This is for work, I swear!

But of course, some Chinese gamers are asking a different question: what games are these public servants playing? The answers, it seems, are pretty similar to what regular Chinese gamers are playing. But if you want to play games like a Chinese government official, here’s what you should be playing:

Casual Games: Fight the Landlord!, Mahjong. No surprises here as these are popular games offline as well (Fight the Landlord is a card game) and they’re very easy to find and play online.

Flash Games: Happy Farm. Needless to say, browser-based flash games are quick popular because they can be exited with one quick click if your boss comes walking around the corner. Chinese public servants are apparently partial to social games like Happy Farm (the Chinese game that Zynga cloned to make Farmville).

PC Games: Demigods and Semi-Devils, Fantasy Journey to the West, Zhuxian, Do Po Cang Qiong. MMORPGs like World of Warcraft don’t see to be as common among Chinese officials as they are among regular Chinese gamers, but clearly public servants have nothing against historical-fantasy-style RPGs.

Multiplayer Competitive Games: DOTA, League of Legends. Yup, even Chinese officials aren’t immune to China’s DOTA craze, apparently. So watch out the next time you fire up a game of League of Legends with strangers; your teammates might just be the people who are supposed to be running your city!

Mobile Games: Fruit Ninja, Fishing Master, Temple Run. Here, Chinese officials are basically just reflecting what the top free game downloads are on Chinese app stores, so these titles shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Again, these results come from an investigation with a very small sample size, so take them with a grain of salt. But if other Chinese public servants game like these guys apparently do, then Chinese officials are playing more or less the same games as regular Chinese gamers.

(via QQ Games)

Credit: Googleblog.blogspot.ca

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced yesterday that that its Google Apps will be used for educational purposes by 10 million Malaysian students, teachers, and parents. Furthermore, the government will also ‘deploy’ Chromebooks to be used in the country’s primary and secondary schools. VentureBeat believes that the government chose Chromebooks because of their relative affordability. All of this is to support Malaysia’s 12-year education blueprint.

The government plans to provide 4G internet access, a virtual learning platform, and a minimum 10:1 ratio of students to computers to all 10,000 schools in Malaysia. Those Chromebooks will definitely help the students get more familiar with computers, and of course will also make sure Google is very much central to people’s lives starting in the early school years.

Google Apps for Education has gained quite a few partners across the Asia Pacific region in the past few years. Among them are Thailand’s Khon Kaen University, Indonesia’s Petra University, the Philippines’ Commission for Higher Education, Singapore’s Ministry of Education, and India’s University of New Delhi faculty of management. There are currently 3,000 schools worldwide that are using Chromebooks for educational purposes.

(Source: Google via VentureBeat)

On Wednesday, NPC representative Wang Tian made a rather shocking accusation: Chinese e-commerce platforms have permitted sellers to evade more than 100 billion RMB ($15 billion) in taxes. And that’s just in the year 2012. In fact, the taxes lost from Alibaba platforms alone add up to more than 35 billion RMB ($5.5 billion), according to Wang.

To be clear, Wang isn’t saying the problem is e-commerce companies themselves — at least not entirely. Rather, he says that an investigation has revealed most sellers on e-commerce platforms don’t provide official invoices to customers along with their purchases. But those invoices, which are printed on special paper and must be purchased from the government, are the primary way the government taxes business transactions like consumer purchases — if sellers aren’t providing them, that means they’re not paying the taxes they should be.

How and to what extent e-commerce sites should be taxed has been a hot topic in China since online shopping became popular, but in part thanks to these numbers, the topic has bubbled to the surface again at this year’s Two Meetings. Chinese lawmakers are considering alternative ways to tax the industry. Song Lan, an assistant director at the State Administration of Taxation, expressed some skepticism about Wang Tian’s sky-high numbers but agreed that the taxation of e-commerce transactions was a serious problem:

E-commerce is a difficult topic we’re researching, because virtualized transactions are pretty difficult to monitor. Additionally, our [transaction] management methods are relatively outdated. So the taxation of e-commerce sites is something we’re researching right now.

The trick, of course, is to extract additional tax dollars from e-commerce platforms without crushing them, and Song Lan has said that the State Administration of Taxation is considering how to tax the industry in a way that promotes its healthy development while not, at the same time, allowing it to shirk its tax obligations.

It’s a difficult balance to strike, and one that authorities aren’t likely to take a crack at before this year’s Two Meetings ends. But the renewed attention could mean that new regulations might be coming sometime later this year. If e-commerce platforms are really resulting in billions in lost tax revenue, you can be sure that tax authorities won’t allow that situation to go on forever.

(via Sina Tech, image source)

From left to right: Pony Ma, Lei Jun, Robin Li

It’s spring in Beijing, and China’s yearly celebrity parties legislative conferences (the “Two Meetings”) are being held in the capital. Among them is the National People’s Congress (NPC), which boasts among its members two new representatives: Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun and Tencent CEO Pony Ma. But the NPC doesn’t have a monopoly on the stars of China’s tech industry. The other meeting, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), is also welcoming a new representative: Baidu CEO Robin Li.

So China’s tech giants are out in force in China’s legislature. Neither the NPC nor the CPPCC wields much real power, but that hasn’t stopped any of these guys from making proposals. So what have these fine gentlemen suggested so far? Let’s take a look!

Xiaomi’s Lei Jun: Cut away the red tape for startups

Lei Jun’s proposals this year are focused on making things easier for startups. In his NPC proposal, Lei lists five problems and proposes solutions for them.

• Problem: The government industry and commerce organizations often force new companies to register legal documents using specific forms and structures because its employees don’t have the time or expertise to assess the legality of more customized documents, even though those may be better for companies. Solution: Let companies and their lawyers take responsibility for the legality of their documents and don’t require industry and commerce organizations to assess them.
• Problem: In cases of premium capital increase at an LLC, the Industry and Commerce officials only investigate and certify the capital that is on the books when the company is registered, and not the premium increase in addition to what’s on the registry. Solution: The Ministry of Industry and Commerce should start investigating and certifying all of the capital.*
• Problem: Registering a company name can be a long and inconvenient process. Solution: Increase options for communication (such as phone and web communication) and implement web tools to streamline the name-registration process.
• Problem: Official industry and commerce organizations require a specific number to be filed along with a pledge of stock rights, even though some pledges of stock rights aren’t for specific sums of money but rather for fluctuating sums tied to stock prices, voting shares, etc. Solution: Don’t require the registration of a specific sum in some cases.
• Problem: Buying enterprise invoices can become expensive as there are only a few authorized printers and little wiggle-room for debate on price. Solution: Make them free, like other invoices.

Tencent’s Pony Ma: The government should embrace the internet, support tech companies financially

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pony Ma’s NPC proposals also focus on improving China’s startup environment. According to Sina Tech, he has so far made three proposals:

• The government should support startups by pushing big companies to create epayment, microfinance, and capital investment platforms that will improve the startup supply chain. The government should also establish its own organizations to support and invest in startups, as well as cracking down on IP violations and law-breaking.
• China needs to put more strategic emphasis on the internet by doing three things: establishing a single organization with clear-cut responsibilities for managing the internet, increasing subsidies for basic telecommunications services, and speed up the move to the web when it comes to government and social services.
• China should do more to assist tech companies as they move out internationally by actively participating in international trade agreements and safety standards as well as providing additional support and assistance to internet companies and even establishing an “internet commissioner” in overseas Chinese embassies.

Baidu’s Robin Li: Don’t require real names to use public wi-fi

Robin Li’s proposal to the CPPCC is focused on making public wi-fi faster and easier to use. According to Sina Tech, the current regulations governing public wifi require wifi providers to track and store users real names, and what sites they visited. Public wifi time is also limited, and logging in is difficult. Li’s proposals states:

Under the current system, wi-fi loses the convenience and speed that was originally the point, and raises the difficulty and threshold for using wi-fi to the extent that many people have just given up on it. When you make users take one extra step, you lose 90 percent of them.

Li has two recommendations for combatting this:

• Lower the threshold for getting online by eliminating the real-name and phone number requirement for some public wifi locations.
• Use a web-exclusive ID for logins (such as an email address or a weibo account), don’t require an authentication code every time, and that should solve the problem of repeat registrations and get everybody online more quickly and conveniently.

We probably won’t see more formal proposals from these guys this year, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to keep quiet for the rest of the session, and other luminaries in China’s tech industry will probably also make use of the Two Meetings to call for changes in China’s tech scene. We’ll be keeping our ears to the ground to bring you all of the latest in the Two Meetings tech madness, so stay tuned!

(images via Forbes, therichest, kelikuru)

*This one involves a lot of financial jargon and we’re not 100 percent sure we’ve gotten it exactly right, so we’ve contacted Xiaomi for a bit of clarification and will update the post if needed.

Jike’s frontpage. Click to enlarge.

Authorities, who are effectively also China’s web censors, don’t want news of Jike’s failure getting out. Along with rumors of Jike – which is run by People’s Daily Online, which also publishes the Party mouthpiece newspaper, the People’s Daily – planning to lay off 100 workers, censors are putting pressure on websites and social sites not to cover the news. The small Chinese tech blog that broke the news, Huxiu.com, was forced to take down its article, but it lives on in English on the site’s repository of occasional translations.

Plus, it turns out the the Jike bad news was the reason for one of China’s top entrepreneurs and investors, Kaifu Lee, being suspended from Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo for three days. Lee’s temporary ban seems to have been caused by his criticism of Jike’s chairman, well-known Olympic table tennis champion Deng Yaping, for her failure to turn RMB 2 billion (US$318 million) of investment – presumably with taxpayer money – into anything other than a flop that’s used by pretty much nobody. Deng had little prior experience running a web company.

A waste of taxpayer’s money?

Let’s remember that all China’s search engines – except the renegade and oft-blocked Google.com.hk – already censor search results in line with the country’s increasingly heavy media monitoring and censoring. So the three state search sites – Jike, Panguso, and CCTV Search – just look like very expensive ways of cutting out the inconvenient middle-man (aka: the private sector) so as to streamline the Party angle on all news. Chinese consumers, however, have decided that they want to stick to the search engines – like Baidu (the market leader), Qihoo’s 360 Search, Soso, Apple’s Siri, and Google – that are already embedded in their web browsers and smartphones. And that won’t change unless the nation goes full-on North Korea.

As for Jike, it’s strongly denying that a quarter of its current 400-strong workforce is about to be laid off.

It appears that the media censors are defending state-run Jike. The Huxiu blog explained in English what happened to its controversial article:

In the noon of February 17, 2013, Huxiu.com received mail from the relevant departments that request us to delete the Jike Search article reports. Soon after, we found all the reprinted articles that on the Chinese Internet community within the scope were disappeared, at the same time, related information on weibo was also lost. That afternoon, Huxiu.com published another article try to analysis the gain and loss for Jike Search under Deng’s management. Again, Huxiu received another mail from the relevant departments that request to delete the article. Without any effect negotiations with the relevant departments after inconclusive, Huxiu is forced to remove this article.

This morning, in the midst of yet another messy and massively depressing media and censorship scandal – after last month’s huge blow-up over the Southern Weekend‘s spiked editorial – Kaifu Lee reaffirmed his belief in Chinese social media – though he had to do so on LinkedIn due to his ongoing Weibo ban. He defended the robustness of China’s social media landscape, and pointed out how he – and many others – had voiced their opinions online recently:

In the past three years, I’ve been one of the most vocal members of the Chinese social media, and have accumulated 30 million followers on Sina (and another 24 million on Tencent Weibo). I am not an activist and have no agenda. I am regarded as a moderate but direct microblogger. People follow me because of my content (covering parenting, leadership, personal growth, current events, high tech, investing, overseas news), my style (I tell it like it is, and work hard to tell a good story despite limited keystrokes), and my diligence (I tweet every day 10-20 times, except last few days!).

(Sources: Huxiu, Shanghaiist, and PandoDaily)

A clip from a TV report about the hidden cameras

Spring Festival is usually a time of celebration, but this year it was also a time of embarrassment for some government officials in Hunan province. According to a Xinhua report, local governments across the province used webcams and other small “pinhole” cameras to secretly record lazy government cadres sleeping, playing browser games, and watching online videos during work hours. The secretly-recorded videos were edited together as part of a new propaganda production on how officials should behave, and there are already calls for some more permanent form of supervision to keep officials from wasting time at work.

The proliferation of the internet in China has made work faster and easier in many ways, but it also provides ample opportunities for time-wasting. Many popular games and videos can be played from any computer with a connection, and at a job I once held working for a state-owned company in China it was not at all unusual to see employees casually watching soaps on Youku or playing browser games in the middle of a work day.

This, of course, is a problem that employers everywhere face, but Hunan’s new movement to stamp out laziness in government workers could prove to be a strong deterrent if the officials caught wasting time are actually punished in a meaningful way. Web cameras and other recording devices are almost everywhere now; in cities, many Chinese people are carrying phones capable of recording HD video. If Hunan’s approach catches on, being a lazy official could become an awful lot harder to get away with.

That’s a good thing, and in fact, I’d like to suggest that Hunan and other provinces take things a step further by setting up web cams with publicly-accessible feeds in government offices so that the people can observe what public servants are doing with their tax dollars. Surely it wouldn’t be too difficult to set up a dedicated site, or perhaps a streaming partnership with a web video company, that users could log on to and watch over government offices. Call it crowdsourced supervision.

In fact, perhaps these web feeds could also be accompanied by a button that, when clicked, would sound a loud klaxon alarm in the office to wake up anyone who was sleeping. I’m sure that internet trolls would abuse that kind of system mercilessly, but you have to admit, it would resolve the problem of officials sleeping on the job!

OK, that’s not a realistic suggestion, and although it would be technically possible, I doubt many local governments would ever make public feeds of their offices available online either. Still, they really should consider it. In addition to cutting down on time-stealing, it would also be a great step forward in the direction of government transparency and it could even help cut down on corruption (although most of that happens outside the office).

The technology is there; all that’s needed is a government with the guts and vision to implement it. Someday, I hope I’ll be able to go online and waste time during my workday by supervising local government officials online.

(Xinhua via QQ Games)

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is under fire from dozens of rights advocates today in the form of an open letter to Skype which calls on the new owner of the VoIP service to clarify just how secure Skype is. Signed by the likes of Global Voices, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the China-oriented Great Fire blog, the letter demands Microsoft to also reveal any “surveillance and censorship capabilities” in the Chinese version of Skype.

Alleging that Skype might be the subject of intercepts by both US and Chinese governments, the open letter requests clarifications and some transparency from Microsoft regarding its TOM Online joint-venture version of Skype, which is foisted upon all Chinese visitors to Skype.com who get persistently redirected to skype.tom.com instead, and thereby download a different version of the Skype PC app. In a further sign that Chinese authorities would rather its netizens avoid the international version of Skype, the Skype Android and iPhone apps are apparently banned from the China iTunes and Google Play stores.

Watching you Skype

It’s a tricky deputation for Microsoft to handle, as it risks Skype becoming shunned by journalists and activists around the world. Talking about the TOM Online partnership could also take Microsoft into controversial areas. Indeed, we’ve already seen TOM-Skype censoring Chinese users in the notorious case of sensitive keywords related to the 2008 unrest and riots in Tibet. Shortly after that, Canadian researchers told CNET:

TOM-Skype is censoring and logging text chat messages that contain specific, sensitive keywords and may be engaged in more targeted surveillance. What is clear is that TOM-Skype is engaging in extensive surveillance with seemingly little regard for the security and privacy of Skype users. This is in direct contradiction of Skype’s public statements regarding their policies in China.

We spotted Tencent’s WeChat app refusing to send certain sensitive keywords a few weeks back, albeit just for a period of about 48 hours, and Tencent later said it was a technical error.

With free speech online so under threat by nearly all governments, it would be a small but positive step for Microsoft, as the open letter demands, release Google- or Twitter-style transparency reports on information or surveillance requests that Skype complies with.

