http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/16/china-game-family-fight-demolition

China embraces web game depicting family’s fight with demolition crew

Online game inspired by real-life cases of violence between residents and wrecking gang becomes huge hit

• Tania Branigan in Beijing
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 September 2010 13.32 BST

It may lack the sophistication and addictive power of Farmville or World of Warcraft. But an online game in which a family fights off a demolition crew with slippers and bullets has hooked Chinese internet users.

The Big Battle: Nail House Versus Demolition Team has triumphed not through playability, but by tapping into widespread anger about forced relocations. “Nail houses” are the last homes left standing in areas slated for clearance, so called because they stick out when all around them have been demolished.

Owners resist because they do not want to move at all or think that compensation is unfairly low, but wrecking crews often retaliate with tactics ranging from cutting off power and water to physical violence.

Cases such as that of Tang Fuzhen, who died last year after setting fire to herself as an eviction crew beat her family, have caused outrage. Amid a growing clamour, the government issued draft rules designed to curb the worst abuses.

But the issue remains potent. Only last week, three people in Fuzhou, eastern China, were rushed to hospital in serious condition after setting fire to themselves in protest at what they said was inadequate compensation.

“This is our society. It is tiring. It is not easy to live. I don’t know how many people are like the Ding family in real life. So sad,” wrote one player.

Another added: “The game is just for entertainment, but the reality is cruel.”

In the game, Mrs Ding [Nail], still in her curlers, hurls slippers as the men approach, while Grandpa Ding prefers to fire his shotgun. It might sound improbable, but one real life farmer in Hubei province fought off workers with a homemade cannon.

Popular online gaming site 17173 said the nail-house game ranked third among last month’s top games and had been played more than 1.8m times since its launch two weeks ago. The real figure is likely to be higher since that is based on a tally of popular sites and the game has quickly been replicated across the web.

Professor Hu Yong, of Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communications, said forced demolitions had long been a hot topic, with dramatic and horrifying stories circulating in the media or online.

He added: “Forced demolition is about the conflict between governmental power and the individual’s ownership of property. Although China has a property ownership law, it has never been implemented well. People care a lot when governmental power violates an individual’s ownership because it simply can happen to anyone.

“As social conflicts increase, governmental power is getting stronger and stronger as well and a lot of people are resentful about it. That’s why such a little game can resonate among so many people.”

Players pointed out that it appeared to be impossible to win the game, because so many thugs swarm the house in the final level – a realistic touch, they thought.

“I have already got 70,000 [points] in the game but my house was still demolished. It tells us that the demolition team is not defeatable … The only thing we can do is to wait and die,” concluded one.

Additional reporting by Lin Yi

Readers’ Comments on Power to the (Blogging) People

http://www.balanceofculture.com/2010/09/blogging-and-an-au-courant-beijing-consensus.html

Banlance of culture

09/15/2010

Blogging and an au courant Beijing Consensus

From Tom Friedman’s NYT op-ed yesterday:

“China for the first time has a public sphere to discuss everything affecting Chinese citizens,” explained Hu Yong, a blogosphere expert at Peking University. “Under traditional media, only elite people had a voice, but the Internet changed that.” He added, “We now have a transnational media. It is the whole society talking, so people from various regions of China can discuss now when something happens in a remote village — and the news spreads everywhere.” But this Internet world “is more populist and nationalistic,” he continued. “Many years of education that our enemies are trying to keep us down has produced a whole generation of young people whose thinking is like this, and they now have a whole Internet to express it.”

While a more nationalistic perspective is inevitable to a certain degree during a country’s economic and social progression, we should also keep in mind that China’s younger generation is vastly more educated and globally minded than their elders. And, though free speech rights in China are still – for the most part – culturally opposed to what many of us are used to in the West (and this includes communication on the Internet), the untested newness of the “Internet factor” is perhaps what is most intriguing as we experience an au courant Beijing Consensus develop.

