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Google Buzz blocked in China!

Friday, February 12th, 2010

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NOTE: For those readers who’ve been offline for the past 3 days, this is a post about Google Buzz, the new Google service that has invaded the World’s mailboxes this week.

But take it easy, hold on a sec, don’t rush to your GFW test tools, this has not happened yet. I just want to be the first to announce it and get all the credit, since I am 90% certain that Google Buzz will be blocked within a week. The remaining 10% I am hedging in case the GFW censors get too high on Baiju over the New Years and their reactions are a bit slower than expected.

Look, I hate playing blogger of doom, but this is just how China works today. I’ve heard a few opposed opinions from bloggers I respect, and I am ascribing that to wishful thinking. There is no way Google Buzz is going to continue open, here is why:

  • Gbuzz is attracting very fast a larger number of users than Twitter or Facebook in China, due to its use of Gmail, a relatively popular email service here.
  • The viral transmission potential of Google Buzz is extraordinary, and very appealing for the Chinese way of using the internet. In the first 24 hours of GBuzz in China the popular Chinese bloggers where getting far more comments than pioneers like Robert Scoble.
  • After their recent controversy with the Chinese authorities, Google put Gmail (and now GBuzz) on HTTPS, which means that the GFW cannot  see the content flowing inside China. They cannot block particular users or keywords, and neither can they force a self-censorship of Google as they did with the Google.cn, for reasons both technical and political for the Google company.

So what we have here is a means of massive viral communication, completely out of control and with a potential to piss off the Chinese authorities that may be second only to the Epoch Times.

A Real-time Simulation

For those who still don’t agree with me, I have used my old engineering supercomputer to do a real-time simulation of the upcoming events, starting from yesterday, when most Chinese Gmail users got access to GBuzz. The first 4 steps have already happened as of February 12:

Step1: GBuzz is rolled out in China and within hours the popular bloggers are getting streams of comments in the few hundreds. One of the first subjects of discussion is whether the Buzz will be blocked or not.

Step2: Some Chinese users start timidly testing the system with unmodified swearwords and taboos, such as Caonima and Malagebi. Euphoria: no comments are deleted or blocked!

Step3: - After 12h some Chinese users are already sending pictures of beautiful ladies with a peculiar tendency to wear less and less clothes even as the winter is hitting back hard on the mainland.

Step 4: Bloggers like Han Han or AiWeiwei discover GBuzz and start broadcasting there. Not only their posts, but worst still, the flow of comments is out of reach of the Chinese authorities. Comment threads are by now in the tens of thousands.

Step 5: The next big viral event hits the Chinese internet, and seeing that all comments get erased on the other blogs and microblogs, even more people starts flocking to GBuzz.

Step 6: By now most netizens have understood that GBuzz is their GFW free day out. Uncensored photos of Edison Chen or drunken party cadres recirculate widely, people even write appraisals of the performances. More than 50% of the words on GBuzz worldwide are in mandarin characters, and about 10% of them are some form of 妈/逼 word construction (mother /cunt).

Step 7: The early days of FOS were rather hectic, but the people finally realizes the advantages of communicating freely. The divide between the Chinese internet and the rest of the world is disappearing quickly, and Google Buzz has written a page in World history.

… in the meantime, somewhere in the middle kingdom…

the evil 5Mao teams of netizens sold to the the party have caught up with GBuzz and are calling their bosses in the propaganda department to wake up from their baijiu dreams and show up at the GFW headquarters with red tape and pruning shears…

Conclusion

OK, I think you get the gist by now. And the conclusion is this: there is no way GBuzz is going to remain open in China. The only question remaining to answer is what will happen to the rest of the Google services, in particular Gmail and Google.com (G.cn is already doomed in my books).

I see here 2 possibilities:

1- Google Buzz could technically be blocked without blocking GMail, in spite of their integration. The GFW could achieve this by using intelligent URL blocks on the #buzz string that appears on all the buzz URLs. Easier still, since they are in negotiation with Google, they could ask G to facilitate the blocking of GBuzz in exchange for GMail remaining open.

