http://www.cjr.org/feature/chinas_chess_match.php?page=all

Feature — November / December 2010 Columbia Journalism Review

China’s Chess Match

How the web has empowered the people

By Howard W. French

Early in 2003, like millions of other migrants of his generation, Sun Zhigang, a young graphic designer, left central China, where he had attended university, and headed for the country’s booming industrial Southeast. His quest: work, and with luck, fortune.

When he entered an Internet café one evening, shortly after his arrival in Guangzhou, he was stopped by police who demanded to see his ID, which he had left behind in his nearby apartment. It was a costly mistake. The police had just launched a large-scale dragnet of illegal migrants, and as was common at the time for people without papers, he was promptly hauled off to detention.

Three days later, Sun Zhigang’s family was informed of his death, which the police claimed had been caused by a heart attack. But the Southern Metropolis Daily, a local tabloid that was just establishing itself as a powerful crusading force in the country’s news landscape, would not let the story end there. A few weeks later, it ran a two-page spread that put a far more sinister spin on the incident. Citing a confidential autopsy report, its bold headline read: UNIVERSITY GRADUATE, 27, SUDDENLY DIES THREE DAYS AFTER DETENTION ON GUANGZHOU STREET.

Word of Sun’s death spread rapidly, so rapidly that what ensued was without precedent in China. Within two hours of the newspaper hitting the street, thousands of people from around the country had posted angry commentary on Sina.com, China’s largest news portal. What would quickly become known nationwide as the “Sun Zhigang case” had begun to go viral.

After its initial scoop, the Southern Metropolis Daily was banned from reporting further on the incident, but old-fashioned censorship measures like this would prove too little, too late. Online discussion of the case was already mushrooming, and so was the scope of debate, which began with calls for justice in one particular tragedy but quickly led to far broader demands for legal reforms to put an end to the arbitrary detentions and other abuses routinely suffered by hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers.

In June, with the Sun Zhigang case still the talk of the Internet, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao announced an end to regulations that police had used for two decades to summarily detain paperless migrants in hundreds of detention centers, which were maintained around the country solely for this purpose.

Beijing has never acknowledged the public fury and Internet mobilization around the Sun Zhigang case as the driver of this major reform, but for most of China’s Internet-savvy public, the connection was unmistakable.

Looking back, China’s Internet era could well be said to have begun with this case. Not literally, of course, since China had been online already for several years. But the outcry over Sun Zhigang’s death is widely seen in China nonetheless as the opening act in the age of the “netizen.” In a country whose populace has been treated as subjects far more than as citizens throughout its history, the emergence of the Internet as a platform for dramatically freer speech, for edgy popular mobilization, for protest and dissent, has arguably given the Communist Party its most serious challenge in controlling the country’s politics since the Tiananmen Square massacre.

At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, it has also given rise to naïve optimism in the West about the transformative power of information technology. Early on, this optimism caused some, including as prominent a figure as Bill Clinton, to predict that the power of the Internet would irrevocably lead to the democratization of China.

Even while they reject views like these as unrealistic, many analysts of Chinese affairs nonetheless see the story of the medium’s rise there as one of the most important drivers of change in what all by now recognize as one of the world’s fastest-changing societies. They caution, however, that like China itself today, this story is immensely complex, and is unlikely to conform to the scenarios either of the country’s control-obsessed rulers or of those who yearn for a swift democratic transformation of China’s politics.

To understand both the power and the limitations of the Internet under a resolutely authoritarian system of government, it helps to fast-forward from 2003 and the Sun Zhigang case to 2009, to a case that would become just as celebrated as that of the dead migrant worker: the story of Deng Yujiao, a twenty-one-year-old hotel waitress from Hubei Province.

The hotel where Deng worked doubled as one of this increasingly freewheeling country’s countless one-stop spas that offer everything from traditional karaoke, hot baths, and haircuts, to massage and a full menu of sexual services.

