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http://tim.z.infzm.com/2010/03/06/%E8%AF%84%E8%AE%BA%E7%BF%BB%E8%AF%91%EF%BC%9Athe-chinese-internet-industry-will-thrive-only-if-it-respects-individuals%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8/

Hu Yong: The Chinese Internet industry will thrive only if it respects individuals

魏一帆　更新于2010年03月6日

Domain registration is not suitable for continued use as a control. Rather it should be treated purely as a plan for civil rights. There should be no limits on the qualifications of those who register for domain names… The current laws and regulations restricting basic registration are too strict. They are not beneficial for the expansion of the dot-cn system, nor are they in synch with the basic characteristics of the Internet world wide––openness and equality.

The Chinese Internet industry will thrive only if it respects individuals

By guest commentator Hu Yong [胡泳]

In just a short two months, the dot-cn domain has been on a roller coaster ride.  First, it was cited as an accomplice in providing pornographic material as nine government departments cooperated in an anti-pornography campaign on cell phones. It was also determined that China National Network Information Center (CNNIC), which is the only organ allowed to register domestic domain names, did not strictly enforced the real-name review system [to ensure the true identities of dot-cn domain name holders]. In essence, it made it rather easy to operate obscene sexual websites. Since CNNIC had to provide proof of its innocence, it declared that as of December 14, 2009 when applying for dot-cn domain registration, formal application materials must be provided. This includes the original domain name application with an official seal, a photocopy of the business license, and a photocopy of the identification card of the applicant.

These measures have been universally understood as a suspension of individual dot-cn domain name registrations, but this understanding is not correct at all. Even though individuals have always registered these names, the system has never recognized this kind of “registration.” Citizens have never been granted the legal opportunity to register dot-cn domains.  Now as CNNIC rectifies its management, it is merely reiterating and strictly enforcing existing regulations.

So is there no cause for criticism of CNNIC?  Of course there is. The year end rectification of CNNIC’s domain names has been satirized as a kind of violent demolition of the Internet, which is not an unreasonable description. One manifestation of this “violence” is when dot-cn domain names were being promoted domestically this year. CNNIC not only used the banner of patriotism, it also encouraged domain registration companies to enter into a price war, even urging them not to balk at launching a so-called “The one yuan domain name campaign for all people and the national domain name launching plan.” The results of the promotion were startling: dot-cn domains quickly rose from 1000 to 13 million. But during the promotion, didn’t CNNIC know that regulations prohibited individual registrations for dot-cn domains? After these individual operators had already become an enormous group, CNNIC made another statement saying that, in fact, individual domain registrations have never been permitted in the system and must be strictly dealt with. This is like building a large department store and after using all kinds of means to solicit a large number of tenants, the department store suddenly announces that its contract with the store owners is illegal.

For whatever reason, CNNIC had been operating illegally for a long time but now this has effectively strangulated the life out of Internet entrepreneurship. Not only are individuals unable to register dot-cn domain names, even registered users will be subjected to inspection. There can be only one kind of grave consequence: Internet users will vote with their feet to escape the “violent demolition,” taking their business abroad. At the turn of the new year international domain name registration in China has suddenly exploded and dot-cn names have reduced dramatically.

Websites and users leaving en masse has created enormous pressure on CNNIC, forcing it to rethink its domain name policy. It announced new regulations just days ago: individual or unincorporated organization domain name holders must provide the registrant’s personal identification and valid contact information. Though such a simple sentence does not mean dot-cn domain names will once again embrace individual users, at least it recognizes the legality of previous individual dot-cn domain name holders.

Moreover, media reports state CNNIC is currently researching draft plans to open personal registration of domain names. Despite the vacillation and disorganization of CNNIC’s policies which have caused Internet users to adopt a wait and see attitude, the wild fluctuation between the extremes of saying they will take it over completely to saying it will be wide open has had a grave impact on the reputation of dot-cn domains. However, CNNIC has begun to get back on the right track. It is using good intentions to consider the personal interests of the 384 million Chinese Internet users, 13 million dot-cn domain name users and the 3 million websites under dot-cn domains which have been removed from the Internet. This is worth encouraging.

Dot-cn represents the top level domain name of China around the world. It is the trademark of China on the Internet. This trademark ought to be owned by every Chinese person. Domain registration is not suitable for continued use as a control. Rather it should be treated purely as a plan for civil rights. There should be no limits on the qualifications of those who register for domain names. Even if problems arise because of this, it is a bit like finding mouse droppings in your soup. You can’t give up eating altogether because of this. Besides, the current laws and regulations restricting basic registration are too strict. They are not beneficial for the expansion of the dot-cn system, nor are they in synch with the basic characteristics of the Internet world wide––openness and equality.

