The data was immediately published by the People’s Daily Chinese. A month later, it came out in the English version of the paper, and since then it has been making the rounds of the Western press, with the predictable apocalyptic spin.  Within China, however, the article has failed to spark any significant debate, even though the subject wasn’t censored. It is already positive that the authorities speak openly of this problem, but clearly a different approach is needed to raise awareness and find solutions.

With the help of my sister, pediatrician Dr. Madariaga, I have been comparing data from different primary sources outside and inside China. The CASS data coming from China official statistics turns out to be very consistent with previous outside sources, like the often quoted BMJ study. It is also the most pessimistic of all, and the most politically credible, as the patriotic CASS can hardly be accused of anti-CCP bias.

What follows is my analysis of the existing research from a different perspective. Not to do projections on the future, but to see what these numbers tell us of the Chinese today, and what solutions can be found. The results are shocking, read and judge by yourself:

The Story: A Very Common Occurrence

Today, almost 20% of the pregnancies that happen in China are manipulated using the simple method of ultrasound scan to determine gender, followed by abortion in case it is a female.

Most first time pregnancies are natural, with only a few percent points of manipulations. This makes sense, as the 2nd trimester abortions necessary for sex selection are not without risk for the mother’s reproductive capacity. Most families prefer to assure the first descendant, knowing that if it is a girl they will get a second go anyway.

However, about 50% of the first birth parents (the same 50% who had a girl?) decide to go for a second one. It is here that the gender manipulation happens massively. Around 30% of these families manipulated their pregnancy using the method described, with some provinces like Anhui showing a rate of up to 50% manipulations for second births.

This shows that sex selective abortion is not a minority problem practiced by a few rogue parents. It is a very common occurrence, with large parts of the population and the health sector taking part in it. In spite of the illegalization of ultrasound scans for sex detection in the 90s, it is obvious that a large part of the doctors are colluding with the public to ignore the law. In short, in most parts of China practicing sex selective abortion is extremely easy and extremely common. Practically anyone can do it.

Among these depressing results, here is a positive note: The very fact that the practice is so widespread would mean that government information campaigns can have a very important effect if they are done seriously. On the other hand, supervision and control campaigns are condemned to fail, although some particular measures might be applicable. More on this in “Conclusions” below.

The Numbers

Here is the basis data for the story above. I have used several research papers shown in references. In particular, the research done by the British Medical Journal in 2005 has been one of the most useful. Where possible, I have used the CASS paper because it is more recent, and the data (from the 2009 Statistical Yearbook) should be statistically sounder.

According to CASS, among the registered children below 4 years old, there were 123.26 males per 100 females. It is known that the expected value is around 105/100 females, therefore:

1– According to this ratio, there should be around 117 girls born with those 123 boys. 17 girls are missing, these are pregnancies that have been selectively aborted (about 7% of the total 240).

2- However, to get rid of that 7% of female fetuses, it means that around 14% of the pregnancies actually used ultrasound scans with the intention of aborting. Of this 14%, approx half were male and they proceeded, half were female and they aborted.

3- The ultrasound+abortion properly performed should give close to a 100% success. However, due to the illegality of the method and the lack of resources in many areas of China, I have introduced an efficiency E of 90%±10 to cover errors, cheats, late diagnostics, etc.

Following the steps above, we get the following general formula for the percentage of manipulated pregnancies N, where X is the male/100females ratio, and E is the success rate of sonography+abortion.

N = [(X*100/105 - 100)/(X*205/105)]*205/100E = [(X-105)/X]/E

With this simple formula we can estimate the number of manipulated pregnancies in the different cases provided by the BMJ study (this data is from 2005, for registered births. It is more conservative data than the CASS 0-4 year olds). Here are the numbers I obtain for different cases:

Confidence: Because of the different sources, it is hard to estimate overall confidence parameters. I have taken the following assumptions, and the intervals should be close to the 95% confidence range:

• Natural ratio is 105±2 with a very high confidence rate.
• The Statistical Yearbook table gives 2 decimals precision.
• The BMJ data gives confidence levels of 95%.
• I have taken the E as 90%±10, to cover even the most conservative case where there is a 100% efficiency in the system.

But more than the confidence numbers, the consistency of all the different sources over time strongly backs these results. The  interval on BMJ 1st birth makes this information hardly usable, but for the rest of the lines in the table, the results are significant beyond doubt. In particular, the 2000 census, the BMJ paper and the CASS all confirm main line: Almost 20% of the total pregnancies are gender manipulated.

Unregistered, Adopted, Infanticides and Others

One of the main objections that can be done to this data is that those 7% girls missing from the census 0-4 year olds are not all due to abortion, but to unregistered births (including infanticides, abandonments and children just kept out of the law). Certainly, some part of the N values I am giving corresponds to these occurrences, but it is so small as to be insignificant in the statistics.

Many children from unregistered births trickle back into the stats in the following years, as they register for immunization or schooling purposes. Surprisingly, in all the reference studies we see the sex ratios for 1-4 year olds (and even the 5-9yo) are higher than those of births, showing that late registrations tend to be more boys than girls. This causes the sex ratios at birth used in BMJ to be lower than the 0 to 4 year old values of CASS.

In a country like China it is inconceivable that significant numbers of people live their lives unregistered beyond childhood. To affect the statistics significantly, there would need to be millions of roaming “phantom” girls that have never been asked their IDs, and there would be at least some trace of this.

As for the murder/abandonment option, it simply does not make any ethical or practical sense for any Chinese familiy to do this today. If only because the ultrasound method is much better in any cost/risk calculation. This is the main reason to believe the ultrasound+abortion hypothesis accounts for the practical totality of my missing girls: it is by far the easiest way to do it for any Chinese family.

Sex Selection: How it happens

Form practicing specialists I obtained the information that at 15 weeks of pregnancy it is possible to determine the gender by ultrasound at almost 100% precision. Some research shows that this can be done even as early as 10 weeks, but let’s take the conservative assumption of 15 to account for the technological/legal situation in China. Even with this assumption, there is still largely the time to do a sex selective abortion.

In fact, according to this study by the WHO, virtually all 2nd trimester abortions in China are performed using medical methods. Induction with mifepristone and misoprostol for 10–16 weeks’ gestation, and intra-amniotic administration of ethacridine lactate for of >16 week’s gestation are routine methods in clinical practice in China.

So it is easy to figure out how this works. An ultrasound scan around week 15, followed by a drug induced abortion the same week, probably performed (and billed) by the same doctor for no more than 100$ the whole package. It is unlikely that doctors get much more than that, due to the available resources of the rural population, and the existence of competition. Virtually very hospital and consultation has ultrasound scans, and the numbers speak of a burgeoning sex selection industry.

Abortion in China: The holocaust

There are about 13 million abortions practiced in China every year, for a total of 18 million births. Almost 10% of the total abortions are motivated by gender selection.

Some Western “scientists” like to call this a holocaust of little girls, and they use it to expose the evil of the Chinese system. But we have to look at the problem more closely to understand how it happens, and why so many Chinese families are supposedly “evil”.

Nowadays abortion is freely available in China, and there are no defined time limits for access to the procedure. Sex selection is forbidden in theory, but in practice there is no way to know the motives of a person requesting an abortion. Certainly, sex selective abortion is a massive problem in the aggregate, but from the point of view of a single individual, it is not necessarily more “wrong” than other cases of abortion.

In fact, from a purely ethical point of view, it is not clear that most common reasons for abortion are any sounder than gender selection. Many Chinese peasants practicing this have serious economic and subsistence reasons to prefer a boy. How does this compare with other common cases, such as: because the time is not convenient, because the parents want to study, because they just couldn’t be asked to use contraception.

People with religious or ethical beliefs have all the right to call this a holocaust. But in all honesty they should include in the count most of the 13 million of Chinese abortions, as well as most of the abortions practiced in the West. Or is the destruction of a fetus any less wrong when its gender is not known?

It is about time China reduces its rate of abortions, but this is a different problem that has little to do with gender selection.

Why Prohibition is Completely Useless

The Chinese government forbid in the 90s the use of ultrasound for the purpose of gender assignment, in order to curb the growing trend of gender selection. In fact, it is the popularization of cheap ultrasound devices in the 90s, rather than the single child policy, which has been the main driver of the problem.

The problem with ultrasound scans is that they is an important diagnosis tool, and the devices themselves cannot be banned. As we have seen, abortions without a justified reason are not forbidden either. So what IS forbidden? Here is the reason why the law never worked and will never work: what is forbidden is to transmit information.

Information is famously the single most difficult thing to keep under control, and this is the basic element of information, a bit, boy or girl. It can be transmitted with the raising of an eyebrow. Considering the economic incentives, the large number of doctors who have access to the machines, the existing demand, the lack of a social conscience of the problem, the impossibility to prove the crime… one cannot imagine for a moment that this Prohibition can ever have any effect in China.

If the worrying trend shown in the graphs is going to be stopped, it will most certainly not be through prohibition. But see below are some alternative ideas that may work.

Conclusion and Some Ideas for the Government

Unfortunately, most of the articles published about this are concerned with either exposing CCP’s policies, or else drawing spectacular scenarios of the future. The goal of this post is just to analyze the existing research from a different perspective, looking at this serious problem from the side of its protagonists. This is part of my old quest to understand the Chinese people.

By looking at the other side of the problem, we have found some results that are shocking, even for Chinese readers. The reaction of disbelief I have seen in Shanghai friends, as well as the little debate existing on the internet even after an official source wrote about it, all illustrate the the low social awareness of this problem. I hope my results can be useful to increase this awareness, and in the meantime here is my little contribution to figure out effective policies:

1- Communication Campaigns: We have seen banning does not work, and no efforts by the central government is going to change this in the short term. On the other hand, because of the large proportions of the phenomenon in society, a vigorous information campaign is likely to have a strong effect amongst the least convinced of the “selectionist” parents and doctors. A massive long term campaign is needed, including films, adverts, sponsoring television characters, etc. to create a negative perception of gender selection. More importantly, the campaign should highlight the advantages of having a girl in China, which are rapidly growing as the gender imbalance makes females more demanded.

2- Abortion Controls: Nobody can know if the motivation behind an abortion is gender selection or not. But what is sure is that practically all gender selection abortions occur after the 12th (probably 15th) week. In the frame of a general move to lighten the restrictions of the single child policy, the introduction of restrictive conditions for late abortions would  have an important effect in dissuading sex selective behaviors, apart from avoiding risks for pregnant women and other misuses of abortion. This should be accompanied by campaigns to promote contraception to avoid a sudden spike in fertility.

I wish someone inside the Chinese Government reads these points and considers them urgently, for the sake of China and the World. And please, speak about it, let everyone be aware of the problem, encourage debate. Not censoring is already a good step, but active measures should be taken as well to promote discussion. This is a problem that can never be solved by the authorities alone. Involve the people!

If you have some other suggestions, or else some question/correction, please leave them in comments.

References

• China’s excess males, sex selective abortion, and one child policy: analysis of data from 2005 national intercensus survey – BMJ
• Sex Ratios at Birth in China – CEPED-CICRED-INED
• CASS 中国2011-2015年期间需要关注的人口问题 – 2010 Social Blue Paper
• CASS 2010 Blue Paper Index – 2010 Social Blue Paper
• The worldwide war on baby girls – The Economist
• Abortion Laws Around the Word – Pew Forum
• Sonographic early fetal gender assignment, by V Mazza – 2001
• Surgical vs medical methods for second-trimester induced abortion-WHO
• 1 in 5 marriage age Chinese men to remain bachelors… – People’s Daily
• Abortion statistics cause for concern – China Daily
• Statistics China – UNICEF

1. for a simple introduction to the problem of gender imbalance in China and its potential consequences you can read this article from the Economist

I was flying back from Chongqing recently when I was reminded of the very frustrating problem of reading Chinese. There was a movie on the cabin TV and it had a particularity: it carried subtitles in Chinese and English in parallel, in two lines of comparable font at the bottom of the screen.

As I watched I kept forcing my eyes to stick to the Chinese subtitles in order to exercise my reading (the sound was off) but it was pointless. Every single time, before I had finished reading the Chinese I already knew the meaning of the line anyway. The words in English just seemed to transmit their meaning even if I was not looking at them.

Reading Chinese

We already spoke last year about the problem of Reading Chinese functionally. It is very important for advanced students of Chinese, because progress beyond a certain level depends largely on this ability. Many foreigners are able to read slowly and even do good translations of Chinese texts with the help of a cursor dictionary. But to read functionally, in my definition, is a completely different thing. It means to be able to read all sorts of general texts as quickly and reliably as an average native.

I have observed that this reading fluency is extremely difficult to attain for readers who were not educated in the Chinese system. And I know from personal experience that this is not a common problem of learning foreign languages; with practice, reading fluency comes parallel to speaking in languages with alphabetic script. This problem is unique to Chinese characters, and I have the impression that it has been largely ignored by educators.

The Reading Test

I want to differentiate very clearly the reading skills from the acquisition of new vocabulary/characters. Obviously when you need to look up words in the dictionary, reading is slower, but that is not what we want to measure. We can define a test to measure the reading speed :

The index is the time you take to read a 500 character text divided by the time taken to read a similar text (the next 500 character section in the same book) in your native language, with the premise that you are familiar beforehand with all the characters/words/expressions contained in the text, and no preparation prior to reading is allowed. The test is easily performed with a bilingual book, although it takes some trial and error until you find a section where there are no unknowns.

Since there is no vocabulary or missing character issue, the indexed difference in speed is mostly due to the difficulty in parsing the message, what I call the pure reading skills.

Parsing Chinese

I am beginning to suspect that this index is very difficult to decrease, even with long periods of daily reading. I scored about a 3 in the test last year, and almost one year later (pending careful testing) I am afraid I am not far from where I was. Actually, I might be cheating slightly because I was using an Obama book that I had already read before.

Let’s see all the possible reasons why it is so difficult to parse the message when we know all the elements inside it. As far as I can think, there are 3 main complex processes that we do when we read: 1- Recognizing the characters 2 – Parsing them into words 3- Parsing the words into sentences.

Step 1 – Recognizing the characters

It is understood that when we read English, we normally don’t read letter by letter to make out a sound, but rather we recognize whole words or even chunks of them at a glance. This allows us to read very fast, and I am sure the same kind of phenomenon happens when Chinese read their language. They see a 中央政治局常务委员会 in one beat of the eye.