When a local Communist Party official who was entertaining friends at the spa took a liking to Deng and demanded sex with her, she refused and was assaulted. Rather than give in to the man’s demands, Deng fought back with a pedicure knife and stabbed her assailant, killing the official and injuring one of his friends. She then called the police herself and calmly awaited their arrival.

Word of the incident traveled fast, initially following much the same pattern as the Sun Zhigang killing, with newspapers picking up the story and local propaganda officials banning further coverage, only to see the news spread like wildfire on the Internet.

Many analysts say the matter might have gradually tapered off and disappeared were it not for what has come to be seen as a signal act in the emergence of an important new force in online activism: the investigative blogger.

Raising money online to conduct his own investigation, a blogger who goes by the name “Tu Fu” made his way into the mental institution where Deng Yujiao had been confined. His photographs of Deng strapped to a bed are widely credited with redoubling public outrage over her treatment.

Huge numbers of what are now universally known here as wang min, or netizens, proclaimed their support for the young woman, demanded that murder charges against her be dropped, and in some cases urged a crackdown on the sex industry or greater protection for its many workers.

Almost overnight, Deng Yujiao became a national figure, and a hero to many. A slogan popular among many women proclaimed: “Anyone could become a Deng Yujiao.”

As with the Sun Zhigang case, with the ever-sensitive anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre fast approaching, Beijing tried to quash news and discussion of the official’s killing and its aftermath. “Hubei’s case concerning Deng Yujiao has been under judicial investigation in accordance with the law, and news organizations should halt following up the case temporarily and call back journalists working in Hubei immediately,” read an order issued by the central government’s propaganda authorities a little over two weeks after the incident.

Soon afterward, though, the murder charges against the waitress were downgraded, and Deng, though convicted of the lesser charge of excessive force, was freed. Once again, there would be no government acknowledgment of the role of public opinion, but for millions of Chinese people the impact of the outcry on the web was again unmistakable. “Netizens and other grass-roots forces in cases like Deng Yujiao’s are particularly effective in reaching the masses when the government suffers a credibility crisis,” said Tu Fu, whose real name is Wu Gan, in an interview with the South China Morning Post. “The government is supposed to do what the public expects them to do, and we only hope they do better. The problem is that there never used to be a proper channel or platform for communication, and now the Internet can serve that purpose.”

A great deal changed in China between Sun Zhigang and Deng Yujiao. Most notably, the number of regular Internet users had risen to over 300 million from less than 70 million. The use of advanced mobile phones, often capable of surfing the web at high speeds, had also grown in parallel leaps and bounds, becoming nearly universal in the country’s increasingly affluent big cities.

Along with these developments, a new generation of savvy, highly networked Chinese came of age. Very often, they were no longer content to use these new technologies for the simple voicing of opinions. More and more, China’s netizens were coming together to press demands for justice and meaningful change.

The resourceful ways that Chinese netizens have responded to the social injustices that surround them and to the limitations of their country’s carefully censored press, and indeed the sheer pace of change in this world, highlight one of the fundamental complexities of characterizing the situation of expression in China. For instance, it is becoming ever clearer that China’s online community is providing a more robust example of the full potential and sheer relevance of what we call the “citizen journalist” than exists in many rich, liberal societies. This, despite the fact of determined, even stern political control of the press that is often emphasized in the West.

In the space of a few weeks, Deng Yujiao became perhaps the most vivid illustration of this trend, and arguably its greatest beneficiary. Where Sun Zhigang had already died before the public ever became aware of him, the young hotel waitress was absolved. To be indicted for a crime in China almost always leads to conviction, and historically there have been few surer routes to execution than to be accused of murdering a Communist Party official. With the loud backing of her online supporters, though, Deng had proverbially beaten city hall.

And yet examined more carefully, the era between these two prominent cases—or what might be seen as act one in an unfolding online power struggle between citizen and state—has been far from one of unmitigated gains for the public. This can be seen both in the nature of the two cases themselves, and in a host of steps the Chinese government has taken to try to stay ahead of the game and to cede as little ground as possible to online activism.