2- GBuzz might go down and take down with it all the Google services in China once and for all. Especially this can be true if the negotiations between Google and the Chinese government are not as smooth as I supposed lately. This has happened already in Iran, and I am certain most leaders in the CCP wouldn’t even  blink. Or does anyone think they care about the outside opinion on China’s freedom of speech?

So this is only a 2-way dilemma, I don’t see any other solution. The final outcome of the Google vs. China affair is coming very soon, precipitated by the unexpected birth of GBuzz. Neither Google nor the CCP can afford to wait much longer, as the pressure is mounting on both sides. The end is near, fasten your belts and turn on your VPNs.

And Happy New Year of the Tiger

And now I am going to close the computer, leave the office and take a flight to a certain tropical destination in South East Asia where I intend to spend my New Year’s Holidays. When I am back to Shanghai on the 22nd, Google Buzz will be over in China, and I will be just in time to pick up the pieces. I look forward to a whole new series of posts on the year of the Tiger.

Happy New Year to all, 恭喜发财!

Year-End Edition 2009 (1): Measuring "China"

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Goodbye 2009. Here is another Year-End Special of Chinayouren, the first after a full year of operation. Thanks all for sticking around.

As usual we will start with the popularity of China in the news. This year it is more interesting than ever, because 2010 is a round number, and the early-birds of the China Experts are already chanting the Chinese decade.

As we predicted last time, 2008 was a peak for China related news in the World, and it was going to be difficult to beat that in the short term. Within the general rising trend, 2009 has gone back to reasonable levels of media attention, partly because Xinjiang and the Tiananmen anniversary were no match for Tibet, Sichuan and the Olympics; partly because the US Obamania has stolen the show from the Middle kingdom.

In the first months of the year the crisis did bring some attention to China, but as soon as it became clear that the stimulus package was working and damage was under control, the journalists’ interest waned. Here are the results of my Chinanews-meter, the high precision tracking device I purchased from the Uni of East Anglia:

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Occurrences of "China" in LaVanguardia 1881-2009

This year I want to go a bit further, so I add below the statistics from Google Trends for the News references of the term “China”. Note that Google Trends is not more precise than my own original method, because the number of news sources that Google references always grows. To recalibrate the scale we must try neutral words like “when” or “he” and take them as visual zero axis, leaning the whole curve to the right. The result confirms clearly the peak of 08.

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Google Trend News for "China" (axis not corrected)

Still, this system is not very accurate, and I would like to find a more reliable way to estimate the impact of China.  I guess the old Chinanews-meter above is as good as I can get for now. As a random mainstream newspaper in Barcelona without any special connection with China, there is no reason why La Vanguardia  shouldn’t replicate roughly the general trend in the West.

Another possible solution (albeit without numbers) is to use the tool “Google Timeline” to compare some occurrences of “China” within particular newspapers. Interestingly, I have seen that the “highbrow” newspapers, such as the NYT or WAPO, tend to have a more stable coverage of China, as they usually have staff dedicated fulltime to this subject:

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New York Times occurrences of "China"

Whereas more “lowbrow” papers like USAToday tend to show more the peaks and the valleys, as they follow more closely the trends of popular interest (see the massive peak in 2008 Tibet+Sichuan+Olympics):

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USAToday occurrences of "China"

As a temporary conclusion I would say the results from USAToday and similar papers are more significant, because by far that kind of media have the largest number of readers in the World. This confirms again the trend seen in my old Chinanews-meter, and it also confirms the impression of most China bloggers I have spoken to: 2009 was not as hot as 2008.

Your call

I am still not entirely satisfied with these measurements and I am looking to find a better way to estimate “China” and follow it over time. If you have any idea please let me know in comments. Any suggestion welcome.

In the meantime, the bets are open for 2010 predictions, closest guess gets a beer.  Remember there is the Shanghai Expo and the end of the stimulus package, plus the novelty of Obama will be worn out. I go for a safe 4,000 this time (we have to use the Chinanews-meter again as it is the only chart with numbers in it).