Posted at 09:02 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/opinion/15friedman.html?_r=1

Readers’ Comments

Rui

Victoria, BC

September 15th, 2010

10:29 am

“a whole generation of Chinese schooled by the government on the notion that the U.S. and the West want to keep China down”

Don’t be too eager to blame this belief on CPP propaganda. First of all, Chinese people nowadays can often read English and find any opinion they want on the Internet, and are loath to believe anything the Communist party says and admire the West. But the Western media and blogosphere in general are making it hard to refute this conclusion. Americans can be just as nationalistic as anyone, just witness the recent anti-Muslim protests. Secondly, I am completely educated in the West and even I believe the US and the West want to keep China down. Anyone who often reads English news on China should see my point, especially Foreign Policy. Everything is tainted by their overblown fears, which is a shame, because I think Chinese are inclined to like America. The US has China completely surrounded, has hundreds of military bases worldwide, has been continuously starting wars for decades, and still thinks China, who has not fought anybody since 1979, is the aggressive one. Basically, no one but the US is allowed to pursue their national interests. Some Americans are determined to look into the future and see an enemy in China. Wish hard enough and it might come true.

Johnny Aiello

Philadelphia

September 15th, 2010

10:32 am

Tom did not mention his “Cyber Tribe” impact—the huge Chinese diaspora, much more pro-American than the Chinese-in-China blogosphere. Within the next few years the biggest tug-of-war for China’s soul will be fought between the international host-nation Chinese (diaspora) and the origin-nation Chinese (China). In the coming age of “Global Cultures,” these battles between host-diasporas and origin-nations will be the real challenge of what each culture will represent deep into the 21st century. Some cultures will be tailor-made for the International stage as Global Cultures, some not. Since Italians invented the Global stage, look to them to have a sparkling new 21st century Renaissance! China will again have its Marco Polo.

EXPATRIATE AMERICAN

TIEN SHAN MOUNTAINS, KYRGYZSTAN

September 15th, 2010

9:38 am

No, Friedman, China still controls the people and their is little or no free speech.

There is no freedom of Religion, no right to bear arms etc. etc.

China may have many new skyscrapers that enthrall you and others—but the Government is Militantly against Real Freedom.

ecs

New York, N.Y.

September 15th, 2010

9:40 am

Sooner or later, China is going to demand regional hegemony. The Middle Kingdom shall rise again. The United States needs to seriously start thinking about what it’s really going to do when that day comes. When push comes to shove, would we really defend Taiwan all the way? Will we fight, or will we acquiesce like Great Britain acquiesced to the United States over control of the Western Hemisphere in the 1890s?

Jake Wagner

Santa Barbara, CA

September 15th, 2010

10:11 am

According to Plato’s Republic, the best form of government was not democracy, but a tyranny ruled by a benevolent philosopher king. The idea behind this was that in a democracy, the people as a whole usually don’t make terribly good decisions for themselves.

Mao Zedong was a disaster, but he was followed by a series of increasingly capable Chinese leaders, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and finally Hu Jintao, the current leader. The last two of these were trained as engineers, not as lawyers or community organizers. Chinese leaders made many decisions that stepped away from communism towards capitalism, and would have been unpopular if put to a vote. Consider the one-child policy for example. Yet these decisions have helped China prosper in the modern age.

Meanwhile the world’s most prosperous democracy has made a series of very bad decisions, many of them wildly popular with an electorate which becomes more and more poorly informed as time goes on. The US invasion of Iraq and the deregulation of US financial markets are two decisions with disastrous consequences which come to mind. Even now, neither Congress nor the president has the integrity to face genuine problems realistically. For example, we need to raise taxes to bring the looming national debt under control, as well as provide a much better safety net for America’s poor. We need to control illegal immigration, and push Mexico to take responsibility for its own poor. We need to achieve zero population growth so that we can live within the constraints imposed by a finite planet, and so forth.

Plato suggested that democracy was inherently unstable, and that instability is becoming all to apparent within the US. Meanwhile, if Friedman is right, the internet may have the opposite effect of making China more democratic, and ending its period in which Chinese decisions were made by better informed but benevolent leaders. The point is that in China this is not necessarily an improvement, as the American experience demonstrates. Nothing lasts forever. But although America’s badly functioning democracy dooms it to a period of decline, there is no guarantee that China will replace it as the dominant world power.