Picture from AntaraNews

Detik reports today that the Indonesian Government’s Goods and Services Procurement Agency (LKPP) has recently signed an agreement with 27 Indonesian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to help conduct its e-Tender program. This is intended to make the government e-Tender process more effective and transparent.

The agreement will enable all the district governments to choose any of the 27 ISPs to conduct the e-Tender. Moreover, all the procurement proposal values submitted from those ISPs will be publicly available on the LKPP’s e-Katalog website page.

The Indonesian government is gradually transforming all tender processes into electronic tenders. LKPP believes that the process will result in up to IDR 55 trillion ($5.7 billion) annual savings.

The e-Tender process could become an interesting opportunity for startups out there, and in fact one has already made its move, as you may recall featured startup Pengadaan.net from earlier this month.

[Source: Detik]

Look out e-commerce, there’s a new sheriff in town! Well, actually it’s the same sheriff as before, but now he is paying more attention, so look out!

China’s e-commerce sector has been immensely profitable, but it has also been kind of like the wild west. Without a lot of regulation, it’s very easy to find customers, merchants, and the employees of e-commerce companies that kicked it complaining about fraud. Now, China’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce has stepped in, announcing that it will establish a unified national system of oversight for e-commerce to prevent and punish law-breaking and unfair practices.

A Beijing-level official in the Ministry told the Beijing Evening News that the city was taking the lead by establishing a new laboratory for the collection of electronic data and evidence that will hopefully help in the prosecution of law-breaking e-commerce companies. The system, which will be overseen by legal authorities, can apparently access the computers of e-commerce executives and copy (but not alter) files to its own servers for examination.

It’s not clear when the Ministry’s new system of oversight will be fully implemented, but it is clearly taking e-commerce fraud very seriously. Ministry officials promised to make the fines levied on e-commerce criminals harsher, and this year the Ministry has already inspected more than 290,000 e-commerce sites, deleted more than seven million instances of illegal product information, and shut down 168 illegal e-commerce companies.

[Beijing Evening News via Sina Tech]

One example of a government weibo account: the Ningbo police’s official page

We all know Sina Weibo has a massive number of users, and over the past year as it has become clear to everyone that this really is a new sphere for public discussion and not just a passing fad, government bureaus have rushed to make their presence known on the social networking service. Police departments were among the first adopters, and now according to a recent report released by Sina, there are 50,947 different government entities with weibo accounts. That number is as of late September, though, so the actual number now is likely higher.

Although the number shows there is still a ways left to go before China’s bureaucracy has fully joined the information age, it also reveals things have been improving at breakneck speed. Indeed, the number of government weibo accounts has more than doubled since December of last year.

As of September, 33,132 of government weibo accounts represented government organs while 17,815 represented specific government officials. Departments and officials from every province are represented, but unsurprisingly the places with the most accounts are more developed areas like Beijing, Jiangsu, and Guangzhou. Public security, public health, and tourism departments are (unsurprisingly) among the most likely to have Weibo accounts.

It’s clear there is still plenty of room for growth, but it’s good to see local governments embracing communication and jumping onto weibo to interact with their constituents.

[Beijing Times via Sina Tech, Image source]

Last Tuesday, an Indonesian military Air Force jet crashed at a housing complex in Riau. Ironically, the injuries from that incident weren’t caused by the crashed plane, but by violent conduct from military who were securing the premise. This made headlines all over Indonesia after it was recorded and published on YouTube.

The video shows a soldier doing a judo-style take down and choking a journalist. There were other abuses which took place as well, to both local residents and other journalists who were taking pictures of the plane crash.

In the soldiers’ defence, they were securing the premise for public safety and also protecting classified information that could be leaked from the combat aircraft. But in the journalists’ defence, they were just doing their job – reporting a plane crash that took place in a civilian neighborhood, and that they were protected by the Press Preedom Act [1].

The incident also spurred quite a debate on the YouTube. Some people defended soldiers’ rights, considering their orders to secure the premise, but regretted that they used violence to do it. Some were equally displeased with both parties by calling them both arrogant; including the journalist who persisted on taking pictures. Others expressed disappointment that this violence happened in front of so many children. But the majority of those enraged by the incident blamed the soldiers.

In the end, The Jakarta Post cited Indonesian military commander admiral Agus Suhartono today as saying that he apologized for the assaults conducted by his subordinates. This is after numerous journalism associations across the country subsequently staged protests. The military promises to officially investigate the matter.

This is not the only moment that the Indonesian military displayed more arrogance than it ought to. The recent “Palmerah Koboy” incident saw a soldier use his gun and baton to intimidate and assault a biker at Palmerah area, over a routine traffic dispute. It was captured and published on YouTube, and has been viewed more than 685,000 times.

Now that Kompas is also promoting citizen journalism with its K-Report app for Blackberry, any arrogance and violence by the authorities can now be easily reported and published for the world to see. Authorities will likely (and hopefully) think twice before acting in this manner in the future.

[Source: Jakarta Globe via Sidomi, image: atjehpost.com]

If you’re wondering whether your phone has any illegal maps, you can check to see whether your maps have any disputed territories (like the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, the Paracel islands, etc.) that aren’t labeled as being a part of China. If they do, congratulations! Your maps are illegal. Chinese customs agents would like to confiscate your phone and send it to the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation for “further investigation.” Seriously.

The news report (which we picked up via @niubi) doesn’t make it explicit, but the reason for this is the ongoing spat with Japan over an uninhabited island chain (called Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese) that may be a valuable source of oil. The announcement is China’s latest sabre-rattling reminder that it won’t tolerate anyone (or any internet maps) suggesting that the islands don’t belong to China.

If you’re worried for your phone’s safety at Chinese customs, though, I wouldn’t be. Practically speaking, it would take forever for customs officials to stop everyone at the border and search through all the maps available on their phones, computers, tablets, and whatever other internet-friendly devices they have. Moreover, confiscating people’s phones just because they can access some maps on the internet that China doesn’t like would be ridiculous, and although the Chinese government does have a pretty tin ear when it comes to how its actions are received internationally, I have got to believe they know well enough that China Steals Tourists’ Phones is not a headline they want to see. I could be wrong — don’t blame me if your phone really does get confiscated — but I expect this is one of those all-bark-and-no-bite situations.

[Xinhua via @niubi, Image via Getty]

The threat posed by malicious hackers to companies and the government in Indonesia continues to grow stronger, although so far there hasn’t been any significant damage to speak of. Not yet anyway, says the director general of the Telematics Applications of Ministry of Communications and IT, Hashwin Saso, at a seminar and international conference titled “Potential Information Security Threat Awareness ” in Bandung. Hashwin explains:

Hacker attacks in Indonesia are quite big, but so far they are not yet on a destructive level. It also has not caused site or network damage that could resulting in chaos for IT systems that run companies or institutions.

He noted that hackers include not only local players in the country but also include hackers from abroad. The MCIT has conducted a number of steps, working with the community to maintain digital security.

Hashwin said that government sites are the most favorite target for the hackers. The MCIT and the Ministry of Defence sites have been targeted several times. However, there was no real damage of the IT systems and networks there. He said there are communities abroad who openly gather forces of hackers to hijack the MCIT site.

The seminar and discussion in Bandung was attended by more than 700 IT experts. With this seminar, many around the country could join forces and increase the awareness of potential threats to information security. This international conference brings together IT experts from at home and abroad. This particular event was the first time that the meeting was held in Bandung.

[Source: Republika.co.id]

China’s World of Warcraft players are not the luckiest gaming community in the world. They are generally passed off as gold farmers by racist gamers in the West, they’re detested by other Asian gamers who resent the server invasions that occur whenever new expansions come out (because most of them take a while longer to come out in China), the expansions they do get are often late and ridiculously censored, and they’re frequently held up in the media as addicts.

The latest perceived injustice comes at the hands of state-run television channel CCTV, which recently broadcast a dramatized story about a man who went into bankruptcy after ignoring his work to play World of Warcraft. The details are frankly a bit over my head — I am a gamer but never got into WoW — but long story short, veteran players feel that CCTV misrepresented the game in order to drum up drama for the story and make the game seem worse than it is. They claim that some of what was depicted in the story isn’t actually possible in the Cataclysm expansion the players in the piece were shown playing. “This time CCTV’s lies are just too unprofessional” wrote one WoW player on Weibo.

Chinese WoW players have been feeling victimized and marginalized for quite a while now, though. Several years ago, one team of players made an incredible machinima video that, among other things, details the complaints of Chinese WoW players and ultimately takes things a step further. If you’ve got a few free minutes, I recommend checking out this clip from the film. Start at around 1:40 and watch to the end. Even though it’s a few years old now, it will give you a pretty good idea of how WoW players in China often feel. (Warning: Contains NSFW Language)

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[Via QQ Games]

Beijing’s deadly floods this summer quickly became an avenue for criticism of the government when it claimed it would have been “impossible” to text a warning to the city’s more than 20 million residents in a timely fashion. China Mobile’s Guangdong subsidiary quickly proved this wrong by sending out more than 30 million warning texts about floods in that region shortly after the Beijing disaster, and now the company has come out and said that it has the capability to handle warnings in Beijing, too. In fact, Beijing Mobile (China Mobile’s Beijing subsidiary) Party secretary Tian Limin says that with the government’s permission the company is capable of sending out 25 million warning texts — enough to cover every Beijing resident — in under ten seconds.

The company is also planning to do more to improve service in low-service areas to ensure that when warning texts are sent out, everyone actually gets them. This involves installing mini signal “bases” in a lot of places, which has led to concerns among some residents that they are at risk from increased radiation. Tian, however, says that citizens need to disabuse themselves of the notion that these bases cause any radiation risk to humans.

The catch to China Mobile’s high-speed warning plan, of course, that it can’t warn anyone without the government’s permission and cooperation, which obviously it didn’t have when the flooding occurred this summer. The next time disaster strikes Beijing, the government is probably more likely to turn to telecom companies given the embarrassment caused by this summer’s failure. But it’s still a little disconcerting that even if Godzilla stomped his way past a China Mobile office, the company still couldn’t tell anyone about that until the folks in Zhongnanhai had signed off on it.

[via Sina Tech, Image source]

The site, which is fairly simple at the moment, aims to inform people of who their reps are, as well as providing some basic biographical information about them. Users who want to submit information about reps can also do that by choosing their location and then filling out a rather basic form with their contact information, and each representatives page also includes a form that allows users to ask the rep questions. How those questions are then transmitted to those representatives — and whether or not they’re likely to respond — isn’t clear, but it’s probably better than nothing. Just in case, the site provides links to Google and Baidu searches as well as the rep’s official online profile so that users can try to dig up some contact information on their own.

Those search engine links also allow you to pay attention to what your reps are doing, which is the actual point of the site. Gongmin Guanzhu means, roughly, “citizens pay attention,” and the site’s motto is “Change begins with paying attention.” Even if it can’t really help you change government policy, at least the site can tell you a little about your representatives and make it easier for you to keep track of what they’re up to.

The site is really well-designed: it’s simple and easy to navigate, and in contrast to most official government websites, it looks nice and clean. It could definitely use some more detail (an FAQ page that explains who is behind the site and how it works would be a good start) but I think it’s a pretty cool idea nevertheless. It is apparently maintained by “volunteers,” but who they are and why they’re doing this isn’t explained in any detail.

Of course, I feel obliged to point out that the People’s Congress is a rubber-stamp body with little real power that meets for only two weeks each year. Still, getting the attention of your People’s Congress reps could be a good first step for anyone with a grievance they’re looking to resolve. And I think the site’s motto is right; change does start with citizens paying attention to what their government is doing.

As an Indonesian, I tend to think that most of my government agencies perform terribly when it comes to serving the public. And it is one of the main objectives of Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to conduct bureaucratic reform in his now two terms in power. Thanks to the internet, that shake-up is happening right now as some public services – like renewing a drivers’ license – become available online.

Meet Open Government Indonesia. It is part of the Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative that aims to make governments better. In Indonesia, Open Government Indonesia focuses on pushing transparency, public participation, and innovation across government departments.

One of its big programs is the Open Government Competition. The recent competition saw no fewer than 62 public service agencies coming from 34 ministries. Ayu Kartika Dewi, Head of Open Government Indonesia Secretariat, informed us that the competition requires participants to show a program which will ensure a measurable improvement in their service in three months time.

At the awards night last Friday, 10 innovations were named as finalists. Although not all of these innovations are tech related, some of these winners show encouraging progress in incorporating the use of information technology to enhance public services. Here is a short list of notable use of technology among the finalists:

• Inatrade, demoed by the Ministry of Trade, enables people to apply for trade-related licenses online. Named as the winner of this competition, I do find that the web app is the most rich-featured and accessible for the public.
• Similarly, the Passport Administration System in South Jakarta allows people to apply for their passport online. Although I had some difficulty finding the actual service in internet, I ended up finding it here.
• Online Driving License Registration, rolled out by the DKI Jakarta Police Department, enables citizens to apply or extend their driving license online and complete the whole process in just two working days.

When asked what the next step for Open Government Indonesia is, Ayu answered that they are currently developing a portal named Satu Layanan (which means “One Service”). This portal is meant to serve as the place to go when you need any information about any service from a government agency. Ayu even gave us a preview of what the portal will look like:

In its current form, Satu Layanan holds information on services from 41 government agencies containing various information such as electricity bills, taxes, and weather forecasts. When you navigate to one of the icons in the portal (as shown in the picture above), the website will show you more detailed information about the service you selected (as shown in the picture below). I think this a step in the right direction to improve public services in Indonesia.

New ThinkPad X131e Laptop

According to a Bloomberg report today, Chinese PC maker Lenovo (HKG:0992) is going after Dell’s share of government and education sales in the US.

Earlier this year we saw Lenovo reap the rewards of a government contract in India, which helped them overtake Hewlett Packard [1] in that market by leaping to 14.9 percent market share, up on 9.7 percent for the same time the year before. So if it can do something similar in the US, it can only mean good things for its already growing business there.

The afore-mentioned report cites Lenovo’s North American vice president and general manager, Thomas Looney, as claiming that the company can grow more than 20 percent a year in sales to education and government institutions.

Indeed Lenovo is pushing hard for the American market, recently landing a three-year sponsorship deal with the National Football League, becoming the official laptop, desktop and workstation sponsor for the organization – and likely getting lots of important TV air time during games.

Looking at recent trends in PC market share in the United States, Lenovo was the only top five manufacturer to show positive yearly growth in IDC’s recent second quarter report, with a 6.1 percent jump from a year before to hold 8 percent of the market. In contrast, leader HP was down 12 percent, although it still holds a commanding lead with almost 26 percent of the market.

Li Qiang testifies

The United States’s Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) — chaired by congressman Chris Smith and senator Sherrod Brown — held a hearing today to discuss workers’ rights in Chinese factories. It’s a topic that we’ve discussed before, and one that hits home for most people interested in technology, since many of our high-tech gadgets are manufactured in Chinese factories. So how bad is the situation? To hear the selectively-chosen speakers in this afternoon’s session, pretty bad.

Longtime congressional testimony veteran Harry Wu began his testimony with a probably-apocryphal story about a Motorola CEO who spoke to then-Chinese premier Zhu Rongji about setting up a factory in China. “I just hope that the Chinese workers don’t form a union,” says the CEO. “So do I!” replied the Chinese premier. That pretty much sums up how the hearing went. Rep. Smith and Senator Brown were especially harsh in criticizing the Chinese government’s role in China’s labor problems, but many of the panelists stressed that multi-national corporations — especially highly profitable tech companies that make their gadgets in China — are also a big part of the problem.

