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Post tags: Robert Hughes
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It is the year 2049. China’s economic development has so disturbed the world’s other major powers that the United States, Japan, and Russia form an alliance and invade China. Fierce battles break out on the plains of northeast China, where Japanese troops and U.S. fighter jets besiege Chinese infantry. Caught by surprise, China’s army nonetheless stages a glorious counterattack by deploying levitating tanks, and employing a strategy based on lessons learned from the Anti-Japanese War and the Resist America War (better known in the West as WWII and the Korean War, respectively).

Such is the plot of The Last Counterattack, a serial novel published on Blood and Iron Reading, a Chinese military literature website. In one of the latest installments, published on May 2, U.S. government-sponsored hackers have infiltrated the Chinese military’s network and accidently launched a Chinese nuclear missile directed at the United States. The anonymous author’s online profile says he is a former colonel in the People’s Liberation Army and currently a staff officer in charge of operations and reconnaissance in the 12th Armored Division at China’s 21st Army Group. Going by the online pseudonym “the Old Staff Officer,” he told FP in an interview conducted over the Chinese messaging service QQ that he “enjoys the feeling of letting [his] imagination fly.” But Li, as I’ll call him, believes that what he’s writing may actually come to pass. In an April blog post, he explained his thinking for the book: “The world besieges China and attacks it from all sides. Is this possible? Yes!”

There are thousands of Chinese war fantasy novels on the Internet — too sensitive to be published in book form, they circulate on blogs, and websites like Blood and Iron Reading. Most languish, but the more popular ones get read millions of times. As a rising China struggles to define its military aspirations, and as the country’s vast propaganda apparatus encourages citizens to define their version of President Xi Jinping’s vague slogan “Chinese Dream,” these military fantasy novels provide insight into what Chinese people’s war dreams look like. [Source]

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Post tags: blogs, censorship, Japan, military, online novels, People's Liberation Army, QQ, United States
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To fund the urbanization plan, local governments would issue long-term bonds to finance spending on roads, housing and social safety nets, Reuters reported in March, quoting sources with ties to the leadership.

But a fiscal overhaul is needed because local governments don’t have steady tax revenues to back the issuance of bonds. Under China’s tax structure, in place since 1994, the central government gets most receipts while local governments do the spending, forcing them to rely on land sales for survival.

To support the process, Beijing needed to overhaul its land and tax codes as well as free up the rigid residency registration, or “hukou”, system to give migrant workers access to education, health and other services where they work, experts have said. Li wanted more detail on these sorts of reforms in the plan, the sources said. [Source]

While Reuters also reported that Li and President Xi Jinping preferred reform to any short-term economic stimulus, The Economist asks why they can’t pursue both:

Just as structural reforms have implications for demand, the converse is also true: efforts to boost demand can affect the course of structural reform. China’s 2009 stimulus lending was successful in reviving demand. But it also had some damaging structural side-effects. It further skewed the economy in favour of investment, especially property construction; it made a mess of local-government finances; and it forced China’s banks to serve government ends, thus delaying their evolution into commercial lenders.

The stimulus had one other damaging side-effect—on China’s economic philosophy. Many analysts now seem to believe that all stimulus measures delay reform, if only because they ease economic pain without which policymakers will not act.

That is a mistake. Stimulus does not need to be at odds with reform. Cutting taxes or increasing social spending would both stimulate the economy and help rebalance it towards consumption and services. Likewise, many structural reforms, such as removing barriers to entry in industries now dominated by state-owned enterprises, would also simultaneously help to boost spending. The Chinese economy clearly needs reform and may soon need revival. There is no reason why the leadership cannot do both. [Source]

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Post tags: economic reform, Li Keqiang, National Development and Reform Commission, reform, stimulus, urbanization, Xi Jinping
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Chang has based her biography on “long and detailed” research in newly opened Chinese and western archives, said publisher Jonathan Cape, and has revealed “a totally different picture” of Cixi “to the one that has prevailed for a hundred years”. One of Emperor Xianfeng’s 3,000 concubines, Cixi rose through the ranks by producing an heir, Tongzhi, and when Xianfeng died in 1861 she ousted other contenders and installed herself as sole regent for her son, ruling China for 47 years.