FH

Tokushima, Japan

September 15th, 2010

10:27 am

Living in Japan for nearly a decade, I am well aware of the imperialistic trends that dominate China. While denouncing any agression against their notion of peace, the trend is to dominate every possible “niche” of society, be it an international science committee or a political issue. While, as an example, Japan’s TV is mostly sport, cooking or quiz oriented, on a visit to China 5 years ago, I was aware of the large amount of war movies on TV that should remind the viewers that “this” was not over, even if the new tactics are smiling with peace. In my hotel in Guangju, a show room offered items for sale, with among others an almost live-size bronze statue of a storming soldier. This probably reveals a degree of uncertainty at the government level. Social unrest in the form of strikes, significantly against foreign employers are another symptom of today’s China. There is no doubt that the blogosphere will reveal more of that in the near future.

Tariq Scherer

Paris, France

September 15th, 2010

10:27 am

It’s good to hear that democratic fervour, an interest by the populace in their state and their leaders, is finding a vibrant outlet to support it. But I can only hope that this online blogosphere is more responsible than our own early forays into the online unmoderated world: the case of the drudge report comes to mind or even our most recent ethical introspection over the wikileaks documents release.

We were fortunate enough, in both cases, to have a free press, with editorial standards and codes of ethics, to then take this online fervour and translate it into an ongoing researched, sourced, and ethical political debate. But are similar safeguards available in a control-state with a locked-down traditional media establishment?

Here’s to hoping it works for the best. China has so much to offer across its diaspora and its country. At the moment, the world is only getting to see a small thumbprint of the greater picture and it would be shame if this greater China doesn’t receive the exposure it so richly deserves.

Dan

California

September 15th, 2010

10:31 am

Hopefully the nationalistic tendencies Friedman describes will be counter-balanced by the fact that the younger generation in China is much more internationalized and educated than its parents in terms of knowing more about the world (including being more exposed to Western values and ideas), visiting other countries, learning English, conducting multi-national commerce, studying abroad, practicing capitalistic business, etc. With that comes pride and confidence, but also hopefully thoughtfulness, understanding, and some degree of rationality and moderation.

HelterSkelter

Toronto

September 15th, 2010

10:38 am

As long as China continues to grow and prosper it is unlikely to display its nationalism too broadly. The danger is when times get tough and people who are used to double digit economic growth get restless. They will start to blame the government for their troubles and the government in turn will need to blame parties outside of China. Then just wait.

At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, it’s just a matter of time before China asserts itself and then all bets are off. I for one plan on having my young infant learn Mandarin.

Penny Whites

Foxboro

September 15th, 2010

10:38 am

There is a decades old myth about the US-China economic relation: Without US consumers, Chinese economy would collapse?! It wouldn’t hurt to ask this question: can most America consumers afford relative expensive stuff Made in USA? Evidently not. The matter of fact is: vast majority US consumers can only afford cheap stuff in Wal-Mart, Kmart etc. Nobody force us to buy Chinese goods. We do it ourselves.
Patriotism rarely dictates consumer behavior, Economic does.

Aamy

Germany

September 15th, 2010

10:38 am

Are you kidding me? It’s really ironic that you think the Chinese government cares what their people say and think. If they want everyone eating ice cream, then it’s vanilla for everyone. America is no different, if you want everyone to consume oil you make huge vehicles and houses.

Each and every American has the ability to make purchasing decisions at home and at work. So let’s get it done and start buying American or at least buying from pro-American democracies. Where is the patriotism in buying a Chinese drill press or a Chinese pair of shoes? Where is the patriotism in buying a non-American car? Shame on those retail companies and consumers buying pants or shirts from Pakistan when those pants and shirts can be made in America. Our troops are coming back from war and the only jobs available for them are part-time, minimum wage jobs with no benefits. We are consuming our heritage and we are loosing the war to serve the global economy with quality American made products.

Narda

Thousand oaks

September 15th, 2010

10:38 am

Ever since China rattled about making a new currency, the cat was out of the bag. They can rattle on about the dangers of Capitalism as everyone can see that greedy CEO’s gave away the store, decimated the American supply chain, and now the American people have no place to work. However, the China engine hums as American CEOs salivate at the Chinese market which can never be theirs, because China won’t let them. With a planned economy and top down control, US can never compete as we have a messy democracy with no way for long range planning because our election change our government every two years. Wither goes the United States.