While the Sun Zhigang case appears to have forced the state’s hand in introducing a major legal reform involving migrant labor, by comparison, in retrospect, the Deng Yujiao case looks more like an emotionally satisfying one-off with little in the way of weighty political resonance. “When it comes to the rights of people who are advocating systemic change, or who are engaging in extremely unpopular speech, or who are expressing certain religious views, or speaking about the independence of this or that place, these people have no more rights than they did ten years ago,” says Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “Deng Yujiao shows the small stuff may have changed, but the big stuff, absolutely not.”

Although often ham-handed and sometimes subject to tactical about-faces, government tactics include forcing smart-phone users to submit to real-name registration, making anonymous speech difficult, and the insertion of monitoring devices and software into computers and into network gear. And while it is clear that Beijing does not wish to see a proliferation even of simple, narrow cases like these, Chinese authorities have demonstrated a remarkable capacity for learning lessons from major online incidents, and for responding with tactical flexibility. This includes measures, collectively known as the “soft-management approach,” that range from offering hush money to get people to take their complaints offline to paying web users to toe a pro-government line in order to steer debate.

From time to time, propaganda authorities even issue progressive-sounding rhetoric about the utility of the Internet (and other media) as vehicles for “supervising” governing authorities, and keeping them on the straight and narrow. Rhetoric like this can sound remarkably similar to talk in the United States about the role of a Fourth Estate, but what the propaganda authorities have in mind is a Fourth Estate with uniquely Chinese characteristics. In Beijing’s iteration, freer Internet speech and online activism can be useful tools in checking excessive corruption and official abuses of power, under the right circumstances. As such, they may even paradoxically reinforce the legitimacy of the authoritarian state.

Early last year, for example, the death in detention of a peasant in southwestern Yunnan Province sparked an Internet furor that threatened to take on similar proportions to the Sun Zhigang case. In a tactic that is becoming increasingly common, provincial officials launched an online appeal for netizens to help investigate the case. Officials eventually invited several netizens, including some of the most vociferous online critics of the police, to tour the detention center and speak with the warden. This would-be display of openness was played up heavily in the press and the bloggers eventually released a report saying they knew too little to place blame squarely on the police, quickly taking the wind out of the Internet campaign around the incident.

At the same time, Beijing frequently exercises the right to step in aggressively whenever an Internet campaign becomes too popular or too outspoken, or touches on matters deemed too sensitive. Lines are drawn firmly around certain topics: Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen have long been on the list. Similarly, petitioning or criticism of local governments is sometimes tolerated, while criticism of the central government, its politics and personalities, remains strictly and energetically policed.

“The Sun Zhigang case represents the start of a Chinese, Internet-based civil society,” says Yong Hu, a professor at Peking University who is widely regarded as one of the country’s leading authorities on the web. “The Chinese government became aware of this incident’s symbolic importance and has used its power to influence the course of the Internet. Since then, there has never been such an effective case of Chinese citizen solidarity, and some believe this is a result of the government working very hard to make sure that Internet movements don’t take on a more continuous presence.”

Zheng Yongnian, a political scientist at the National University of Singapore who specializes in the Chinese Internet, says that Beijing has demonstrated an impressive capacity for adaptation, having started out from a position where the Internet was largely seen as mainly a political liability and evolving to a position today where it is increasingly seen as an important tool of government. “In the West, people in the scholarly community associate the Internet with democracy,” he says. “But one should never underestimate the ability of this government to absorb this technology.”

For all of the government’s success in preventing challenges to the system, others say that the very ecology of the Internet has changed greatly since the Sun case in ways that will dramatically raise the stakes for the government. In parallel, many of these analysts say that Chinese society is itself evolving rapidly in ways that favor greater outspokenness on the part of its citizens, and much greater interaction and social organization. Combined with the fast-shifting technological landscape, these trends have made sensational incidents on the Internet both more frequent and increasingly difficult to predict. “The Sun case was in the web 1.0 era, in which the government only needed to control portals and bulletin boards,” says Yong. “Since then, we have entered the 2.0 era, with a proliferation of blogs, with social media, and with SMS [text messaging]. These are a lot harder to control and it is difficult to say who will be successful in the future. That’s the big question mark.”

