today, it is like a chicken talking to a duck.  You can’t convince me and I can’t convince you because we have different foundational structures.  For example, the “public” in “public sphere” implies different things to different people.  We cannot even tell the difference between “public” and “private.”

Habermas is not a post-modernist.  He does not think modernism is finished yet.  This caused him to find a common foundation for disparate things.  He went back and forth and thought that communication could be a foundation.  Furthermore, soemtimes there may not be interests involved in communication.  Since man is a social animal, there must be social communication.  He believes that communication must follow certain principles or else communication will break down.  He was interested in effective principles and realistic principles.  All his works trie to say that we must find a foundation for human society or else we become like loose sand particles.  When everything solid has faded away, what would human society be?  From this, he found communication and he raised it to a very high level.

I ran into the economist Luo Xiaopeng.  He thought that since the reforms began, especially after 1992, the economists have achieved an hegemony in speech — an imperialism of economics, as it were.  Nobody listens to those people in the field of humanities.  Everybody knows that people in philosophy have no speech rights, whereas the economists are effective with what they say.  Xiaopeng thought that Ronald Coase’s theories cannot explain many of the things in China.  I was very appreciative and understanding.  I think that Habermas is much more significant for China than Coase.  Habermas still firmly believes in the values of modernism such as freedom and democracy.

I say that our China has never gone through a post-modernist stage, even though many people make a living off post-modernism.  How much can it explain about China?  Nobody seriously discuss the modernist ideas in China.  Whenever we discuss freedom, people will say things that make you laugh to death.  Some might say that there is no absolute freedom in the world.  Or someone else might say that our traditional Confucian philosophy also has democracy and republicanism.  You just cannot hold a discussion.

The most basic direction of Habermas’ public sphere is that the public sphere will ultimately produce a deliberative democracy which some also call a negotiated democracy.  The public express themselves fully in the public sphere and reach a consensus, influence policy and take action.  This sort of thing is definitely missing in China.  We do not even have the most basic communicative rationality right now.  On the Internet, this is very clear.  What are we most familiar with?  First, they give you a label and slot you into a group.  Then we have the residual poison from the Cultural Revolution so that whenever you say something, they won’t consider whether it is reasonable or not.  Instead, they start guessing your ulterior motive or whom you are speaking for.  They will instinctively take a dim view of things.

At my blog, I was writing about Google a couple of days ago.  I thought that the search engines have become commercial products and therefore they are not as valuable as before.  We should be able to discuss this sort of thing.  But as soon as I said that, someone immediately asked whether I had accepted money from Baidu?  They will attribute these types of things on you in very ugly ways.  So on the next day, I wrote a blog post critical of Baidu.  This becomes something of a joke.  But there was no way to conduct a discussion.

Therefore I don’t think that we are talking too much about Habermas in China.  We are not talking enough about Habermas and we ought to talk more about communicative rationality.  When communicative rationality cannot be established, it will just be more hubbub of noises.

The original research of Habermas for the public sphere began with a coffee shop which is a discussion space.  I personally don’t think that the Internet resembles a coffee shop.  Instead it looks more like a supermarket, where people with different needs come to get whatever they want.  It is not realistic to achieve the ideal speech space in the short term.  The communicative rationality of Habermas cannot be realized on the Internet.  But I don’t think that just because it cannot realized, then his theory should be declared useless.  At least, the most basic premises of Habermas’ public sphere still exist.

Q: Do you think that the Internet is an unfinished public sphere?

A: I think it can be said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/asia/12cyberchina.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

China Alarmed by Threat to Security From Cyberattacks

By SHARON LaFRANIERE and JONATHAN ANSFIELD

Published: February 11, 2010

BEIJING — Deep inside a Chinese military engineering institute in September 2008, a researcher took a break from his duties and decided — against official policy — to check his private e-mail messages. Among the new arrivals was an electronic holiday greeting card that purported to be from a state defense office.

The researcher clicked on the card to open it. Within minutes, secretly implanted computer code enabled an unnamed foreign intelligence agency to tap into the databases of the institute in the city of Luoyang in central China and spirit away top-secret information on Chinese submarines.

So reported The Global Times, a Communist Party-backed newspaper with a nationalist bent, in a little-noticed December article. The paper described the episode as “a major security breach” and quoted one government official who complained that such attacks were “ubiquitous” in China.

The information could not be independently confirmed, and such leaks in the Chinese news media often serve the propaganda or lobbying goals of government officials.

Nonetheless, the story is one sign that while much of the rest of the world frets about Chinese cyberspying abroad, China is increasingly alarmed about the threat that the Internet poses to its security and political stability.

In the view of both political analysts and technology experts here and in the United States, China’s attempts to tighten its grip on Internet use are driven in part by the conviction that the West — and particularly the United States — is wielding communications innovations from malware to Twitter to weaken it militarily and to stir dissent internally. “The United States has already done it, many times,” said Song Xiaojun, one of the authors of “Unhappy China,” a 2009 book advocating a muscular Chinese foreign policy which the government’s propaganda department is said to promote. He cited the so-called color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia as examples. “It is not really regime change, directly,” he said. “It is more like they use the Internet to sow chaos.”