Charles Kernaghan, the executive director at the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights kicked off the first panel with a discussion of a factory of VTech’s. VTech, if you’re not aware, makes tons of cordless phones in addition to electronic learning tools and other gadgets. According to Kernaghan, VTech workers make 15.5 times less than their American counterparts, which is why nearly all cordless phones are made in China these days. Workers at VTech, Kernaghan says, work twelve or more hours a day, for around 80 hours a week plus as many as 37 additional hours of overtime. He described the pace of work there as “relentless, furious, mind-numbing [and] exhausting,” and said that the workers “feel like they’re in prison.” In photographs from inside the factory obtained by his organization, workers revealed food in company cafeterias that was literally rotten. Kernaghan said that 80 percent of workers “try to flee” at least once over the course of the year, but they are generally kept from leaving by the unpaid back-wages that management holds over their heads, suggesting they will forfeit it if they go. Fellow panelist Li Qiang of China Labor Watch said later in the hearing that the working conditions at VTech described above “do exist in most plants and most factories throughout China.”

Kernaghan stressed that “nothing will change in the global economy without enforceable labor rights” and said that it was at least partially the responsibility of corporations like VTech and Apple to push for workers’ rights in China.

But are Apple and other multi-nationals really trying to implement labor reform? The hiring of third-party auditing firms to conduct inspections of Chinese factories has often been cited as evidence that foreign firms are trying to uphold international standards, but Li Qiang said his organization had uncovered “strong evidence” of corruption in some of these audit programs. In one example, inspectors were paid to “overlook” certain violations in their report while stressing areas where violations didn’t occur. “Audit reports would be made of of facts, but of course, they ignore some of the facts,” said Li.

As for Apple, Li singled the company out as one that has the opportunity to really make a change in China’s labor situation if it chooses to do so. Apple CEO Tim Cook’s yearly salary is roughly equivalent to the yearly salary of 300,000 supply-chain workers, and Apple’s yearly profits are equivalent to more than a hundred years of salary for those same 300,000 workers, says Li. “Corporations like Apple do have the resources to change the conditions, and I think we should start with Apple to change the conditions on the ground.”

Police-confiscated forged stamps and documents

If you want to do anything official in China, you’re going to need some stamps. Red-ink official “chops” adorn almost every kind of important document, and chances are if it doesn’t have a stamp, Chinese officials aren’t going to accept it. For that reason, some criminals in China do a brisk trade in forged stamps. But making it look official isn’t always easy, and one gang apparently went the extra mile for their customers, hacking and tampering with 185 different government websites nationwide to make their stamps appear more official and to assuage customers’ concerns by making their company appear to be legitimate. So far, police have arrested 165 suspects and confiscated more than 10,000 fake stamps and 7,100 fake certificates of various kinds.

Although it’s good that the criminals will be brought to justice, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this sort of thing is pretty easy to do and will probably happen again. Last year we wrote about how many Chinese government sites haven’t been updated in years and it’s hard to believe there’s much security in place if a gang of stamp-forgers was able to penetrate so many websites and insert links to their own sites or tamper with content in other ways. Indeed, Jieyang police captain Chen Xiaoping told the Beijing Times that the “security level” of these government sites was even lower than that of commercial sites like Tianya and Kaixin, which have previously experienced security leaks.

In addition to apparently being easily hackable and rarely updated, many government websites are a design nightmare and feature a horrible user experience that makes it difficult to find useful information. In light of this latest news, I think the government ought to mandate an overhaul to all government sites, not only to make them more secure but to make them more usable for regular people looking for basic information. Secure, functional websites would benefit everyone, and hopefully would make it more difficult for criminals to use government sites for profit like this.

[Beijing Times via Sina Tech]

I Tawt I Taw A Guberment!

Readers may recall Google’s recent transparency report just a couple of weeks ago, which raised important questions on which nations censor and inquire about user information. Now Twitter, noting inspiration from Google’s work, has released its own transparency report. Like Google’s this holds some surprises as well.

The first alarming point is that Twitter has received more government requests for user information in the first half of 2012 than it has in all of 2011. Secondly, out of 849 user information requests, a whopping 679 (almost 80 percent) of them were from the US. The number two nation in user information requests was surprisingly Japan, with 98 user information requests (almost 12 percent). No other nation has more than 11 user information requests.

Like Google, Twitter didn’t elaborate on the data very much, with no judgements passed on either the US or Japan. But the phrasing in the blog post announcement, as well as the date the company chose to release it, indicates to me that Twitter seems many of these requests as unfounded:

Wednesday marks Independence Day here in the United States. Beyond the fireworks and barbecue, July 4th serves as an important reminder of the need to hold governments accountable, especially on behalf of those who may not have a chance to do so themselves.

I’ve reached out to Twitter representatives for more information regarding Japan specifically, and I’ll update you if I receive further information. The complete country data released by Twitter can be viewed below. Twitter says that in the future it will be publishing updates on this report twice a year.

[h/t to Rich]

The warning message many China-based gmail users are seeing.

Google has also made it clear that the warning does not indicate anyone’s account has actually been compromised yet. Rather, it is a warning that users affected should take additional steps to secure their accounts.

As far as how, exactly, Google is aware that these attacks are State-sponsored, the company is playing its cards close to the vest:

You might ask how we know this activity is state-sponsored. We can’t go into the details without giving away information that would be helpful to these bad actors, but our detailed analysis—as well as victim reports—strongly suggest the involvement of states or groups that are state-sponsored.

Perhaps this is just my own case of China tunnel vision, but it’s difficult not to see this as a reference to Chinese government hacking attempts, especially given that Google took a shot at China’s censorship system just last week. It’s clear the company has no interest in playing along with the Chinese government, and given that many China-based gmail users — including me — have already experienced hacks and other attacks with apparently political motivations, it’s not much of a stretch to assume Google is talking about China here.

Anyway, if there was any doubt before that you should enable extra security measures like two-step authentication for your Google accounts in China, there shouldn’t be now. Check yo self before you wreck yo self, people.

[hat tip to @TomLasseter for mentioning this on Twitter]

Does this look like fog to you? Taken in Beijing in Spring, 2012

The AP is reporting this afternoon that a senior Chinese environmental official has told foreign embassies in Beijing to stop reporting on the capital’s pollution levels. The message is a very clear reference to the US Embassy’s @BeijingAir Twitter feed, which reports real-time pollution levels for PM2.5 (the smallest and most dangerous particles) and Ozone every hour.

The Twitter account has been an annoyance to China more or less since its advent, especially given that Beijing does not publish its own PM 2.5 pollution data, although the government has agreed to begin next year. This newest admonishment is probably the result of Beijing being afraid that the US Twitter feed will provide data and health assessments that differ from China’s own, which is almost certain to be true. Beijing’s pollution standards differ vastly from standards in the US and Europe, and PM 2.5 levels considered quite unhealthy overseas are acceptable under China’s standards. In fact, Chinese officials said as much in their overtures to embassies to stop reporting pollution data:

Wu [a senior environmental official] said it isn’t fair to judge Chinese air by American standards because China is a developing country. He noted that the U.S. has gradually made its environmental guidelines more stringent over time.

The standard China uses “takes into account the level of our current stage of development,” Wu said.

The US Embassy is not likely to care about this or to shut down its Twitter feed. Nor are lung cancer or any of the other deadly diseases associated with long-term PM 2.5 particle exposure likely to care much what “stage of development” China is at. Indeed, lung cancer rates in Beijing have risen by a terrifying 60 percent over the past decade even while smoking rates remained the same.

But the real issue Beijing is likely concerned about is the degree to which this data may become accessible to the Chinese public in the era of mobile internet. We’ve written already about one Chinese app that takes data from the US Twitter feed and makes it accessible — and easier to understand — for Chinese audiences on Android. That’s bad enough on its own (it’s clear the government doesn’t want to publicize any PM 2.5 data and the general feeling is that it agreed to only as a result of growing public pressure this fall), but it will be even more embarrassing next year when the government begins publishing its own data.

Imagine this: a Chinese user reads the daily pollution levels in a Chinese paper (“healthy”), but then flips on his or her smartphone and checks an app connected to the US feed that tells a different story (“hazardous”). That makes the government look bad, and it’s probably why environmental officials are whining that the US’s Twitter feed is unfair.

Despite the obviousness of the truth — Beijing’s toxic haze is there for everyone to see — the government prefers to deflect discussion of the problem, and in fact the haze is often called “fog” rather than “smog” or “pollution” in Chinese media. But increasingly, a plethora of apps that feed off the US Twitter feed give Chinese smartphone users access to the same grim information expats have been sighing (and then coughing) about for years.

[AP via Asian Correspondent]

It’s not clear where the site was designed, and a WHOIS lookup returns the true owner of the domain has been concealed, though it appears the site is currently hosted in Denmark. Although it is apparently the official English-language website of the North Korean government, it is connected with and seemingly operated by the Korean Friendship Association, a sort of international fan club for North Korea that anyone can join. In fact, it’s very easy to join, according to the site:

In order to join the KFA, please send an e-mail to korea@korea-dpr.com with your complete name, address, telephone, birth date and e-mail. The membership is totally free.

Members can also purchase a KFA membership card for 50 Euros ($63).

The site is full of information about North Korea, from details about the country’s flag to information on how to travel there for business or pleasure. It also has a photo gallery and an online Cafepress shop where one can purchase DPRK swag. In fact, the whole thing looks pretty normal, until you start reading any of the text. Then, of course, you come across things like this:

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a genuine workers’ state in which all the people are completely liberated from exploitation and oppression. The workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals are the true masters of their destiny and are in a unique position to defend their interests.

So the DPRK is selling the same old crazy in a slick new package. I can’t imagine this will be a particularly effective soft power tool for the Hermit Kingdom; on the other hand, it’s been a hot topic on Twitter all morning so I could be wrong. There do appear to still be a few bugs in the system, though. For example, this page is supposed to be a new memorial section for Kim Il Sung, but it’s actually just a dead link.

Either way, perhaps China’s government could take the hint and ask the North Koreans to design new official websites for China while they’re at it. Most Chinese government websites are a nightmare of outdated and mostly terrible design.

Update: As noted by Terence Ng in the comments, it seems this “new design” is actually based on a $15 template. At least they have decent taste?

We knew that shares in People’s Daily Online (SHA:603000), China’s government-backed news website, were hot, but apparently they’re a little too hot to handle. The stocks were suspended in morning trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange today after excessive trading had pushed its price up by just over 100 percent from its initial listing at 20 RMB per share last Friday. It is currently at 40.5 RMB, and has now resumed action in the afternoon.

The procedural measure is, says an article on the People’s Daily site, “aimed at reining in speculative manipulation of share prices,” and is temporary. Indeed, the shares were also briefly halted on their debut last week.

But the motives for the bullishness on these stocks is interesting. Li Weidong, research director at consultancy China Venture, told the People’s Daily Online:

The reason why investors are bullish about the news portal is because of its unique background. In some investors’ eyes, the state-backed media company’s profits are somehow guaranteed given the support it receives from the government’s preferential policies.

And so its state-sponsored heritage makes the stock, perhaps, a sure-fire winner in the micro-censored media landscape in China where private news websites can be ordered to do anything, and authorities can even demand the removal of articles or key personnel. That makes life tough for web portals like Sina, (NASDAQ:SINA), Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), et al.

Other government-controlled news organisations might list in China soon, including state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), and the official news agency Xinhua.

People's Daily Online shares on its opening morning, up to time of publishing at 11:30am.

People’s Daily Online, the news website that’s the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece on the web, has listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange this morning under the ‘SHA:603000’ ticker. The stock opened much higher than the anticipated 20 to 22.5 RMB per share range, starting today at 31.01 RMB and then climbing rapidly. Just before lunch, it’s already trading at 35.28 RMB.

The flotation looks to have raised 2.41 billion RMB (US$383 million) from 69.1 million shares for the company at its much higher opening price. The lead underwriter is CITIC Securities (HKG:6030; SHA:600030).

People’s Daily Online – not to be confused with state news agency Xinhua – has portals in 15 languages in addition to its Chinese news. The company had previously declared that it would use the finances to upgrade and bolster its wireless services, tech platform, and editorial team.

The state-controlled website, at people.com.cn, generates most of its revenue from advertising, wireless services, and content syndication. But it’s under pressure to innovate and push more into mobile, with many smartphone-toting Chinese preferring to get their (very tightly-controlled) news from less dowdy sources that have cooler apps and websites, such as the portals from Sina, Tencent, Sohu, or Netease.

You can follow the People’s Daily Online stock on QQ Finance.

Apparently, the market works something like this: “sources” acquire personal information through a variety of means which might include hacking and phishing. But actually, many “sources” are government workers who have access to citizens’ personal information because of their positions, and sell it to make some money on the side. These people rarely approach online information sales platforms directly, so the information is usually transferred via an intermediary, perhaps a friend of the source, who then sells it to an ‘information platform.’ Sources generally make relatively little, often just a few dollars per person, though it varies based on the person in question and the quality and type of information.

Once these online ‘information platforms’ have the info, it is generally sold to private investigation companies at a significant markup (around $80-$300). The investigation companies then sell this information to clients, sometimes as part of a larger information package and often at huge markups. In an interview with a reporter from the Beijing Morning Post, a representative from the Beijing police said that certain pieces of high-value information were sold for as much as 60,000 RMB (about $9,500), although most went for much less than that.

Of course, this crackdown hasn’t eliminated the dangers of having one’s personal information stolen, and the police say that reports of stolen information are rare and difficult to trace because generally the victims have no idea the theft has even occurred. Given that a good portion of the information is initially leaked by government sources, there’s also no way to really avoid the risk. Being careful to avoid phishing scams and viruses can certainly help, but if a local official with access to your data decides he’d like to line his pockets a little, there’s not much you can do about it.

So, uh, I guess we’d better hope the police do a good job of staying on top of this and cracking down on the trade in illegal personal information.

[Beijing Morning Post via Sina Tech]

Chinese government officials, take note of Shang Bing's open eyes and mouth. This is called 'answering a question,' and it's something you might want to consider trying every once in a while!

It’s no secret that China’s internet is pretty slow. Looking at the numbers makes it clear, and the message is struck home every time I leave China. When I went to Hong Kong last year, I was shocked at the speed of the internet. When I went to Singapore for our most recent Startup Asia conference, the internet in our hotel was way faster than the internet I have at home. It’s a little bit depressing.

But the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s Shang Bing wants us all to know that the government feels bad about it too. At a press event yesterday, Mr. Shang did something Chinese officials almost never do: directly answer a difficult question from the media. When asked about the disparity between broadband speeds in China and elsewhere in Asia, Shang responded:

We have always paid attention to the internet speed rankings published by many different organizations within China and abroad. The communications industry is clearly aware of the fact that there is a definite difference between the internet speed in China and in leading countries abroad, and there is a mood of urgency [about this in China]. To use some internet slang to describe it, we feel ‘pressure like a great mountain’ is upon us.

‘Pressure like a great mountain’ is a kind of pun; it sounds like the name “Alexander” in Chinese but it also evokes the idea of the sort of pressure one might feel when being crushed by a large mountain. In using it, Mr. Shang was making a kind of joke — another thing Chinese officials don’t do very often — but he was also acknowledging that MIIT and the telecom companies feel pressure to catch up with China’s neighbors on broadband speed.

Shang cited high infrastructure costs as a reason China has been slow to lay fiber-optic cables, which allow for faster connection speeds than typical phone lines. Those costs have been dropping, but Shang also pointed out that China’s vast and varied geography, as well as it’s massiv population, make implementing any new infrastructure expensive and difficult.

Still, with the weight of a figurative mountain on top of them, here’s hoping they get cracking on solving the problem anyway.

[Via Sina Tech]

Chinese web researcher Hu Yanping has indicated there are rumors that authorities will ban Chinese search engines such as Baidu from indexing real-time search results from the country’s Twitter-like Weibo sites, such as Sina Weibo.

Tests today on Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) show that the feature is still in operation, with certain trending terms appearing in the form of three microblog tweets on the Baidu first page of results (pictured above). The incorporation of microblogs in Baidu is a relatively new phenomenon, with support for Sina Weibo and then Tencent Weibo added just last month.