In the next part we will see the results of this blog in 09, and I will inflict you with the best of the 2009 collection. While I get that ready, to follow the year end tradition, here’s the green pastures of the Biscay coast:

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UPDATE: This morning I did a “callibrated” Google trend, taking the word “when” as horizontal reference. “The lower curve is the one representing “China”. The results are far from precise, but they do confirm a strong peak in 08 and return to normal in 09:

Occurrences of "when" (up) and "China"(down) in Google Trends News

UPDATE2: I have found out these days one reason why the Chinanews-meter shows such a sharp fall in 2009: in the beginning of the year the popular correspondent of La Vanguardia, Rafael Poch, was demobilised from Beijing. It is very possible that a few hundred of the articles missing in 09  can be explained by his absence.  Of the charts above, probably the general reality of Western media is somewhere between the USAToday and the NYT charts. I am still looking for a way to put numbers to that, any idea would be welcome.

China and the World Map of the Internet

Friday, December 4th, 2009

I was tinkering with some statistics last night, considering that strange idea of the Insularity of the Chinese Internet that we’ve been discussing lately. The expression itself is odd, because “internet” and “insularity” form an oxymoron, but you hardly notice these things when you live here. It’s normal routine in the land of socialist market economy.

Whatever we make of the phrase, the fact is that it comes up every time, whether we are speaking of language, media or politics,  all seems to point in that direction.  The pictures below are my attempt to draw a World Map of the Internet to illustrate this insularity, using the data from the site Internet World Stats.

Here is the first idea I had: I got the statistics of all countries with more than 10 Million internet users, that makes 32 in total, from China to Morocco. Then I did an Excel chart where each bubble has an area proportional to the internet users of the country, and crucially, I filled the bubbles with code from the Matrix. Result: the World Map of the Matrix:

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The World Map of the Internet Matrix

One interesting thing in the map above is that Asia is already the largest internet area in the World. Amazing—but not really, after all, it has by far the largest population. And this is nothing compared to what is coming: with the growth of India and China the internet is going to be an Asian joint in the next few years. No hit will be really global on the net without them. Up to now, most people on the net were from developed countries, from now on the majority will be from developing ones. The close contact between our societies will have important consequences online and off. That is, supposing we really manage to connect.

But when we speak of the internet, it doesn’t make much sense to look at political boundaries. There is no such a thing as border controls online, what really unites or divides the peoples is culture. An in particular, the most important parameter is language: regardless of your national origin, what defines you as an user is the language you surf in. That is the reason why my browsing habits look more like this blogger’s than like anyone in my country: ESWN and I have completely different backgrounds, but we have in common our surfing languages.

So I looked up the statistics of the 10 most used languages on the internet, from English to Korean. This time I coloured the bubbles with flags, and I placed them roughly on the center of gravity of their community of speakers. The result is the map of Surfing Languages:

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The World Map of the Surfing Languages

Still, the map is not great. Many of the speakers in the massive English bubble are actually Indians, Spanish should be both in America and in Europe, and Australia is completely out of the picture. Physical distance has no meaning on the net, even less than political boundaries. It becomes clear that geography is of little use for my purpose, so we might as well dump  Gmaps and stick to the bubbles.

My new diagram looks like this, where all the major internet communities are represented together in a Cloud. We are all interconnected, and the only solid differentiator is language. Two people might share a hobby, like soccer , but they don’t go to the same websites if they surf in different languages. Most of the media and resources on the internet are not translated into other languages, but rather re-written and re-interpreted by native bloggers/journalists, who function as border control among the communities.

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Improved World Map of the Internet: the Cloud

One of the things we see on the Cloud is that all the communities are touching each other. But I’m afraid this is not a very precise picture. Normally Russians don’t translate Japanese content, neither do Portuguese translate Arabic. The English language has a crucial role on the internet today, because in most cases it is through English that the rest of the languages communicate: Most content is translated first to English and from there to the other communities. The English bubble, including users from all over the World, is the Center of the Internet.