Stafford Smith

Seattle

September 15th, 2010

10:38 am

Instead of making people more tolerant and international in outlook, the electronic blogosphere tends to make us more narrowly tribal. We reach out into the network, but only to those who mirror our views. I wonder what Marshall McLuhan would have said about that.

SillyValley

CA

September 15th, 2010

10:44 am

The parallels between the rise of China and Germany are troubling. If/when their bubble pops and they have a serious economic slowdown, will China turn overtly fascist? This scenario is not as far-fetched as it may sound. China is de-facto fascist in many ways, if you look at the substance of what they’re doing rather than at their “communist” label. They’re one leadership change away from becoming a pretty nasty and aggressive neighbor.

moonwell23

Albany, NY

September 15th, 2010

10:45 am

American bloggers are totally full of themselves and their self-perceived influence, why shouldn’t China’s be? If the voice of the people spoke and nobody listened, did it make a sound?

Liu

Brazil

September 15th, 2010

10:45 am

If the unfiltered message from the ambassador were as the same tone of the majority of news published in the Western media outlets related to China, soon the West will find out that it´d be indifferent to have it filtered or not by the malign Chinese media.

kat

OH

September 15th, 2010

10:52 am

Your naivete knows no bounds.

Alex K.

San Diego, CA

September 15th, 2010

11:24 am

At moments like this, the people of the developed Western democracies, the ones who purchase so many PRC-manufactured goods, would do well to remember whose serene, bloated visage is printed on every paper denomination of RMB. Boycott the PRC!

glennvirt

nj

September 15th, 2010

12:49 pm

Mr. Friedman has this rather uncanny talent for talking about trees when he is lost in the forest. This is not a Chinese phenomena. Mass (or mob) democracy is sweeping the world. It is most organized in China for some reason but it certainly exists everywhere. The Tea Party is a child of this phenomena. The blogosphere in English seems far more jingoistic than the population at large (at least I hope so). Almost like it has become an outlet for the baser instincts of people which are often suppressed in ordinary face-to-face social intercourse.

I see old-style political institutions withering in the heat of massive social networking everywhere. If early experiences in China (such as the ability of Internet chat to ostracize and punish people in the real world without any sort of trial) are a clue to the future, civilization in general is in for a bumpy ride. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the accumulation of power in China and everything to do with the tidal wave of new social interactions that no one understands or has any remote idea of how to channel.

It almost seems as if all the norms of civilization that have been painfully accumulated over thousands of years are being swept away by this technological tsunami and that the human race is going to have to relearn how to communicate in positive ways, almost from scratch.

Michael D. Houst

Barrington, NH

September 15th, 2010

12:50 pm

Hu Yong is either deluded, or is just a mouth for the Chinese government with his comment of, “China for the first time has a public sphere to discuss everything affecting Chinese citizens,”. You can’t have government censorship on one hand and freedom of speech on the other. Which leads me to beleive that he’s just another chinese shill.

Yes, the West fears China as a threat to their economic power. They’ve just surpassed the U.S. in total energy consumption; and will likely pass the U.S. in GNP in the near future.

And unlike the U.S. and Western nations, China is not saddled with a background of Judeao-Christian inhibitions to “play-nice and share”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/opinion/15friedman.html?_r=1

Op-Ed Columnist

Power to the (Blogging) People

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: September 14, 2010

Beijing

This moment was inevitable. Ever since China began to shuck off communism and turn itself into a global economic power, its leaders have followed the strategy of a “peaceful rise” — be modest, act prudently, don’t frighten the neighbors and certainly don’t galvanize any coalition against us. But in recent years, with the U.S. economic model having suffered an embarrassing self-inflicted shock, and the “Beijing Consensus” humming along, voices have emerged in China saying “the future belongs to us” and maybe we should let the world, or at least the ’hood, know that a little more affirmatively. For now, those voices come largely from retired generals and edgy bloggers — and the Chinese leadership has remained cautious. But a diplomatic spat this past summer has China’s neighbors, not to mention Washington, wondering for how long China will keep up the gentle giant act. With an estimated 70 million bloggers, China’s leaders are under constant pressure now to be more assertive by a populist- and nationalist-leaning blogosphere, which, in the absence of democratic elections, is becoming the de facto voice of the people.