I see here the first big obstacle to our reading. We have not developed the skills to make out these complex shapes automatically, and we are forced to consciously recognize each character before we move on. Even for the very basic characters in the previous paragraph, I still cannot take in all of it as immediately as I take “Politburo Standing Committee”.

What do you think? This is the Step 1.

Step 2 – Parsing the Words from Characters

One thing is to recognize a chunk of characters at a glance, but a different thing is to identify the words that they form. This step is extremely easy in Western languages, because the words are clearly separated by spaces, and proper nouns have Capital Letters. But written Chinese doesn’t offer this help, so there is an added parsing step in figuring out where are your units of meaning.

See for example the expression 发展中国家, I can tell you in no time that it means “developing country”. But now check out this random section of text I just copied from the internet:

前四个会议分别讨论了现有生物技术在发展中国家粮食和农业领域中的作物

Is it 在发展-中国-家粮食？Or is it 在-发展中国家-粮食? Obviously it is the second one, but if we read character by character and follow the statistically economic approach, our first tentative parsing would be the first one. A native reader sees the whole 5 character chunk at once and detects the word, but due to the difficulty of characters, most foreign readers see in small chunks of 2 characters, which forces them into a process of trial and error.

In fact, the example given above is very elementary, but consider introducing into a text longer words, fixed phrases and foreign names like this one: 圣文森特和格林纳丁斯 (special prize of the jury to the foreigner who gets this). It is easy to see that the Chinese are adding a whole step of parsing that is practically inexistent in our languages.

In case you are skeptical, it is easy to do a realistic simulation of what that added step would mean if we had it in English. Just see how long you take to read this text, taken from this article:

karunanidhiwaslividthatdayanidhiandbrotherkalanidhihadbecometooambitious holdingpopularitycontestsagainstalagiriintheirnewspaper,whoseofficewas burntdown.rajadidnottakechargeofthetelecomministryalone.kanimozhiwas toremainhis”guide”.hewasfocused.hisallegedundersellingofthe2Gspectrum(a designatedpartoftheairwavesforusebymobilephoneoperators),whichcaused alossofRs22,466croreaspertheCBI’sestimate,surfaced.

Good luck! It is almost difficult to believe that Chinese actually read their language at normal speeds (and believe me, they do).

Of course, there is not an exact equivalence, because Chinese characters combine in different ways from English letters/words. But it gives a good feel of this tricky parsing step that is unique to Chinese. Native minds have developed since childhood to accomplish this in an instant, but this step involves some process that is quite different from what we are trained to do. Is it possible to acquire that ability? This is what I mean by the Step 2.

Step 3 – Parsing the Words into Sentences

The parsing of sentences once we have the words is overall similar to what we do in Western languages. In fact, Chinese grammar is not all that different from English grammar at the level of the sentence structure. Those tricky long sentences usually have a similar order, and the clauses are marked with commas (ideally) in a similar way to English. This step is much easier, in my experience, than parsing long sentences in agglutinative languages like Basque, where a good part of the grammar information is only given at the end of the sentence in the form of a verb declension.

Conclusions

This is only a 1.0 issue and it will be improved/completed in further posts. I wanted to share these points and get some feedback and ideas before I continue.

This subject is important because it can help us understand how the Chinese reading process works, and perhaps also develop a method to help all those students who are stuck in the advanced (but not functional) level. As more people decide to learn Chinese seriously, the number of students stumbling on this block will increase – it is already large even today.

For the moment, it seems clear that these Step 1 and Step 2 that I describe above are the main obstacle to fluent reading, but I want to find more ways to quantify this. In particular, I have the following ideas that we could try to do if someone is interested:

• Do a larger scale test for the Reading speed.
• Test the reading Speed of Natives in their own language and in English.
• Do a test to quantify Step 2 (by comparing word-spaced character reading speed with normal reading speed of a similar text)
• Answer to the question: is it actually possible to improve in Steps 1 and 2, or is it some automated process you need to learn as a child.
• Think of possible exercises to improve Steps 1 and 2.

Any ideas on this points will be welcome, and any links to previous research as well. Nothing of what I say here is written on stone, and I would very much appreciate other suggestions.

Many of us visit forums like Tianya or Mop to read the hottest topics and get a feel of what is trending on the Chinese internet. However, we don’t usually take an actively role, at least I had never tried posting before. This experience with Michael has taught me a few things about how these forums work, and in particular one of the biggest, Tianya. I know many people out there are interested in this, so here are the points I noted for your info:

1- There are around 200,000 people at any given time on Tianya, a big part of them looking at the front page of the most popular discussion boards, “entertainment” and “mixed comments”. I posted on “mixed comments”, because some regulars told me that this section usually appreciates 原创 (original creation) posts.

2- The key to attracting readers is to have your post on the front page for as long as possible. New posts start on top and slide down as other posts or comments appear. Usually the site is so busy that 1 or 2 minutes is enough to sweep you off the front page. Every post goes to the top again when someone posts a comment on it, even if it is the author.