By 2006, blogs had come into their own in China, spreading rapidly and becoming an important part of the business model of the country’s huge Internet portals, or web hosting firms, companies like Sina.com, Sohu, and Netease. Suddenly, a control-obsessed state was faced not only with a popular new means for the dissemination of news, but equally important, an unprecedented platform for the emergence of independent opinion leaders. Typically, these are bloggers who build large followings and become trusted because of their perceived expertise in a given area, or because of their knack for countering the prevailing, government-driven narrative.

China’s most prominent blogging opinion leader is Han Han, a twenty-eight-year-old high-school dropout from Shanghai with movie star looks and a habit of posing witty and trenchant challenges to authority. Ai Weiwei, another hugely popular blogger and one of China’s most prominent and politically engaged artists, recently compared Han Han with the country’s most totemic author of the twentieth century. “Han is more influential than Lu Xun,” he told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, “because his writing can reach more people.”

Given the size of China’s online audience, which is roughly 400 million and still rising fast, Han Han could also be the world’s most popular blogger—his 425 million cumulative hits place him at the top of Sina.com’s rankings.

At his best, Han Han’s posts operate at a level of sly and wicked subversion, if not of the law then of China’s often oppressive conventions in social and political thought, and especially of the government line. One of the best recent examples of this has come in the mounting dispute that has pitted China against Japan over the question of the ownership of the Diaoyu Islands, a tiny cluster in the East China Sea, following the arrest by the Japanese Coast Guard of a Chinese fishing-boat captain.

Beijing has played a complicated hand in the matter, ardently fanning the embers of nationalism in the state-controlled press, while carefully censoring Internet discussion of the issue with an eye toward preventing big demonstrations in the streets and other mass mobilization, which the state fears could get out of control.

With the crisis with Japan deepening, Han Han mercilessly probed the contradictions in the government’s position while warning his followers of the dangers of manipulation by the state. “In my opinion, if everyone and everything is doing well, life is as one wishes, the wife, kids, home, car, work, leisure, health, all are okay, one can, under the guise of national sentiment, go and make a fuss about protecting the Diaoyu Islands. But if you have something of your own that you haven’t protected, first protect that and then we can talk. Don’t worry about something so far off.”

To those who decide to protest anyway, he continued: “Don’t be surprised when after the battle, you, mortally injured, see the leaders and the invaders [the Japanese] cheerfully discussing a big business deal.”

The impact of the rise of blogs is evident in the spate of big, Internet-driven stories that has regularly rocked China beginning in 2007. If it’s true that none of them forced the hand of the central government on a politically sensitive matter like migrant labor, each dominated the national conversation for a time and either resulted in important local changes or broke new ground in terms of the Internet’s ability to feed public skepticism toward the state.

In the first of these cases, in March 2007, a couple residing in the former wartime capital, Chongqing, refused to allow their home to be demolished to make way for a big mall construction project. They held out even as all of their neighbors accepted modest compensation from the city and the land surrounding them was excavated, leaving their home perched atop a thimble-like nub of reddish earth.

Although initially written about in the traditional Chinese media and in the international press, including a piece I filed from Chongqing for The New York Times, the case became a national sensation online, where the couple’s home became known as the “nail house,” because of the way it stuck out, and through the web discussions of the couple’s struggle against the city became an important element in a growing movement centered on what in China is still a recent phenomenon: property ownership.

Eventually, the nail-house couple won a far more generous compensation offer, but more significantly, their resistance inspired countless copycats.