If we make a comprehensive survey of the history of the development of the Internet, we will find that the vast majority of websites around the world are built and operated by individuals. The influence of the Internet expressed in today’s global society is tied up with the convergence of efforts on the part of countless individuals. It can be said that individuals are the soul of the Web. Without them, there is no Internet. For this reason, in the wake of an unusual shake up of dot-cn domain names, we hope CNNIC can absorb this lesson and respect individuals and every Chinese Internet user even more. This is not just a kind of civilized or elitist respect, but even more so it is a necessary precondition for developing Chinese Internet industries and is directly related to the long term and overall interests of our nation.

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NOTE: This is a translation of an editorial which first appeared in Southern Weekly on January 21, 2010. The original can be found here.

http://cmp.hku.hk/2010/04/22/5688/

Hu Yong: Disaster Relief Shouldn’t Be Hyped

Posted on 2010-04-22

CMP fellow and Peking University professor Hu Yong writes in today’s Southern Metropolis Daily about the need to be clear about the differences between “charity” and social responsibility. Hu also criticizes the way Chinese media have become obsessed with keeping running scoreboards of donation amounts from companies and public figures in China.

“[W]e cannot possibly estimate the effect the strength and spirit of those affected by the disaster has had on us,” he writes. “So perhaps it is more appropriate to talk not about what we have given, but about what we have received.”

Disaster causes us all to feel that we live in an entirely different world. In the face of disaster, we all feel we must do something. In the aftermath of the May 12, 2008, earthquake in Sichuan, China’s open humanitarian attitude, courage and determination won the respect of the world. Now, once again, the earthquake in Yushu has stirred people’s hearts. The evening charity event on China Central Television on April 20 raised a total of 2.17 billion yuan, surpassing the 1.5 billion yuan taken in during the 2008 event that followed the Sichuan quake.

This show of broad concern is certainly moving. But we can also glean from these disaster relief efforts a taste of just how things have changed.

First of all, the attitude of the people and enterprises making donations has been “mixed with sand” (掺了沙子), so to speak. If you look carefully, you can see that some companies seem less attentive to the plight of those affected by the disaster than they are mindful of the opportunity to do a bit of public relations.

I use this word “seem” because there is no way to know whether they are genuine or not. But we saw with the Sichuan earthquake that it was the donors with star power that dominated the television lens, and no one was very interested in the rest. This time, companies doing their bit for the disaster relief effort are making a point of employing smart business strategies to demonstrate their “selfless” regard for the victims.

In both disaster relief efforts, we saw the media putting up donation scoreboards, thereby putting a lot of pressure on companies. The amount of money companies put up for relief efforts has become a test of how much they are willing to give back to society.

These scoreboards are updated daily and always changing, demanding the attention of anyone who cares about the donation effort. Who’s given more, and who’s given less. Who has stepped up in the rankings, and who has come down. These have become a focus of our attention.

We should understand that if we treat donors differently according to “who’s given more and who’s given less,” this will inevitably do harm to the sense of care and solicitude that donors feel. If these rankings continue to spoil the media with selfishness, the danger is that these “public instruments” will degenerate into snobbish tools “forcing charity” on others.

As for “forcing charity,” Web users have a lot to answer for themselves. In the face of large-scale disasters, people naturally find it hard to keep cool heads — there’s nothing remiss about that. But there are times when we see emerge a kind of “tyranny of the majority.” In the wake of the May 12, 2008, Sichuan earthquake, the Chinese public went on a moral crusade, which we saw in the so-called “Donation Gate” involving China Vanke, which was seen as having donated too little, while Wanglaoji Pharmaceutical was praised for its generosity. The prevailing ethic throughout all of this was force and pressure.

Whether or not public figures donate money, and how much, has been put under the spotlight. Yao Ming, Zhang Ziyi and other full-fledged stars have all been subjected to a game by which we decide their hero status on the basis of how much they donate.

In the midst of the Yushu relief effort, this game has once again prepossessed Internet users in China. Who is giving more — private enterprises or state-owned enterprises? Chinese companies or international ones? Why aren’t industry monopolies giving more money? And these rough-handed property development companies of ours — what are they up to? The stars, the rich, the prominent — where do they stand?

This whole process exposes our tendency as a people to set moral benchmarks too high. It’s not bad for a person to act as a selfless sage, but we cannot point to sainthood as the basic standard to which all people must adhere.