[...]Her “groundbreaking” new biography will “comprehensively overturn … the conventional view of Cixi as a deeply conservative and cruel despot”, said Jonathan Cape, and show how she abolished foot-binding, developed foreign trade and diplomacy, and revolutionised China’s education system. [Source]

Just as her new biography is expected to question the mainstream reputation of the empress, Chang’s last book, 2005′s iconoclastic Mao: The Unknown Story, challenged the official history of the PRC’s revolutionary hero.

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Post tags: authors, Chinese history, history, jung chang, qing dynasty
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In just 30 years, China has risen from long-standing poverty to being the second largest economy in the world – faster than any other country in history.

From angry farmers to weary migrant workers, powerful politicians and everyone in between, what China says and does, has become of undeniable importance to the entire world.

Episode 1: The Dramatic Rise, focuses on the divides created in Chinese society by the rapid economic reforms:

Episode 2: Power and the People, looks at how Chinese citizens get their voices heard in the Internet age:

Episode 3: The Fire Inside, examines the fight for women’s equality in China:

Episode 4: Made in China, has not yet been broadcast but will look at China’s role in the global economy.

Read more special media reports on China, as well as more about China’s rise, via CDT.

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Post tags: China's rise, manufacturing, migrant workers, online expression, special reports, urban rural divide, women's rights
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The New York Times reports on just how pervasive hacking is in Chinese society, and on the many free-agents who contract their hacking skills for corporate, official, and illicit projects (and often, all of the above). While joint operations between military and academic institutions are covered to describe China’s “complex universe of hacking and cybersecurity,” the Times also quotes a former hacker, who explains that western assertions of state-sponsored hacking may be misinformed:

The culture of hacking in China is not confined to top-secret military compounds where hackers carry out orders to pilfer data from foreign governments and corporations. Hacking thrives across official, corporate and criminal worlds. Whether it is used to break into private networks, track online dissent back to its source or steal trade secrets, hacking is openly discussed and even promoted at trade shows, inside university classrooms and on Internet forums.

[...]Corporations employ freelance hackers to spy on competitors. In an interview, a former hacker confirmed recent official news reports that one of China’s largest makers of construction equipment had committed cyberespionage against a rival.

[...]Another former hacker said the monolithic notion of insidious, state-sponsored hacking now discussed in the West was absurd. The presence of the state throughout the economy means hackers often end up doing work for the government at some point, even if it is through something as small-scale as a contract with a local government office.

“I don’t think the West understands,” he said. “China’s government is so big. It’s almost impossible to not have any crossover with the government.”

[...]“In China, everyone is struggling to feed themselves, so why should they consider values and those kinds of luxuries?” the former hacker said. “They work for one thing, and that’s for money.” [Source]

At his Washington Post blog, Max Fisher also reports on the legions of freelance Chinese hackers, focusing on the damage they are wreaking upon China’s economy:

A year of stunning revelations has made many Americans aware that Chinese hackers, some of them believed to be associated with the country’s military, have infiltrated just about every powerful institution in the District, from federal agencies to think tanks to, yes, media organizations. But less well-known are the freelance and industrial hackers operating within China, where they’re estimated to have caused $873 million in damage to Chinese economy in 2011 alone. [Source]

For more on cyber espionage, hacking, and China’s “patriotic geeks,” see prior CDT coverage.

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Post tags: cyberattacks, cyberespionage, cybersecurity, hackers, hacking, People's Liberation Army, PLA
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In the cartoon, pigs keep guard over Tiananmen with tanks and AK-47s. The slogan, “Long Live the Four Legs” is a reference to Animalism in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Meanwhile, the pig leaders tell each other, “Our belief is the truth of the universe!”

What We Believe In, by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT:

Read more about Hexie Farm’s CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.