Another problem with the Cloud is that it shows all the communities equally interconnected, which is not very realistic. Users who speak European languages are much more likely to read English. The Spanish community, for example, includes many Americans who surf English sites as much as their own language. Actually, most of the language bubbles share a significant part of their pixels with the English bubble, so we can represent the Map as a sort of Venn diagram:

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Second Iteration: the Venn Diagram Map

We see the new Map is very different from the previous one. Now there is a cluster of Western languages that share a lot of content with English, two more languages that share a bit, Russian and Arabic, and then the three languages that form the core of the Asian internet today: Chinese, Korean and Japanese. And you may have noticed that I have drawn Chinese at a distance from the rest.

For various reasons that we will see, Chinese don’t use Facebook, or Twitter, or Youtube, or MySpace, or eBay. They don’t read Boing Boing or the Huffington post, and they chat in their own QQ chatrooms. They rarely receive the viral emails that we receive, and instead they get others like this one. They have all the things that we have and some more, but they built them in parallel in their separate parcel of the internet.

Whereas the sizes of the bubbles above are based on quantitative data collected by a respected source, the positions are only decided by semi-informed feeling. Any reader could argue that China should not be so far right. There is Hong Kong,  Chinese-Americans, even mainland Chinese who do surf in English. And I will be forced to admit that the Venn Map is flawed, because it fails to show this.

But in such a fast changing World like the Internet, position really means nothing. What holds today may be different tomorrow. What is really significant is the dynamics: which direction is China going, and how will the internet look in 10 years? Everybody agrees that China’s internet community is growing very fast, and that is natural. The worrying part is that it might also be moving away from the rest.

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Third iteration: The Dynamic Map

Because in Western countries internet penetration is already very high and India is still lagging behind, in the next 10 years the Chinese internet will become almost as big as all the rest together. If it continues to diverge, it may grow into a parallel network, like a dark side of the moon, a vast, self-sufficient island that the government can cut out at any moment and most people inside it don’t even notice the difference. This defeats the whole idea of the www.

Whatever the real magnitude of the problem, it is clear to most observers that there is a disconnect between China and the rest of the Internet, and there are powerful forces pulling them further apart. Fortunately, there are also forces working to balance this, and the results in the coming years will very much depend on how those factors play against each other. Here is how my new map looks now:image4

The Forces of the Internet

As we saw before in this blog,  some of the main factors that keep China separate from the World are the following, shown in red in the chart:

  • Linguistic, as we saw in this post, where we proved that Chinese language is beautiful and unique in many ways, but it makes it very difficult for Chinese and foreigners to connect.
  • Cultural, in the broad sense of the word, meaning that the communities have so different views and values that they cannot understand each other. This includes the problems with the Media.
  • Political, the deliberate actions of the CCP in  multiple forms, including Nannies, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) and directly arresting people, as we saw here.

And in green the main factors that go in the opposite direction. Here they are in detail, for the optimists to rejoice:

  • The growing number of bridge bloggers and other internet uses that work to connect the two communities. These include not only the English language Chinablogs, but mainly Chinese people who translate foreign media and other content on the Chinese internet. From this humble blog I also did my bit against the GFW.
  • The post 90s and 80s generations that already dominate the Chinese internet. Their personal tastes in arts, music or cinema will probably be more international, and push them to connect with the World. This point is object of debate though, and some Westerners are very skeptical of the post 80s.
  • Business is one of most important factors that link China to the World. Since the construction of the EU, it is no secret that commerce can achieve the most ambitious goals in World Peace, so whatever your take is on those business minded Chinese, they are probably the main force that is still keeping the Chinese Island connected and holding the World Wide Web together.

What do you think? 你有什么想法?

Do you think I am exaggerating? Or is the problem even worse than this? Any factor I missed in the Internet Maps? Internet friends: you are the pixels inside the coloured bubbles, you know all about this World because it is your home: comment and help me improve my Map!