The diplomatic fracas was a session of the regional forum of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, held July 23 in Hanoi. In attendance were foreign ministers of the 10 Asean members, as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi. According to one of the diplomats who sat in on the meeting, the Asean ministers took turns subtly but firmly cautioning China to back off from its decision to claim “indisputable sovereignty” over the whole resource-rich South China Sea, which stretches from Singapore to the Strait of Taiwan over to Vietnam and carries about half the world’s merchant cargo each year. Its seabed is also believed to hold major reserves of oil and gas, and lately China’s Navy has become more aggressive in seizing fishing boats alleged to have infringed on its sovereignty there. China also has been embroiled in maritime disputes with South Korea and Japan.

As one minister after another got up at the Asean meeting to assert claims in the South China Sea or argue that any territorial disputes must be resolved peacefully and in accordance with international law, the Chinese foreign minister grew increasingly agitated, according to a participant. And after Mrs. Clinton spoke and insisted that the South China Sea was an area where America had “a national interest” in “freedom of navigation,” the Chinese foreign minister asked for a brief adjournment and then weighed in.

Speaking without a text, Yang went on for 25 minutes, insisting that this was a bilateral issue, not one between China and Asean. He looked across the room at Mrs. Clinton through much of his stem-winder, which included the observation that “China is a big country” and most of the other Asean members “are small countries,” The Washington Post reported. The consensus in the room, the diplomat said, was that the Chinese minister was trying to intimidate the group and separate the territorial claimants from the nonclaimants so that there could be no Asean collective action and each country would have to negotiate with China separately.

As negative feedback from the Yang lecture rippled back to Beijing, China’s leaders seemed to play down the affair for fear that after a decade of declining U.S. influence in the region they were about to drive all their neighbors back into America’s embrace.

How much China’s leaders will be able to cool it, though, will depend, in part, on a third party: the Chinese blogosphere, where a whole generation of Chinese schooled by the government on the notion that the U.S. and the West want to keep China down, now have their own megaphones to denounce any Chinese official who compromises too much as “pro-American” or “a traitor.”

Interestingly, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing has begun to reach out to that same blogosphere — even inviting bloggers to travel in the car with the U.S. ambassador, Jon Huntsman, and interview him when he visits their Chinese province — to get America’s message out without filtering by China’s state-run media.

“China for the first time has a public sphere to discuss everything affecting Chinese citizens,” explained Hu Yong, a blogosphere expert at Peking University. “Under traditional media, only elite people had a voice, but the Internet changed that.” He added, “We now have a transnational media. It is the whole society talking, so people from various regions of China can discuss now when something happens in a remote village — and the news spreads everywhere.” But this Internet world “is more populist and nationalistic,” he continued. “Many years of education that our enemies are trying to keep us down has produced a whole generation of young people whose thinking is like this, and they now have a whole Internet to express it.”

Watch this space. The days when Nixon and Mao could manage this relationship in secret are long gone. There are a lot of unstable chemicals at work out here today, and so many more players with the power to inflame or calm U.S.-China relations. Or to paraphrase Princess Diana, there are three of us in this marriage.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on September 15, 2010, on page A35 of the New York edition.

http://amoiist.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-i-broke-jail.html

2009年8月11日 星期二

How did I break out of the jail?

Recently after I was released from jail, a lot of people frequently asked me what happened and how did I succeed to get rid of such trouble. I was too tired to answer these questions again and again, so I write the following to brief what happened on me. But as you know, some people imposed great pressure on me, so I couldn’t tell as much as possible about the case.