In a tweet on Mr. Hu’s verified account (see it here), the founder of analysts DCCI says that Baidu – and presumably other locally-operating search engines, from Microsoft’s Bing to state-run Jike – will have to put a stop to this. In translation, he said:

Hu Yanping's microblog post on this rumor. Click to enlarge.

Baidu’s and Sina’s short honeymoon is over? A rumor: relevant departments say that search engines must stop indexing microblog content. But can this sort of block stop the dissemination of information?

By “information,” we feel that he means rumors, and that this is part of the ongoing war on rumors being waged by authorities who feel that loose lips sink ships could stir up dissent, especially where the gossip – and inconvenient news – touches on political issues, whether it’s the ongoing Bo Xilai scandal or endemic corruption in general.

A more likely scenario is that Baidu and other search engines would have to screen the kind of Weibo trends that appear in their results more carefully. Although we’d be surprised if this were not happening already.

We’ve reached out to Baidu on this issue, but no-one was immediately available to comment.

The bad blood between Qihoo and Tencent runs pretty deep at this point. Last year’s PR slugfest has evolved into a series of court cases, the latest of which begins today in Guangdong. Tencent stands accused of monopolistic practices for bundling its anti-virus software with the popular QQ IM software, forcing QQ users to forgo other anti-virus and security options (including, of course, those offered by Qihoo).

Today, Sina Tech revealed in full the content of an internal memo Qihoo CEO Zhou Hongyi sent to staff about the lawsuit. The memo is dated today, meaning it was leaked pretty quickly, and possibly intentionally. In it, he’s got some very strong words for Tencent:

From [previous cases and Tencent's behavior] we can see that Tencent has not engaged in any deep reflection on its mistakes in the “3Q War” as it publicly said it would, and instead is attempting to use lawsuits both to cover up its own disgraceful, monopolistic “two-for-one” behavior and to create obstacles for the development of our company. Facing this situation, the company [Qihoo] has decided to use the law to protect itself, and in October of 2011 we sued Tencent for monopolistic practices.

The whole memo is a bit over the top. Zhou alludes to the Microsoft anti-monopoly suit, crediting it with the rise of Facebook and Google in the US and implying Qihoo’s suit could have a similar effect. He also framed the lawsuit as an example of Qihoo sticking up for smaller companies to stop Tencent’s unjust practices:

Most companies can only resign themselves to enduring Tencent’s abuse of its status in the market, and the few companies that stand up can only strongly criticize [Tencent]. Qihoo hopes that this anti-monopoly lawsuit will eliminate the abuse of [Tencent's] controlling-the-market status, restrict competitive behavior, and end the chaos of the internet, purifying the internet environment.

Yes, if there’s anything that can help purify the internet environment in China, it’s a series of ugly lawsuits and mudslinging memos like this one. Qihoo has marched into the courtroom for you, internet citizen, and for you, small internet company! We’re sure the fact that it stands to gain buckets of money (specifically, $24 million) and a potential slice of a big market if the decision goes its way is purely coincidental.

[via Sina Tech]

People’s Daily Online, the news website closely tied to China’s governing Communist party, has just issued a statement saying that it intends to raise as much as 1.55 billion RMB ($238 million) from its forthcoming Shanghai IPO. That’s three times more than planned previously. Subscriptions for the stock open this afternoon and continue throughout tomorrow – but there’s no date set for when it actually will hit Shanghai tickers.

It has set a range of 20 to 22.5 RMB per share, meaning that it could raise 1.38 to 1.55 billion RMB. 69.1 million People’s Daily Online shares will be issued, and the lead underwriter is CITIC Securities (HKG:6030; SHA:600030).

The state-controlled website, at people.com.cn, generates most of its revenue from advertising, wireless services, and content syndication. It also has versions in English, Korean, Tibetan, Arabic, and numerous other languages, and has a subsidiary and office in the US. The company had previously declared that it would use the finances to upgrade and bolster its wireless services, tech platform, and editorial team. But that was said when it planned to raise just 527 million. Now that that figure has tripled, it’s not clear how that might change its intentions.

The People’s Daily Online faces significant challenges from younger and fresher news sources, such as those from major web portals like Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), and Netease (NASDAQ:NTES).

Last year, People’s Daily Online – a subsidiary of the People’s Daily newspaper – saw its profits jump 74 percent year-on-year to 138 million RMB, while its sales revenue leaped 50 percent to 497 million RMB.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

The taxes requested apparently include a 17% value-added tax and regular income taxes. This could result in some shops needing to make payments of over $100,000, according to the Guangzhou Daily.

Many net users are worried that the more thorough tax enforcement will result in increased prices across China’s e-commerce sector. Industry insiders worry that with taxes, the increased cost of operating an internet shop will eliminate the meager price advantage e-commerce sites currently have over brick-and-mortar stores.

Of course, internet shops should have been paying taxes all along, but while the laws have always been there, the enforcement has been quite lax. The move to extract back-taxes from major Tmall merchants might indicate a new, more serious enforcement strategy. At the moment, though, it’s only affecting a small percentage of Tmall shops. Whether it’s a fluke or an omen of things to come…well, we’ll just have to wait and see.

[Guangzhou Daily via Sina Tech]

So Sister Feng is banned from TV. We know you're devastated.

China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, a government bureau tasked with eliminating all television programming other than the CCTV Evening News overseeing a big chunk of China’s entertainment business, has been tightening up Chinese television over the last few years, banning everything from mid-show advertising breaks to shows that include time travel. At a recent forum, SARFT assistant director Li Wei said that in order to avoid television being excessively vulgar and entertaining, SARFT feels internet celebrities and people involved in scandals should not be allowed as guests on television programs.

At present, this is just SARFT’s opinion, but policy seems soon to follow. Speaking about popular TV shows inviting internet celebrities as guests, Li Wei said: “We will quickly correct and reverse this problem; you can’t make the same mistake over and over.”

So internet celebrities will be confined to the internet again, or so it seems. How will SARFT actually define who is an internet celebrity? How big a scandal will one need to be involved in to be banned from TV? These questions remain unanswered. But never fear, your favorite internet celebrities will still be available on the internet, which SARFT isn’t in charge of regulating.

[QQ News via @niubi, Image via ChinaSmack]

The ‘Internet Society of China’ (ISC) has today released a paper entitled Written Proposal on Resisting Internet Rumors that aims to use a mixture of education and stricter regulations to prevent gossip and hearsay spreading across the tightly-controlled Chinese internet. Coming just nine days after authorities punished China’s two largest Twitter-like sites for failing to suppress political rumors, it comes across a lot like the much-vaunted “war on terror” whereby the Bush-era US government sought to defeat any rogue elements that might harm it.

Trouble is, both rumors and terrorism are abstract concepts, and you can’t win a war against a concept. And as an unjust war breeds a new generation of malcontents driven to extreme actions, so a new wave of internet clampdowns, regulations, and censorship will create even less transparency in Chinese politics and the web that might drive netizens to more conjecture and gossip. China’s microblogs, like Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, already have an expensively large crew of staffers engaged in self-censorship, deleting posts that contain keywords that threaten “social stability” (a new propaganda watch-word which is mentioned several times in today’s ISC paper) and banning users as well. On top of that there’s the newly-implemented ‘real name’ policy on the Weibo services that’s supposed to squash rumors by making people feel responsible – or scared? – about what they tweet to their microblogs. But, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and Tencent (HKG:0700) are swamped, and the punishment for most is just a deleted comment. Weibo users know this, and so are still engaging in gossip – even of a political nature – amidst the grim darkness of the lack of transparency in both government and news and web media who comply with all media regulations or else face being shut down.

And so a war on rumors is now underway, characterized by greater surveillance of ordinary folks as if everyone is somehow guilty. Just like how the war on terror massively bolstered the US and UK police state. But where the west has seen advanced face-recognition cameras, and full-body airport scanners, Chinese authorities already have all forms of media in a strangle-hold; it just needs to get a tighter grip. Trouble is, there’s not too much else that can be done – the recent false coup rumors saw the afore-mentioned Weibo clampdown on commenting along with six people arrested for propagating the initial rumor. What else is there? Arrest hundreds? Demand that Twitter-like sites have a built-in delay of a few minutes? Require people submit their tweets via fax to the local police bureau? OK, that last one is plain facetious. But how can progress be made in banishing rumors online when Chinese web users see no light, no progress, from authorities themselves?

8 Ways to Banish Rumors?

The ISC paper – see it here (in Chinese) – today puts forward eight points for how the web can be made to have only “a positive impact on economic, political, cultural and people’s lives,” and not engage in behavior that can cause “a major social nuisance, serious violations of civil rights, harm the public interest” or “also endanger national security and social stability.” Seven of the eight put the onus on web companies and people themselves, with little in the way of self-awareness that the media landscape might need to be altered as well. Here are all the pointers in summary:

1. The first point in the white paper calls for a greater “awareness of the law” as it exists already along with tighter “industry self-regulation.”

2. The next one gets more lyrical, suggesting that the web be geared towards promoting “Chinese culture, a socialist culture” and “healthy web content” such as “spreading scientific theories.” And while that’s great, it doesn’t address the human need for news.

3. Enhance “social responsibility” of those working in online media to vet content, and greater “corporate social responsibility” to “resolutely cut off Internet rumors” on forums, microblog sites, and anywhere else online.

4. “Strengthen internal control mechanisms” at web companies and ensure active “content screening.” Very similar to the third point, really.

5. Employers should be encouraged to have their “website employees conscientiously fulfill their legal responsibility” in making an ethical and healthy web, and better “distinguish” those netizens who will be more likely to propagate rumors. Again, a lot of overlap with points three and four.

6. All social media “shall comply with the government’s internet ‘real name’ authentication requirements” which are already in place on the major Weibo platforms.

7. [Media/web companies] should “listen to the opinions of web users, and work hard to rectify the issued noted by the public.” Finally, a glimmer of awareness of what’s the root cause of the frustration of many on the web! But this seems superfluous alongside the calls for more efficient controls.

8. “Strive towards the majority of internet users actively supporting web companies in resisting and banishing online rumors.” This is an especially vague one, and has the air of turkeys voting for Christmas.

And that, in all its vague and blustery glory, is all that the ISC paper has to offer.

To get an idea of how opaque things are – and getting worse by the year, to be frank – in both online and offline media, note that the official line on the recent Weibo punishment and arrests was deleted from the website of state news agency Xinhua. Here’s the blank page. Let’s not speculate why. But plenty of netizens are still writing, retweeting, and commenting on rumors – and precisely because it’s getting harder and harder to get objective news.

That leaves Sina and Tencent – and whichever web company will have the next social media success – struggling to sift false rumors (along with the very many keywords which are currently banned for utterly opaque reasons) from thousands of Weibo tweets per second. And that too sounds like an unwinnable war.

[Hat-tip to William Farris on G+ for spotting the ISC article]

Probably not coincidentally, the launch of this site coincides roughly with the anniversary of Ai’s disappearance one year ago today, when he was taken by Chinese State Security agents and held for 81 days via a loophole in Chinese criminal law that allowed the police to hold Ai under ‘house arrest’ at a location of their choosing and without informing his family or anyone else of his whereabouts.

It’s not exactly a live video feed, but the cameras cover four different areas of Ai’s studio/home, and post new photos every few minutes. I’ve been watching it for a couple hours this afternoon, and it’s clear the images are updated with some frequency. It’s not exactly compelling viewing, but that’s not really the point.

Still, if you want to be in on the joke — or you just want to see more photos of Ai scowling at his computer and his cat wandering around the courtyard — go ahead and bookmark WeiWeiCam. Household surveillance isn’t just for the police anymore!

The Tencent penguin's scarf isn't always just a fashion accessory.

It’s no secret that Sina Weibo’s laissez-faire attitude towards implementing real-name registration and controlling (false) coup d’etat rumors has had some pretty serious consequences. The other day, a friend of mine raised a question I think we’ve spent too little time on in our discussion of these incidents: why? Why would Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) risk the ire of regulators by being so haphazard in its implementation of the real name rules? I don’t know for sure, but I have some ideas.

This is not a mistake

First of all, I don’t believe it’s possible that the many holes in Sina’s real-name requirements are just bugs or inadvertent mistakes. Sina Weibo itself is a very solid product, and Sina obviously has the talent on staff to do real name right if it wants to. Moreover, even if there were a few bugs at first, it has now been several weeks, and many of these issues have been openly discussed on weibo since day one. If Sina really wanted to close these holes, it’s very hard to imagine they couldn’t.

Nor do I believe Sina simply felt their gigantic user base made them untouchable, as though they could do whatever they wanted without fear of government intervention. There is no internet service that is too big for the government to shut down if it decides it’s too much of a risk, and Sina knows this. As I wrote last week, the government shut off the internet in an entire province (save a few local sites) for months, it certainly would have no qualms about shutting down a single microblogging service if the stakes were high enough. Sina is one of China’s oldest internet companies, and I can’t imagine it has any misconceptions about its own invincibility. No one is invincible.

So why would Sina do this on purpose?

Why would Sina be so lax in implementing real-name restrictions, and why would it allow rumors of an attempted coup to spread after those regulations were supposed to be in place? There are plenty of theories, but I personally believe there are a few reasons:

Sina was testing how serious the government is. Needless to say, a totally unrestricted weibo is better for business. It means higher user numbers and probably higher user activity, and all of that means more money. Given that, it’s in a microblog operator’s best interests to do as little as possible to restrict user access. In implementing real name rules in such a half-assed way, my guess is that Sina was testing whether the Beijing government wanted actual change or just the appearance of change. If the latter, Sina’s initial implementation would have been good enough, and if the former, failures might be explained away as ‘working out the kinks in a new system.’ Either way, Sina needed to find out what the government really wanted so that it didn’t block out any more users than it really needed to.

The spread of rumors actually looks good (from a certain perspective). Although the government is primarily concerned with maintaining stability and its image of unity, Sina is in the difficult position of having to please two masters. Users and investors were collectively concerned that real-name restrictions might hurt weibo by reducing user activity or cowing people into silence. While the spread of coup rumors has clearly gotten Sina in some trouble with the government, it has also helped show that users are still there, still active, and still talking politics. This benefits Sina, and the company may have decided that benefit outweighed the risk of a potential crackdown.

The risks are relatively minor. Because the real-name regulations had just gone into place and because the government hadn’t really drawn a clear line in terms of how tightly rumors needed to be controlled, Sina could be relatively sure that if the laissez-faire approach backfired, it would get some kind of warning from the government first, rather than being completely shut down. And indeed, the site has been “punished” and comments are shut off through tomorrow morning, but the service is still available and no major damage was done to the company. It’s impossible to be sure, but I suspect that this outcome is actually much better for Sina than it would have been if the company had implemented real-name rules and stricter censorship on its own a few weeks ago. Now, Sina looks like the victim rather than the opressor, and that’s good for Sina even if the end result for users is the same experience.

The SIIO announcement that Sina and Tencent had been punished for allowing rumors to spread, and Sina and Tencent’s subsequent closing of their commenting features for several days, indicates that the government is drawing a line of sorts. We don’t know what was said behind closed doors, so it’s difficult to determine whether Sina will attempt to implement real-name rules any more seriously, but certainly it will need to keep a tighter lid on rumors with potential political implications.

Of course, this is all just my own opinion, and no one knows what’s going to happen next. Feel free to share your own theories in the comments, or check out what Weibo users are saying about the ban and a relevant Xinhua editorial from yesterday about the spreading of rumors.

According to a Xinhua report from late Friday evening, a spokesman from China’s National Internet Information Office has announced that several internet companies, including Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and Tencent (HKG:0700), have been legally punished for permitting the spread of unfounded rumors. Specifically, the report cites unfounded rumors that were spreading like wildfire on Sina Weibo of an attempted coup d’etat happening in Beijing. [Update: All comment viewing and posting is now banned. Scroll down for a screenshot].

