Category: China

The New York Times has a rather breathless and exciting account of how a “Phone Call From China Transformed ’84 Olympic Games”. It relates the tale of how the head of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee believes China “saved the Olympics”, both for LA and subsequent cities, when they confirmed on May 12th, 1984 that they would come to the LA Games in defiance of a Soviet-led boycott. The Soviets issued a list four days prior of 100 countries that supposedly agreed to the boycott, one of which was China. Considering only 14 countries eventually joined, I think its safe to say the Soviets were full of crap. The article gives the impression that somehow the Chinese had to be vigorously lobbied or were taking some major political risk. That’s kinda hard to swallow, considering what the New York Times keeps in their own archives.

Time Magazine, April 30, 1984 ushering in a quarter century of “Changing China” cliches

China was a few years into the “Four Modernizations”, and that year the PRC would reform SOEs and COEs, starting a wave of double-digit GDP growth. Meanwhile the USSR was still flailing away at a central economy that didn’t really go anywhere. The L.A. Olympics were the first commercially financed Olympics ever, eventually netting a $250 million dollar surplus. Between that and the Soviet Friendship Games, its pretty clear which was Deng Xiaoping’s kind of sporting event.

Just four weeks prior to the phone call, Ronald Reagan had been welcomed to China with a 21 gun salute and guys drinking Coca Cola. The USSR responded by accusing China of openly supporting Reagan’s “militarist course” and “provocative anti-Soviet orientation”, and then cancelling the highest level talks in 15 years. The Sino-Soviet split had been going on for years, and China in the 1980s was aiding the United States’ proxies against the Soviet Union in at least two conflicts: namely the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua. The conflict in Afghanistan, by the way, was the official reason why China boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which probably would have been their first Olympics since the Taiwan/Taipei problem had been resolved, had it not been for the unfortunate fact that Moscow was in the Soviet Union. Deng Xiaoping, later that October, said that Sino-Soviet relations were still going nowhere (apart from trade), due to “three big obstacles”: Soviet troops in Afghanistan, support for Vietnam in Cambodia, and all those SS-20 nuclear missiles along the border. The thaw didn’t really happen until Gorby, and ever since the two countries still kinda dislike each other on a more personal level. It’s hard to imagine that the L.A. Olympic committee’s eleventh hour trip to Beijing was anything more than a junket. But hey, that’s what organizing the Olympics is all about.

I’m @ Hong Kong University for the China Internet Research Conference, and I’ll be liveblogging about the panels on the official blog along with John Kennedy, Oiwan Lam and others. I’ll also be on Twitter, if it behaves, along with all these other people (if you’re attending and your twitter feed isn’t in this mashup megafeed, let me know. Will be on the lookout for chatter on Summize and Twifan).

From Lian Yue’s Blog:

From Wang Xiaoshan’s:

Regular blogging will commence soon.

From the Washington Post, April 3rd, after the verdict in the Chi Mak espionage trial:

“The Chinese government, in an enterprise that one senior official likened to an “intellectual vacuum cleaner,” has deployed a diverse network of professional spies, students, scientists and others to systematically collect U.S. know-how, the officials said.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, April 13th, announcing the Minerva Consortia (h/t Danger Room):

“The Chinese government publishes a tremendous amount of information about military and technological developments on an open-source basis. However, it is often inconvenient, if not impossible, for American researchers to get access to this material since it is often available only in China. A real – or virtual – archive of documents acquired by researchers and others abroad would help us track Chinese military and technological developments.”

Yes! Because U.S. academics should be thrilled to copy and export unclassified public domain data from China after the U.S. locked up someone for the rest of his natural life for doing the same thing.

Continue reading “US Deploys Own Grains of Sand Strategy”

It’s 100 days to the 2008 Beijing Olympics! That can only mean one thing! No, not deteriorating reporting conditions. No, not a countdown ceremony in Nepal, though thats some serious unintentional irony right there. No, not whatever else is being reported. No, it can only mean one thing… ROCK!