Barely a month later, another huge story with important social implications spread via the Internet, when a TV reporter from Henan Province, acting on a tip, visited Shanxi Province and confirmed the use of kidnapped children as juvenile slave labor in the region’s primitive brick-kiln industry. This scoop reflects a longstanding pattern in Chinese reporting, an end-run around local censorship, where reporters from another province will break the most sensitive news in a given place, confident that local propaganda authorities have no control over them.

Local authorities initially denied the existence of such a practice, but word of the scoop by the reporter, Fu Zhenzhong, spread far and fast via the Internet, leading thousands of parents to demand the government’s help in recovering their missing children. And amid an outraged national Internet discussion, this clamor fueled a fierce competition among news organizations to investigate the industry. Eventually, over 550 minors were rescued from the kilns and many of the operations were forced to shut down.

The third major item thrust on the public agenda by the Internet that spring involved plans to construct a large chemical factory specializing in pesticide-related compounds in the city of Xiamen. Citizen awareness of the project spread via the Internet, and spurred a vehement opposition. Before long, the city was forced to reconsider its plans, and the project was eventually shifted to a rural location far from the city. Many see the online activism around the Xiamen pesticide project as a major milestone in the brief history of not-in-my-backyard politics in China. “Basically, no one understands well how messages like these spread and how a topic goes viral,” says Guobin Yang, a Barnard College professor and author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. “What is certain is that everyone is paying attention to this right now, starting with the government.”

Yang says that it is widely rumored among specialists in China that Beijing spends as much on online censorship, Internet monitoring of public opinion, and devising ways to control and defuse web-driven protest and dissent as it spends on the military. “No one knows how much money goes into Internet control,” he says, “but whatever the sum, it is certainly a lot.”

For all of the lavish expenditure and elaborate precautions, the Internet’s tendency to catch the government off guard is seemingly undiminished. The most recent explosion of more or less spontaneous public opinion that caught the authorities by surprise occurred in late summer when citizens throughout China began rejecting the government’s drive to immunize over 100 million infants against measles.

For years, China has endured serious food and medicine safety scandals, and despite the prevalence of measles, which can be deadly, word spread quickly via the Internet—with no readily apparent basis in fact—that the new vaccine was unsafe and that the government should not be trusted to vaccinate millions of children.

If no one knows the precise mechanisms behind an issue going viral on the Internet, the vaccination crisis was a powerful reminder of one of the most common factors: a deep vein of skepticism toward the authorities. In many instances this skepticism, or even cynicism, toward the government feeds a protest reflex that in a hyper-networked world can very quickly take on political overtones.

The best recent example of this is a series of push-backs by players of online games, which are hugely popular in China, especially one known as World of Warcraft. Last year, the state’s attempt to impose changes on the game, including the reduction of violent images and measures intended to combat obsessive Internet use, sparked an enormous and prolonged outcry by the game’s fans. They committed virtual suicide online in mass protest, and produced a multi-part online video denouncing censorship.

“The gaming community, politically, was the last thing that people were worried about,” says Xiao Qiang, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Journalism and director of China Digital Times, a widely followed website that analyzes online developments in China. “But the people who are playing games are some of the people who are most involved in online chatting, and so this starts a wave of discussion with lots of political edge to it, and ends with a video whose final shot is a freedom bell ringing, along with the warning: ‘Don’t think our voice is small.’ ”

Lots of analysts are keenly examining this same picture and coming to starkly divergent conclusions. “There is a role for the Internet to empower civil society,” says Singapore University’s Zheng. “Civil society is able to do many things. But I don’t think that the Internet can democratize China. That is asking too much. By the same token, the government will never again be able to maintain total control.”

“I would like to be more optimistic, but there is plenty of evidence we are headed not toward democratization, but toward prolonged authoritarianism,” says Rebecca MacKinnon.

By contrast, Qiang draws a far more positive conclusion. “We have entered into a dynamic situation, with the government forced to adapt and to explain itself all the time,” he said. “We are seeing the emergence of a new kind of online culture, and it is pushing for a more democratic society and stands in opposition to the state’s hegemony. It even has leaders, in people like Han Han and Ai Weiwei, and for now at least, the authorities don’t seem to be able to do anything about it.”