My story was quite dramatically interesting. More than a month ago, i.e. late June, some people from Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Provine, published some posts titled such as “Yan Xiaoling (嚴曉玲) much more miserable than Deng Yujiao (鄧玉嬌)”to a lot of forums, claiming a 25-year-old woman Yan Xiaoling  was gang raped and murdered, and alleging the men responsible with ties to some local officials. And then, I received a video in which mother of Yan Xiaoling cried and told the local authorities’ attempt to cover up the case of her daughter in Fuzhou dialect from a friend of mine. I uploaded this video to a foreign video-sharing site (www.tinypic.com) without any edits, but I didn’t realize that this video would bring me big trouble in the other day. Fuzhou police dismissed such stories, and then arrested about 6 people including me for crime of defamation. Five Mawei police (Mawei is a district of Fuzhou city) came to my company in Xiamen in the afternoon of July 15, and confiscated my computer and took my cell phone away, so I was unable to contact with any of my acquaintances until they took me to the office building of Mawei Police Bureau and put my phone on the desk in front of me so that I could take this phone at any time when the police who interrogated me didn’t notice. No one knew that I was seized except my boss who is also a friend of mine. And then, they asked me to lead them to my residential place from where they took away my laptop. A police saw my iPod Touch on bedside and asked what it was. I cheated them that it was just an ordinary MP4 player rather than a memory device, so he didn’t take it away. The police never thought this small device would become a powerful weapon.

However, I successfully made the whole world know where I was hours later. It was about 5:00am of July 16 and they had interrogated for several hours, so the police were quite tired. The police sitting opposite me felt asleep and the other one sitting behind me played games on computer so engrossed that he was unable to pay attention on me. I quickly and quietly took my phone and sent messages announcing that I had been arrested by Mawei police to Twitter in English via a twitter’s mobile web interface (www.dabr.co.uk). The messages were quickly translated back to Chinese by a Chinese user dupola and crazily retweeted by other users, and this drive also attracted international attention. With a certain popularity in Chinese blogger sphere and Twitter, the news that I was detained was quickly spread to everywhere on the Internet. Interestingly, I also had enough time to read paragraphs of an e-book with my phone until a police realized that the phone was in my hands. He grabbed the phone from my hands, but it was useless, too late.

Hours later, I was sent to the Second Detention Center of Fuzhou where I have spent a total of 16 days. And then, I didn’t know what happen out of the detention center at all, because the mails . After release, I began to know some friends of mine had organized kinds of campaigns to rescue me from some reports (1, 2). Mr. Hu Yong (胡泳), associate professor in journalism from Peking University wrote an article on South Metropolitan Daily, the most liberal newspaper in China, to defend the bloggers involved in this case. A prominent blogger and independent political commenter Michael Anti (安替) sent the first postcard and book to me, and then another well-known blogger based in Guangzhou Wen Yunchao (北風) initiated a movement called “One person one postcard, calling Guo Baofeng back for dinner”, calling for netizens to send postcards bearing words with “Guo Baofeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner” borrowed from an Internet speculation “Jia Junpeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner” to me. A twitter user (ID: digitalboy) based in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, even made a banner on his web store (www.geekcook.org) to support me and promised that he would send a T-shirt free of charge to anyone who had sent a postcard to me if he/she could send him a photo of this postcard as a proof. This movement was quite effective and hundreds of postcards flooded to the detention center, resulting in huge public opinion pressure on Mawei police. Great public anger finally forced them to release me. It’s worth to mention that the objects of postcard campaign were then expanded further to other prisoners of conscience, like Xu Zhiyong, Tan Zuoren, Huang Qi and Hu Jia, etc.(see the spreadsheet).

During these days when I was detained in the detention center, my younger sister Guo Lihua (郭利華), an undergraduate student from Xiamen University, played the key role in rescue of me. After she was told that I had been detained by Mawei police, she went to my residential place and took the name card book and iPod Touch. She sent messages to my journalist friends and friends from Twitter according to the information of name cards, telling them the news of me. With the help from my friends on Twitter (IDs: xmarden and daxa), she was told how to set up an account on Twitter as well as bank account and Paypal’s clone Alipay account for fundraising to hire a lawyer for me. She also used my iPod Touch to notify my friends from a QQ group from where she collected almost a half of donation. When I asked her how she informed my friends without knowing the password, she said the QQ app on iPod Touch memorized the password so she could automatically login and keep in touch with my friends. A Fuzhou-based friend of mine from this QQ group provided my sister great support when she went to Fuzhou to rescue me.

