China Digital Media Readings for January 18th

• Posted by bbishop
• on January 18th, 2012

• China to expand real-name registration of microbloggers | World news | The Guardian- “Currently, this type of registration is being tested in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. We will extend it to other areas once the pilot programmes prove successful,” said Wang Chen, minister of the State Council Information Office.”We will focus on newly registering users and then extend it to existing microbloggers.”.. Beijing-based internet analyst Bill Bishop said the move was no surprise.

  “They tried real-name registration with cell phones – that was harder because there were so many retailers. They tried it with online games, but that was more about protecting kids,” he said.

  “This is a whole different level. It is a much more serious thing and it is not that difficult for the government to enforce it; there are only two providers that matter.”

• Raphael Strauch | LinkedIn – Co-Founder and Managing Director at GaoPeng, Co-Founder and Managing Director China
  Groupon
• SEC Edgar Baidu – Baillie Gifford & Co now has a 9.53% stake in baidu $bidu
• 国新办：网络实名制主要在微博客当中进行-《财经网》 -
• China: Part iPad, Part Little Red Book. Yep, It’s the Red Pad. – China Real Time Report – WSJ- The only reference material a loyal Chinese Communist Party member would need to do his job in the 1960s was Mao’s Little Red Book.Today, there’s the Red Pad (红派壹号).

  Or so claimed Chinese media last month, when the websites of state-run media ran articles about the availability of an iPad-like device for the ideologically pure Communist. Running a version of Google Inc.’s Android software and boasting a 9.7-inch screen, the Red Pad offered content specifically tailored to China’s Communist platforms such as the website of the party’s People’s Daily mouthpiece – as well as a budget-busting price of 9,999 yuan ($1,584), more than twice the price of a comparable tablet from Apple Inc.

• The China Beat · Digital Chinese Whispers: Death Threats and Rumors Inside China’s Online Marketplace of Ideas- to date, Anglophone literature on the Chinese internet has tended to celebrate its liberating, subversive potential. The focus here is on those brave dissent-bloggers (Ai Weiwei, Murong Xuecun, Pi San, Zola, and others) who dare to speak truth to power while cleverly poking holes in the “Great Firewall of China.” In recently published books and articles, one finds numerous examples of whimsical yet biting digital parodies (grass-mud horses, river crabs, and steamed buns), online environmental and community activism (the PX and Green Dam incidents), cyber-attacks on local corruption and vested interests (Li Gang Gate and human-flesh search engines), and even occasional open criticism of the Party and its leaders. These are examples of the “blog revolution” that Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley and its widely read China Digital Times (CDT) website, claims is sweeping China, and “shaking up the power balance between the people and the government of the world’s most populous nation.”In the latest issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, I put forward an alternative scenario (see “Blogging Alone” and Guobin Yang’s reply “Technology and Its Contents”). Without denying the significance of the above examples, I offer an outsider’s critique: an intervention informed by, but positioned outside, the burgeoning field of Chinese internet studies, and instead rooted in my own research on Han cyber-nationalism. In the article, I argue that the Sinophone internet is producing the same shallow infotainment, pernicious misinformation, and interest-based ghettos it has created elsewhere in the world, and these more prosaic elements need to be considered alongside the Chinese internet’s potential for creating new forms of civic activism and socio-political change.
• Watch: U.S. China Envoy Locke Says China Fears Arab Spring – China Real Time Report – WSJ- Curious about the television interview with U.S. China envoy Gary Locke that prompted a mini-tirade from China’s Foreign Ministry earlier this week?Here it is.

  In the interview, conducted by PBS’s Charlie Rose and broadcast Monday, Mr. Locke pulls no punches in describing China’s recent crackdown on dissent as a product of Arab Spring paranoia, saying leaders in Beijing “are very fearful of something similar happening within China.”

• Commerce Ministry Has Taobao’s Back – ZILA BLOG – Alizila – Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce website, is in the middle of a disagreement between China’s Ministry of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative (USTR). According to a Jan. 19 Reuters News story, Beijing is objecting to the USTR’s ongoing listing of Taobao as a notorious market for piracy.

  During a news conference in Beijing, Shen Danyang, a spokesman for the Minitry of Commerce, said that China is “greatly concerned and strongly opposed” to Taobao being singled out as a haven for Chinese vendors selling counterfeit products.