The idea that the Chinese people, as a whole, are engaged in struggle, overcoming shame, or that every individual is responsible for the fate of the nation goes back before the Communist era. Since 1949, these ideas have been intensified, but it didn’t start there. And now’s a good time to remember it, because the 80th anniversary of the Jinan Incident is coming up next weekend. The Jinan Incident, on May 3rd 1928, was a brutal clash between Chinese and Japanese troops that both sides, it seems, wanted to avoid but failed. Kuomintang forces ended up retreating from the city, and the Kuomintang government declared May 3rd to be National Humiliation Day. A boycott of Japanese goods followed.

Continue reading “It Ain’t Easy Being Chinese”

via Hecaitou and Lian Yue, Backtoourmotherland.com.

The website calls for Chinese Canadians to renounce their citizenship and provides links on how to do so. It also argues that the Canadian citizenship pledge is unpatriotic for Chinese since one swears allegiance to the Queen of England, who is the chief representative of Western colonialism, since England took part in the Opium War and humiliated the nation. The website doesn’t appear to give any information as to who has actually done this, or a forum for discussion.

This seems like a really bad idea, considering Yang Hengjun’s brilliant call for media reform in China and increased efforts to reach the true masters of Western media, the audience themselves. Curling into a ball and retreating to China doesn’t seem like it would help with that sort of engagement.

A word that seems to be cropping quite a bit lately from both Chinese and non-Chinese quarters has been “brainwashing”. The Merriam Webster and American Heritage dictionaries give the etymology xi nao (洗脑), the English word first appearing in 1950.

In the book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing”, Robert Jay Lifton cites the writings of the American journalist Edward Hunter first used it “as a translation of the colloquialism “hsi nao” (literally, “wash brain”), which he quoted from Chinese informants who described its use following the Chinese takeover.” The term was later applied to indoctrination techniques in other parts of the world. Hunter was a propaganda specialist for the OSS during World War II, and collected a great deal of Chinese propaganda material, which is now available in the Chinese Pamphlets e-collection at the Center for Research Libraries. The Oxford English Dictionary says the first appearance of the word was in an article by Hunter for The New Leader in 1950, while Wikipedia cites an article by Hunter in the Miami Daily News the same year titled “‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party”.

In the years that followed, “brainwashing” got alot of play to explain defection among American POWs in the Korean War, and that in turn later became part of the premise of “The Manchurian Candidate”.

There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that xinao was an official phrase in the Chinese government, but referred to what is typical translated as “thought reform”, or 思想改造 (sixiang gaizao), which referred to the re-education of the intelligentsia and educated after 1949. Official history says that thought reform started in 1951, but according to one Chinese blogger, the roots can be traced back to 1950 (when Hunter first heard the term xinao referring to political re-education) in Mao Zedong’s speeches at the Second Meeting of the 1st CPPCC National Committee, when he exhorted intellectuals to use their free time to study Marx-Leninism, educate the masses and engage in self-criticism. An English version of the speech, “Be A True Revolutionary”, does not appear to mention intellectuals or holidays, but does quote Mao Zedong saying “Towards the people, on the contrary, it uses the method of democracy and not of compulsion, that is, it must necessarily let them take part in political activity and does not compel them to do this or that but uses the method of democracy to educate and persuade. Such education is self-education for the people, and its basic method is criticism and self-criticism. I hope that this method will be used by all the nationalities, democratic classes, democratic parties, people’s organizations and patriotic democrats in the country.”

The blogger quotes Mao Zedong speaking at the 3rd Plenary of the 7th Central Committee of the CCP, which can also be found on Xinhua, “对知识分子要办各种训练班，办军政大学、革命大学。要使用他们，同时对他们进行改造.” “Intellectuals need to do every kind of training, military education, revolutionary education. They need to be utilized, and at the same time reformed.” Most likely these campaigns, which the following year would solidify as “thought reform”, were the ones Hunter’s informant was referring to when he used the term “brainwash”.