Finally a miracle happened on this magic land. After 16 days of detention, I was released by Mawei police. This result is desired by all people who paid attention to this case and seen as a triumph of netizens and public opinion. But what lesson can be learned from my experience? I think the most important factor is strong command of the use of Internet, especially Twitter and modern tools for communications. Can you image that if I was not an Internet user familiar with kinds of applications, or if there was no a smart phone like Blackberry 8700 or Twitter didn’t exist or its API down at that time? The result must have been quite different with now, I think. That is to say, I used Twitter to save myself and this phenomenon deserves to be discussed. Twitter is a great invention, making communications easier and much more rapid than any conventional means. For example, after I sent the SOS message and refreshed the webpage in a shorted moment, I saw the screen of my phone was full of tweets both in Chinese and English about me, making me feel confident at that moment. A Canadian friend feng37 whose real name is John Kennedy sent a direct message in the first instance saying that someone had made phone called to the lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan who defended another blogger You Jingyou, a friend of mine, involved in the same case. Moreover, all kinds of campaigns heavily relied on Twitter and all people this article mentioned have Twitter accounts. In most of time, twitter is for records of life streams, but it has been more and more used in fields related to politics, such as Iran election. In my case, it was also served as tool saving myself. Some people asked me that why not text messages to your friends or called them since I had held your phone. The reason was simple: I should not make my friends at high risk or get involved and it was bedtime. Certainly, the occasional factor is the sleeping and game playing police who created opportunity for me to touch my phone. If not, I didn’t have any chance to send messages to Twitter. I was lucky enough, because I failed to send more messages to Twitter after sending the first two messages. I thought there was signal intervention. Twitter encountered DDoS attack days ago, making nearly all API fail. There must have no such interesting stories if this condition occurred in July 16.

Twitter not only saved me, but also pushed me to the national stage even international. My name was widely known across the country, and appeared in lots of English reports (1, 2, 3, 4). Searching the tag #Amoiist on Twitter, I witness the great power of Twitter. Who will be the next lucky guy benefit from Twitter?
Posted by Peter Guo at 星期二, 八月 11, 2009

http://cmp.hku.hk/2010/09/01/7250/

China Media Project

Content » News and analysis

Tale of a murdered microblog

By David Bandurski | Posted on 2010-09-01

Since July this year there have been rumblings of change in the world of the Chinese microblog, hints that authorities are getting more active in the control of this new information medium, which allows virtual real-time sharing of information tidbits among networks of users. Last month, CMP fellow and new media expert Hu Yong (胡泳) wrote of the importance of the microblog in China. Hu’s delicate subtext was that new attempts to control the technology must not be allowed to sap it of its vitality.

The signs, it seems, are now becoming more explicit.

In a blog entry posted yesterday, Wu Danhong (吴丹红), an assistant professor at China University of Political Science and Law, who writes online under the alias “Wu Fatian” (吴法天), popped the lid on the recent death of his microblog and the censorship he endured while maintaining it over a period of five months.

Wu Danhong is perhaps best known outside legal circles in China as the man who uncovered the truth about Chinese businessman Yu Jinyong (禹晋永), who was found to have falsified his resume, and was one of a number of prominent Chinese business leaders this summer to be dragged through the muck of the Internet. Here, for example, is a recent interview (in Chinese) in which Wu Danhong talks about how he first began to suspect that Yu Jinyong had lied about his education and credentials.

For those who missed the fireworks, New Century magazine has a good run down in English of the scandals facing Yu Jinyong and others recently.

Incidentally, it was also Yu Jinyong who famously thrashed the media as the source of his troubles, saying during a press conference he called: “If I want to close the door and beat the dogs, I have to first let them into the house. So there are a lot of media with us today.”

The following is Wu Danhong’s post yesterday on the senseless murder of his microblog.

Many people already know who I am — at least since I openly exposed the frauds of Yu Jinyong. But this is only a small part of my world. I have spent fifteen years studying the law, and I have been on the Internet for twelve years already. The Internet has become an important space in which I share my ideas about rule of law.

In the past, I was quite preoccupied with my academic work, a young scholar who scarcely lifted his head to see what was happening in the real world. Every year I wrote academic papers, and only every so often did I write more casual essays. Letters from two death-row inmates ultimately shook me out of my quiet and complacent life.