It’s not clear exactly how the companies were punished — the report just says that they were “seriously criticized and punished accordingly” — but the language is quite strong. The rumors are referred to as exerting an “evil influence” on society, and those who spread them are called “lawbreakers” who acted “maliciously” and “without reason.” Xinhua is China’s official state wire service, and these words were probably carefully chosen.

The report ends with this sentence: “The two companies [Sina and Tencent] expressed that they would thoroughly implement the relevant regulations, take steps to reform themselves, and increase their supervision [of content].” That is very significant, especially if you’re a weibo user.

Earlier today, I wrote a piece about several different ways Sina’s real-name regulations could be evaded, and it has certainly seemed to me like Sina hasn’t been taking things very seriously. Tonight’s Xinhua report, however, may foreshadow significant changes. We don’t know what kind of punishment Sina or Tencent received, but it’s clear Chinese regulators want them to shape up, and since those regulators have the power to shut them down permanently, it’s hard to imagine they won’t comply.

Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo have grown into massive powerhouses, and even after the real-name rules went into effect (kinda), they still have impressive user numbers. But don’t be fooled into thinking that would stop the government from shutting them off entirely to prevent the spread of rumors it sees as extremely harmful — like, say, rumors of a failed coup during a time of leadership transition. People who suggest the government wouldn’t shut down weibo because it’s too popular may be forgetting that just a few years ago, the government turned off basically the entire internet in Xinjiang, a province with over twenty million inhabitants, for months after unrest occurred there. If they think weibo poses a real threat to social stability, they will not hesitate to pull the plug.

But it will never come to that, because Sina and Tencent aren’t stupid. They may have been playing fast-and-loose with the real name regulation rules so far, but they both understand that complying with regulators is the only way a company can do business in China. (Don’t believe me? Ask Google.) So, if you’re on weibo, expect to see significant changes in the months ahead (and maybe don’t retweet those coup rumors unless you’re interested in getting to know your local State Security agents a bit better). Real-name registration hasn’t significantly impacted the discourse on Chinese microblogs yet, but I have the distinct feeling that the music is about to stop.

UPDATE: Both Sina and Tencent Weibo have now suspended commenting services. Users can still post and retweet weibo messages, but attempting to comment on them results in an error message saying that the commenting feature of the site has been suspended until April 3. Reportedly, six people have also been arrested for the spread of the coup rumors. Here’s what Weibo users now see in the comments area on the Weibo.com website (similarly with Tencent’s t.qq.com):

[Via Xinhua, h/t to @eobserver, image via Shutterstock]

1. Strengthen organizational guarantees: Local governments should take further steps to organize with e-commerce, increase oversight in this area, and adopt e-commerce companies into existing channels of supervision and cooperation.
2. Create a robust environment for the development of trust in e-commerce: Everyone — government, consumers, and the companies themselves — should push to hold e-commerce sites accountable for their promises.
3. Increase public service and market oversight in e-commerce: Again, local governments should get more involved in supervising e-commerce sites, especially in ensuring they abide by the laws.
4. Increase the strength of attacks against illegal behavior in e-commerce: More recommendation of strong government oversight, including the possible founding of a long-term branch of government dedicated to oversight and law enforcement in this area.
5. Perfect mechanisms protecting rights and benefits [of consumers]: Extend existing and create new systems to ensure the rights of consumers are protected in the e-commerce sphere.
6. Strengthen e-commerce legislation and create industry standards and norms: Pretty self-explanatory.
7. Perfect the diversification of e-commerce financing mechanisms: Increase transparency in financing and also increase government investment in this area.
8. Strengthen statistical monitoring of e-commerce: Increase cooperation and oversight of the relevant government departments to ensure accurate statistical tracking of the market.
9. Speed the development of skilled professionals: Increase training initiatives, etc.
10. Increase international cooperation: Work with more international companies, and promote the development of Chinese companies through cooperation.

Those are just very short summaries, of course, there’s much more in the full report. The overall message is pretty clear, though; Chinese terms for “oversight/monitoring” appear at least 17 times in the report, and the term “guide” — as in, the government will guide e-commerce companies as they develop — appears 12 times. In other words, I hope you like some relevant departments in your online shopping, because you’re about to get ‘em.

China’s top microblog services, such as Sina Weibo, are just two days away from enacting new ‘real name’ regulations that will effectively block users from tweeting/posting if they haven’t submitted their name and ID number to the web company. And so Sina Weibo is pushing a more simplified way of just linking one’s Weibo account to one’s phone, using SMS, without specifically typing out your name and ID number.

But since Chinese phone SIM cards should, legally, only be sold when accompanied by your name and ID, it’s likely that the SMS verification method now on Sina Weibo will make a database check. That can be cheated, though; more on that later.

Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has put up a special ‘real name’ page (pictured up top) for this registration as the deadline looms. The lady in the image is holding a sign saying “Get the weibo identification badge. We are all reliable people!” It makes no mention of this being a new legal requirement on Chinese microblogs. The page has two main options – note the green buttons – for an SMS-based verification, or a manual input of your details. The phone-based method is of course faster, and I was able to do the whole thing in literally less than a minute by just sending a code to the Sina mobile number. Not being a Chinese national was clearly no problem with this method. Others have reported that the manual input will fail for foreigners (as pictured here) as it will only accept Chinese text in the website’s name entry box.

After linking my Weibo account to my phone, I was given a virtual badge (pictured above) that could be retweeted.

We then experimented using a very old SIM card belonging to my colleague that was bought before the SIM card real ID law was put into force back in 2010, and so was not linked to a real name. And, lo and behold, Sina Weibo rejected the number with a stony silence and no confirmation SMS. So it seems that Sina Weibo is indeed doing a national database check. My own new SIM card, in contrast, is linked to my name and passport number.

Of course, this simpler SMS verification method is not infallible, and could be cheated by purchasing a SIM card using fake ID credentials. That way, Sina would have a name on file, but it would not be that person’s real name. We didn’t attempt to do so, but it’s certainly something that could be done.

The Sina Weibo ‘real name’ homepage features a counter showing how many people have registered their real identities in this way. It currently stands at 18.69 million, and is rising at the rate of about 20,000 people per hour. It’s not clear precisely what that tally is counting. Being such a low number – compared to the 250 million registered on Sina Weibo – it’s presumably limited only to those who’ve taken advantage of this new page, and not people who have submitted their real IDs earlier in some other way. Also note that new users have been signing-up with their real names since January 1st, so this affects only current users who’ll need to submit the info or else face being blocked from posting later this week.

Previously, Sina’s Liu Qi told Reuters that the company reckons some 60 percent of users of its Weibo service will have registered their real identities by the deadline, but no concrete numbers on the conversion progress were given. To be frank, that sounds very optimistic given the number of inactive users – and zombies and microblog spammers – that are inherent in such a social network.

China’s four major microblogs, then, are facing being cut down to size, and user numbers to be revealed later this year will show us precisely how drastic the loss of users was. Less than half, perhaps? Sina Weibo’s SMS verification method shows us that the microblogs desperately need to make it as easy as possible – even if that means the system can be cheated.

Garbage text messages is pretty annoying, especially when they wake you up in the middle of the night. But are they a crime? Chen Weicai thinks so, and he says that telecom operators who fail to stop those texts are criminal accomplices.

Being a responsible lawmaker who takes China’s myriad social issues very seriously, Chen spent his free time during last week’s NPC sessions collecting spam texts from the other NPC members. “In one week, I collected 17 fraud/spam texts,” Chen said. Of course, there are 2,987 representatives in the NPC, so 17 isn’t a particularly large number, but probably Chen didn’t find time to talk to everyone. (Plus, Chinese telecoms offer government bigwigs special spam-blocking services regular folks don’t get unless they sue).

But Chen says that in 2011, over 100,000 fraudulent text messages were sent, which cost losses to the people of over 4 billion RMB ($634 million). It’s not clear where he got those numbers; apparently an awful lot of people fall for these spam texts and end up giving money to the senders.

So why don’t telecoms stop these messages? According to Chen, “The telecom department is enticed by large sums of money, and doesn’t filter texts for the masses; this is losing the big picture in pursuit of small profits!” And it’s not a technical problem. When asked, Chen brought up the case of Mr. Yang in Guangdong, who sued China Mobile because he was being harassed by spam texts and was eventually put on an anti-spam list.

Chen suggested telecoms could also screen texts sent from a single number to more than 10,000 people at once. This, he says, would not be an invasion of privacy because sending a text to 10,000 people isn’t something regular people do.

Since sending spam texts can be a crime — a subset of spam texts are also fraudulent — Chen says that telecom operators failing to block the texts are criminal accessories.

On a completely coincidental note, we’re sure, Chen’s PSB department owes telecom operators more than 180,000 RMB ($28,571) after sending a flood of anti-spam warning texts to users over the Spring Festival holiday.

With China’s Congress in session, the Minister of Industry and IT, Miao Wei, has revealed that the country will not launch a 4G mobile network for another two to three years. Although 4G trials are currently underway in a few cities, the minister said that the timing was dictated by the building of the higher-speed network’s base-stations, which ought to exceed 200,000 by the end of 2013. And that’s when a nationwide roll-out might actually happen.

For now, China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941) will have to make do with its 3G network which uses the home-grown TD-SCDMA protocol that’s not used anywhere else in the world. This has made it tough to get killer devices onto the network – though it finally did last year, with help from the likes of Motorola (NYSE:MMI) with its customized-for-China Atrix phone. But the country’s leading mobile network needs another boost, prompting one China Mobile executive to hint that China Mobile will soon launch a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) device – that would most likely by a HTC or Nokia model. Both HTC (TPE:2498) and Nokia (NYSE:NOK) are racing to be the first to launch a WP7-powered phone in China, and so it seems that China Mobile will be in on the action.

That’s in contrast to China Mobile’s misfortune in not being able to persuade Apple to make a TD-SCDMA version of the iPhone. Nonetheless, just over 15 million locals use their unlocked iPhones on the network anyway, using mere 2G (i.e. GPRS) if they want to get mobile data.

In the interim, the IT minister said that China’s three mobile telcos will have to boost their 3G network in order to bring on more subscribers before the move to 4G. For the government’s preferred mobile network, the semi state-owned China Mobile, that means planning to have as many as 400,000 TD-SCDMA (3G) base-stations in three-years time – critical to a smooth handover to 4G. The country saw 80 million new 3G users in 2011, and the grand total now stands at over 127 million 3G subscribers out of a billion nationwide phone users.

But the future 4G landscape will be fragmented by differing protocols – just as was the case with 3G. China Mobile will use the LTE TDD variant (though it’s not a homegrown solution, unlike TD-SCDMA), while most American networks use LTE FDD. The former is better known as WiMax, and the latter as simply ‘LTE.’ China is pushing for LTE TDD to be the global standard.

[Source: HC360 Telecom news - article in Chinese]

Is China Mobile (HKG:0941, NASDAQ:CHL) in trouble for corruption again? After several recent rounds of restructuring, it appears the company may still be plagued with problems; today the Chinese media is reporting rumors that China Mobile VP and Executive Director Lu Xiangdong has been detained by Jilin prosecutors for questioning. When questioned, China Mobile’s PR arm did not deny the rumors, but said it was in the process of understanding the issue.

Insiders told Caixin that on the night of February 28, prosecutors from the Jilin office’s anti-corruption division took Mr. Lu from Beijing to Jilin to undergo investigation. Supposedly, the case was referred to them by China’s Supreme Court. If true, this would make Lu’s case unlike previous high-level China Mobile exec’s cases — and presumably more serious — because he is not being investigated by the Party Discipline Committee first and rather has gone straight to criminal investigation. According to the Beijing Times, this is evidence that the prosecution probably already has strong evidence against Mr. Lu.

Interestingly, the detailed description above disappeared from Caixin‘s website without explanation after a few hours. China Mobile couldn’t confirm whether it was true or not either, saying they are in the process of actively trying to understand the situation.

The disappearance of the report could indicate that it is incorrect, but more likely it has more to do with China’s media regulations. Regardless of the report’s veracity, high-level corruption is a sensitive issue and the government tends to prefer to control reporting quite tightly when a situation like this arises. China Mobile is a state-owned company, and corruption at its highest levels could also implicate government officials directly. There’s a good chance the Caixin report’s deletion is just an attempt to control the story by subduing it, at least until all the facts are clear.

Of course, this is all still just rumor, though China Mobile’s non-denial sure makes it sound like something’s going on. If it’s true, we’ll likely know soon enough. Either way, we’re starting to wonder if there’s anyone at China Mobile who isn’t corrupt…

[Beijing Times via Sina Tech, image via CFP]

Fans of internet porn in China, be warned: your days may be numbered. Yesterday, the government announced a new internet crackdown campaign that is to be a cooperative project of nine different government departments and will last from March through the end of August. The crackdown will focus on pornographic content on the internet, including mobile sites, as well as other forms of “vulgar information,” whatever that means. (Note: it means politically “sensitive” content).

Crackdowns like this are launched with some frequency, but the specific mention of mobile networks is interesting. In the past, the primary focus of these crackdowns has been “regular” internet sites, and mobile porn peddlers have in some cases been able to slip through the cracks. This campaign is the latest indication that smartphone smut fans are increasingly in the line of fire.

The crackdown will also affect social media sites, and its mandate specifically tasks it with — among other things — closing down illegal websites. But in practice, it’s unlikely that most users will even notice the campaign is happening, and the chances of a major social networking site being closed as a result of it are very, very slim.

[via Sina Tech]

China’s police are on the back end of a three-month long crackdown on cybercrime, and apparently, they’ve found an awful lot of it. Over the course of the crackdown, police told Xinhua, they cleaned up more than 1.2 million pieces of harmful information, closed over 7,000 illegal websites, and investigated harmful information posted on 1,075 prominent sites.

Among those prominent sites were Tianya, Sohu, and Baidu’s Tieba. The BBS services these companies offer are theoretically self-censored, but the police found that on these and many other sites, illegal information was present. These sites have apparently been given a deadline for cleaning up their acts.

The police were looking for a number of things, but specifically targeted black market sales of things like guns, bombs, stolen bank information, poisons, phone-tapping devices, etc. Criminals can’t exactly list these things on Taobao, so sales are often arranged via BBS forums, which are less easily searchable and simpler to remain anonymous on. At the same time, police were also looking for “illegal harmful information that seriously harms the stability of society” — i.e., politically sensitive information, dissident opinions, news reports about censored topics, etc.

So I guess we can all rest a bit easier knowing the Chinese internet now has fewer bomb salesmen and, uh, people who disagree with the government about stuff. Hooray? Anyway, if you’ve run across some harmful information on your own and are looking to report it, there’s a website for that right here. Happy snitchin’.

[Xinhua via Sina Tech, Image source]

The Chinese citizens national ID card. All Weibo social networks need your ID number and real name starting next month.

The real name requirements for Weibo in China is about to get realer. On March 16, 2012, all Twitter-like service providers in China need personal ID data from all users (old and new). Even though you may still post under your alias, they’d know who, say, “TomCat1234″ would be, as they have your ID data on file.

In a recent Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) Annual Report on China’s Rule of Law, as reported by China.com.cn, the real ID requirement has been singled out as something that could “bring new uncertainty in building the rule of law on the Internet.”

The report points out that the real ID requirement is actually a way to limit freedom of expression, because anonymous expression would no longer be permitted. Although it’s true that the ID requirement might stop some rumors in the making, the requirement would also make the Weibo lose its function as an open forum for constructive dialog. The report advocates that the rules think twice before implementing the real ID requirements.

CASS also points out the extra paperwork and a lack of information privacy laws in China as being unconstructive to the new ID requirement. It points out that the new requirement might invade upon the rights of the individual to speak his or her mind, which is going to be a big minus for the future of the Weibo.

We’ve just under a month until the new Weibo real ID rules kick in — and this year is going to be a pretty ‘sensitive’ one for China with the transition to a new leadership. While we might not be surprised if the ID requirement kicks in for real, the controversy surrounding the policy might still be too much. And if it implodes in the end… would we be surprised as well?