[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]

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Post tags: hexie farm, orwell, political cartoons, political reform, Xi Jinping
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The truth is: for the rich, the law is a paper tiger, easily circumvented by paying a “social compensation fee” — a fine of 3 to 10 times a household’s annual income, set by each province’s family planning bureau, or by traveling to Hong Kong, Singapore or even America to give birth.

For the poor, however, the policy is a flesh-and-blood tiger with claws and fangs. In the countryside, where the need for extra hands to help in the fields and the deeply entrenched patriarchal desire for a male heir have created strong resistance to population control measures, the tiger has been merciless.

[…] The public outrage voiced against Mr. Zhang during the last week plays into the Party’s hands. Instead of attacking the government’s barbaric policy, the people are being encouraged to criticize the rich for escaping its claws.

Ending this scourge is a moral imperative. The atrocities committed in the name of the one-child policy over the last three decades rank among the worst crimes against humanity of the last century. The stains it has left on China may never be erased. [Source]

At The Guardian (via CDT), Ma recently explained how family planning riots in Guangxi in 2007 inspired his latest novel, The Dark Road.

© nornell for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: family planning, inequality, ma jian, one-child policy, social inequality, Zhang Yimou
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The high value placed on foreign degrees has shaken up the job market. It has become easier for foreign-trained Chinese scholars to return home and get jobs at prestigious universities; and non-Chinese academics have an even easier time. By contrast, the chance for a domestically trained scholar to work at a prestigious university is dwindling, even if they get their doctorate from one of China’s top institutions.

[...] As part of this push to become world-class, the universities and education officials are also reinforcing a “publish or perish” mentality. Chinese universities are attempting to improve their standing in global university rankings rapidly. To do so, they are trying to improve the research areas that the rankings rely on. For publishing, this means that articles in Thomson Citation Index-listed journals are encouraged above all else—in fact, no other international indexes are even considered or recognized, and such language is written into faculty contracts. In consequence, book publishing is considered unimportant and is even openly discouraged in faculty discussions.

There are various policies in place to persuade faculty to submit exclusively to such outlets, the most obvious being financial rewards for successful publication. Most universities will pay between 5,000 and 10,000 RMB (or 750 and 1,500 USD) per article. Importantly, only the first author or corresponding author gets these financial benefits, and this effectively persuades colleagues not to work together. [Source]

See also how China’s top institutions fare in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

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Post tags: academics, higher education, rankings, universities
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Singing

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Post tags: Robert Hughes
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A captive in Dongqiao, Fujian Province, May 11, 2013.

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online.

Guangdong Propaganda Department: Do not report, republish, or comment on Gu Chujun’s May 22 news conference or related activities. (May 22, 2013)

广东省委宣传部：对顾雏军22日举行新闻发布会及相关类似活动，不报不评不转。

Gu Chujun, former CEO of Kelon Electrical Holding Group, was convicted of overstating profits and embezzling funds. He is currently serving a ten-year prison sentence which began in 2009.

Central Propaganda Department: Do not report or comment on the May 11 villagers’ attack on government workers in Dongqiao Township, Hui’an County, Fuzhou, Fujian Province. (May 22, 2013)

中宣部：福建泉州惠安县东桥镇5月11日村民围攻政府工作人员，不报不评。

At the beginning of the month, Dongqiao officials clashed with locals about plans to requisition land for an oil refinery. On May 11, villagers captured one of the town’s vice mayors and a riot police officer. See more photos from Dongqiao at CDT Chinese.

CDT has collected the selections we translate here from a variety of sources and has checked them against official Chinese media reports to confirm their implementation.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The original publication date on CDT Chinese is noted after the directives; the date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, environmental protests, Fujian, Gu Chujun, Guangdong, Ministry of Truth, propaganda
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The battle against global warming has received a transformational boost after China, the world’s biggest producer of carbon dioxide, proposed to set a cap on its greenhouse gas emissions for the first time.

Under the proposal China, which is responsible for a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, would put a ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions from 2016, in a bid to curb what most scientists agree is the main cause of climate change.

It marks a dramatic change in China’s approach to climate change that experts say will make countries around the world more likely to agree to stringent cuts to their carbon emissions in a co-ordinated effort to tackle global warming.