Democracy may be too big a short- or even medium-term expectation for China, even with its burgeoning Internet culture. But from my perspective as a longtime observer of this country, if China’s civil society is the key factor in the country’s evolution toward a future in which the Communist Party must accept greater limits to its power, the Internet is this evolution’s beating heart.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/20/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-china-baidu

Is Facebook preparing to hurdle the Great Firewall?

Social network chief Mark Zuckerberg photographed meeting boss of Chinese search engine Baidu in Beijing

• Jonathan Watts in Beijing
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 December 2010 12.13 GMT

Mark Zuckerberg with the head of Baidu, Robin Li, at Baidu’s Beijing headquarters on 20 December. Photograph: t.sina.com.cn

“It was just two nerds comparing notes,” the spokesman said. “Keep the speculation in check.”

But when those nerds happened to be the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Robin Li, the head of Baidu – the biggest search engine in China – there was no way a quiet business lunch was going to remain quiet.

Moments after Zuckerberg and Li were seen strolling through the canteen in Baidu’s Beijing headquarters today, an employee posted a blurred mobile phone photograph of them on his microblog.

The image spread quickly, first via Chinese social networking sites, then on to the English language side of the internet, prompting speculation that the two IT players may be planning to cross the divide.

Zuckerberg – recently named person of the year by Time Magazine – has made no secret of his desire to expand in China, where Facebook has been blocked by the government censors’ Great Firewall since 2008.

On a recent global map of Facebook users, China appeared as a black spot, though it has a bigger internet population than any country on Earth.

Zuckerberg’s current holiday is his first known trip behind the Great Firewall. But he has started taking Mandarin lessons, and recently asked Facebook members for tips on places to visit with his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan.

In a recent speech at Stanford University, he said the company may turn its attention to China in a year if it can first crack Japan, South Korea and Russia.

“How can you connect the whole world if you leave out a billion people?” he asked then.

“Our theory is that if we can show that we as a western company can succeed in a place where no other country has, then we can start to figure out the right partnerships we would need to succeed in China on our terms,” he said.

Zuckerberg appears to have found common ground with Li, an internet entrepreneur who has completed a postgraduate course in the US.

Since then, he has shrugged off Google and Yahoo, as well as criticism about a supposedly weak stance on censorship and copyright piracy, to make Baidu the dominant force in the Chinese search engine market.

In an earlier interview with the Guardian, Li said Baidu would one day become an international rival to Microsoft and Google.

Since the two men were introduced in autumn 2009, they have met twice before today, and are said to have hit it off.

Kaiser Kuo, Baidu’s director of international communications, said he was not privy to the details of their latest discussion.

“As far as I know, this was two nerds comparing notes,” he said.

Any talks are likely to be exploratory. Given the furore over censorship that followed Google’s decision to curtail its Chinese search engine earlier this year, it is unlikely Facebook and Baidu would like to draw further attention to the issue. China already has two social networks that are Facebook imitators: Kaixin, with 80 million users, and Renren, with 150 million.

These lack the economic clout and global reach of Zuckerberg’s company but they do have the advantages of language and cultural awareness, as well as the protection of the Great Firewall.

To tackle them and other big Chinese platforms, such as QQ, Facebook would probably have to move inside the firewall and accept greater censorship.

“If Facebook wanted to enter China, it would not have to change its function, because netizens here are used to copycats already, but it must, like other international internet companies, obey Chinese laws and regulations,” said Hu Yong, a professor at Beijing University’s school of journalism and communication.

Critics already accuse Facebook of failing to protect its members’ privacy settings and selling personal data to advertisers. If it was to also sacrifice free debate in order to secure a share of the Chinese market, it is likely to come under even greater fire for lacking business ethics.