Well, we all knew it was coming. Heck, I even wrote it was coming in an article three months ago. Now, it’s official: China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) plans to establish a platform for regulating internet television.

According to SARFT vice-chief Zhang Haitao, the administration will regulate IPTV streaming services, mobile video services, and traditional internet television services like Youku (NYSE:YOKU) and Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO).

The move is part of a larger push by SARFT to regulate the “three networks:” telecom networks, computer networks, and cable television networks. The regulatory bureau already has a tight grip on television, but until now, internet television and mobile video have been allowed to develop relatively free of SARFT’s interference er, regulation.

The announcement reads in Chinese media like SARFT is looking to improve the internet television industry and make it safer and more interactive via its new platform. While it’s as yet unclear exactly what the ramifications of this will be, I suspect that if anything, SARFT will be ‘keeping us safe’ from the types of entertainment it considers harmful, i.e. basically anything that isn’t CCTV News. Of course, I could be wrong — we’ll just have to wait and see how things actually turn out.

On a related note, for those interested in the background of SARFT’s regulatory impulses this past year, this article is a very interesting read.

[via Sina Tech]

I REFUSE TO PAY FOR SECONDS I HAVEN'T USED!

Are you sick of paying for a full minute of phone time when your call lasted only a few seconds? Probably not. But if you are, the Harbin Industry and Commerce Bureau feels for you. In fact, the bureau has called for an end to “irrational” payment schemes that force customers to pay a per-minute rate even when their calls don’t last a minute. It holds that calls should be counted and billed by the second, not by the minute.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, telecom operators aren’t too excited about this, and the result is an ongoing scuffle between the Industry and Commerce Bureau and the Harbin Telecommunications Bureau. Telecoms hold that the Industry and Commerce Bureau has stepped beyond its authority and has no jurisdiction over telephone fee structures, because officially telecommunications are overseen by a national authority (a department of the State Council), not a local one like the Harbin Industry and Commerce Bureau.

However, a coalition of more than forty local lawyers has signed on in defense of the Industry and Commerce Bureau, calling on the government to bring an end to pay-per-minute requirements and offering free legal counsel to the Bureau if it comes down to the court system. People are also coming to the defense of the bureau, agreeing that charging people for more service than they have used violates consumers’ rights.

The Harbin Industry and Commerce Bureau’s rhetoric may be a bit overstated — counting calls by the minute ‘infringes on consumers’ right to financial safety?’ — but its heart is in the right place. Consumer rights will be an increasingly high-profile issue over the next month as World Consumer Rights Day — March 15 — draws ever closer. Traditionally, CCTV and other high profile media use the “holiday” to highlight issues relating to consumer rights.

[Beijing Evening News via Sina Tech, Image via Shutterstock]

When a story this sensitive goes viral, Sina generally blocks searches for relevant search terms so that while people can still talk about the issue and don’t feel like they’re being censored, it’s impossible to get the big picture of what folks outside your social group are saying. Before today, every time I saw this happen, search terms were blocked for extended periods of time (weeks, months) until the story had faded out of the news.

This morning, things were different. When I first checked Sina Weibo, around 10 AM, searches for “Wang Lijun” weren’t being censored. But then shortly after that, I checked again and a search for Wang returned the typical censorship error message:

In accordance with the relevant laws and regulations, your search results cannot be displayed.

I figured that was the end of it, so I was shocked when just a little while later searches for the term began to go through again. Had Sina blocked the term by accident? Was there a bug? Just a few minutes later, the term was blocked again. Then around noon it appears to have been unblocked again, and as of this writing, it remains unblocked.

A screenshot from the first time searches for Wang Lijun were blocked

This is, to put it lightly, unusual. I’ve never seen a blocked term get unblocked so quickly, not to mention a term get blocked, unblocked, blocked again, and then unblocked all in the space of just a few hours. So what’s going on here? Was it some kind of bug?

There’s no way to know for sure — Sina is never going to comment on this sort of thing — but it seems possible that with the basic story still up in the air, the folks at Sina aren’t really sure whether this term should be blocked or not, and are doing their hemming and hawing in public. (Contrary to popular belief, most Chinese internet censorship is practiced by service operators like Sina who must attempt to decipher for themselves where the “line” is, although the government does sometimes issue specific orders to block objectionable content).

Another theory, suggested by @niubi on Twitter, is that Sina operators may be letting a certain amount of Wang-related chatter get through on purpose because it will damage the reputation of his boss Bo Xilai. Bo is expected to assume a high-level position in China’s national government this year, but the possible attempted defection of someone high in his administration could seriously damage his chances, and there are factions within China’s Communist Party that would be interested in seeing him fall.

Of course, it’s all pure speculation at this point. The rumors may be entirely false, and while Sina Weibo’s censorship pattern this morning was definitely odd, it could have been a bug or some other error. Whatever’s going on, though, it’s definitely interesting.

Most recently, Sina Weibo has been in the news for reduced new user registration numbers as the March 16 real-name registration deadline looms.

China's national ID card - its number must be given to microblog service providers under new 'real name' web regulations.

We’ve known since the first week of January that real-name registration was going to be a government-mandated requirement on Chinese Twitter-like services – and now we know the deadline will be March 16th.

That’s the day by which current users of the major ‘Weibo’ platforms – such as Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo.com, and Tencent’s (HKG:0700) t.qq.com – must submit their national ID (or foreigners may use their passports) so that the service has the real name of every user on file. If you fail to do so, there’s no punishment as such; you’ll still be able to login to your account and read your stream, but you won’t be able to post. The government claims that it’s being implemented to prevent harmful mistruths and rumors getting circulated online, but many skeptics say it is yet another move to repress freedom of speech on China’s lively microblogging sites.

The real-name registration has been in place for new signups since the start of January, so the roll-out isn’t new in itself.

A ‘Meagre’ 3 Million Sina Sign-Ups?

According to reports in the Chinese media, three million people have registered with Sina’s Weibo with their real ID in the past month. That sounds like a lot, but it’s way down on the 20 million or so new users that were coming onboard before. Either the new system is scaring away spambots and zombie account makers, or genuine users are being put off by the new regulations. If it’s the latter, then this could be a grim year for Sina and Tencent – plus the other major micr0blog platforms – as they lose new and existing users in droves. Perhaps it’s the beginning of the end of Twitter-like services in China.

So, what’s your take on all this? If you’re an existing user of one of the Weibo services, will you register your real name, or shut down your account in disgust?

[Source: NetEase news (article in Chinese), via DigiCha]

Yesterday, as rumors swirled in the Chinese media that Google Maps had missed an important filing deadline and might be forced to shut down in China, we reported that such a shutdown was unlikely. Later in the afternoon, China’s Bureau of Mapping and Surveying confirmed that it was all just a rumor. That filing deadline Google supposedly missed? Yeah, they actually turned the application in early. Like, three-months-ago early.

The bureau sent information to Sina Tech stating that Google Maps indeed applied for the license back in November 2011, well before the February 1 deadline. The application is still being processed, but the bureau confirmed that while it’s being processed, Google is still permitted to operate its mapping service in China.

This makes sense given what Google told Penn Olson when we talked to them yesterday (“We’re currently in discussions with the government”). It also raises the question of where, exactly, this entirely unfounded rumor came from. Was this yet another case of a competitor drumming up some fake news in hopes of gaining some market share by weakening the market leader, or just some good old-fashioned bad journalism? Perhaps we’ll never know.

Is Google Maps about to disappear from China? Probably Not.

China News Service is reporting today that Google Maps may be on its way out in China. If true, the loss would impact millions of Android smartphone users who use the built-in mapping service to navigate on their phones. It would also be great news for Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and other Chinese net firms with mapping services.

It appears, however, that this report isn’t accurate. Google has applied for a maps license, it turns out, and from what I can tell, a disturbance of Google Maps service in China seems unlikely. Penn Olson spoke with a representative from Google, who told us:

We’re currently in discussions with the government about how we could offer a maps product in China.

Even Google’s rivals appear to be playing down the significance of the China News Service report. Sougou Maps CEO Kong Xianglai is quoted in the China News Service piece as saying, “This situation isn’t as serious as [people] imagine,” and a Baidu Maps rep suggested the implementation of this regulation wouldn’t have a significant impact on the online mapping industry.

All websites that want to offer online mapping services in China were ordered last year by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping to submit applications prior to today or cease their operation of mapping services within China. The China News Service report suggests that Google may not have filed an application, but that appears to be untrue.

It’s a good thing, too, because losing Google Maps would have a pretty significant affect in China, where it is the mapping market leader by a fairly wide margin. In addition to Android mobile devices, a loss of Google Maps would impact numerous Chinese web services that have implemented Maps into their websites.

This isn’t the first time there have been questions about Google Maps’s legal status in China. Last year it also reportedly missed a deadline, and was expected to shut down on July 1, but (needless to say) that never happened and the service was not interrupted. So take reports of Google Maps’ demise with a grain of salt.

[China News Service via Sina Tech and @niubi, chart data from Analysis]

RedPad's main screen

Yesterday, we told you about the RedPad, an Android tablet aimed at China’s government officials and priced at an incredible 9,999 RMB ($1,580). Yesterday, the Southern Metropolis Daily spoke to an official RedPad rep and got the full scoop on the device, and also heard the company’s official response to many of the cynical questions raised by Chinese net users after the device went viral yesterday.

The biggest question, of course, is why the device costs so much. After all, the thing is running Android and boasts modest tech specs; why does it cost twice as much as an iPad? RedPad spokesman Liu Xianri says that what they’re selling is services and information. The hardware, according to Liu, “only costs us 2800 RMB” ($438). The device is so expensive because it is designed specially for work use by government cadres, and is the exclusive provider of some “Red” (read: Communist) resources. “In a market economy,” Liu explains, “Red resources cost money too.”

‘Unlike the iPad, we provide more than just hardware’

Liu says he doesn’t get the iPad comparisons since — according to him — Apple only needs to pay hardware costs to sell it. Of course, that isn’t even a little bit true: Apple spends boatloads of money developing its iOS software platform as well as operating its app store and acquiring new software services (like Siri) to fold into its existing offerings. But that’s what Liu said. He also said “if you install all kinds of apps on an iPad for a year, you’d need 10,000 RMB” ($1,580). But with the RedPad, all the apps are free, as long as you understand that 7,100 RMB ($1,112) of the device’s original cost is paying for the preinstalled apps.

Most of those apps are connected to various provincial and national Communist Party newspapers. There’s also a suite of apps including a calendar, calculator, and slide show manager for office use. To the RedPad’s credit, the Southern Metropolis Daily reporter tried out its handwriting recognition feature and found it to be accurate and speedy. Then again, there are a number of extant Chinese handwriting input solutions for Android; it’s not clear whether the RedPad’s is original or whether it is just using one of those.

Amazingly, Liu also told reporters that part of their strategy was to make the device the most expensive one on the market. His logic is that people think expensive things are good, so making the RedPad expensive establishes that it is the best. Once the product is on sale, the price will be negotiable. Um, OK…

‘Don’t worry, this totally won’t be a misuse of public funds!’

RedPad's offices in Beijing

Part of the reason Chinese net users have been so concerned about the price is that the device is targeted at government officials, who might not care about the price because they’d be buying the things using taxpayer money. To this, Liu responds that RedPad didn’t invent the mobile government office use market, and that currently, government officials are all using iPads. I’m not sure how that’s relevant, given that the RedPad costs nearly double what an iPad costs, but whatever. Liu also stressed that RedPad “wants to compete with the foreign brand [Apple]” and that there would be no forced sales (meaning local governments would not force their employees to buy the device).

Meanwhile, the People’s Daily — which RedPad has taken great pains to associate itself with in its promotional materials — has been busy drawing a clear line between itself and RedPad, telling reporters yesterday that it played no part in the development or promotion of the RedPad, and that their cooperation consisted only of RedPad using some of their content. Liu agreed the two were only “partners.”

Interestingly, another “partner” of RedPad’s is the periodical Internet Public Opinion, which Liu says has given RedPad the exclusive distribution rights to the tablet version of their publication. Readers who subscribe to three years of Internet Public Opinion will even receive a free RedPad. A three-year subscription to Internet Public Opinion costs 3,800 RMB ($595).

Something tells me that this interview is probably not going to help dissuade people that the RedPad is an overpriced, underpowered piece of crap that’s primarily designed as a shiny way for local governments to launder bribe money, but hey, who knows!

[Southern Metropolis Daily via Sina Tech]

A largely unknown Chinese manufacturer has launched a ‘Red Group Number One’ Android tablet that’s aimed at, and highly customized for, China’s ruling cadres. Following the URL of the very flakey website that it’s from, we’ll just call it the RedPad. Its specs are pretty decent but its price is enough to make even the most patriotic think about getting an iPad instead: the RedPad costs 9,999 RMB (US$1,580), though it’s currently available for the bulk-buy price of 7,100 RMB ($1,124). With a mere 16GB of storage, that makes the RedPad inexplicably nearly twice the price of an iPad or a mid-range Android tablet.

It comes with a fancy leather case that’s embossed with in gold with the product’s name (pictured below) and lots of pre-installed apps that might help the officials go about their working day. They include the People’s Weibo app (a state-run microblogging platform that’s nowhere near as popular as Sina’s or Tencent’s Weibo), the People’s Daily newspaper app, and ‘Zhongnanhai Developments’ which is a guide to what’s going on in the National People’s Congress. But most of the apps are available as separate, free downloads if someone were to buy a normal Android tablet or smartphone instead.

The RedPad’s manufacturer – see its website here, though it’s struggling to cope with the traffic today – doesn’t seem to make any other devices, and it’s not clear who’s the OEM. Aside from the great curiosity about the tablet in the Chinese press, it has not been made stated if the near 3,000 members of congress must purchase it.

The RedPad’s key specifications are: Android 3.2 ‘Honeycomb,’ a 9.7-inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, a Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage space. Here are a couple more pics sourced from Evolife.cn:

Above: the RedPad comes with this embossed leather case. Below: the manufacturer's suitably patriotic poster to advertise the RedPad.

China's national ID card - its number must be given to microblog service providers under new 'real name' web regulations.

With it now certain that China’s popular Weibo (microblogging) services – prime among them being Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) and Tencent’s (HKG:0700) – will have to implement real-name ID checks in the coming months, it appears that the system will not come cheap. Indeed, each single online check of a user’s name and national ID number will cost a rumored 2 RMB (US$0.20). And so for Sina and Tencent, the government-mandated checks could end up costing them hundreds of millions of RMB for their 250 to 300 million Weibo users.

But it was never going to come free. And it raises the complex issue of potential government ties to the company, called id5, that will process these real-name checks. That little-known company will be the prime beneficiary of these sixteen new regulations for microblogs. It is the government that charges the fee, but it’s id5 that will handle all the processing.

Sohu IT reports that the Beijing-based Time Weekly newspaper has tried repeatedly to question staff at the mysterious id5 about this, but journalists have been turned away.

If, say, 75 percent of Sina’s 250 million Weibo users turn out to be real people or companies – i.e. not spammers or zombie accounts – who wish to continue using the service, then all those checks would cost Sina a total of 375 million RMB (US$59 million).

Being Held Accountable For Your Tweets

The official line is that the real-ID clampdown will help stop false rumors (and maybe spam as well) spreading via the numerous Twitter-like services. But other analysts fear it’s a move to suppress free speech on these lively and increasingly popular sites. (Note that microblog users can still use cutesy and wacky nicknames – but Sina, Tencent, Netease (NASDAQ:NTES), and all those other operators, will have every user’s actual name and number on file).

These charges have been levied before, and industry insiders believe that Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) had to pay up for its (failed and shuttered) microblog, Shuoba – but that the search engine giant ended up paying more than the rumored 2 RMB that it’ll cost in 2012. It’s not clear if the real-name requirement deterred users, or if Shuoba simply failed to take off because it arrived too late to be a contender.