3- Therefore, the best way to reach the millions of reads is by creating a snowball effect: ie. attracting a discussion that ensures that every minute someone will post a comment, thereby making the post remain in front page. This can be better kickstarted if you have some Tianya friends that support you in the beginning, but it can also be done by re-commenting yourself (there seems to be no limit on the number of self-comments, I took advantage of this to shamelessly promote Michael).

4- To create this snowball effect, the posts that work best contain controversial statements that spark discussion among significant groups, ideally men vs women, or Shanghainese vs outsiders, or conservatives vs modern, whatever. An example: A story explaining why a woman should allow her husband to cheat on her hit the millions of readers, attracting obvious flames from both sides.

5- In spite of all the crazy things we read about the Chinese BBS, the people at Tianya are mostly civil. I didn’t get any racist or xenophobic remark, just one 20 yo who asked me *please* to not take a Chinese girlfriend because they don’t have so many girls here for them.  In fact, there is far less racism, flames, trolls, in Tianya than in similar large forums I have seen in the West. Most people commented sincerely and some even took the trouble to give me detailed advice on language.

6- In the end my post stabilized at around 5000 views and 70 comments, a fair part of them mine. I guess one reason why Michael didn’t fly is that I was too honest. I never hid it was fiction and I asked for advice on language. I am pretty sure it would have been more successful if I tried to post it as a true story. One of the main buzz generating subjects is the true/fake assessment in posts, but I gave myself away there.

7- Another interesting thing in Tianya BBS (and many other big BBS as well) is that it is an almost purely raw content website. There is no place for design or web 2.0 gimmicks, the posts allow no HTTP and no revisions. The site itself is almost entirely raw text except for the adverts and the simple logo of Tianya shown above. Some part of me really, really likes this concept.

In conclusion, I have no idea how this translates into useful business purposes, but what I am sure is that it is quite feasible to get a post rolling into top Tianya hits if you design it for that.  I am not particularly interested in the business perspective myself,  but perhaps this is useful for those of you who are.

As for me, I found the experience really good fun, and I am grateful to the kind readers of Tianya for their support. I think I will repeat it soon with a more viral story, see you all in the BBS!

When I first got to Shanghai 3 years ago I was young and my heart was full of ambition. Eager to make a name for myself in the local business circles, I handed out my name card liberally to all those smiling locals that pullulated in the networking events, actively introducing themselves and offering their cards in the lovely Asian two-handed fashion.

It took me a few weeks to understand how things work in Shanghai, and by then my card had already become a commodity in the IDs market, classified right up there under the header: First Class Expat Suckers.

The downside of this is that a good 75% of the text messages I receive since then are adverts. The good side is that these adverts are among the most extraordinary that I have ever seen, giving a good insight of the resourcefulness and creativity of the Shanghai underworld.

The messages include special cards to spy on someone’s conversations, loving daughters I never knew I had, or innovative credit at advantageous rates of only 3-figures percent, right in the middle of the financial crisis. For a while I have given up reading them, as I considered I had already seen all there was to see. But recent evidence reveals that this field of research is far from exhausted. See the last message:

Go to Switzerland to enjoy the Living Cells of a (Sheep) Foetus Injection treatment, totally repairs the decaying organism. During the whole process a translator will look after you. This will make you rejuvenate, your youth will glow again in a totally new life experience. Telephone:X.

Like usual, excuse the inaccuracies. It would be easier if I chose originals that made more sense, but I like translating dangerously. The main problem here is with the character 羊, which is a sheep, but in words like 羊水, it just means amniotic fluid.  That is why sheep is in parenthesis, indicating that the expression 羊胎素 might actually refer to a normal (human) foetus. Just how much more disgusting can this get.

Working Questions: What exactly are these guys selling? Is it just a scam, or do they really have a place in Switzerland for old Chinese who are rolling in it?  Anyone tried the Living Cells of a Sheep Foetus Injection? If I try it, won’t my bodily hair grow white and fluffy like a little lamb?

Like usual, CNY readers are invited to call the number and test the treatment at your own risk and peril, post results in comments below.

In fact, other than the deals with advertisers (the revenue-generating part of the business), there is little of Google.cn that is really in China. The data collected by Google.cn is a valuable asset for the company and it is kept in the US databanks, together with all the other Google countries indexes. Among other reasons, because Google.cn is nothing more than Google.com translated and censored for the Chinese.

This made me think of a possible outcome I hadn’t thought of before: that Google.cn may uncensor its content completely and continue to function normally served from the US, hosted under a different domain (since .cn extensions are controlled by China). From a practical point of view this wouldn’t make any big difference, as it would just be a copy of Google.com in simplified Chinese. But from a political and “face” perspective, it could be extremely damaging for Google relations with China, and probably lead to GFW of all Google services.