[Source]

China now burns nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined — one factor contributing to the record levels of PM2.5 recorded early this year in Beijing — and has been accused in the past of being uncooperative in the global fight against climate change. Amid the new leadership’s call for “ecological progress,” the Ministry of Finance hinted in February at the imminent imposition of an emission-curbing carbon tax, though the ministry later said that, due to economic concerns, the move would have to wait until after 2013. Details about another measure towards “ecological progress” were recently unveiled: the country’s first pilot carbon-trading program will launch next month in Shenzhen. From The Guardian:

The trading scheme will cover 638 companies responsible for 38% of the city’s total emissions, the Shenzhen branch of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced on Wednesday. The scheme will eventually expand to include transportation, manufacturing and construction companies.

Shenzhen is one of seven designated areas in which the central government plans to roll out experimental carbon trading programmes before 2014.

[...]Li Yan, Greenpeace east Asia’s climate and energy campaign manager, said that the pilot programmes will inform the central government on how to motivate local authorities to adopt low-carbon policies.

[Source]

In a report covering both the possible carbon cap and the new pilot program, Think Progress underlines the global and local impact of carbon emission in China, and notes what China’s progress in carbon regulation implies for the U.S., the world’s second top carbon dioxide emitter:

The possibility of a carbon cap in China has been hailed as “potentially transformative” in the fight against climate change, as other major emitters such as the U.S. have historically cited China’s inaction on climate change as reason to avoid implementing meaningful greenhouse gas regulations. Previously, China has shied away from cuts in emissions, saying its main priority was the growth of its economy. In November 2012, the state-owned Xinhua quoted Xie Zhenhua, China’s chief negotiator to the UN climate change talks, as saying it was “unfair and unreasonable to hold China to absolute cuts in emissions at the present stage, when its per capita GDP stands at just 5,000 U.S. dollars.”

But now, China’s advancements in carbon regulation mean the U.S.’s strategy of waiting for China to act on climate change before it does is becoming less and less credible. China has already pledged to cut its carbon intensity, or emissions per unit of GDP, by 17 percent between 2011 and 2015 and 40 to 45 percent by 2020, compared to 2005 levels. In February, the countryannounced it would be implementing a carbon tax, but it later clarified that it would wait until 2013 is over to introduce the program. And the country has invested substantially in renewable energy, spending $65 billion on clean energy projects in 2012, nearly twice as much as the U.S.’s $35.6 billion.

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Post tags: air pollution, carbon cap-and-trade, carbon tax, emissions standards, environment, greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, sustainable development
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Lawyer Pu Zhiqiang Says He Is a “Key Person,” Refused Admittance to Hotel

Pu Zhiqiang’s identification information as it appeared on a terminal at the Rui’an Hotel in Beijing. (Pu Zhiqiang/Weibo)

Last night, prominent lawyer Pu Zhiqiang posted on Weibo about a “rather shocking” event–he has been classified as a “key person” and barred entrance to a hotel in Beijing. The hotel states that it is simply following procedures for verifying the information on guests’ identification cards.

“I have just learned that, as a key person, I can’t enter this hotel. It feels very strange to know I’ve been labelled like this.” At 9 p.m. last night, Mr. Pu wrote a weibo saying that he had been going to the Rui’an Hotel on Zhengyi Road, Beijing to see a friend visiting from out of town. His friend had also brought tea for Mr. Pu. What is unusual is that Mr. Pu was stopped by public security at the door, where they checked his identification card.

Mr. Pu revealed that he gave his card to the security guards, who swiped it at a terminal to check his information. They told him that he is a “key person” and that he would be refused entrance to the hotel.

Outside the Rui’an Hotel. (Pu Zhiqiang/Weibo)

Mr. Pu took a photo of the information about him  displayed on the terminal screen, explaining that he is not a petitioner. The security guards were courteous, saying they understood he had not come to petition, but Mr. Pu was still unable to go inside. There was no dispute between the two sides. Mr. Pu called his friend, who came outside to give him the tea.