Sina’s and Tencent’s shares have been stable since the new regulations were outlined on December 16th – but the full pain of implementation has not yet begun. It will be costly for the companies, and could drive some users away from using any Weibo platform.

Follow this developing issue on our ‘real-name’ tag as it becomes mandated on other areas of the Chinese web as well.

[Source: Sohu IT news (article in Chinese), via Bill Bishop’s Digicha]

The Department of Commerce (via Xinhua)

E-commerce has exploded in China, with more and more users buying stuff from clothes to computers online. But as the market expands, so too have customer complaints. Now, China’s Department of Commerce is stepping in to try to straighten a few things out.

The Nanfang Daily learned yesterday that the department plans to punish e-commerce companies that break promises they’ve made to consumers by forcing them out of the market entirely. It’s not exactly clear how that would work, but the article specifically mentions retailers and third party vendors who cancel orders for no reason in the run-up to this Spring Festival as a group the department wants to eliminate. (Unscrupulous retailers will sometimes allow customers to order products with impunity and simply cancel orders with no explanation when they run out of stock).

It’s not clear how any of this will actually work, but the Department of Commerce is trying to attach some teeth to its fighting words, reportedly pushing the State Council to include regulations for internet retail management in its legal plan for this year.

[Nanfang Daily via Sina Tech]

This is not a real Chinese ID (obviously), but it IS what they look like. via Shanghaiist.

In an announcement that should probably be filed under “common sense,” the Beijing Police want you to know those sketchy websites that offer you all the personal details connected to a state ID number in exchange for 5 RMB ($0.78) are actually illegal. Information — like addresses, phone numbers, photos, and more — that is associated with a state ID address isn’t actually public, and it’s certainly not supposed to be for sale.

Probably that’s something you, a decent person who doesn’t regularly attempt to buy personal data using state ID numbers, would have assumed. But it must have been tempting for sketchy bosses and businessmen to try to see what sort of dirt they could did up on prospective employees and anyone else they could trick into giving them the all-important ID number, and at 5 RMB a pop, it was also cheap.

Actually, it seems that this personal information once was actually public, but according to a Beijing Police announcement yesterday, it’s not anymore. So, yeah. If you were thinking of checking some state IDs out via their numbers, don’t. And if you’re running a website selling that sort of service, you may want to shut it down. The rest of you, carry on (and protect your personal data).

[via Sina Tech]

Take off your shirt before you say that! -via China Digital Times

After the announcement that Beijing authorities had mandated real-name registration for Beijing microblogs, there was some speculation that Guangzhou-based Tencent might receive a flood of users defecting from Beijing-based Sina Weibo, as Beijing municipal regulations apply only to companies based in Beijing and thus didn’t apply to Tencent. Unfortunately for those who prefer anonymity, though, Tencent and six other Guangzhou and Shenzhou-based microblogging services have now also implemented real-name registration systems.

According to the Southern Metropolis Daily, the requirement goes into effect today, and is a response to orders from the Communist Party this fall to implement better controls over microblog content. Since Sina Weibo has already implemented real-name requirements, this means that China’s largest microblogging services — with a combined user base of over 500 million people — are now both real name only.

The regulations are being touted in the media as a way to combat fake accounts and promote rational debate, but there is concern among users and observers that the regulations will also be used to facilitate prosecution of people who express opinions critical of the government or spread information about events the government doesn’t want publicized. This section of the Beijing regulations, especially, has given cause for concern (translated by William Farris, via Digicha):

Article 10. No organization or individual shall make unlawful use of a micro-blog to reproduce, publish, or transmit information with the following contents:

(i) violating the basic principles of the Constitution;

(ii) jeopardizing national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity;

(iii) harming national honor and interests;

(iv) inciting ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination, undermining national unity;

(v) violating the state religion policies or propagating cults and feudal superstitions;

(vi) spreading rumors, disturbing social order, or undermining social stability;

(vii) spreading obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, terror or instigating crimes;

(viii) insulting or libeling other or infringing on other people’s legitimate rights and interests;

(ix) inciting illegal assembly, association, procession or demonstration, assembling to disturb social order;

(x) illegal activities on behalf of civil society organizations;

(xi) contains content prohibited under other laws and administrative regulations.

Many of the phrases in this article will be familiar to dissidents and journalists, as crimes like “subverting the government” and “undermining national unity” are often used as blanket charges to justify the detention or imprisonment of those critical of the government or vocal about its abuses on a national or local level.

It’s also important to remember that in China’s case, “real-name registration” does not mean what it means on Facebook. Users are free to choose whatever username they would like; however, to make posts, they must have provided proof of identification (i.e., their state ID number and other documents) to the microblogging provider. Other users can’t see it, but it allows microblogging providers and by extension the government to keep very close tabs on who is saying what.

Whether the system will truly be used to prosecute dissenters is still unclear, but personally I’m not optimistic, and apparently neither are many of Sina’s users. An online poll of Sina users found that over 25 percent of them were planning to stop using microblogs as a result of the regulation. That said, the poll did have a small sample size, and all online polling should be taken with several grains of salt.

We’ll have to wait and see what actually happens, and how Chinese users react to it. But today’s announcement signifies that users no longer have a choice. If they want to use microblogs, they’re going to have to do it with their real names attached (or find a way around the Great Firewall and get on Twitter).

[Southern Metropolis Daily via Sina Tech]

CCTV reports on new Weibo rules

Well, we all knew something was coming. After months of rumblings about stronger controls on microblogging sites, China’s official media is reporting today that the Beijing municipal government has published a new list of sixteen regulations for microblogs. Among these regulations is the rule that users must use real-name registration — i.e. connect their account to their identity and official state ID number — before they can post anything. Users who don’t register with their real names will be able to browse weibo postings, but not post themselves.

It’s perhaps worth explaining here that this isn’t “real-name registration” the way that Facebook does it. Users can still register usernames as whatever they’d like them to be; what’s required is that the microblogging operator has their actual identification on file so that they can be held responsible for anything they tweet.

In the report we linked, the regulation is presented as an effort to cut down on zombies and the buying and selling of followers. However, the regulation is also a way for the government to exert some pressure on microblog users who spread political and news stories authorities don’t want spread.

When these rules will go into effect, or how widely they’re actually implemented, remains to be seen. But if they’re for real, the impact on China’s microblogging scene could be tremendous. As Bill Bishop of Digicha wrote on Twitter this afternoon:

[CCTV via Sina, h/t to @niubi on Twitter for linking this]

Shao Ning, CFP via Sina Tech

Shao Ning, deputy director of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC), said at a meeting in Beijing on Saturday that the committee would be adjusting the way Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are run based on new classifications that separate all state-owned enterprises as either “competitive” or “public interest” companies.

It’s unclear what changes, if any, will actually occur in the companies’ day-to-day operations, but the classifications separate SOEs into those whose aim is to make money (“competitive”) and those who may take substantial losses intentionally in order to provide necessary services to the public (“public interest”).

In his explanation of public interest companies, Shao specifically said that category will include “communication services” and companies that have significant monopolies in their industries, both of which indicate that China’s major telecom providers — which are state-owned — will be considered public interest companies.

That could be good news or bad news for consumers, as it likely means lower, government-mandated pricing, but it also eliminates much of the impetus for companies to develop new services and technologies to get ahead of the competition. Economic scholar Hua Sheng responded to the report in a Beijing News article, saying “Doesn’t that mean we’re on the road back to the early days of the reforms [i.e., the 1980s] and all those years of economic reform were for nothing?”

It remains to be seen what effect this will actually have on the operation of telecom provides and other public interest SOEs. It’s also not immediately clear whether Shao was speaking just from the perspective of the SASAC, or whether his view is representative of the central government’s feelings on SOE reform.

In related news, more SOEs are set to pay the government dividends on their profits via the SASAC. Which companies were chosen has not yet been announced, but according to the People’s Daily the list will be published on December 31.

[Beijing News via Sina Tech]

See the second-to-last row on the bottom, price is on the far right.

So, it turns out the Chinese government doesn’t know crap about computers. Or maybe they don’t care about money? Perhaps there’s some kind of corruption going on. Whatever the reason, Southern Metropolis Daily is reporting today on an invoice from the government-run Chinese Academy of Science that lists a 128 MB memory stick (for a printer, apparently) as costing 6,247 RMB ($979). Uh, what?

Of course, the same exact product costs about 300 RMB ($46) on the open market, according to Southern Metropolis Daily, and we’re betting you could find it for even cheaper than that. Heck, for $979 you might as well buy the latest iPod and use that for data storage! That might sound hyperbolic, but actually the Jianyang county archiving department was found to be using iPod Touch 4s as their “portable hard drives” some time ago.

Anyway, back to the memory sticks; apparently, a vendor told reporters it was possible to find ones that cost that much, as buying an “original” HP stick that has since been verified and tested by HP technicians apparently costs about 6,000 RMB. But when a reporter spoke with HP, they said that these “original” memory sticks went for around 600 RMB, not 6,000, and that the 600 RMB sticks were their most expensive product in that category.

A worker at the Chinese Academy of Science that reporters spoke to confirmed that they indeed purchased and used that kind of memory stick, but would neither confirm nor deny that the invoice posted online was authentic. The worker did say that their purchases were all legal, and that anyone with doubts about the prices could check a website where central-government-approved purchase prices are apparently posted. But when reporters attempted to check the site, they discovered it was not accessible to the general public and required “authentication of government ID” to log in.

Whatever’s going on here, it’s hard to imagine that the extra $850-or-so the government is dishing out isn’t ending up in someone’s pocket, so take your pick: is it corruption or incompetence? Either way, it’s pretty damn embarrassing.

'Our site was hacked; we're looking into it.'

Like many local governments in China, the government of Longhushan in Jiangxi maintains a website that’s intended in part to serve as a way for the government and the people to interact. Although the site is currently closed save the front page and a short message (see image), just recently it featured a section where people could ask questions or make complaints and officials from the government would respond.

All was going well until one official, it seemed, started to go off script.

When a citizen complained about the difficulty of getting a One Child Policy document processed, the official response came through: “Bullshit [it's hard], just bribe me with money and I’ll get it done for you.”

When a citizen complained about “tofu-dregs construction” — a slang term that refers to construction of buildings using shoddy/inferior materials that lead to collapses — the official response was “Tofu dregs are my absolute favorite dish!”

Parents complaining about schools were met with sarcasm. A complaint about the quality of the school food was met with “Go down there and cook for them, then” and a complaint about the classrooms being too loud and chaotic was met with, “If it’s chaotic then it’s chaotic, [if you have a problem with that] just tell your son not to go to school at all.”

Was this the work of some overly-honest official? The government doesn’t think so. Their official site currently says that it was hacked, and government reps told Southern Metropolis Daily that although access to the site was shared among a number of different government departments, the chances of it having been an inside job, so to speak, are “very low.”

The police are investigating, but the phrases have already been embraced by netizens as the latest examples of leirenyu — shocking statements. Most leirenyu attributed to government officials are genuine quotations — China, like anywhere else, has its share of braindead politicians — but these statements seem to be resonating because although they’re almost certainly the work of some kind of prankster, there is a grain of truth to them, too.

In any event, this isn’t exactly the only problem government websites in China face. Earlier this month we ran a piece (also based on a Southern Metropolis Daily article) about how some government sites haven’t even been updated in years.

[Southern Metropolis Daily via Sina Tech]

SARFT attacks TV ads, and maybe video web sites too, via the Telegraph

For the past few days, rumors have been swirling that along with its limitation of “entertainment” programs, China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) will also be implementing a new regulation that bans all advertisement during TV dramas. Yesterday SARFT management bureau chief Li Jingsheng announced that SARFT will indeed be banning ads during TV programs.

The detailed regulations will be announced sometime later this month, but it seems that advertisements will be allowed, but only during the time when one show has finished and the next show has yet to begin. Shows will no longer take breaks in the middle of episodes for advertisements.

Needless to say, this could have a massive impact on the Chinese television market, where yearly losses in advertising as a result of the regulation have already been estimated as potentially reaching 20 billion RMB (over $3 billion US). We expect this figure may be a tad inflated, as networks will likely find ways of replacing that lost revenue — running text ads that scroll across the bottom of the screen while shows are in progress, perhaps — but there’s no doubt the regulation will nevertheless have a massive impact on the industry.

Online Video Sites: Time to Celebrate? Maybe…

At face value, this would seem to be great news for online video operators like Youku and Tudou, who are already poaching viewers away from television but who have historically struggled to profit from them. With fewer advertising opportunities on television, there’s a reasonable expectation that at least some of the money TV networks will be losing may flow in the direction of video websites, instead.

Moreover, if the loss of in-program advertising weakens China’s popular satellite networks, that could serve to drive even more viewers onto the internet as TV stations losing money will likely have to sacrifice quality or quantity (or both) in their show productions to be able to balance the books. In particular, this could really help Youku, which has an established history of successful self-produced dramas and films. If similar regulations don’t affect internet operators, and net ad revenue increases, Youku (and other sites) will be able to put even more money into original programming.

…and Maybe Not

That said, SARFT has framed the regulatory decision as a move to get viewers away from their computers and back in front of the TV by offering them a more enjoyable viewing experience. There are plenty of people who are annoyed by the advertising that permeates many of China’s web video sites, and the prospect of an ad-free television experience could be just what’s needed to get them back in front of the big black box.

Of course, that seems like a fairly pointless gesture. Entertainment is moving to PCs and, beyond that, mobile devices, period. SARFT can’t regulate that reality away, unless they can trick some other regulatory bureaus into shutting down the internet entirely (hey, it’s China, you never know). But that doesn’t mean they can’t go down swinging, and one has to assume that some of those fists are going to be aimed directly at online video providers.

We can be fairly certain, too, that SARFT is not trying to do online video sites any favors. Others have interpreted the regulations as a move by SARFT to weaken independent TV stations and, by extension, strengthen CCTV, and this makes some sense in light of the “entertainment ban” on satellite networks announced by SARFT earlier this year. If SARFT’s primary goal is to strengthen CCTV and the domestic propaganda apparatus, probably independent (and foreign-listed!) websites like Youku (NYSE:YOKU) and Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO) will find themselves in the regulatory bureau’s crosshairs sooner or later.

Here, it’s worth noting that SARFT continues to be involved in a sort of behind-the-scenes territorial spat with MIIT (the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology) over who should be allowed to control certain types of content on the internet. Typically, the internet is MIIT’s domain, but as SARFT’s interests (TV shows, films, etc.) move increasingly online, so too has SARFT asserted its authority over those areas of the net.

In any event, it’s hard to be sure what exactly will happen before the regulatory details are announced and we see how satellite TV networks respond. We’ve also reached out to some domestic video websites for comment on the new regulations and will update this post if we hear back.

[Via Netease Tech, h/t to @MalcolmMoore and @niubi for sharing that link on Twitter and having a short discussion about it as well!]

MIIT, the Chinese government body that inspects all your favorite mobile gadgets and toys, has announced that starting December 1st, mobile phone makers do not need to provide a charging cord to them along with the phones they submit for testing. What does that mean for consumers? It means that mobile phone vendors are now free to sell their devices without packaged power cords.

Sina Tech is trumpeting this is a victory for the consumer, since third-party chargers are often significantly cheaper than the ones that come bundled with your phone. Think about, for example, the difference between Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone chargers and third-party chargers. That USB connector cord will cost you $20 if you buy it from Apple, and $0.89 if you buy a generic brand. So that means big savings, right?

Well, yes and no. From what we can tell, although phone makers are no longer required to package power cables with their phones, MIIT’s new regulations don’t stipulate that they’re not allowed to, and since that’s often a way for phone manufacturers to make some extra money, we’d guess that especially in terms of higher-end phones, you may still have to buy them with the power cord packaged.

That said, many vendors will likely offer phones without packaged cords regardless of what manufacturers plan, allowing customers to save money and also potentially reduce waste if they already have a charger or two for the phone at home. It’s not an earth-shaking market change, but it does seem like it can only be good for consumers, so…hooray!