I sincerely hope this does not happen, and I hope that Google leaders will give due face to the Chinese government. One thing is to be consequent and decide to stop censoring content, a position that I respect. But a very different thing is to slam the door and slap the face of a government that is representing a whole country, whether we like it or not. That kind of arrogance would be completely unwarranted from any corporation, especially one with strong ties to a government that is not precisely an international model of respect of human rights.

I guess we’ll know the answer to this very soon. In the meantime, someone has an explanation for this “hosted in China” thing? I am puzzled, because Google.cn does behave like a site hosted in China (ie, no Reset Connection blocks), but unlike Baidu, the IP is outside. This is the only such case I have seen of outside IP not triggering RC terms, I guess it is part of  G’s deal with the government.

PS .For explanations on the technical stuff see the related posts below.

PSS. Another new thing on Google.cn that has been around for a few weeks is the advert that shows up once in a while on top of the searches: 小提示：”G.cn，值得信任” — 通过 G.cn 上谷歌. (announcement: you can trust G.cn–visit Google through G.cn). Ironic that this message has replaced the “censored results” notification that used to be on top of the search results.

Something is moving in Google China.

I have been working for the last 12 hours with Google docs, and I just realize I was using Yi’s computer, the one that doesn’t have the VPN installed. This means that Google Documents is unblocked since  yesterday evening at least.  And so is Google Groups! Both sites were blocked by the Chinese GFW until recently.

Now I don’t know what to make of this. Is the GFW tinkering with the censorship algorithms as it prepares to include the whole of Google.com in the block and turn off the lights for ever? Or are the negotiations in Beijing going fine, like we were wishfully trying to guess this week from the mini-Youren updates?

For the moment my tests of Google.cn and Google.com show no difference from censorship as usual. More about this coming soon, plus a recap of the situation in advance of possible changes. Stay tuned.

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• You can click on the title of the news item to go directly to that article.
• You can click on the Follow button to see my profile and subscribe.
• You can Reply to any of my notes right here in this page.

There is one annoying thing with GReader sharing system: you still can’t reply directly to a note. That is why I have opened this page. Just copy the note you are replying to in your comment below, or continue an existing thread. If it gets interesting enough I will open a separate post and put it in the front page.

Any other suggestion about this new service is more than welcome!
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But let’s leave our bipolar guesswork aside for a while, so we can concentrate on a more interesting issue. Namely, that it’s great that Google.cn is going to disappear, and that whatever happens to the rest of the Gs, the Chinese internet will be a better place when Google.cn is gone. Let’s start with some crude survey work:

Baidu, Google.cn or Google.com?

I improvised a little survey today in the office, where I asked three of my young Shanghai colleagues which search engines they like to use. Interestingly, the answers were very similar, and all included some form of the following statements:

• Baidu.com is better for local information and Chinese culture.
• Google.cn we use sometimes for international information.
• Google.com? Nah, that’s for foreigners.

These results are surprising, because as we saw yesterday, Google.com and Google.cn are exactly the same engine.  It doesn’t make any sense to search on Google.cn, where anything as innocent as 胡锦涛 (HuJintao) is obviously SEM manipulated. For the first experiment of the day we can see how, using this slightly conflictive term, results start to differ between G.com and G.cn. Try the links, see where there’s a Wikipedia article missing?

But the best of all is the answer given by the sample colleagues when I insist on why they use Google.cn: Oh well, the browsers here  direct you to Google.cn by default. That is probably the main reason why G.cn is ranked 3rd on Alexa for China, while G.com is only ranked 6th.

Hey, wait a second. Are you telling me that all it takes to get an identical, non SEM-ed Google Search in China is to type a “.com”, and 300 million netizens haven’t noticed in the last 4 years? Well, yeah. Kind of. Let me introduce you to:

The Chinese censorship and its peculiar victims

This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Chinese censorship in the West. I realized this with the crazy Wang post, the one that was linked in an article 3 days straight on the Most Read list of the New York Times. I got lots of hits, and also lots of mail from creative Americans proposing ideas to help “free the Chinese” from the claws of the GFW.

But listen, the sad reality is, the CCP’s systems of censorship are so effective not because they are diabolically sophisticated, but because… because the Chinese netizens can’t give a damn if they are being censored by their government or not.

You don’t believe me? Then perhaps you have a better theory to explain why nobody uses the widely available, free web proxies to surf the internet. Or why the majority of Chinese netizens still use Google.cn when they have an identical search engine that is not manipulated on Google.com

Shocking, right? But not so much. The truth is that, in spite of popular funny memes and the occasional juvenile rant, the majority of Chinese who are rich enough to use the internet are happy with the status quo. They do find it mildly annoying to be treated like children by the CCP, but as long as the bills are paid, they don’t think so much of it.

And this is also why, if someone wants to create a device against the GFW, the user activated systems like proxies or Tor are not effective, because people simply don’t use them. The idea of a Server Side Proxy, or the Unblockable Host that would unblock a site WITHOUT action by the end user, was discussed here, and I concluded it was not feasible.