The sensitivities are acute. Earlier this year, a group of Chinese activists wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg after their Tiananmen Square protest memorial page on Facebook – “Never Forget June Fourth” – was closed down. They expressed concern that they were being harassed to placate China’s censors, but Facebook administrators insisted the action had been taken because they set up the wrong kind of page.

Currently, there are numerous sites on Facebook that would not be permitted in China, including clubs and groups that campaign on behalf of the victims of Tiananmen, the imprisoned Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and Falun Gong.

The Dalai Lama, who is reviled by the Chinese authorities, has an official Facebook page that is “liked” by more than a million people. This would be impossible if the company was to move its servers inside China.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/gladwell-on-social-media-and-activism/63623/

Alexis Madrigal – Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor for TheAtlantic.com. A former staff writer for Wired.com, he’s the author of the forthcoming history of clean energy in America, Powering the Dream.

Gladwell on Social Media and Activism

Sep 27 2010, 2:47 PM ET 26

I really like Malcolm Gladwell’s new piece on digital political organizing.

It’s got an excellent structure, alternating scenes of the lunch counter protests of the 1960s with ideas about the loose social groups that activists attempt to catalyze on Facebook and Twitter. His big point is weak-tie networks don’t have the dedication and structure to take on an established power structure. Martin Luther King, Jr, he notes, had a one million dollar budget and 100 staff members on the ground when he got to Birmingham.

I found myself surprised at how much I liked the piece. I’m a big fan of Clay Shirky, whose various writings about the potential of the Internet as an organizing platform would seem to run directly contrary to Gladwell’s thesis.

Certainly, the strong form of his argument — that Twitter and Facebook make it harder to organize — seems unsupported (at least in this article). But I can get behind a weaker form of the idea. Communication technologies are often lauded as the key to unlock our societal shackles even if they actually reinforce existing power structures — and Gladwell does an excellent job pointing that out.

So, I think we can read Gladwell’s piece as a fairly specific indictment of the current uses of the current generation of tools. Truth is, very few major activism projects succeed through Facebook or Twitter. Shirky would totally agree with that, I think. And in cases where they seem to have helped, it’s quite difficult to quantify how much, if at all. The explicit compare-and-contrast with Birmingham and the broader civil rights movement throws the possibility that we’re diminishing and deracinating activism into stark relief, and I think that’s a good thing.

But there are two threads of his story, in particular, that leave a lot to be desired.

First, a smaller quibble. Gladwell defines Twitter like this, “The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met.” But the thing about Twitter, at least for me, is that I *end up* meeting the people that I interact with most closely. Twitter acts as a kind of human recommendation engine in which I am the algorithm. In person, I’ve met Clay Shirky himself, Tim Maly, Robin Sloan, and at least 10 more — and I’ve edited dozens of folks that I know exclusively through the service. What Twitter lacks in corporeal contact, I think it makes up in longevity. I’ve been watching some people’s minds work on the service for years. Every day I see their faces in my feed. To label these weak ties is just inaccurate. And it makes me wonder, can’t we know people through their writing? Is face-to-face contact the only way to build strong ties?

University of Maryland-Baltimore sociologist Zeynep Tufecki also points out that, as in my case, lots of weak ties beget some strong ties.

“The relationship between weak and strong ties is one of complementarity and support, not one of opposition. Gladwell has written about weak and strong ties before and continues a tradition of contrasting them as ontological opposites, somehow opposing and displacing each other,” Tufecki writes on her blog Technosociology. “That is a widespread conceptual error and rests upon an inadequate understanding of these concepts. Large pools of weaker ties are crucial to being able to build robust networks of stronger ties — and Internet use is a key to this process.”

Second, the most serious overextension of the argument is that “networks” don’t have leadership or organization. Gladwell writes:

Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

This feels thin. Sure, Facebook and Twitter don’t have lines of authority per se, but they are not the entire universe of social enterprises online. What about Linux development? Or mathematical problem solving at MathOverflow? Or the Obama campaign’s efforts? Or all the little social spaces online where people come together to push for an idea or a project, like Greater Greater Washington?