Both inmates wrote to me after reading editorials I had written for the Legal Daily and the Procuratorate Daily. They described the wrongful aspects of their cases and hoped that I could offer my assistance. I was unable to help them, but their appeals did make me recognize that legal scholars had an obligation to share their knowledge and ideas with society at large, and that perhaps this is a far more important business than the writing of academic papers. Here is how I put it in the preface to Profiles in the Law:

In academia, should we or should we not turn our attention more to real and living things of concern? Indeed, the bulk of our academic work is shared within the community of legal scholarship. But commentaries and editorials can reach a much larger audience, helping more people understand the concepts of democracy and rule of law, and giving them an experience of fairness, justice and conscience.

Ever since I began practicing law part time and writing a blog in 2005, my writings have circled around one idea, or one hope — “that one day those who observe the law will not be alone and isolated, that those who break the law will live in fear, that the law enforcement process can promise fair trials and give us a society in which justice prevails.”

It was by happenstance that I registered on Sina Microblog on April 5, 2010, and began my days as a microblogger. As a Web-based information tool allowing rapid connection with groups of people through bits of information, the microblog allows great ease of communication.

But my optimism about microblogging came with underlying reservations too. Back in April I wrote on my microblog: “The rise of the microblog has revolutionary significance for freedom of speech in China. On this platform through which everyone can become a ‘journalist,’ information controls are already rendered powerless, and hundreds of millions of Internet users are pushing their way into the future through a society that has already become rotten. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, the communication technology of the microblog will develop and replace traditional media. The biggest unknown factor is when the government will step in to muzzle the power of this wild horse surging forward.”

In fact, controls on the microblog were already evident as I expressed the above sentiment. Another professor at China University of Political Science and Law, Xiao Han (萧瀚), a colleague of mine and someone who dares to speak the truth openly, had already been “reincarnated” some thirty times — he would move his microblog to another account for a while before that one would be shut down. But for those users registering accounts in their real names, there had not yet been a precedent in which a microblog was completely shut down.

August 28 marked the one-year anniversary of the launch of Sina Microblog. To commemorate the day, I wrote a record of my experiences with my Sina Microblog being blocked and deleted. My intention was to gift Sina with a certificate of merit, or a silk banner of honor, if you will, thanking their management personnel for their arduous work in deleting posts and blocking service, for their contributions toward a harmonious society. But this pleasantry of mine ultimately unleashed the pent-up displeasure these management personnel felt towards me. Without any prior notice whatsoever, the posting function on my microblog was made subject to item-by-item review, and all subsequent posts were blocked.

But it seems this matter was not so simple as it appeared on the surface.

On August 29, after the attack on Fang Chouzi (方舟子), there was quite a stir on the Internet. Many people wondered why I had not responded to express my support for Fang. They had no idea I could no longer make posts.

On August 30, my response and comments functions were set to item-by-item review by management personnel, and I found later that my responses were not being posted at all. I was entirely unable to respond or comment.

On August 31, my personal photograph and bio were deleted by Sina Microblog management personnel, and I received no prior notice whatsoever about this. I attempted to make contact with managers, and one manager told me that this wasn’t their decision, but was “the intention up top” (上面的意思). I said my microblog had contained nothing at all that could be construed as illegal or reactionary. He said my posts had probably dealt too much with current politics (时政内容太多). I said I focused mostly on legal issues, and can you guess what he said? He said, “The law is also current politics.”

On the night of August 31, I discovered that not only were my microblog followers not growing, but they were in fact falling in number. I watched them fall from 9,958 to 9,952. When I asked my friends about this, they said I had already been marked as “forbidden” (禁止关注), so it was no longer possible for others to follow me. A few of my friends were skeptical. They un-followed me and then attempted to add me again — but this was impossible.

This is how Sina Microblog has managed to thoroughly kill me off. 9,957, 9,956, 9,955 . . . Before long, all of my Sina Microblog followers will vanish.

In the last day or so, I’ve tried many time to get the news out, but all of my posts have been deleted by Web managers. If other microblogs attempt to post my content they too are deleted. A reporter from Youth Times approached Sina Microbog on my behalf and was told that all this was because “large amounts of language attacking the government had been posted” (发表大量攻击政府的言论).

In truth, it’s difficult to find anything among my posts that attacks the government. If they said that I had attacked Tang Jun (唐骏), Yu Jinyong (禹晋永), Li Yi (李一) and Dong Siyang (董思阳) then I would have to confess. I’ve spent a great deal of energy exposing their frauds. But do they represent the government?