This is also the reason why initiatives like Chrter 08 never make it in China: it is not about users trying to get access to dissident sites, it is about dissidents unable to market their ideas to a general population that is unreceptive.

Advanced SEM for Dummies (Search Engine Manipulation)

The most amusing thing in the Google crisis is all the commentators crying about the loss of Google.cn and its negative consequences for the freedom of the Chinese. In fact, I maintain that Google.cn is the most evil product to ever have existed in the Chinese internet, and the World will be a better place without it.

That is because, unlike the Chinese official sites that practice censorship, what the search engines do is manipulation. Why? Because Google.cn is not a content site in itself, it is a gateway to the internet. When people type in a keyword into the search field, they are actually trusting it to return a fair picture of what is on the net.

When you type a “sensitive” term and G.cn removes all the results except the People’s Daily and Xinhua, Google’s responsibility is double: not only it supports those often objectible views on the first page, but it also implicitly states that it is the ONLY opinion existing in the World.

And the worse is, the Chinese who believed that would be right to do so, because Google’s well known principles clearly specify their commitment to give all the information available  in a democratic way. The little warning message that is displayed on Google.cn SEM searches is meant to avoid this situation, but it is tiny and often placed right at the bottom of the page, so most Chinese users just ignore it.

In the case of Google.cn, SEM is not about “good” or “evil”. It is about breaking the very principles that give a sense to the Google company, and it is understandable that Google has never been comfortable with it.

All tests in Chinese, English spelling is on purpose. The anomaly in the chinayouren string proves that in some rare cases G.cn does give better results that G.com, as SEM does not apply to petty disharmony.

Google.com and the GFW URL/IP blocks

One clarification is necessary here: when we say Google.com is free of SEM, it doesn’t mean that it is entirely uncensored. Google.com is hosted outside China, so it suffers from GFW blocks, in particular URL string blocks, like all the sites hosted out of the mainland. A funny way to test this block is to introduce the string  “chinayouren.com/eng” in any site search like Wikipedia, Yahoo, etc hosted out of China. The RC block is guaranteed! (fortunately I have changed my URL since and I  managed to unblock my blog).

A less funny example is when you search things like FLG, the famous religion fiercely opposed to the CCP. Google passes the characters of FLG to the URL, and this triggers the RC. And here is where we see the evil of Google.cn compared to Google.com:

• Google.com gives a very disruptive RC,  unmistakable sign of GFW block. This is plain censorship. Try here.
• Google.cn gives results from People’s Daily and Xinhua, the second of which starts: “FLG: the evil nature of the bloody…”. This is SEM manipulation. Try here.

Add to this that, for obvious practical reasons, the Chinese government cannot RC block too many common terms, or it would make the internet unusable. There are far less terms RC’ed on Google.com than terms SEM-ed on Google.cn, which is the reason why it is fairly easy, using Google.com in China, to get to very explicit material about Tiananmen 89 and many other delicate subjects. And even when those sites often are blocked themselves, the user who has seen the excerpts and thumbnails in the search results and then obtained an RC when clicking on them should be enlightened.

In conclusion, Google.com is a Search Engine that is:

1- Exactly as good quality as Google.cn (identical index)
2- Without the manipulation of Google.cn
3- AND much less censored than Google.cn

And the only reason why Chinese don’t use it is that Google.cn sounds more Chinese to them, and they just don’t care enough. Most probably the disappearance of G.cn will push the present G.cn users to switch to G.com, and the outcome will be increased freedom in the Chinese internet.

Conclusion

It is obvious that, if Google manages to keep Google.com and eliminate Google.cn, and in the process convince the CCP that it has already suffered the deserved punishment (for Google it DOES matter to lose G.cn, it is a source of revenue) then all will have ended well. That was probably not the initial intention of Google’s move, but it is a possible outcome.

On the other hand, some commenters are already saying that I am too optimistic, and that the CCP will quickly come to the same conclusion I have come and block Google.com. The good news is that EVEN if they do block Google.com, the situation may still be better than today. The Chinese Google users will start to miss the G, and they will start to use web proxies to access Google.com, expanding their use and making the Chinese net population more conscious of the GFW and of the ways to cross it.

And I think with this I have said all I had to say about Google and China. I am planning to write about other things for a while, at least until important, first hand news come out. In the meantime, you can ask questions or raise objections in the comments below, and I will try to help.

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*NOTES AND CLARIFICATIONS:

1- If you are outside mainland China probably the experiments will not work, because Google.com is tailored to your own country. There are web proxies hosted in the mainland that you can use to trick Google into thinking you are in China. I don’t remember any now, if anyone knows please comment below.

2- People have asked me about Bing and Yahoo’s SEM policies. A very quick test shows that in principle Yahoo.cn/com is similar to G.cn /.com, while Bing only has one version here, and it looks SEMed, but I’m not sure. In any case those sites are way behind Google in China.