你觉得这很夸张吗?还是认为问题写得还不够严重?你知道我在互联网地图里忽略了哪些元素吗?网友们:你们是小圈里面的像素,那里就是你们家,帮助我改进我的地图!  U5KMU63NGPP2

Euro-Obama in China

Monday, November 16th, 2009

barack_obama_the_french_sun_king So Obama is in China, and even if he is not my president he is still my favourite president. Here is my first-hand analysis of the visit.

The most important news, surprisingly gone unnoticed by all observers, is that Obama wants to become Euro-bama in Chinese. That is how I read the new spelling of his name in characters, as proposed by the website of the white house :

欧巴马 (oubama) will replace 奥巴马, where 欧 is the Chinese character for Europe, making the name sound in Chinese like Euro-Bama.

Some might say that the new spelling is chosen for greater phonetic similarity, or because it is standard in Taiwan, but when have politicians listened to the linguists? There is a clear political motivation in the naming of Euro-Obama, and I see a bright future in the project.

I think I speak for a large number of Europeans when I say we are very happy to see this plan finally in execution. Mr. Obama, please sweep away all our bunch of incompetent presidents and prime ministers, and become King of the European Union. Then, perhaps, in the next meeting with China you can represent our united interests, instead of having each European tribe sending its little pathetic chief for the CCP to cleverly divide and manipulate a la Sun Tzu.

One of the things I like of being European is that you can be thoroughly unpatriotic against the UE, and nobody cares. Dear commentators of the Washington Post, please do not worry anymore. America is not in decline yet, and it will not be for a long time. Among other reasons because it is needed by European countries that are too incompetent to unite in international politics. And indeed, when the Chinese people see Obama, they see a leader of the West as much as they see a leader of America. Because seen from here, the concepts of West, Europe, America, or Euramerica (欧美)have never been all that distinct.

After this important geostrategic consideration, you can continue to read what else is to read about the visit. Essentially nothing, because no real news have emerged yet, and most journalists and bloggers alike do their best to fill in their columns with China generalities. Apart from the links above, interesting questions are:

  • Will Obama comment on the Human Rights Watch report about black jails and other human rights issues? Of course this will not happen, no more than Hu will elaborate on the new theories of the Liberation of Tibet. But it is interesting for the sake of debating.
  • Perhaps more likely is that he mentions the environment, as this blog suggests. I am pretty sure the two leaders will mention it, actually, a different thing is how much of a commitment will come from the meeting. From the voiceless rest of the World we will be watching to see if the 2 giants finally decide to make a move and quit sending their fumes to our back yard.
  • Finally, a lot of articles out there speak of Obama-mania and make a big deal of the Obamao icon, which has been circulating in China since before the election. My view is that young modern Chinese tend to like Obama, and he is marginally more popular than Bush was. But there is no such thing as the Obamania we saw in Europe, and most people here adopt a cold stance of “wait and see”. The minute 欧 mentions some delicate issue or  meets some old lama, it will take no more than a minute of well phrased CCTV news to wipe the Obamania into thin air.

So already, quit the Obamaos and give me some Eurobamas, we are growing tired of politics over at the other side of this continent.

Back to the HSK (2)

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

e59bbee78987_1 I am back to Shanghai with some interesting anecdotes and some mildly funny pictures of Japan. Unfortunately, I will not be able to post any of that,  because this week I am busy with work trips in China, and especially because this is the HSK week. It is just as well, I guess, after all this is not Japanyouren, and there are funnier travel bloggers out there if you are looking for a laugh.

Before I disappear for a week into my studying den, let me explain you again this business of the HSK. It is short for 汉语水平考试,or Chinese Level Exam, and it is the official standard to measure your level of mandarin, accepted by all universities in the mainland. It is also a very crazy exam, designed to squeeze out of the examinee’s brains as much linguistic information as possible in 3 hours, and then put it down in measurable statistical terms.

As it happens, the HSK is an exam that does not mainly measure your level of Chinese. It measures your determination, endurance and sangfroid, and your faith in a better life after the bell. The good side of it, apart from hardening your soul, is that it gives you a good taste of the ultracompetitive Chinese education system and their university entrance exam. It is even reminiscent of the 科举考试, the old imperial examination to select the bureaucracy, which famously caused some of the candidates to lose their wits and become heavenly kings. For a foreigner who is serious (deranged) enough to try to understand China, this experience is essential.