In contemporary China, “xinao” is a bit of a curious word. It is often used precisely as we would use it in the West, right now across the Internet in reference to CNN, or more loosely when author Wang Shuo called the 80s generation brainwashed by Hong Kong and Taiwan pop culture. Numerous stories appear talking about pyramid schemes “brainwashing” people into scams. But then there are the political campaigns mentioned online, such as “City and Rural Party Branches Hand in Hand”, which says that in tackling rural poverty, material donations are not enough but city and rural party members must go to each others areas to “brainwash” and “liberate their thinking”. [突出抓好思想共建。共建不能只是停留在给钱给物的层面上，更要抓好党的建设，解放思想，要组织城市党员进村入户，组织结对村党员进城洗脑，按“一加一模式”结对帮扶贫困党员和贫困户。]

Other instances often use the term brainwash positively (and in quotation marks suggesting its sorta slang) when referring to educating cadres, human resources (no quotation marks), public anti-corruption campaigns and to describe (again, positively) the controversial remarks of Professor Zheng Qiang (郑强), who railed against defects in the Chinese education in a speech in Jiangsu, saying “the higher your test scores, the more disabled you are”, early education overloads students, English education at a university level leads to students who only understands “English with a Sichuan accent”, and other thought provoking stuff.

The term xinao then, seems to have two lives in China. One is the sort of contemporary usage familiar to English speakers, as a negative term for indoctrination and people in China, where the word and concept originated, is now applying it to others, while the other xinao continues to be a term for a kind of “thought reform”, though now applied positively as a buzzword to things like Six Sigma training. Heh. I’ve lost count of the levels of irony at play here.

Photo courtesy of BCostin, under Creative Commons (Flickr)

Rumor floating around on the BBSes, copied from the Ming Pao Daily in Hong Kong (google cache):

昨日一个名叫「我爱榨菜君」的网友发表文章称，于昨日上午6时许乘坐地铁2号线，有4名男子在陆家嘴站上车，「穿着黑西装，面容严肃，非常之一本正经，在车上站成了一排」，然后4人各拿出1个录音机，开始播放「我们支持西藏独立」的录音，还「请大家上飞机时记得携带汽油炸药酒精」等。当时车上乘客不多，无人採取任何行动，4人放完录音就跑到另一车厢。

此外有网友称，有朋友停泊在上海音乐学院门前的汽车被喷涂上藏独字样和符号。

Yesterday a netizen called “I Love Mustard King” posted an article, yesterday morning riding the No.2 metro line, 4 men got on at Liujiazui Station [wearing black suits, solemn expressions, unusually serious, entered the car in a row], then the 4 each took out a tape recorder, began to play a [I support Tibetan Independence] recording, as well as [Please Everyone, When Boarding the Aircraft Remember to Bring Gasoline, Explosives, Oil], etc. At the time there weren’t many passengers, no one did anything, the 4 men ran to another car after the recording finished.

Other netizens report friends at Shanghai Music College cars were graffitied with Tibetan independence slogans and symbols.

Either there’s a really imaginative poster out there, or Shanghai is the first victim of Pro-Tibetan Independence performance artists. The article also claims that in the past couple of days Shanghai police have already confiscated more than 100 “volatile materials”. [此外，上海公安开箱检查地铁乘客行李以来，两日已检获百余件易爆物品。] Nail polish remover or C-4?

Lawyer Peter Scheer has a beef with the Great Firewall in the International Herald Tribune, as well as taking a swipe at foreign law firms practicing in China:

At 225 million users and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s Internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.

I experienced this first-hand when, about a year ago, I made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing results for Internet searches performed inside China – within the “Great Firewall” of government censorship, as it is called – with searches performed from outside.