The end result of setting such impossible standards is not the general improvement of society, but rather greater hypocrisy and repression. This is a lesson the Cultural Revolution has already taught us.

There are a few distinctions we need to be clear about. First, social responsibility and charity are not the same thing. In the midst of disaster, we’ve seen many companies making donations, and that is their social responsibility. Bearing an appropriate degree of social responsibility is a basic bottom line for any company’s survival. But we have to separate this social responsibility from charity.

When foreign business owners make contributions to a cause, their means of doing so differs clearly from what we see in China. When they announce the amount of their donation, they make clear whether the donation is made in the name of a foundation (set up by the owner, with private funds), privately, or in the name of the company. In the first instances, the act can understood as charity.

By contrast, the vast majority of mainland companies are announcing the amounts of corporate donations. As I understand it, some even announce combined amounts comprising monies donated by the company itself and donations contributed from individual employees. Setting aside the contributions from employees, these corporate donations can be construed as acts of social responsibility. They are meant to make a favorable public impression, and the companies can count on social returns — although I would encourage them not to focus overly on what they get in return. Charity, on the other hand, arises out of my own personal moral convictions, and it cannot be done out of consideration for what I might get in return — lest it become hypocrisy.

Secondly, relief efforts made in good faith must not be subject to hype. To those companies who take part in the relief effort principally out of consideration for positive publicity, we must ask: in a normal market environment, companies are for-profit entities, but in the event of a disaster, can we not for a moment suspend market rules?

Third, donations should be made not out of duress exercised with enmity against those who have, but should instead be an act of gratitude. Disaster relief donations should come from a willingness to help. What we need from everyone at such a time as this is earnestness and care, regardless of how big or small a company is, or how rich or poor a person is.

As for those of us individuals who donate, we can make concrete calculations about how much material help we have provided to the victims of this disaster. But we cannot possibly estimate the effect the strength and spirit of those affected by the disaster has had on us. So perhaps it is more appropriate to talk not about what we have given, but about what we have received.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2009-04/14/content_7673939.htm

Stumbling blogs

By Mu Qian (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-14 07:44

Although more than 100 million Chinese people have blogs, Wang Xiaofeng, one of the most famous Chinese bloggers of all, claims this will become less and less popular in the next few years.

Wang bases his conclusion on the fact the blogs are no longer a novelty and the lack of profit-making opportunities on blog websites.

“A blog is not commercially valuable. It is just a place for graffiti,” he says.

Wang started his first blog in 2004, when it was becoming popular in China thanks to Muzi Mei, a young woman who made herself famous by writing a blog about her various sexual experiences.

Like most Chinese bloggers, Wang tried several websites but was not satisfied with their service and censorship and opened his independent blog www.wangxiaofeng.net in May 2006.

With his humorous, sometimes cynical comments on pop culture and Chinese society, Wang’s blog is now one of the most visited independent blogs in China, with an average of 35,000 daily hits. Together with RSS (Really Simple Syndication), he estimates that about 60,000 people read his blog every day.

His blog gets even more readers than many magazines but Wang says only one company has so far paid to advertise on his site.

“The content and readers of blogs are very mixed, so it is hard to achieve a good advertising effect. That’s OK for me. I don’t want my blog to become commercial and a burden for me,” says Wang, who is a full-time journalist at the Sanlian Life Weekly.

If bloggers are not concerned about their commercial value, it is vital for the websites. After five or six years, some of the first ones are bankrupt or shifting direction.

www.blogcn.com has changed its name from “China Blog” to “Bo Shang”, a made-up word that incorporates “blog” and “fashion”, indicating its changing focus.

There have been reports about the collapse of www.bokee.com, the first blog website in China. Its founder, Fang Xingdong, denies its imminent demise but admits that the company is undergoing a strategic contraction and the number of its employees has dived from 200-plus in 2005 to about 30 now.

Fang founded the site in 2002, when he saw its great business potential but, like most of his competitors, Bokee has not had enough advertising income to support itself. This predicament became even more acute when Web portals like www.sina.com began to build blog channels in 2005 and when investment dived in the ongoing financial crisis.

“We have walked along a zigzag road in the commercialization of blogs. What we want to do now is reduce our running costs and live through the downturn,” Fang says.

He complains that not enough Chinese blogs have valuable content and that most are just used to entertain.

Hu Yong, an associate professor at Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication, believes the entry of Web portals into the blog market played a key role in the popularization of a medium first used by IT professionals but is also behind many of the difficulties experienced by blog websites.