  “When referring to Chinese businesses, we noticed that the United States notorious market list would use terms like ‘alleged’ and ‘according to industry information,’ ” Shen said. “With ambiguous terms and no conclusive evidence or detailed analysis, this is very irresponsible and not objective,” Reuters quoted Shen as saying.

• 微博认证“钱”规则 – IT观察 – 21世纪网 – 核心提示：在遭遇过郭美美事件之后，再爆发“高美美”事件，使得新浪的实名认证公信力再次受到质疑。
• China’s Digital Advertising Market in 2012 [Slideshare] | TechRice -
• Baidu Beat-Latest CNNIC China Internet Stats -
• Kantar Media to Acquire Leading Chinese Social Business Intelligence Agency CIC | TechNode -
• 赶集网总裁被指为股权造假证 称不愿与前妻争论-搜狐新闻 -
• Black Industry Behind Internet Data Leaks-Caijing – The storm created as a result of the data leak incident seems to be ebbing. Still, the security of online information is still a delicate matter in China, thereby presenting an urgent need for introspection. How can this black industry behind Internet data leaks exist? How should China deal with the industrial chain that starts with computer hacking? Who should be held accountable for user data leaks, and how? How can rule by law in China’s Internet industry be consolidated?
  Information security experts told Caijing that prior to this data leak incident, the attackers must have acquired a large amount of database resources. “It is entirely possible that the attackers had seized more user databases than which have been exposed.” Some experts even contended that “Almost all major websites suffered large-scale data leaks.” It is just that some of the websites chose not to disclose the data leaks, fearing it may smear their reputations
• In D.C., China builds a news hub to help polish its global image – The Washington Post- In a downtown D.C. office building hard by a Starbucks and a busy construction site, China’s most ambitious effort to become a global power in English-language TV news is literally taking shape.For months, Chinese and American workers have been constructing a multi-floor TV studio complex on New York Avenue NW. Within a few weeks, China Central Television (CCTV) — the nation’s state-run international broadcaster — intends to originate news broadcasts produced by a staff of more than 60 journalists hired in recent weeks from NBC, Bloomberg TV, Fox News and other Western news organizations.
• Elections in Taiwan set the bar for China – China Media Project -
• RedPad is the Tablet Custom-Made for China’s Cadres, Costs Twice as Much as an iPad | Tech in Asia – A largely unknown Chinese manufacturer has launched a ‘Red Group Number One’ Android tablet that’s aimed at, and highly customized for, China’s ruling cadres. Following the URL of the very flakey website that it’s from, we’ll just call it the RedPad. Its specs are pretty decent but its price is enough to make even the most patriotic think about getting an iPad instead: the RedPad costs 9,999 RMB (US$1,580), though it’s currently available for the special offer price of 7,100 RMB ($1,124). With a mere 16GB of storage, that makes the RedPad inexplicably nearly twice the price of an iPad or a mid-range Android tablet.
• Tencent Is Going After Sina Weibo | DigiCha – Sina has a big lead in Weibo, but unlike Tencent it does not have a massive, diversified, cash puking machine to subsidize a huge marketing war for China’s elite netizens.
• With Weixin Lifestyle, Tencent Is Finally Building A White-Collar Brand | TechRice- With Weixin, Tencent finally has a product for white-collars (50 million registered, 20 million actives), an objective that had eluded the firm for over a decade. We at TechRice thinks that’s a very big deal.Simon Fong, CEO of Xueqiu, writes:

  Tencent’s problem is that it’s very difficult for it to reach the highest-end users at all. At the very least, in some situations it’s embarrassing to share your QQ number (whether a user has one is besides the point, this is about social conventions). But now Tencent has a new product that is finally penetrating that market: Weixin Mobile IM. Look around you, aren’t all your fancy friends using Weixin too?

• Qunar Considers U.S. IPO as China Travel Demand Fuels Expansion – Businessweek -
• Russia’s Mail.ru Launches Its Own Twitter After China’s Microblog Explosion | mocoNews- Russia’s big Mail.ru portal is trying to ape Chinese companies’ microblog boom by launching its own Twitter clone, Futubra.Alisher Usmanov, who owns almost a third of Mail.ru Group, also owns a majority of DST Global, which took a stake in Twitter itself with a 2011 investment.

  Twitter has two million Russian-speaking users after translating its site to Russian last year, according to Yandex (via RIA). But the example of China, where microblogs – or, “weibo” – have exploded, shows indigenous services have gained more traction than foreigners.

• China Agency: Microblog Explosion Over – China Real Time Report – WSJ – The number of Chinese people using Twitter-like microblogs at the end of 2011 nearly quadrupled from a year earlier, but the era of high growth for microblogs in China may be over.
• Chinese scalpers hire migrant workers to wait in line for iPhone 4S | ChinaHush -
• Three trends on China’s internet in 2011 – China Media Project -
• 18家视频网站正版率仅76％-搜狐IT -
• INCONVENIENT TRUTH: Your iPhone Was Built, In Part, By 13 Year-Olds Working 16 Hours A Day For 70 Cents An Hour -
• Nick Yang — “Pirate-Entrepreneur” « Innovation Economy -
• 苹果店停售iPhone4S遭扔鸡蛋 [鲜橙热闻]__鲜橙互动 南都网 南方都市报 新闻互动网站 南都数字报 – nice photos from Apple’s Beijing iRiot Launch
• 电商融资“皇帝新衣”：谁在忽悠谁？ – 产经 – 21世纪网 – 一位VC人士表示，融资额夸大集中出现在电商、团购等过去两年非常热门的领域，就是因为多家企业获得融资，所以才争相高报融资额。
• VIE disclosures are pathetic | China Accounting Blog | Paul Gillis – Investors need the information required by the FASB standards on VIEs to properly assess the risks of investing in companies that use the VIE structure.  I call on companies to improve the quality of disclosures.  I suggest that the Big Four get together and agree how to apply the FASB standard in China.  I also call on the SEC to get tougher on requiring companies to make these disclosures.
• Yunyun (云云): Social Search Meets Q&A | TechRice -
• iScalp, iQueue, iScuffle- Ning Weiping, an employee with Jones Lang LaSalle, the property management company overseeing the Village, said they had not made any emergency plans for possible disorder because the store did not inform them of the new launch.”They’ll have to pay extra money if they want us to enhance security and management,” he said, ”and normally the police wouldn’t have many precautions either.” The Apple store does not pay the police for the extra security service so the officers will not step in unless there are reports about crimes or disorderly behavior, Ning said.

  ”I don’t know whether we’ll have enough officers tonight to watch out for incidents at the store,” an officer with the Sanlitun police station told the Global Times yesterday evening.

• Apple Details Working Conditions at Factories – WSJ.com- surprised no mention of the censorship/other compromises//Local police ordered Apple to close the store, saying the situation wasn’t safe. Apple later said it would temporarily halt sales of all iPhones in its five retail stores in mainland China.

  Chinese authorities have looked unkindly on such disturbances, and Apple executives scrambled to control fallout from the incident, which was shown in videos around the world.

• All iPhone Sales Suspended at Apple Stores in China – NYTimes.com – Wary of unrest, police ordered the store not to open, according to one source familiar with the situation. Furious, some would-be customers threw eggs. Police dispersed the crowd and temporarily cordoned off the store.
• 驻京办报警寻找微博炫富女 要求新浪正式道歉-搜狐IT -
• Apple audits unveil child labor, slave labor & more at supplier plants | VentureBeat- In Chinese partners, Apple’s investigations found issues with payment of workers, benefits for workers and environmental practices. Some suppliers were found dumping wastewater at a farm near the plant, using unsafe machinery, forging payroll records and even administering pregnancy tests to some workers.Perhaps most troubling of all from a human rights perspective is the continuing instances of child and involuntary labor in Apple’s supply chain. Although Apple says it maintains a a zero-tolerance policy for such labor and that the 2011 audits found that instances of child labor “were down significantly,” the company can only verify that no underage workers were found at final assembly suppliers.
• 苹果暂停iPhone销售 黄牛拒付农民工全额佣金_通讯与电讯_科技时代_新浪网 – beijing iphone 4s scalping bosses screwing migrant workers who waited in line out of their full wages(CH)

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