The law firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed checking out search terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong.” Mind you, these were the kind of lawyers who spend their careers pushing back against the demands of government authorities.

So seductive are the business opportunities in China that the risk of losing them transforms even hardened litigators into wimps.

I guess somebody had their Wheaties that morning. This doesn’t seem fair. Banned keywords are, after all, illegal. It might be stupid, but its the law. While there doesn’t really seem to be any laws against searching for illegal keywords, the keywords themselves are illegal which makes it that risky shade of gray we all know so well in China. There are things that foreign law firms ought to stand up for in China. Doing a search as a favor to a colleague overseas doesn’t seem worth the risk – these are law firms that believe in a process of engagement. Calling them wimps seems unfair, and dismisses that they’re doing good in China in a different way.

Besides, why should they have to recreate what the Berkman Center already did? They get billed by the hour (ba doom ching). Even better, why not use the Blossom tool and do Google searches through a Tor node located in China? (The Tor page appears to be unblocked in China at the moment)

Web sites based outside China, meanwhile, are subject to blocking by the Great Firewall based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government. These include nearly all blogging services, Wikipedia and wiki platforms generally, social networking sites and peer-to-peer technologies of all kinds, including photo-sharing and video-sharing businesses. In other words, the full panoply of Internet technologies.

In general, this is true. China’s filters have struck at overseas Web 2.0 applications in particular. But saying its “the full panoply” is inaccurate. China has now unblocked YouTube again and its being bombarded with Chinese made videos about the Tibet controversy. MySpace.cn has 2 million members, which presumably doesn’t include those who signed up on MySpace.com, which has remained unblocked, though it seems to be hanging on a connection today. Facebook.com is unblocked. Chinese users responded to a flickr block with annoyance and proceeded to route past it. Twitter remains unblocked. And nothing has ever seemed to stop BitTorrent, eMule or other peer-to-peer services. I’ll grant Wikipedia is only newly unblocked, and we’ll see how that goes. Blogspot, livejournal, wordpress.com and it seems now blogs.com have been blocked, and the government certainly takes a less than friendly view on them. But Scheer gives the impression these services are totally cut off, while its more patchy and randomly changes.

But here’s the part where Scheer really blows my mind. After saying Western Internet companies in China should disclose their role in censorship (fair), openly assert their disagreement with government policies (problematic), and move Chinese customer data off shore (Rebecca MacKinnon also recommends this) and if they can’t do that at least warn Chinese customers they are adhering to local laws (I believe the terms of service for Yahoo!, MySpace and the like do just that when they mention “damaging public security, revealing state secrets, subverting state power, damaging national unity,” etc.) Good. Fine. But then he goes on to say:

Finally, where warnings are not possible or go unheeded, companies should force customers to give their real names when using their Web sites. That will force users to think carefully about what they say or do online. Ironically, the barring of anonymity is the surest means of getting users to appreciate the risks of saying what the government doesn’t want to hear.

What? How exactly would you “force customers to give their real names”? Obviously you would need something like the real name registration system the government attempted to place on all web content in 2005. Who else but the Chinese government is going to confirm the name is real? Nobody else has anything like that kind of data. You can’t do a credit record check with ChoicePoint or something. Anyway, the system never happened, and later a voluntary “pledge system” was suggested and mocked. And only 15% of the public seemed to like the idea in the first place. This was a government program that free speech advocates such as RSF were against. Yet Scheer is saying that you should go offshore, but if you can’t do that issue a warning, but if you can’t do that – make them all do what the Chinese government once wanted to do and overseas activists feared?

Am I reading this right? Is he actually saying that overseas Internet companies should deny Chinese citizens the right to anonymity so that they’ll get mad and demand rights? Is he really suggesting that Chinese citizens are completely unaware of the consequences of certain speech, and ought to be forced to learn about it by Yahoo! and Google? Is he saying “stick it to them so they’ll learn the hard way”? Because that’s flabbergasting.