Mr. Pu says that he has checked into hotels across the country and has never encountered this situation before. The reception manager at Rui’an stated last night that their “hotel is rather special,” as they do not receive foreigners or anyone with a criminal record. If someone’s identification card indicates that he is a key person, the staff can only decide whether or not to admit him based on the information available.

Radio France Internationale also reports on Pu’s encounter at the hotel [zh].

Via CDT Chinese.

Note: Ironically, zhengyi 正义 means “justice.” Back.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, pu zhiqiang, rights defense
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Yuan Huizhong. (Weibo)

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online.

State Internet Information Office: Immediately delete contents which calls into question the appointment of the children of cadres to positions in local government, members of the so-called “governing second generation,” “governing third generation,” “red second generation, etc. (including news, blogs, forum posts, images, and video). Report on the progress of your work. (May 14, 2013)

网信办：立即清理质疑一些干部子女出任地方领导职务所谓“官二代”“官三代”“红二代”等信息（含新闻，博文，贴文，图片，视频等），并将简要工作情况上报。

This directive could be in response to a netizen backlash after the “rocket promotion” (火箭升迁) of Yuan Huizhong to the Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province chapter of the Communist Youth League. According to China Daily, Yuan only has three years of experience, but her father has a top appointment in the city. The directive seems preemptive of future controversies, however, as Yuan’s case is still visible on Weibo [zh]. Earlier this month, Deng Xiaoping’s grandson became a “sensitive” word on Weibo after becoming county head of Pingguo County, Guangxi Province.

The keywords “governing second generation” (官二代), “governing third generation” (官三代), and “red second generation” (红二代) are all searchable on Weibo.

CDT has collected the selections we translate here from a variety of sources and has checked them against official Chinese media reports to confirm their implementation.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The original publication date on CDT Chinese is noted after the directives; the date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, Internet censorship, Jiangsu, Ministry of Truth, official corruption, propaganda, second-generation officials, Yangzhou
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Efforts to strictly control communication in the digital age — what Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon has called “networked authoritarianism” — have been assumed to influence the way that Chinese netizens interact with the Internet (a theory easily given weight by the emergence of subversive web phenomena such as e-gao). However, a new study by two graduate students at Northwestern University argues that cultural factors have more impact on web usage than does censorship. Below is the abstract for “How Does the Great Firewall of China Affect Online User Behavior,” by PhD candidates Harsh Taneja and Angela Xiao Wu:

Internet access blockage is widely understood to isolate Chinese Internet users and “balkanize”
the Internet. Drawing from the literature on global cultural consumption, we question this
assumption and argue that online user behavior is structured by cultural factors. We develop a
framework that integrates access blockage with other structural factors to explain web users’
choices. Analyzing online audience traffic among the 1000 most visited websites globally, we
find that websites cluster according to language and geography. Chinese websites constitute one
cluster, which resembles other such geo-linguistic clusters in terms of both its composition and
degree of isolation. Our study demonstrates that cultural proximity has a greater role than access blockage in shaping people’s web usage. It also calls for sociological investigation of the impact of Internet blockage.

[Source]

MIT Technology Review summarizes the new study’s findings and its methodology, before drawing attention to its faults and siding with the counter-argument:

[...]And herein lies the biggest problem with the study by Taneja and Xiao Wu—it fails to take proper account of the behaviour of Chinese-speaking people who are outside of the Great Firewall of China but able to access content within it. It is easy to imagine that this relatively small group acts as the glue that links the Chinese cluster to the rest of the world.

If that’s the case, then the cultural fault lines created by the Great Firewall are hidden in this data.

It may well be that cultural factors are an important influence on people’s surfing habits, possibly the most important influence. But the argument that censorship is somehow less significant because of this is insidious and dangerous. On this matter, Hillary Clinton was correct.

[Source]

Also see prior CDT coverage of Internet censorship and the Great Firewall, and The Economist’s in-depth special report “China’s Internet: A Giant Cage“.

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Post tags: academic resources, censorship, Great Firewall, Internet, Internet censorship, Internet culture
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