But back to the facts: This Saturday 17th is the HSK advanced, and I am going to fight for a level 9, out of 11 possible levels. I need to get this degree desperately, for the sole honourable objective of beating my own record. This is the Olympic spirit.

IMG_2248 My practice essays with thoughts on the Four Books

Here are some details of the exam: the reading section contains text with a total of over 4,000+ characters, the equivalent of some 10 pages in a standard format novel, and on that text you have to answer 15 questions (not choose a,b,c,d, but actually answer with a sentence). There is a total of… 15 minutes for this part. I tested with a native Chinese friend and that is the time she took just to read the text at normal speed.

The essay writing is another scary part, because you get so used to typing with the computer that when it comes to handwriting characters you don’t even know where to start. At least here you do get 30 minutes for an essay of 400-600 characters, so you actually have the time to read what you are writing, and to consider if you really want to express your own point of view in an exam which contains exercises like:

The concept of scientific development leads our people towards a more ——- society”  ( a-harmonious, b-harmonic, c-harmonium d-hormonal)

This example is not exactly literal, I am quoting from memory. The point is the HSK has a strong Beijing flavour, and some of the phrases are taken directly from CPC handbooks and the helmsmen’s theories. In a way, it feels like the Four Books of the imperial examinations all over again: the Thought of Mao Zedong, the Theory of the 3 Represents, the Concept of Scientific Development… As the old saying goes: All things they’ve changed, and nothing has changed.

America against the GFW

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

I just learn from Reuters that U.S. is testing system to break foreign Web censorship. This is the first news I have that the US government is trying to outsmart the GFW. Fantastic, after the anonymous hackers now it is the most powerful state in the World that will confront the dreaded wall. The war of the internets is here again.

I am not usually supportive of external efforts to force political change in China. Democracy is like love, I say, it has to come from the inside if it is going to be true. But when it comes to breaking the GFW any help is welcome. GFW censorship is a shameful activity and it amounts to lying to the people, China deserves better than that.

Now, the only problem I see here is that the program is not looking great. I will not criticize the technical part of it, I am sure Mr. Berman has hired the best brains in Silicon Valley to ensure the solution is sound. But like in all internet applications, it is the final user’s point of view that has the last word, and from this perspective I have strong objections. Here is why I think it is dumb:

The real challenge of the GFW is not for final users to be able to access information on the web, this is already done in many easy ways, not to mention that RSS feeds are not censored and any blocked website can be read simply by opening its feed on Google Reader.

No, the real challenge is for content providers, including dissident bloggers, Chinese NGOs, discussion forums, etc. to be able to serve their content in a way that is immediately accessible to all. Because the objective of those sites is NOT to be read by their fans, but rather to spread the word into the general population. And the general population has been proven once and again too lazy to use the GFW bypasses linked above, unless it has a definite purpose to use them (usually porn).

In a nutshell: “Voice of America” is offering a service for fans of VOA to subscribe and access content that they can already access anyway. What those guys need is not to access content, but to SERVE it.

So it looks already like GFW 1 – USA 0.  I wish I could say good try, but really they are not even trying. What is this, a VOA publicity stunt? Whatever, all agencies have a budget to spend, I guess.

Instructions to deal with the GFW

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

I have written a lot recently about the Great Firewall of China (GFW). I had my site blocked for two weeks and this inspired some frustrated posts until eventually I worked my way through the Wall. The good news is I learnt a lot in the process, and now I can write some tips to help others with the same problem. Anyone who has a website hosted outside China can use these instructions to try to keep it accessible here. Here is the index, follow the links for details.

Prevention – Try to stay out of trouble

From the beginning when you set up your website, there are a series of measures you can take to reduce the probabilities of getting blocked and/or making your life easier if this happens. If you follow these points hopefully you will never need get to the next Section.