To distill, who says online social networks can’t have leadership, strategy, and clear lines of authority? Even if we said that no current effort rises to the level of a sit-in, I wouldn’t bet against powerful movements developing through social media over the next decade.

People are still learning how to organize online. The tools are new. But perhaps what we can take from Gladwell’s piece is that we need a little more bravery and dedication to go with our whiz and bang new stuff.

Thanks to Zack Sherwood for the pointer to Tufecki’s work.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

Annals of Innovation

Small Change

Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

by Malcolm Gladwell October 4, 2010

Social media can’t provide what social change has always required.

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.

What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.

So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

The students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960 described the movement as a “fever.” But the civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE. Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.

The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his superb 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups. “Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures,” Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.”

This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.

This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural features typical of networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms—made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.”

In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far more unified and successful left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meetings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were regularly infiltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.

The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.

Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody.” Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.

When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.

Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age—and he’s right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause” in the Internet age.

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución. ♦

http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Asia/Story/A1Story20101201-250239.html

Chinese Ministry ends online tug of war

Wed, Dec 01, 2010
China Daily/Asia News Network

Months of very public skirmishes between two Chinese software giants appears to be over after intervention by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, but disputes still linger.

The conflict between Qihoo, maker of the 360 brand of antivirus software, and Tencent Holdings Ltd, creator of instant messaging software QQ, can be traced back to September when Qihoo released a report that implied QQ could compile private user information.

But the instant messaging program “uses a security module known as QQ housekeeper to scan – not all the data on a computer, but just for those with trojan horse characteristics”, Wang Xiaoxia, director of the company’s legal department, told China Daily.

“What’s more, we don’t upload the data and so do not violate user privacy,” he said.

Tencent has asked a third party for appraisal as evidence of its innocence.

Only personal information related to identification can be counted as private, according to a China Intellectual Property News quote of Wu Handong, president of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law.

“If QQ just scans files ending with dot-exe (programs in the Windows operating system) it is not infringement on privacy,” Wu said.

Even if it does scan documents, it depends on what information is contained in them, he added.

Wang said 360 software misled users to uninstall some QQ programs, which it identified as malicious.

The quarrel became increasingly intense and reached a climax with a public letter from Tencent in early November announcing that QQ and the 360 antivirus program are not compatible – and asked QQ users to take one out.

“It was an emergency,” Wang said. “We had no other choice.”

He claimed one of Qihoo’s products takes advantage of its position as a basic software to probe QQ user log-on information, which “is of commercial value to us and could be used for Qihoo’s own messaging system in the future”.

“If we did not make a move, our users’ data would be stolen by them (Qihoo).”

Yet Zhou Hongyi, Qihoo’s board chairman, said his company is not branching out into instant messaging.

“Within our company, some say we should do instant messaging – I told them it’s impossible,” he said, according to a story in the Southern Metropolis Daily.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology began to investigate the fracas in November and criticized the two companies for injuring consumer rights in pursuit of their own economic interests, Xinhua.net reports.

By late November, each company published a letter of regret. Both used the same phrase – claiming a “reverence for users”.

In fact both have stated they were fighting for the interest of users rather than their own.

Yet their battle using pop-up windows that called on users to choose sides no doubt damaged many consumers, according to one academic.

“The war was a kidnapping of user interests,” Hu Yong, associate professor of communications at Beijing University wrote in his blog.

Whether the government’s intervention is needed is another question worth further discussion, Hu said.

The online wrangle has spilled over into serious legal debates.

Lawyers who are also software users have filed a claim against Tencent, which has itself filed a suit against Qihoo. The court is scheduled to begin hearing the case in mid-December.

Yet such quarrels or even legal procedures are better than conspiring to fix prices and markets or getting rid of competitors, Wang Xianlin, professor of law at the Shanghai Jiaotong University, told China Intellectual Property News.

Average consumers have commented that though software is provided for free, user interests still need to be guaranteed.

– China Daily/Asia News Network