State media have vented those concerns more vociferously since Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last month criticized China for censorship and called for an investigation of Google’s claim that its databases had been the target of a sophisticated attack from China. “China wants to make clear that it too is under serious attack from spies on the Internet,” said Cheng Gang, author of The Global Times submarine story.

Despite China’s robust technological abilities, its cyberdefenses are almost certainly more porous than those of the United States, American experts say. To cite one glaring example, even Chinese government computers are frequently equipped with pirated software from Microsoft, they say. That means many users miss out on security upgrades, available to paying users, that fix security breaches exploited by hackers.

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for most governments. While the United States probably has tighter defenses than China, for example, experts say it relies more heavily on computers to run its infrastructure and so is more vulnerable to an attack.

But for China, worries about how foreign forces might employ the Internet and other communications advances to unseat the Communist Party are a salient factor in the government’s 15-year effort to control those technologies. Chinese leaders are constantly trying to balance the economic and social benefits of online freedoms and open communications against the desire to preserve social stability and prevent organized political opposition.

A distinct shift in favor of more comprehensive controls began nearly two years ago and hardened over the past six months, analysts say.

New policies are intended to replace foreign hardware and software with homegrown systems that can be more easily controlled and protected. Officials are also expanding the reach and resources of state-controlled media outlets so they dominate Chinese cyberspace with their blogs, videos and news. At the same time, the government is simultaneously beefing up its security apparatus. Officials have justified stronger measures by citing various internal threats that they say escalated online. Among them: the March 2008 riots in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa; reported attempts to disrupt the August 2008 Olympic Games and the amassing more than 10,000 signatures supporting a petition for human rights and democratic freedoms, an example of how pro-democracy advocates could organize online.

Especially alarming to officials, analysts say, was the role of the Internet in ethnic riots last July that left nearly 200 people dead and more than 1,700 injured — the worst ethnic violence in recent Chinese history. Government reports asserted that terrorists, separatists and religious extremists from within and outside the country used the Internet to recruit Uighur youth to travel to Urumqi, the capital of western China’s Xinjiang region, to attack ethnic Han citizens.

In August, security and propaganda officials briefed China’s ruling Politburo on their view of how the Xinjiang riots developed, according to one media executive with high-level government ties. The executive spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution for discussing delicate political topics.

China’s leaders also reviewed how Iranian antigovernment activists used Twitter and other new communication tools to organize large street demonstrations against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the summer. He said Chinese leaders saw the Iranian protests as an example of how the United States could use the new forms of online communication in an imperialist fashion that could one day be turned against China.

“How did the unrest after the Iranian elections come about?” People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, asked in a Jan. 24 editorial. “It was because online warfare launched by America, via YouTube video and Twitter micro-blogging, spread rumors, created splits, stirred up and sowed discord.”

Since the unrest in Iran and Xinjiang, Chinese leaders have unrolled a raft of new initiatives, including closing thousands of Web sites, tightening censorship of text messages for lewd or unhealthy content and planning to converge China’s Internet, phone and state television networks. They are also carefully cultivating homegrown alternatives to foreign computer technologies and foreign-based Web sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, all of which Chinese censors now block. The government says it needs the new controls to fight pornography, piracy and other illegal activity.

In November, nearly 300 government officials and technicians gathered in Beijing for a seminar that stressed China’s vulnerability in cyberspace.

“It is a long-existing reality that the West is stronger than us in terms of information security,” said the training manual, posted on the Web site of the Ministry of Public Security.

“Most of the key technology and products in the information security sphere are held in the hands of Western countries, which leaves China’s important information systems exposed to a bigger chance of being attacked and controlled by hostile forces,” the manual said.

The risks of dependence on foreign-made software became clear in 2008 after Microsoft deployed a new antipiracy program aimed at detecting and discouraging unauthorized users of its Windows operating system. In China, where an estimated four-fifths of computer software is pirated, the program caused millions of computer screens to go dark every hour and led to a public outcry.

New government procurement rules issued in December require state buyers to give preferential treatment to Chinese-made computers and communication products. But James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a Washington-based consulting firm, said such orders were typically ignored.

James A. Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based research group, said China was caught between contradictory goals. The authorities want to keep using superior Western software so they can engage in espionage and defend themselves against foreign infiltration. “But at the same time they want to use indigenous software, which is not up to par,” he said.

But China is pushing hard to catch up. Mr. Mulvenon describes China as “absolutely the world leader” in development of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) — the successor to the current Internet.

Some suggest China aims to develop a more autonomous system equipped stronger firewalls and filters. China’s leaders “have always had the ambition to develop the capability of one big domestic Intranet that they could manage more easily, if need be,” one Communist Party newspaper editor said. But others suggest China is merely trying, like other nations, to respond to the reality that the existing IPv4 global Internet, in which the United States commands a disproportionate share of addresses, will soon run out of space.

The clearest evidence of China’s determination to wield greater control was the virtual communications blackout imposed over Xinjiang for six months after the July riots. Nineteen million residents in a region three times as big as Texas were deprived of text-messaging service, international phone calls and Internet access to all but a few government-controlled Web sites. The damage to tourism and business, not to mention the disruption to everyday life, was significant.

Hu Yong, a Beijing-based media expert, said the government was no longer as worried as it once was about the economic impact of electronic communication controls.

“That is more secondary to their concerns about political and social stability,” he said.