  • Be careful with what you publish. >>>
  • Try to avoid writing GFW keywords. >>>
  • Choose where you want to be hosted. >>>
  • Choose a good, flexible hosting service. >>>
  • Host your blog/site on a subdomain. >>>

Action – When trouble is at your door

Then one day you realize that your Chinese readership has fallen to zero, and you wonder why you can’t open your website from China. If this happens to you, these are the simple steps to follow:

  • Make sure it is really the GFW. >>>
  • Check if there is an IP block. >>>
  • Find out if the target is really you. >>>
  • Check if there is an URL block. >>>
  • Move to a new IP address. >>>
  • Change your URL and Redirect. >>>
  • Check that you don’t have links. >>>
  • Try to eliminate the keywords. >>>
  • Take it easy, and send feedback. >>>

Notes and Disclaimers

  • Don’t forget to read the party of the first part >>>

Click to continue »

Han Han and the post-80s

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

From http://msn.ent.ynet.com/

Chinese ultra-blogger Han Han is starting a magazine. He announced it previously on his blog, and his last post is already giving the details to send in article drafts and job applications. I learned this last night from my friend 2Ting, who was eagerly preparing her CV and intro letter. The literati of the post-80s are very excited, it appears.

Han’s magazine, which still doesn’t have a name to avoid imitations, is presented in this blog post. A very Chinese and a very Han Han announcement, interesting for several reasons. But before I speak of it let me give some background on Han Han. I’ve been planning to write about him for ages, and never found the time until today.

The man

Han Han is 2Ting’s idol. He is also the idol of thousands of others post-80s Chinese, and he has become - in spite of himself-  a symbol of this often caricatured generation. His bio is interesting: while attending middle school he won a first prize in a famous literary contest, then he dropped out of high school and started writing  popular novels and driving race cars. By now he has become one of the best selling authors in China, and, if I got my stats right, the most read personal blogger in the World. Click to continue »

Is China racist? or new PC colonialism

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

This discussion on China Geeks caught my eye, mostly because it is one of the few that has managed to engage the real Chinese blogosphere to interact with us foreign China blogs. And no less than hecaitou, a respected blogger in both the Chinese and Western communities. Unfortunately, the results are rather discouraging.

It all started when some Chinese blogs, including hecaitou, posted this image, which was picked by Chinageeks in a post titled “racism in China”. Hecaitou responded rather energetically to the pingback, writing a new post, and then commentators from all sides joined the party.

The discussion about whether Chinese are racist or not is a never ending one, and it has been commented to exhaustion already, for example in the FM blog.  It usually degenerates into a series of “you worse than me” counterexamples, as American/Chinese national pride quickly takes over any serious attempt of debate.  Rather  than racism, the misunderstanding comes from a different perception on the limits of the socially acceptable (ie PC). Some notes I would like to add to the debate: Click to continue »

The Shanghai Mounted Police

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

My anonymous friend N. has sent in this picture recently taken in an underground station in Shanghai Xuhui. It is a poster depicting a (Kazakh?) horseman riding with a baby just at the moment when a Shanghai policeman has engaged him in a vicious exchange of toothiness.

Government slogans are some of the phrases that I find most difficult to translate from Chinese, perhaps because they don’t usually make sense.  Anyway, here is my take:  “Policemen harmoniously build peace”. And the three sub-slogans on top:  “Penetrate the bases”,  “Penetrate reality”, “Penetrate the masses”.

Police PR campaign

Yeah, said like this, it sounds like something out of 1984, but that’s only if you are not used to Chinese government slogans. This is a PR campaign that has been done many times before in China. The objective is to show the police close to the people, as explained in this old article in the Xuhui district website.

We already saw some similar campaigns in late 2008, and more are sure to come this year, as the government takes every possible measure to avert risks of instability.

On the other hand, I am not sure how necessary this is. From my own observations, policemen here don’t have the bad image they have in some places in the West. They tend to be quite humble, they rarely use violence, and they get yelled at by the citizens they are supposed to protect. More than once I’ve had them visit my house at midnight, just to shyly ask us to please turn down the music and try to not let more people in if we don’t mind.

So  I have to say that, at least in Shanghai, the government has done a good job of managing police PR. Even I find it hard to believe that it is this same 公安 (police)  who arrests activists and bloggers,  the same who kicks villagers out of their old houses marked for destruction.

Something about Uln

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Let’s admit it, the intro section of this blog gives little information about me, other than the proven fact that I am not called Lilly. And I know from what I have read on other blogs that some people attach great importance to a name and a face, and that in their eyes a blogger signing ULN must be little more than an electronic scoundrel.

I can understand these feelings. Nothing would make me prouder than to stick my picture and my name at the top of each page, because I am not ashamed of what I write and I am ready to stand for each of my statements. Nor is mine a full anonymity, as I know and I am known (with my real name) by many people in the China blogging community.

So why continue hiding behind a pseudonym? Simple:  I like writing about subjects that have the potential to excite large numbers of people. Today I represent a company in China, and this company is not mine to decide its political stance.  There is a real risk of clients associating my blog with my company if my name gets spread all over the Chinosphere - it has happened to other bloggers before-  and due to the kind of clients I deal with, I cannot allow this to happen.

So if you don’t mind, and until the next horde of fenqing decide to flesh-seach and chop up Uln, I will keep my semi-anonymity. But since we are speaking of “credentials”, I want to unveil the following points about me, just to make sure that nobody takes me for what I am not:

  • I am an engineer, but I have a Master in Business and a Semi-Master in International Relations (Didn’t get the degree because I got a job and never found the time to finish the thesis, but I will be back).
  • I like reading a lot, books. Sometimes even uni course books, like my famous brick: Samuelson’s economics. Because of my focus-challenged nature I have always learnt more from my own readings than from what I heard in a classroom, even when I had remarkably good teachers.
  • I have been in China for 2-3 years, including Beijing in 2002 and now  Shanghai. I haven’t stopped for a day speaking about politics with all the Chinese I’ve meet. That probably explains my poor results with the “delicate” sex. On the other hand, it has taught me to be diplomatic.
  • My experience and “achievements” include weird and unconnected points such as: winning a national poetry contest in France, writing and performing songs with guitar and harp, spending 1+ year living and coordinating a project in 5 different provinces of North Korea, and others even more irrelevant.
  • And finally, the most exciting: my Chinese qualifications. My level is already enough to read books in Chinese, the last book I read was XiongDi by Yu Hua, and I absolutely recommend it. I am aiming at HSK 7,  signed up for  the next test session in April and then I will publish the results on this blog.

Voila,  I don’t think any of the points above provides a serious basis to support my comments on Chinese politics and economy, so I am safe from self-satisfaction. My posts will all need to stand on their own, and when they don’t please point it out. Same when I “invent” words and phrases that don’t exist in English.

And I will leave this info hidden behind the fold of a single post instead of updating my profile info. Because I only feel like telling these things to those readers that had the patience to come all this way.

Crisis: Those that see the glass half full

Monday, March 9th, 2009

Xinhua has come up with the most brilliant in-depth analysis of the economic crisis that we’ve read to date.

BEIJING, March 8 (Xinhua) — China’s relatively fast economic growth has caught the eye of the world at a time when most of the countries are experiencing the full wrath of a raging economic slowdown.

As some Western media questions why China works, the world’s economic experts and scholars are also wondering the same thing: What tools China has to keep its economy resilient and why it is well-positioned to weather the financial crisis?

The answer lies in the nation’s unique growth mode featuring a “scientific outlook on development.”

Economists and bloggers of doom, read and learn.  For the sceptics, this editorial is based on the work of recognized specialists, such as:

  • “Analysts”
  • The vice president of Stellenbosch University
  • The Colombian ambassador to China
  • “The international community”
  • Velia Hernandez, professor from the A.N. University of Mexico

And many other “economic experts and scholars”.

Finally,  science at the service of the community.  And the question is, what do I do now with my two months worth of canned tuna?