Last week I participated in a Sinica Podcast on the Internet in China and Zhang Wuben and his magic mung beans. I somehow ended up as the sole defender if the efficacy of properly practiced traditional Chinese medicine; the other guests seem to believe it is some kind of Chinese voodoo. From the Sinica site: Mere [...]
This post originally appeared on Sinocism.com, my blog about more general China topics. China’s efforts to build its “soft power” have been in the news over the last few months. So far none of the coverage of the media strategy for soft power has discussed what may be the fatal flaw in the government’s strategy-the [...]
Rebecca MacKinnon has written a must-read post on the Chinese government’s recently issued White Paper on the Internet in China. She provides the best explanation I have seen of the government’s approach to managing the Chinese Internet–”networked authoritarianism”. As Ms. MacKinnon writes: China is pioneering what I call “networked authoritarianism.” Compared to classic authoritarianism, networked [...]
On Thursday Fred Wilson posted a chart from Comscore listing the top 30 global Internet properties. There are six Chinese sites on the list-Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Sina, Sohu and Netease. The Comscore data significantly understates the size of major Chinese websites. I have borrowed the chart and inserted it below. Google’s Doubleclick Ad Planner has [...]
John Markoff of the New York Times discovered more information about the attacks on Google that precipitated the company’s retreat from China. In “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System” he writes that: …a person with direct knowledge of the investigation now says that the losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a password [...]
Kaiser Kuo has launched Sinica, a new podcast series focused on China. The first installment discusses Google in China and features Kaiser, Jeremy Goldkorn from Danwei.org, and yours truly. You can listen to the podcast here. Popup Chinese provided the recording, editing and hosting of the podcast. If you are learning Chinese and have not [...]
Cui Jian (崔健) performed at Google’s China launch party in 2006. I was in attendance. He was an interesting choice by Google, and he gave a good performance. If Google were to hold their China departure party, perhaps Cui Jian would sing two songs. First, he might sing “Balls Under The Red Flag” (红旗下的蛋). Then [...]
Monday evening Beijing time a Chinese person on Twitter discovered that Google.cn appeared to have stop filtering results on an image search for 89学生运动 [89 Student Movement]. For several hours that search returned this: Now, Tuesday morning, the results for that image search are again filtered, as shown in this screen capture: I tested several [...]
The Financial Times reported Saturday that Google is “99.9 percent certain” that it will shut its China search engine at Google.cn. It has been eight weeks since Google said it would no longer censor search in China. The Chinese government has handled this much better than expected given, from their perspective, Google’s very public provocation. [...]
One of China’s more aggressive state-owned newspapers, The Global Times, has an amazing article today describing Internet censorship in China. The most pervasive and impactful web censorship in China is not carried out by state-owned filtering systems or censors operating the “Great Firewall” and blocking foreign sites. As Rebecca MacKinnon has pointed out, it is [...]
Items of Interest