John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Zhang Jing and Xiyun Yang contributed research from Beijing.

http://interlocals.net/?q=node/334

China: Twitter Revolution

Home » Blogs » damon’s blog

2010-02-11 – damon

What could we learn from Google’s withdrawal in China? Evan Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, had an idea. “We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about.” Moreover, Williams mentioned that Twitter is now developing technology to prevent government censorship. In fact, Twitter runs across multiple mediums including the Internet and mobile devices, as well as modify the Hosts file, use Tweeter tool to set up their own Twitter API and use Dabr and other third-party sites and softwares, secure their advantage over a singular website to avoid government censorship.

Twitter’s form of micro-blog is very popular in China. The already closed Fanfou is one of the famous site and Sina is the latest one. Twitter.com was officially blocked last year following the 20th anniversary of June Forth Massacre and the incident in Urumchi in July, as the Zhongguo Guofangbao, the official newspaper of Chinese national defense, said Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Youtube are turning into ” convenient and powerful tools for western hostile forces to subvert the country and should not be underestimated.”

However, Twitter still plays a very important role in Chinese Internet for its easy accessibility. An interesting research shows that 70% of 1,000 more Twitter users in China is aged 21 to 29, 67% in the coastal region. One of the reasons why they are on Twitter is “understanding the TRUTH, explore their insight.” Twitter connect different news source and social movement. For example, Chinese netizens recently made connection with two important social movements in Hong Kong by using tweets of #stopxrl and #0101hk to discuss and follow the news about the rally for democracy in Hong Kong on 1-1-2010 and the demonstration of stopping the costly (HK$66.9 billion) Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail (Hong Kong section)

The following is Professor Hu Yong’s article about this micro blogging issue or what he called “micro revolution”.

Hu Yong: Micro Revolution: From Twitter to Sina’s Microblog

July 29, 2009, Twitter, the founder of microblog, replaced her classic question “What are you doing?” on the front page by an imperative sentence “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” Once I saw this, I wrote on Twitter: “The change of Twitter today has great significance. The structure of future number-one media appears.”

Insight of trivial information

Twitter, not seen having a bright future in the past, was frequently challenged by the question “Who cares what I’m doing 24 hours a day?” Indeed, there are a lot of gossips, self-pity and self-love on micro-blog, particularly when Fanfou “left quietly” and almost only QQ’s TaoTao and MySpace’s 9911.com remained. During that period, I visited these two sites. The home page of TaoTao read “48.88 million Tao’s friends are nagging on TaoTao”. The most popular one is: “I am very confused today, what I really want to eat at noon? … … I shaped my eyebrow last night, not the one I frequently visited but another one introduced by my colleagues who said it shaped good-looking eyebrow. Unfortunately I don’t think so, the previous one is better…… ”

However, even such a nagging forms a close network of contacts, and creates what social scientist called “ambient awareness” through this kind of connection. Each little update and separate piece of social information is insignificant and even mediocre itself, but by the time they are pulled together, these small pieces gradually connect themselves into an incredibly detailed picture of yourself, your friends or family member’s life, just like an impressionist painting made of thousands of points.

Twitter was born in such context: 140 characters plus “@+Twitter account” which is unbelievable simple. It may lead to a more reflexive culture. Twitter’s experienced users usually talk about the unexpected side effect of the recurrent behavior of self-reporting: You have got to stop several moments every day and observe your own feeling and thought. This behavior will gradually become philosophical. It is similiar to the saying in the Greek aphorism “Understand yourself” and the psychiatric concept of “insight”.

However, Twitter’s greatness is not limited to this static “insight”. The old-styled written diary can fulfill this need. Its greatness resides not simply on ambient awareness, but also its ability of leaping out the narcissistic circle enabled by its unique architecture.

Twitter’s core is attention and concern. Users will be notified any new messages posted by the person they are interested in. Once the message is posted, one would receive notification. The attended one is not required to respond. It makes Twitter’s link directed. Its value is dependent on the qualities of the ones you choose to pay attention to. Some of Twitter’s fixed tools, such as reply, retweet and private message, makes the dialogue happen. And “tag”, which allows us to see the aggregating process of a subject matter, forms a field of dialogue.

It means Twitter is a kind of media as well as a tool of social interaction. From the change of “What are you doing?” to “Share and discover”, the inventor of Twitter realizes that “Share and discover” is much more powerful than “insight”: it can be used to form a kind of distributed journalism characterized by fast speed, rich sources of information and mighty dissemination,. The expansion of information can also encourage the formation of social organizations and social movement.

So the revolution makes her debut.

How does “Micro revolution” happen?

It was the protest provoked by the election in Iran in June 2009 that connected micro-blog with revolution. The news of Tehran riots happened after the election spread just like a wildfire on Twitter. It was further picked up by the news network such as BBC and NPR to disseminate massively around the world. Twitter is amazing. As Tehran blocked the function of cell phone text message and also some websites, Twitter became the alternative network to satisfy the Iranians’ eagerness to receive information and voice out. During the time that protests were going on in Iran, the U.S. State Department sent an unusual e-mail to the Twitter founder to request it to defer its original plan of global network maintenance, because of during the maintenance period, the Iranians would not be able to sign in and thus the information of the front-line of the protest in Tehran could not be promptly delivered to the world outside. Twitter accepted the State Department’s call and the maintenance time was postponed to the early morning of Tehran. Twitter admitted that “we have become an important medium of communication for Iranians.”

The analysis of the role played by Twitter in communication and organization during the Iranian protest has already become the latest hot topic for many social media researchers. However, the whole picture of the digitalized protest is in fact far more complicated. Firstly, the general netizens are well-off young people and urban citizens. They supported the opposite party, which made the illusion for the world outside that “the revolution is about to happen in Iran”. It ignored what the large number of conservative and rural people were thinking. Biz Stone, one of the Twitter founders, admitted that only a small part of the Iranians use Twitter. They might not be able to represent the mainstream opinion. Secondly, YouTube and Twitter are more like a tool to be used for citizen journalism. The protest itself was mainly organized by the opposition candidates in the offline world.

Although Twitter’s role in social action is overestimated, we still have to admit that the Micro-blog service, which is only available for less than four years, set up its own milestone in 2009. In contrast, CNN, famous by its reports on the Middle East a few years ago, was extraordinarily silent. Among the popular vanes in the Twitter’s world – called hash-tag label – one is called “failure of the CNN” (# CNNFail ).

Inevitably people would recall the grand year for CNN: When there is something important happening in the world, millions of people would wait in front of the television for watching CNN’s breaking news in order to receive first-hand information on the site in distant places. Nowadays, the first news source is Twitter rather than TV, no matter what kind of the news, such as “swine flu”, terrorist attacks in Bombay or belly-landing on the Hudson River in New York.

CNN did a great job in 1991 when the first Gulf War broke out. But nearly 20 years later, people seems to have a consensus that real-time, online, crowd-sourced media is the best place to follow current news. A British journalist who I know wonders if it is possible to write history by social media such as the Twitter. It’s amazing that Twitter’s users now have the courage to blame the shallowness and carelessness of big media organizations in reporting international news. CNN here is a symbol – it is remembered by all the fault of the television medium occupied by entertaining infotainment.

Strictly speaking, it is an issue of CNN’s ability rather than its willingness. 20 years ago, CNN enjoyed a privilege to get access to some parts of the world such as China and Iraq. Freelance reporters had no access to them and the local reporters were not able to release their news stories to the world outside. Now that era is gone. The local people already achieve the power to report their own news, no matter whether on Twitter, Facebook, blog or mobile phone. CNN’s exclusive access rights has been enormously dismantled.

This is the communicative revolution brought by Twitter. That’s also what the sentence “the structure of future number-one media appears” means. However, the social revolution brought by microblog might be more important than communicative revolution. In fact, in such a revolution, Chinese Twitter users are leading the world, from social resistance to civic investigation, from monitoring public opinion to creating black satire, from the “power of organizing without organizations” in Panyu anti-incineration movement to mailing a variety of postcards to prisoners of conscience, and from color ribbon campaign for commemoration to Twitter internationalism in “China for Iran” (# CN4Iran ). All these demonstrate Chinese Twitters’ agency and influence. And this power, comparing with the previous driving force, is distinguished by its “micro-power”, an accurate term, rather than a large or brutal force.

Micro power and a broader world

The slogan of Chinese Blogger Conference 2009 is “Micro power and a broader world ” (微動力，廣天地). It anticipated the ways how more and more subtle information-sharing tools and channels promote social progress and collaboration which have immediate impact on our way of life. “A piece of meme, a photograph or a postcard may bring about positive social change, not mention the thousands of possibilities emerging. They brought us a great world for thinking freely. ”

While one person shares his/her own view, more people read this and continue to share this view with others. Through such constant sharing, collective decision can be made. This is similar to the process of water droplets gathering into a cloud — Mao Xianghui, a well-known blogger, compares use the metaphor of droplet for individual. Once individuals agree on a view and continue to share constantly, people with the same idea gather together and form a force, a force which can change national policy and even social order.

From my point of view, micro-power is nothing but taking up one’s responsibility. “Micro” refers to every ordinary citizen. “Power” is nothing but action. Despite the thousands words, it’s action that change the world.

By “Micro” you can also refer to daily micro-politics. Politics can be divided into macro-politics and micro-politics. Macro-politics is structural while micro-politics is daily. Change in micro-politics system are not necessarily logically derived to an adjustment in macro-structure. But if these small units are well-organized, as people are living in the micro-politics, we can greatly improve people’s well-being. If we do not manage well at the micro level, even a macro governance structure such as macro-democracy would not work well. The governance at the grass-roots level still rely on our own. In this sense, we need “micro-revolution” rather than “macro-revolution”. By “micro-information” and “micro-exchange” we may push the revolution forward.

A book titled “Antipolitics” by the Hungarian writer George Konrad in 1982, contains a lot of issues to follow. The examples include the concepts of “anti-political politics”, “the power of the powerless,” and “citizen’s initiative”, etc., frequently used by Valclav Havel. Cui Weiping, the translator of Havel’s work, see “anti-political politics” as not pursuing political power; on the contrary, she advocated people to initiate their works everywhere and at anytime in their everyday life. In other words, it is about how to start from governance around yourself. My understanding of “citizen’s initiative” is that anyone can start from anywhere.

Why is micro-power so important? In the past, the actions are carried out by a few highly motivated people and the mass with almost no initiative. It often results in frustrating results. Passionate people did not understand why the public is not concerned enough about their efforts. The public did not understand why the enthusiasts about politics keep talking rather than silent. Today, those highly motivated people should lower the threshold for action so that people with less passion can join the action a little bit. And all efforts will come together as a strong power.

Source (Chinese)

Internet Post Deletions: The Flowers Of Evil In The Internet Forest

Hu Yong’s blog

Translated by ESWN

(02/06/2010)

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/201002a.brief.htm#013

Tianya, Bandao and other websites have joined together to form the “Internet Media Alliance Against Public Relations” against the Internet Post Deletion companies which are usually know as the “Internet hatchetmen companies.”  The reason was the emergence of more and more Internet public relations firms which live off deleting negative information on the Internet.  They charge their clients on the basis of the content, quantity and location of the target posts.  A post at a small website might cost 100 yuan to delete; a post at a big website or web port may cost as much as 1,000 yuan.  The Internet media companies think that these activities lower public esteem for them as well as seriously interfering with their normal operations.

The true harm from these Internet Post Deletion companies came to light from the Sanlu melamine-tainted milk case.  Before that, the phenomenon was already there but people did not feel personally affected.  During the early developmental stages of the Internet in China, concepts such as “promoters,” “hatchetmen,” or “Internet public relations” did not exist.  As more and more Chinese people got on the Internet, corporations suddenly realized that the Internet had great commercial value.  That was when the Internet public relations firms emerge.

There is another more profound reason why the subject of Internet Post Deletion has come to public attention recently.  After more than one decade in which the Internet was present in China, one important change is that the Chinese Internet has moved from the very remote memory of “the age of innocence” to the “electronic forest” today. People used to have an idyllic or pastoral romance for the Internet which is expected to correct many of the wrongs in the world and to uncover the truth.  The trend in recent years is that the Internet is actually a public opinion arena in which various groups tussle and manipulate.  This virtual world is just as complex (and perhaps even more so) than the real world.  Under these circumstances, we can’t distinguish what is true or false when we run into a crisis.  The information on the Internet basically cannot be verified with the principals or any trustworthy third party.  Even if parts of it can be verified, it depends on many factors and it cannot guarantee that the truth will be told.

As the Internet grew from a farm plot into a forest, it became inevitable that Internet Post Deletion companies emerge.  They are the “flowers of evil” from the earth.  When the Internet becomes the public opinion arena for various interest groups, they will use every means possible to push public opinion in a favorable direction.  Deleting Internet posts is just one of the many possible actions.

Generally speaking, manipulating public opinion is not something to be put on the table under the sunlight.  But in the Chinese Internet, there is something decidedly odd.  On one hand, the various manipulations of information and public opinion do not seem to have to be hidden.  Sometimes they are even deliberately being flaunted.  On the other hand, the recipients of these manipulations seem inured and helpless.  So the Chinese Internet has become an absurd place where the manipulations are shameless and the manipulated are indifferent.

There are also different kinds of manipulations.  For example, some local governments or departments may exercise their special privileges to remove certain posts.  As another example, there are commercial motives.  For an Internet Post Deletion company, the logic is that if you pay them, they will delete negative information/posts as well as manipulate the Internet media.

This unhealthy development of the Chinese Internet implies that there is a huge crisis, namely mutual distrust in society.  The Internet can bring an environment of equality, democracy, freedom plus a natural sharing.  But when the veracity of Internet information is deliberately muddied up, this natural ecology is destroyed.  Like any real-life ecological crisis, this will eventual threaten the existence of those who live there.  A recent example is when academician Zhong Nanshan said, “I basically don’t believe in the number of Type A flu deaths reported for China!”  The Ministry of Health spokesperson Mao Jun’an rebutted this well-esteemed expert: “Frankly, I don’t trust what Zhong Nanshan says.”  So who should ordinary citizens like us believe?

This crisis can be averted by having a healthy system for expressing public opinion.  If public opinion can be more readily expressed, it will improve supervision of the government as well as corporations.  In turn, it will reduced the movement space of these so-called Internet public relations firms.  We acknowledge that the Internet is a contested field, but there has to be a healthy set of rules for the game that go through legal and normal channels.  At the present stage, there are only abominable methods in play.

http://www.bullogger.com/blogs/lihuafang/archives/345317.aspx

Does Internet Matter in China?

李华芳 @ 2009-10-16 22:00

Does Internet Matter in China?

Li Huafang

Hu Yong, 2008, The Rising Cacophony: Personal expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age, Guangxi Normal University Press. （胡泳，2008，《众声喧哗：网络时代的个人表达与公共讨论》，广西师范大学出版社。）

The paper, The Internet and Civil Society in China: a preliminary assessment, is Guobin Yang’s pioneering study on the relationship between Internet and politics, which came up with a question that whether Internet has boosted the development of civil society.[1] In another word, what is the relationship between Internet and civil society?

There are two explanations on this issue. At first, Yang employed a contentious politics framework, which is the most prevailing theory in Internet politics in China. According to this theory, Internet has been used as a “tool” against political authorities in China. Internet, as Yang claimed, provided a new way of protesting. It offers opportunities to people to group together. These groups have been deemed as micro-political powers that may bring up democratic public sphere in the future, because people on the Internet will be able to share information more convenient than ever before. Besides, Internet makes it easier for the public to get access to information which may increase the public’s interests and enhance their capabilities to participate in political movements.

James C. Mulvenon supported Yang’s arguments. In his testimony, Breaching the Great Firewall on “China’s State Control Mechanisms and Methods” 2005, [2] James believed that Internet in China would be able to reduce the control power of CCP, which has suggested a path that might lead China to democracy. Although it is possible, it won’t be an easy mission. To those who want to use Internet to promote democracy in China, they have to break up not only the information censorship but also the technical barrier that the GFW has set up.

However, the second explanation, refuting Yang’s first theory, treated Internet as a tool of propagandizing rather than a tool of protesting. This explanation may overstate the control power of CCP, although CCP does play the role of “big brother” in watching other traditional media.

The second explanation has been challenged by the facts that information censorship and GFW are the main issues discussed by those Chinese Internet users who are able to get through the GFW, or those who can know other languages, in addition to Chinese. So, Yang upgraded his theory from a co-evolution perspective towards the relationship between the protesters and the controllers.

In fact, the above two analyses share a common theoretical basis that Internet is only a tool. The major difference between them is that who controls the tool: the protesters or the controllers. Hu Yong is not satisfied of these extreme explanations. Although Hu Yong’s research is mainly about communication theory which has made him focus more on the relationship between individual expression and the public discussion or public sphere in the Internet Age, he has analyzed the role of Internet in China from the perspective of Internet politics.

Hu made two aspects of contribution to Internet politics theories. First, Hu’s book was a challenge to those who have held dichotomy in political theories. Newsgroups, BBS, and online chatting through various IM tools such as QQ, MSN, Gtalk and Skype have facilitated citizen activities. However, the progresses of E-government programs, launched in 1991, have also enhanced the propaganda. “Is it the best framework for observing and analysing the real situation,” Hu Yong questioned. He emphasized the public discussion or the public sphere, and wanted to find out the relationships behind individuals, public sphere (which refers to civil society), and the government authorities. This refuted two popular theories in political research in China: the “individual vs. state” dichotomy, and “civil society vs. state” dichotomy. Hu stressed that the real world of Internet is so complicated that a simple dichotomy theory fails to work out.

Second, Hu introduced an “individual-civil society” approach to examine Internet development. Internet with techniques of hypertext, multimedia, and interactivity, has become a “common media” (GongYou MeiTi, which is a core idea of Hu Yong’s work) that enable individual voices to form a public sphere. The development of Internet has spontaneously generated public sphere. And the public sphere cannot be simply treated as a protesting tool or a controlling tool. Hu, by using the term “common media”, demonstrated that there were protesters and controllers in this particular public sphere. Both individuals and state authorities contributed to the public sphere by using the “common media”. So, it may be not a good idea, as Hu Yong pointed out, to insist on use of contentious political approach in the area.

However, Hu didn’t pay much attention to Internet politics, perhaps because his main concern was communication rather than politics. There were plenty of discussions about how “common media” had shaped the public sphere and how it had changed the relationship between private and public sphere, which were presented in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. These three chapters, which Hu might not realize, had actually demonstrated a vivid picture of Internet politics by analysing the complexity of the relationships among “individuals”, “public sphere”, and “state authorities ”. In this case, Internet does matter in China.

---

[1] Guobin Yang, 2003, The Internet and Civil Society in China: A Preliminary Assessment, Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 12, No. 36, pp. 453-475.

[2]http://www.uscc.gov/hearings/2005hearings/written_testimonies/05_04_14wrts/mulvenon_james_wrts.pdf

http://special.globaltimes.cn/2010-02/503820.html

Invisible footprints of online commentators

• Source: Global Times
• [03:04 February 05 2010]

By Zhang Lei

They hide behind changing identities and false IDs. They take orders from supervisors in cyber-space. In the US, they might be called “spin doctors,” trying to mold public opinion in favor of one political party or the other.

In China, they are working for both the commercial firms and government entities.

Gansu government recently announced that it was recruiting a team of 650 Internet “commentators” to “guide” public opinion through posts and replies to comments by Web users on Internet forums.

The recruits were soon being ridiculed by other netizens as the “5 mao army,” or “5 mao dang,” referring to those who are paid 50 Chinese cents to post comments favorable to the government.

Some critics say the term “5 mao army” is a product of prejudice under western influence. Zhang Shengjun, a professor of international politics at Beijing Normal University, recently wrote in the Chinese edition of the Global Times that the foreign media are crucial in spreading the term.

“Now it has become a baton waved towards all Chinese patriots…Is there nothing worth admiring in China? Should Chinese government always be the target of criticism?” Zhang said.

According to a veteran media professional with more than 20 years of experience, government websites will approach commentators from traditional media on various issues such as the United States’s arms sales to Taiwan. “It is my decision whether to write under my real name or a pen name,” said the journalist, asking that his name be withheld.

“I was sometimes advised to take a stand different from the government position, so as to create a discussion.” He said the ensuing online debate “helps the public better understand the issues and the truth behind them.”

In addition, marketing companies specializing in online promotion write comments praising certain products to lure consumers into buying them, or at least influence the public’s buying decisions.

Officials viewed China’s online forums, a unique outlet for public opinion, as a threatening environment that could easily get “out of control”,according to an article on the website of the State Council Information Office.