[Via Sina Tech]

Ai Weiwei

Avant-garde artist Ai Weiwei is no stranger to microblogs, or to controversy. Nor is Hu Xijin, the outspoken editor of the state-run Global Times, who was recently profiled in a piece on the Global Times in Foreign Policy. Hu also maintains an active Sina Weibo account and has over 1.4 million followers, although if the comments on his posts are much indication, plenty of them are following just to argue with his points.

Back in April, when Ai was first detained (and before authorities had acknowledged his detention or made any statement about his charges), the Global Times ran an editorial calling Ai a “maverick” and saying he would “be judged by history” and “will pay a price” for his choices. Later in the month, the same paper ran another editorial saying that labeling Ai’s arrest as political persecution was “a fallacy” and that China is “witnessing the unfolding of democracy.” Neither of these editorials included any attempt to assess the evidence against Ai — of which none has been publicly presented — nor is there any indication that the Global Times attempted to speak with Ai or any of his defenders.

It’s not difficult to imagine why Ai Weiwei might have been annoyed by that, and it turns out Ai’s latest digital mischief may be a direct response: a Sunday Twitter post the includes Hu’s cell phone number as part of a list of “leaders of the fifty cents [i.e., nationalist] army.” Apparently — and unsurprisingly — the response to this was swift and unpleasant for Hu, and today’s Global Times editorial is a response to Ai’s tweet, calling him out for “personal attacks” and calling on the government to crack down on microblogs:

If China refutes any regulation of the online world, its social morality will be damaged. The Chinese government should take measures to regulate the online order and curb the increasingly rampant violations on personal rights, including invasion of privacy and death threats. The relevant authorities should take actions to crack down on these illegal acts while safeguarding the freedom of speech.

Twitter is blocked in China, so we can only assume that this call for a crackdown is actually a request for the government to strengthen its efforts to eliminate GFW circumvention tools like VPNs.

As far as the spat between Ai and Hu goes, I think they’re both wrong. Certainly it’s pretty obnoxious to post someone’s personal contact information publicly, even on a forum that’s blocked in China, and I think that was a jerk move on Ai Weiwei’s part. That said, Hu’s assertion in today’s Global Times that the paper has “has made no personal attacks against [Ai Weiwei]” is either blatant lying or shocking self-delusion coming from a paper that ran a hit piece on the man before the government even confirmed he had been arrested.

Ai’s actions and Hu’s advocacy could have real implications for internet access in China, though. VPNs and other GFW circumvention tools may be popular among dissidents, but they’re also virtually a requirement for foreigners living here wishing to access popular web services, and businesses both foreign and domestic who need to be able to reliably access the entire internet for research, networking, sales, marketing, and more.

Hu Xijin is unhappy

Moreover, there have been rumblings for some time now that China’s censors were moving to implement new technology that would make VPNs impossible to use. Over the past year, users of popular VPN services in China have found their connections disrupted with increasing frequency, and administrators of these services have also suggested China is developing a new version of their censorship technology. From Forbes:

The anti-censorship and anonymity service Tor, for instance, has found that many of its “bridge nodes”–privately-placed servers around the world designed to connect users to the rest of Tor’s public network of traffic re-routing computers–have become inaccessible to Chinese users within hours or even minutes of being set up, according to Andrew Lewman, the project’s executive director. Users have told him that other censorship circumvention services like Ultrasurf and Freegate have seen similar problems, he says. “Someone will try to connect, then there’s a weird scan, and the bridge stops working,” says Lewman. “We see weird things all the time, but this is a semi-consistent weird thing, and it’s only coming from China.”

Lewman believes that China’s internet service providers may be testing a new system that, rather than merely block IP addresses or certain Web pages, attempts to identify censorship circumvention tools by preceding a user’s connection to an encrypted service with a probe designed to reveal something about what sort of service the user is accessing. “It’s like if I tell my wife I’m going bowling with my friends, and she calls the bowling alley ahead of time to see if that’s what I’m really doing,” says Lewman. “It’s verifying that you’re asking for what you seem to be asking for.”

That sounds pretty ominous to us. Ai Weiwei and Hu Xijin are welcome to fight on Twitter and Weibo all they like (though the former’s Weibo account has been blocked and the latter doesn’t have a Twitter account) but this spat and Ai’s fundraising campaign in general — which has made ample use of non-China-approved services like Twitter and Google Plus — could be one of the precursors to a newer, even more draconian system of web censorship.

In other words, someday soon, the Chinese internet may be all Hu Xijin and no Ai Weiwei. Ai may be kind of a dick, but as far as I’m concerned, an internet run according to Hu Xijin’s wishes would be reason enough to leave China and never look back. I wonder how many companies — Chinese companies included — would feel the same way.

The Beijing Government site is actually pretty decent

Perhaps it’s just because everyone is moving to Weibo, but a lot of Chinese government websites — sites that represent the official online face of city governments, departments, bureaus, etc. — haven’t been updated in a long time. How long? In some cases, we’re talking years.

A Southern Metropolis Daily reporter conducted an investigation of city government websites around the country, and found that nearly 30 percent of them had problems like infrequent updates or being no longer maintained. Additionally, the reporter found that many sites hadn’t posted phone hotline numbers, or that the numbers that were posted were disconnected, went unanswered during office hours, or even were so out of date that they were actually the phone numbers of private residences.

Unsurprisingly, government spokesmen responded that the relevant departments would oversee and correct this issue going forward.

Although there are plenty of bad things one could say about the American government these days, I was reminded just yesterday while doing some research for a post of just how thorough and up-to-date many of the official government websites are, and how useful that is to me sometimes as a citizen. They’re not always brilliantly designed, but the information you’re looking for is usually there. This is in sharp contrast to a lot of Chinese government sites, which are even more poorly designed and — apparently — also frequently outdated.

Of course, with Weibo platforms and the like, the government seems to be leaning increasingly on professionals like Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) to help with their web presences. But we do hope some of their sites can be updated and overhauled. Microblogging is nice, but when you’re looking for specific information, nothing beats an actual website with a nice clear nav bar and a functional search feature!

[Southern Metropolis Daily via Sina Tech]

The platform, which appears to be exclusive to Beijing for the moment but which we expect will spread soon enough to Shanghai and other first-tier cities, is called the “Beijing Weibo Announcement Room” (rough translation) and collects the postings of Weibo accounts connected to many of the city’s government departments and other official organizations, from the police to the Tourism Development Committee. There are also several government spokesmen listed.

Users can check off the accounts they want to follow and then click once to follow them all at once, or just check the live stream of posts lower on the page, which is sortable into three categories: “Cultural Beijing”, “Technology and Science Beijing”, and “Green Beijing”.

It also features the music video for “Beijing Welcomes You,” which is embedded in the top right and plays automatically. This is an especially important feature, because most Beijingers have only heard this song several billion times by this point and it’s possible not everyone has memorized all the words (or the names of all the celebs in that video) yet.

So, yes, Beijing welcomes you to, uh, check out the official pronouncements of its government departments on Weibo! Because if there’s only thing the kids love more than microblogging these days, it’s reading about the newest regulatory initiatives from the Tourism Development Committee.

We’re guessing that this is, as previously mentioned, related to the official government edition of Weibo we wrote about last month, and we expect that our friends in Shanghai and other cities will get access to the same service soon enough.

Finally, since I had to hear the song again to write this report, I’m inflicting it on you all, too. Commence wholesome entertainment time!

I have to say, to the average expat, the cops here in the PRC might end up as being a little fearsome. It’s these guys who decide whether or not you’re allowed into the country, and if you’re slapped with a thousand-plus RMB fine for speeding, these guys pocket the whole thing (allegedly!). When I lost my iPhone in Shanghai, I spent a whole hour declaring the loss to the cops, who used a little bit of backward technology known as pen and paper…

So you can imagine the shock and awe when you stumble upon police that tweet – of course, on sanctioned Weibo accounts – in straight-forward people language.

Enter, then, Duan Lang, a police offer in Jiujiang, in southeastern China’s Jiangxi province. Officially known as Duan Xingyan, this cop doesn’t appear to be the average cop with official-speak coming out his mouth. Apart from his “average policeman” photo with the ubiquitous Sina Verified badge, he looks like just about everyone else out there.

Just last month, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) launched a Government Edition of its Weibo microblogging platform that helps the Chinese government to get online and tweet to its people. It essentially has the same layout as the more popular brand pages. And this is what’s helping the police – and other agencies – get onto Weibo.

As I found out from local news sites citing the Guangzhou Daily, Duan is remarkable for not tweeting in official-speak (in a People’s Republic where all other officials are). The Jiujiang Police he still works for still channels “police language” on its “public” account, but his own verified account, on which he tweets for up to five hours a day, is remarkably civilian-ish in language. One of his Weibo virtual badges tells that he’s a big fan of Taiwanese actress and singer Barbie Hsu (aka Da S). (You’d hardly expect that from the average officer!) Of course, being inside the system, so to speak, Duan’s got a few things he can’t tweet about. For example — sexy pictures, or other illegal content.

But outside of unconstitutional content, there’s a lot that Duan’s tweeting about. China’s mountains of government cars is a contentious issue to which Duan has a pretty sharp point of view: these cars can no longer fall outside of legal supervision. Next up? Get the law to control them. Churn out a new government car law. “Even if you were just born when government vehicle reforms were just being floated, by now, you’d have grown up,” as he tweets. Precisely: the issue’s been on the table for just about 18 years.

And while Duan can’t immediately take away those traffic jams, what he can take away is that cold official-speak from government officials. In a nation where the state-sanctioned seven o’clock news has been plagued by rather clueless gov-speak for the past three decades, it sure is a breath of fresh air.

Sina can't stop the signal, apparently.

Ai Weiwei’s name is a banned search term on Sina Weibo. His account is blocked. And yet, Sina Weibo is still talking about him.

Take, for example, this post by Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Global Times and the man who likely penned the op-ed in that paper calling Ai’s online fundraising campaign into question (that campaign, by the way, has raised nearly $1 million so far). Hu wrote China needs people like Ai and his supporters because China is a diverse society, but that it also needs to suppress them in order to move forward in the spirit of cooperation.

The post, which went up yesterday afternoon, has already attracted over 1,500 comments and nearly all of them are negative. Here’s a small sample (unfortunately there’s no way to directly link to comments from a Weibo post as far as I’m aware):

This kind of dumbass thinking isn’t even worth a response.

Why are there tears in my eyes? Because I love this land deeply, but nowadays this country is being run by bastards.

[Hu is] talking crap again. Diversity? Ample diversity? If that’s the case, then why did you have to write “Ai w wei” [instead of using his real name and risking the post being blocked or deleted by Sina].

You have the gall to talk about diversity openly in the Global Times, yet [you say] any differing voice can only be a small minority causing trouble. If that’s “diversity,” then the Qing-dynasty practice of imprisoning people for their writings is “enlightened.”

Seeing all these mocking, sarcastic comments, I’m not sure how long Hu can last!

Anyway, you get the idea. I’m no fan of Hu’s and I must admit I got some enjoyment reading through these comments (as of now, there are over 80 pages of them) but I’m highlighting them here only as one minor illustration of a larger point, which is that Sina Weibo has a decidedly “liberal” (by Western standards) bent when it comes to political discussion.

Moreover, this discussion is also an illustration of how impossible it is for Sina to really censor a major topic of discussion on their own service; even with Ai’s name blocked and his account shut down, thousands of people — including a high-profile editor with 1.4 million followers — are talking about him. Even with the talk of an impending crackdown on microblogs, we wonder how effectively anyone can “manage” a political discussion like the one that occurs every day on Weibo.

Of course, shutting down Weibo entirely is possible, but could lead to people expressing their dissatisfaction elsewhere, which isn’t necessarily an improvement from the government’s perspective. I guess maybe it’s true that they can’t stop the signal. And with that flimsy segue, here’s the trailer for the excellent but poorly-advertised film Serenity, because I want to put it there and because it’s all about how it is hard to stop powerful ideas from spreading even when you’ve got a huge censorship apparatus to work with (and also spaceships).

[Many thanks to @goldkorn for pointing this comment thread out]

via CNNGo

Ai Weiwei, China’s firebrand modern artist, has never been one to shy away from controversy, or away from a fight with the government. His iconoclasm brought him to the edge this spring, when he was arrested and detained for nearly three months for initially mysterious reasons. Eventually, he was accused of tax evasion. His arrest became an international incident, and his loyal army of Twitter followers was up in arms until he was finally released early this summer.

Now, Ai has been hit with a $2.4 million tax bill, although he says that the police confiscated all of his company’s financial documents while he was being detained and they have not received any evidence indicating he really owes this much. Ai has vowed to fight these charges “to the death” but his netizen fans have clearly decided to help him out, too. His friends have been tweeting ways netizens can use to donate him money, and just now we spotted this on Twitter:

Now, 400,000 RMB isn’t going to be enough to settle Ai’s tax bill, but that’s a massive amount of money to raise in just a few hours. People crowd-source art projects all the time these days, but this may be the first time an artist has crowd-sourced his taxes. Interesting.

This also has implications for Alibaba and Alipay, the online payment system most netizens are using to donate. Like Paypal, Alipay allows users to easily send money to other users, but as Alipay operates in China, there’s no way it can afford to be seen as a channel through with dissidents can raise money. Ai Weiwei — such a sensitive figure that his name remains a blocked search term on Sina Weibo even now — is not someone that Alibaba wants the government to associate it with.

On the other hand, the company risks angering netizens and appearing overbearing and authoritarian if it blocks donations to Mr. Ai. More practically, it may be difficult to actually do so; Alipay could easily close the Fake Design (Ai Weiwei’s company) account that’s being used to collect donations, but if Ai’s many friends and fans began to collect donations on their own to pass along, it could be very difficult for Alipay to weed out who was involved.

Of course, in a case involving the high-profile Mr. Ai, it’s unlikely Alibaba will be entirely free to choose its own response. The Chinese government is likely already aware of these donations; if not, it will be soon. It seems likely that steps will be taken to prevent people from donating to Ai Weiwei, or at least to stop it from being so easy to make those donations by blocking Ai’s Alipay account.

We’ll keep an eye on this and see what steps, if any, the government and/or Alibaba takes to attempt to block further donations to Mr. Ai. Netizens are also donating via regular bank transfers and have just added a Paypal account into the mix as well. It’s not entirely clear whether the money is being accepted as a donation or a loan. Some of the netizens organizing the campaign have asked donors to provide personal info so that they can be paid back, but exactly when and how that might happen are as yet unclear.

In the meantime, Ai’s remarkably fast fundraising seems to be proof that crowd-sourcing almost anything can work in China, at least if you’re a high-profile artist with a large online following.

Obviously, there have been some concerns about the security and, er, integrity of a free internet connection provided by the Chinese government, since said government has a fondness for censoring the internet as well as using it to track and prosecute dissidents and other citizens they perceive to be a threat.

But a China Daily article from a few days ago essentially confirms fears that the network is, in essence, a trap:

An employee at the Beijing branch of the China Mobile Communications Corp, surnamed Yang, said the requirement of submitting a phone number to log on will help trace those whose online activity might endanger social security.

Ah good, so the network — which will require users to submit their mobile phone number before they can log in — will only be used to trace “those whose online activity might endanger social security.” Unfortunately, “endangering social security” is a stock charge the Chinese government levels at anyone it considers a possible threat, including dissidents, petitioners, protesters, right-defenders, lawyers, artists, bloggers, journalists, and…well, you get the idea.

Beyond concerns about the inevitable human rights violations, there are also concerns that even for loyal Party line-toers, the personal information and phone numbers collected by the network might be sold to companies who could then use them to target advertising and/or just spam everyone’s cell phones. Given that China’s mobile networks are already crammed to the gills with spam, it’s hard for us to imagine how anyone might notice the difference, but yeah, that will probably happen too.

Oh, and did we mention the network might not be free after the three-year pilot program ends? Yeah, just in case you didn’t get the message: