In the 2010 Social Blue Paper, published last December by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there was a very interesting piece hidden among the 330 pages of socio-economic analysis. Under the title “Population problems China should pay attention to between 2011 and 2015″, this article contained some of the newest and most negative data to date about the important problem of gender imbalance [1], published by an official PRC source.

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: Click to continue »

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. Click to continue »

Here is the post I promised analyzing the fate of our friend Michael in the Tianya BBS.  Michael (卖抠) is the main character in the little Chinese story I wrote last week. I didn’t write the story particularly for this purpose, but once it was there I thought it would be a good idea to repost it to the Chinese BBS forums. Most of my readers here are not Chinese speakers, and I was curious to see how it fared among natives.

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: Click to continue »

Of all the amazing things that happen to me in China, the SMS messages I get in my cell phone are one of them.

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. Click to continue »

This morning I was doing some tests on Google to see if there was any change in the search results, and I noticed one detail I had not thought of before: although everyone is describing Google.cn as “hosted in China”, the IP is American, as you can see on whois.

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. Click to continue »

Holy Smokes!

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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Hi, welcome to Surf with Uln, aka The Mini-Youren. This is an experimental part of my blog, a homemade mini-blogging service connected with my Google Shared items. I open this section so I can comment the news without opening posts all the time. Here’s the instructions:

• 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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Back on the job. On re-read, I have the feeling that I might have been too optimistic yesterday. Sure, the style of Google’s announcement betrayed personal involvement, and once at the negotiation table it is to be expected that a more businesslike atmosphere will prevail. But even if G shuts up, it is not sure that the CCP will let them get away with it. Depending on who they have at the table, the outcome will be anything between the two extremes we have considered.

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. Click to continue »

You might be wondering why this story of Google is taking up so much space in this otherwise low-tech blog. I am as well. I think what fascinates me is the almost complete absence of first hand news after the G bomb. The time is for speculation, and for China bloggers and tea leave readers like me, it feels like we are right in our element. To the rest, welcome to China.

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. Click to continue »