One-third of the 77 most influential social events in 2009 were publicized through Web forums and blogs while traditional media were kept silent, according to a report titled, “Society of China: Analysis and Forecast 2010,” by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

In 2005, Li Wufeng, director of the State Council Information Office’s Internet Affairs Bureau, said that online discussions made a deeper impression on people’s minds and behavior than traditional newspaper reports or radio- TV commentary.

“Once mass protests erupt, online discussion boards can quickly mobilize in a way that can undermine social stability if mishandled,” he said.

At about the same time, local publicity departments began to recruit Internet commentators as official jobholders, an idea which the government praised as a great innovation.

In April 2005, the government of Suqian, Jiangsu Province hired 26 commentators. Qualified applicants were required to show political integrity, logic and a sharp news sense, according to the Yangtze Evening News, noting that, “Their performance, based on the number of posts and replies, will be considered for awards in municipal publicity work.”

A picture dated July, 2009 showing a training session for Internet commentators, conducted by the Inspection Commission in Raohe county, Heilongjiang Province.

Pay cut

An official document revealed that in 2004, the CPC Changsha Municipal Committee began to hire a group of Internet commentators who were paid a basic salary of 600 yuan ($88) a month, plus 50 cents ($7 cents) for each post. Many believe that’s where the “5 mao” came from.

Lately, the online commentators have taken a pay cut. On the Hengyang Dangjian website, a recent notice advertised that Internet commentators will be given an allowance of 0.1 yuan for one article and no more than 100 yuan ($14) a month, apart from their basic salary.

Beifeng, a former commentator for a news portal, told the Global Times that commentators either work full-time for State-owned news portals, such as xinhuanet.com, people.com.cn and southcn. com or work part-time as government employees for various government branches, including ministries, public security and academic institutions.

“There are an estimated 20 full-time commentators in Guangdong Province. They usually write two to four articles a week and seldom reply to posts,” he said.

A commentator surnamed Song, 28, who works for a county-level discipline inspection commission in South China’s Hunan Province, said writing news propaganda was part of his job.

“We usually write about our own achievements and comment on the fight against corruption and building a clean government,” Song said.

If local news portals run their articles, the writers get 40 yuan per article for 500 words. The price goes up to 200 yuan if they get published on websites run by the central government.

They are occasionally trained by rednet.cn, a forum run by the Publicity Department of CPC Hunan Provincial Committee, teaching recruits how to become a Web correspondents and delve deeper into policy issues.

There are more than 100 correspondents in the county, mostly working in their spare time, Song said. The county has a population of about 1 million.

This group, mostly public servants, goes online as ordinary users. They then try to put the best face possible on government policies, or praise the virtues and achievements of role models like Shen Hao, a local hero from Xiaogang Village, Anhui Province, who died at age 45.

Their supervisors give them detailed instructions on how to complete each article. They use QQ group to communicate with each other.

Several days ahead of China’s 2008 National Day celebration, 20 commentators in Hengyang, Hunan Province were given an urgent assignment to write 1,000 posts on the discussion topic, “Emancipating minds and development of Hengyang.” Local government leaders had solicited advice from netizens and wanted to counter any negative replies with positive comments.

Each commentator had to edit and post more than 60 suggestions and offer advice, based on propaganda materials they had each received. Comments between 100 and 500 Chinese characters in length were to be posted on rednet.cn. They were encouraged to sign up under many IDs and post no more than five comments for each user name.

There was even a guidebook of Dos and Don’ts on writing articles properly to shape public opinion.

An anonymous editor at tianya.cn, which boasts 30 million registered users, made it clear that no Internet commentators had been hired by the website to shape public opinion, but also noted that the online forum has a department to censor content.

“We’ve found online public relations companies doing commercials inside the forums, trying to reach tens of thousands of users to create a commercial hype,” she said. “These online pushers are not easily recognized because we mostly delete illegal and pornographic content.”

As for the online commentators blending in with ordinary users, she said, “They can register as many IDs as they want, as long as they don’t violate the law.”

The editor recalled how the online commentators were quickly mobilized during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and again during the Xinjiang riots.

Pressure

Wang, a former employee at the Public Security Bureau, told the Global Times that she has never heard of the “online commentators,” but she acknowledged that there are a certain number of people trying to spin online opinions into support for the government.

Wang said netizens often misunderstand the commentators, and that “actually they are not that mysterious. Guiding public opinion is just a job.”

“It is necessary to have the commentators because sometimes truth may hurt social stability,” Wang said. “Netizens want to seek justice, but from their perspective, they can’t foresee possible negative consequences.”

“The forums can’t be easily controlled, but it seems to work that way because most netizens tend to follow what others say,” Wang added.

A law graduate student, who preferred to remain anonymous, said netizens may have their own opinions but the “online commentators” can have a beneficial value.

“Endless online comments put much pressure on the judicial authorities,” he said. “In fact, some of their criticisms are not appropriate. Perhaps that’s when the online commentators are doing the right thing.”

Beifeng played down the impact of the “online commentators”:

“They are inefficient and ineffective,” he said, “People who can log on to Twitter can’t be easily swayed.”

Weakness

Hu Yong, an Internet expert from Peking University, told the Global Times that the public opinion molders have already penetrated different layers of Chinese society.

Hu said that a tourist city’s airport has public opinion watchdogs that keep an eye on the forums and deal with any negative information about the airport. Even a county-level middle school has such a department.