Fang says one remedy would be to separate so-called “elite blogs” and “grassroots blogs”. www.bokee.com could focus on the former, to influence “opinion leaders and the media”; www.blogchina.com, formerly a part of www.bokee.com, could take care of “the community plus online games,” he suggests.

“I’m still optimistic about the future of blogs and I’m prepared to engage in a protracted war,” he says.

According to the 23rd Statistical Report on Internet Development in China, released by the China Internet Network Information Center in January, 54.3 percent of Chinese netizens or 162 million people were using blogs by the end of last year.

However, the report also showed that only 35.2 percent were updated within six months, meaning that most bloggers were not at all active.

Many of the first batch of bloggers have packed up. For example, Zhu Yanlin, a Shanghai saleswoman who began blogging in 2003, has not updated hers since 2006.

“At first I felt quite excited about my blog and updated it every day,” she says. “After a while I began to update it every few days, then every few weeks, every few months, until I didn’t write at all and even forgot my password!

“When I look back at my blog, it was very pretentious. Everyone has some inclination toward exhibitionism and voyeurism, and these appear in people’s blogs.”

On the other hand, Huang Jiashi, a 28-year-old newspaper editor from Nanjing, has been blogging since 2004 and says her day is not complete unless she has updated hers.

“I seem to have become obsessive,” she admits. “The blog is a record of my life. I can now check my old ones and see what I was doing on this day in all those years. Almost every person in my office has a blog. We have links to each other and often comment on each other’s blogs. For me, blogging is a way of communication and a part of my life.”

For Wang, who has published two collections of blog essays, blogging has changed his life. “When I share something fun in my life with others, I am chewing the cud of the fun. Doing this every day, I find that life is not that boring,” he says.

Blogging has also changed his writing style.

“In the past, writing was like wrestling for me, but since I began blogging I’ve been more relaxed while writing,” he says. “It has also widened my scope of writing and restructured my mind.”

Associate professor Hu believes Chinese people are more enthusiastic bloggers than those in Western countries because it offers an important outlet that traditional Chinese media fail to provide.

“It will exist for a long time,” he insists. “Because of people’s need to express themselves and the revolutionary nature of blogging. New technology keeps emerging but blogs still have their place.”

(China Daily 04/14/2009 page18)

http://cmp.hku.hk/2010/02/23/4583/

Hu Yong: government should speed up crisis response

by Hu Yong

CMP fellow Hu Yong (胡泳) argues in an editorial in today’s Southern Metropolis Daily that the government should speed-up its response to public crises and sudden-breaking incidents.

The editorial begins:

Public crises, or sudden-breaking social incidents, are common rather than rare occurrences in a China fraught with tensions and contradictions. We have seen far too many examples in recent years, and these were not so much cases in which the situation itself was explosive, but rather cases where slowness of government response created substantial problems and difficulties.

Not long ago, People’s Daily Online’s Public Opinion Testing Center (人民网舆情监测室) raised the principal of a “golden four hours” (黄金4小时) in dealing with sudden-breaking events, and this was clear-sighted in terms of time frames in dealing with crisis management . . .

http://cmp.hku.hk/2010/04/10/5411/

Hu Yong: A “Special Internet Zone” is a Frosty Joke

by Hu Yong

CMP fellow and Peking University professor Hu Yong (胡泳), one of China’s leading experts on the Internet and new media, pens his own response in Southern Metropolis Daily today to the recent suggestion by several top Internet executives that a “Special Internet Zone” should be created in the southern hub of Shenzhen.

Hu Yong is clearly opposed to the idea of “special zones” for China’s Internet sector, which some have suggested might be necessary to encourage competitiveness within the industry in an environment of rigorous Internet controls. This issue, obviously, is related to the extended Web crackdown in China through last year, and to Google’s recent departure from the mainland.

Sina.com founder and Dianji CEO Wang Zhidong responded: “All along, Shenzhen has had the special zone culture in its veins. In a national context it might be very difficult to resolve the contradiction between the current regulatory approach [to the Web] and [the needs of] Internet innovation, but as a special zone couldn’t Shenzhen become a test case?”

If I hadn’t seen this report on paper and in black ink with my very own eyes, I might have thought it was an April Fools Day joke — and a frosty joke at that.

. . . What we hope, and the most ideal situation, would be the creation of many competing [technology] enterprises overseen by a transparent supervisory mechanism. Supported by good critical citizens, these factors would constitute an optimal force capable of making China’s Internet flexible and responsive in service of the public interest. This work cannot be accomplished by the creation of one or two “special zones” . . .