3- Many tech-savvy Chinese obviously DO know that Google.com is not SEM manipulated. And no, I am not implying here that most Chinese are stupid. I am just saying that most of them don’t give a damn if they search for Hu Jintao and the only answer they get is the People’s Daily bio. There is just no notion of the advantages of diversity of information, something that the CCP is not very good at promoting.

Yesterday I imagined a worst case scenario where Google let ugly international politics get mixed into this affair. That was just a scenario of doom, and not the outcome I consider most likely. In fact, I believe the G leaders are more intelligent than all that, and today I want to offer my personal, optimistic prediction. And to round it up, we will go back to the basics for a little study of Search Engine Manipulation, an essential and often ignored concept.

My prediction

I was glad to hear today that Google wants to retain its operations in China, and that it is “ready to shut down its local search engine Google.cn unless it is allowed to run it uncensored”.

The key info here is “shut down its local search engine”. This would mean that Google is not going to force the situation anymore. Because the best way to piss off the CCP today would be to suddenly uncensor Google.cn without notice, and have the Propaganda Department issue an official note to close the servers. The document would be in all the headlines, and that would represent  an unmistakeable challenge to the CCP’s authority.

But as it stands today, regardless of the old “face” arguments that some commentators have written, I don’t think the situation is critical. The CCP is not particularly happy to see Google leave, and if Google keeps its blogging enthusiasm under control, there is no reason why they will not be lenient. For all the bad points I noted in Google’s initial post, it has the great advantage of being ambiguous. Most Chinese people haven’t read the text, and the CCP can ignore the ultimatum implied and ascribe it to bad Laowai manners, a la emperor Qing.

I am predicting that if Google comes back to reason and avoids big game politics in the coming weeks, in exhange for that the Chinese government will let them get away with the rest.  Well, probably Google will encounter some administrative trouble in their business, their Android plans might take ages to get approved, because the CCP needs to give a lesson to other audacious companies in the future.

But that is a problem of Google and its shareholders. What really matters to us is the freedom and openness of the Chinese internet, and here is the big news of the day: if Google.cn closes and Google.com remains, the Chinese internet will be MORE FREE THAN IT IS TODAY! You don’t believe me? Keep reading to find out why.

Google.com and Google.cn

One interesting thing of the Google search engines that is not very well understood is the difference between the different country sites: Google.com, Google.cn, Google.co.uk, etc. People don’t understand this simply because Google does not explain it in the instructions, and because it has changed over time.

But it is very easy to do some tests and compare the search results to come to this conclusion: what really matters is not the extension of the search engine, but your actual location. The simple reality is that, for Chinese non-SEM search terms (more below), the results in China for Google.com and Google.cn are exactly IDENTICAL. They have the same results in the same order, differing only in the sponsored ads.

If you are in China you can try this by looking up neutral terms like 上海浦东 or 鞋子. Google.com and Google.cn share indeed a single index, and the only difference between them is SEM, or the Manipulation of Search Engine results artificially done by Google in its Google.cn search engine. For various reasons that we will see below, this SEM is the shame of Google and the curse of the Chinese internet. Not only China, but Google Inc. and the whole World is much better off without Google.cn.

This means that, if Google operates smoothly and succeeds to retain in China its PR&D operations, it is very possible that in exchange the CCP will allow them to keep Google.com unblocked (GFW). Then the Chinese netizens, free of the scourge of Google.cn, will click on Google.com, and automatically be free of the brainwashing effects of Google.cn.

Search Engine Manipulation (Introduction)

I know athe conslusions above might sound a bit strange, and there are clearly a few objections that you can make. Namely, that URL and IP blocks still affect the sites you find on Google.com, producing the beautiful Reset Connections (RC) that we are so used to. But there are very important reasons to prefer the Google.com way to the Google.cn way. I need to get some sleep, but stay tuned and tomorrow I will give you the explanation and some nice pictures as evidence.

In the meantime, re-read last year’s study on SEM, RC and all the other creatures. And to start heating up, I leave you with this nice picture of what a Google.com search gives in China, without VPN or proxy or any other special device. This has remained exactly the same in the two years I have been monitoring. There is no real technical reason why Google does not apply SEM here, it must have negotiated with the government when they first came to China, and the CCP must have bought that all Chinese would go to Google.cn.

This time I have done the search in English so anyone can try it. Note the conspicuous results including bloody photos, the youtube video of the tank man, mentions of massacre and Charter 08, and also the remarkable 3rd position of our well pageranked friend Peking Duck.  The FLGs own Epch times comes right below, but it was left out of my screen capture. You can see it yourself at home searching tiananmen 89.

CORRECTION: Error in the original text, where I wrote SARFT I actually meant “Propaganda Department”.  Fortunately I noticed my slip before any commenter called me an idiot. It is corrected. More coming later today.

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