The invisible army is mobilized to downplay hot button issues when controversy heats up on the Internet.

“The commentators may exist and temporarily spin public opinion when conflicts emerge, but they will have no effect over the long run, except making the public more aware of them,” Hu said.

He pointed out that a significant weakness of “online commentators” is that they are hiding behind an IP without identification, so they can’t build credibility and be trusted as a reliable source.

“To a certain extent, their reputation will collapse and the information they provide will become trash.”

In that case, the commentator is not entirely a bad idea in term of teaching netizens how to sort out valuable information, he said.

Another camp

Meanwhile, the term “5 cent army” or “Internet agent” has spreaded online referring to anyone with an anti-China opinion, or commentators allegedly hired by the US and Japan.

“Actually it is only a label,” said Hu. “Public opinion guidance now carries the stigma of immorality, because netizens assumed commentators were only doing it for the money.”

He said the government is getting wiser, adjusting its strategy from online control to guidance.

“It is good they stepped down and joined the debate because people with differing opinions should learn to coexist on the Internet.”

“As technology develops, there is little room for ‘online commentators’ in the Twitter-sphere because they can’t work if nobody follows them, even if they register under many IDs. Besides, their identification is easily exposed.”

In the future, he said, people will care more about their social identity in the virtual world.

Wu Hao, deputy director of the Publicity Department of CPC Yunnan Provincial Committee, who chose not to withhold information when negative news came out, said rather than secretly trying to shape public opinion, govern-ment officials should reply to criticism and offer problem-solving ideas under their real names.

Several provinces followed Yunnan’s lead last year, appointing Internet spokesmen to answer criticism using their real names and titles, according to Southern Weekend.

In 2009, online communication between the government and the citizenry was improving, although tempers flared during some mass protests, according to the Public Opinion Monitoring Office of People’s Daily Online.

Several provincial and ministerial leaders guested on the Qiangguo Forum to communicate with netizens directly after President Hu Jintao talked to netizens via the online forum in June 2008.

China has world’s largest number of Internet users, an estimated 384 million people by the end of 2009. The online community now makes up 28.9 percent of the total population, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center in January.

Dos and Don’ts for Internet commentators

Dos:

• Be accurate, timely, and objective

• Short title and brief article

• Fast response to rumors

• Guide people, don’t simply give opinions

• Check your article on Baidu before signing up

Don’ts:

• Don’t fabricate news or copy others

• Don’t repeat the news or talk about trivial stuff like food and health

• Don’t use an authoritarian tone and talk crap

• Don’t post inappropriate comments on international or foreign affairs

• Don’t mention personal information.

Source: Training materials for Internet commentators.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7d110688-0174-11df-8c54-00144feabdc0.html

Daring blogger tests the limits

By Kathrin Hille in Beijing

Published: January 15 2010 02:00 | Last updated: January 15 2010 02:00

Han Han, China’s most popular blogger, is used to being asked how he pursues a double career as bestselling novelist and racing driver.

“Driving is safer,” he said in a recent interview with the Financial Times. “If one day they tell me, ‘you can’t write any more’, I can still make a living racing. Of course racing is safer than writing. At least it won’t land you in jail.”

But now, in the face of Google’s threat to quit the country over China’s unrelenting efforts to tighten censorship, Han Han might take such risks much more seriously.

The 27-year-old’s cheeky personal style, which he uses in his books, on his blogs and in real life, has helped him accumulate more than 306m hits on his blog, a larger online following than any other personal blog in China and probably in the world.

Last week, he apologetically told his readers that a magazine he planned to start publishing this month would be delayed.

Under the strictures of China’s current publishing system, “it now looks like the first issue won’t come out in the foreseeable future”, he said, asking both authors and readers for forgiveness.

It has long seemed like a miracle that Han Han could somehow say and write things that would get others in trouble.

He caused uproar last year when, walking past a racetrack rostrum where high-ranking officials were seated, he raised his middle finger at them – but no action was subsequently taken against him.

On his blog, he has regularly accused government or Communist party officials of corruption, without getting into trouble.

He does not mince his words. Arguing that the Communist party should establish laws to make its workings more transparent, he says: “For example, I believe China has the world’s biggest sex and gambling industries [both are banned in China], their biggest customers are maybe our Communist party members.”

Han’s secret protective shield is probably a mixture of his popularity and the fact that he never challenges the party’s supremacy in principle.

“I don’t agree with some people who call for elections and a multi-party system in China now. That is clearly not realistic,” he said.

However, there are clear signs that not challenging the big political taboos is no longer enough to guarantee being left alone.

Late last month, Hecaitou, Lian Yue and Hu Yong – three well known commentators – found that the blogs they run on foreign servers were blocked by China’s censors. While all three express criticisms in their writings, none comes close to being a dissident.

Han Han said that for him, relations with the authorities were not all that serious. “Sometimes when they tell me to take a blog post down, I take it down, and I won’t be very upset. We’re all playing a game with certain rules. As long as they let us continue playing, I think there’s no problem.”

That same principle would apply to his magazine, Han claimed just a few weeks ago. He would try to be more daring than other magazine editors but he did not plan to publish an opposition pamphlet, he said. If the censors said no to a certain story, he would just leave a white space.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.