At FT Chinese, CMP fellow Chang Ping writes about the impact inside China of Google’s departure from the mainland, focusing on recent comments made by key figures in China’s IT sector.

The signal fire of Google’s departure from mainland China is still burning strong, and there are now un-harmonious voices emerging from the mainland IT sector. At the IT Leaders Forum held recently in the city of Shenzhen, Ma Huateng (马化腾), Wang Zhidong (王志东), Ding Jian (丁健), Wang Weijia (王维嘉) and other industry leaders all expressed dissatisfaction with the government’s censorship of the Internet. Wang Zhidong and Ding Jian even proposed the creation in Shenzhen of a special Internet zone . . .

Read more at FT Chinese.

The police department in Huai’an has recently set up Internet Public Opinion Offices at all levels. All police divisions are now equipped with press spokesperson offices, so that when sudden-breaking incidents occur we can release information at the earliest moment, which means within two hours or so.

Has Google left China? No. Google has left mainland China and moved its search engine operations to Hong Kong. What exactly will Google do? We will have to wait and see.
China’s government, which does not wish to see Sino-American relations continue down their present path, has emphasized that Google’s departure is purely a commercial matter, and that it should not be politicized. At the same time, however, many state media have gone on a political crusade, criticizing Google and defending Internet controls in China.
Information search technology is the pillar of Internet technology, upsetting the traditional relationship between the broadcaster and the receiver and creating a world in which users themselves are free to search, organize and derive information.
Google is cutting edge, one of the world’s most non-conformist companies. Google is not just a search engine but a new form of media, setting new standards. What Google wished to accomplish in Beijing was the creation of a media free of censorship, allowing mainland Chinese to access information freely.
Not long ago, the Washington Post ran a story by correspondent John Pomfret called, “In China, Google users worry they may lose an engine of progress.” One source interviewed for the story, an academic, said: “If Google is blocked, we will see nothing but darkness.”
The Washington Post story set off a firestorm of speculation in the media. Would China descend into darkness without Google? In my view, this is a pseudo question. The question of whether China grows dark or not does not hinge on any one factor. Google’s exit from mainland China is a certainly a loss for the people of China. But there are thousands of journalists in China fighting every day for freedom. They will continue to work, inching ahead, regardless of whether or not topics like June Fourth or Liu Xiaobo can be discussed. This is why the flame of professional media in China burns on, and why we see sparks like investigative reporter Wang Keqin’s expose last week on faulty vaccines in Shanxi. Light and dark dance around each other every day in China.
Google is keeping the future and its long term goals in sight. It wishes to be a thoroughly free and uncontrolled media, something that cannot exist in today’s China. Given the facts as they are known at present, I still cannot entirely understand Google’s true reasons for quitting mainland China. But I feel quite strongly that Google’s decision to shift to Hong Kong and develop Google.com.hk is a stroke of good news amid the bad.
Google has not exited China. It has sought shelter in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China and the policy of “one country, two systems.” The SAR government stated at the earliest possible moment that it would not censor content at the site and would respect information freedom.
In this special place, somewhat paradoxically called “the domestic outside” (国内境外), Google can continue to provide their services to Chinese — including search services that will be limited for mainland users by censorship actions within China, but which cannot be entirely controlled.
“One country, two systems” is not an expedient policy, but rather a long-term state policy arranged by Deng Xiaoping himself. The “one country, two systems” policy shows great political wisdom, leaping out of the life and death ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism and the rigid thought so pervasive in Chinese politics. In spirit it was not unlike Khrushchev’s 1959 doctrine of “peaceful coexistence, peaceful transition and peaceful competition,” which allowed for the coexistence, comparison, competition and integration of differing systems.
Looking back now, the richness and imaginative possibility of the policy surpasses the original intentions of its framer.
As China moves into the future, Hong Kong will have important contributions to make to the nation’s development, not just economically, but socially and politically as well. Hong Kong is an incubator for democracy, freedom of expression and civil society in China. Everyone on the mainland with an active interest in China’s future and progress of China is watching Hong Kong’s development closely.
Freedom of expression must be fiercely protected in Hong Kong, and we must not grow complacent. Some are concerned that freedoms here are suffering. But there is another important aspect to this issue — do local Hong Kong media make sufficient use of the freedom they have? Do they work tirelessly to raise standards of media professionalism, serving as a model for mainland journalists in the two crucial areas of “freedom and responsibility”? As Internet technologies progress with each passing day, has Hong Kong stayed on top of the trends, accelerating the development of new media in the territory?
Hong Kong’s future is closely tied to the future of mainland China. I feel regret at Google’s departure from mainland China, but I do not feel sadness or despair.
The goal Chinese media are fighting for on a daily basis is not the ultimate goal Google was angling for. Chinese media are fighting a constant struggle for the right to expose, for example, the full facts in the Shanxi vaccine scandal. They are fighting for the right to criticize Hubei governor Li Hongzhong. Their reports are constantly censored, “harmonized” (prevented from being posted online) or subjected to “404 errors” (their articles deleted across the Web). In extreme cases, media may be purged or suspended. But they do not turn back. They gain modest victories again and again. And many small victories can add up to tremendous progress.
Hong Kong’s Google is still China’s Google. Words like “June Fourth” and “Liu Xiaobo” are sensitive words that must be filtered out inside China’s firewall today. But I would ask, what will the situation be in three years? Or in five years, or ten years? I don’t believe that China’s Great Firewall will stand unshaken in ten years time.
And perhaps history will change must faster than we anticipate, and we will not have to wait 10 years for Google’s return to mainland China.

A new book by CMP fellow Yang Jisheng, published in February, compiles more than 100 articles by the veteran journalist reflecting on China’s reform journey over the past 30 years. The book is called “30 Years East of the River: the Plight of the Power Market Economy” (三十年河东：权力市场经济的困境).
Chinese news coverage of the book is available here and here.

CMP fellow and Peking University professor Hu Yong spoke recently with The Beijing News about the impact of microblogging at this year’s “two meetings” of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress. Hu Yong calls microblogs a “new form of broadcasting” and argues that the medium has four basic characteristics.

The Beijing News: You have observed the development of the Internet for a long time. How do you view microblogs, this new type of communication tool?
Hu Yong: Microblogs are a new form of broadcasting, and I think they have four basic characteristics. The first is speed. This represents the new direction of Web development. Traditional media all grapple with the issue of news cycles. Newspapers, for example, make news calculations on a daily cycle. But microblogs are not limited by this as they belong to the instantaneous medium of the Web . . .
Second, they are fragmented. This has a major impact on thinking. In the past, mass media distributed information from the center to the periphery. For example, when a news story breaks in a certain place, media must send journalists to the s scene to report. Those reports are then published [in the newspaper], and then they are subsequently run online. The media that break the story are the “center.” But today there might be microblog users at the scene of the story, and they can transmit information instantly. People who were unknown or insignificant might now become the center of the information [dissemination process], having a powerful influence.
Third, they are direct. There is no mediator, so they are very direct . . . For example, making statements through the traditional media has required going through layers of intermediaries. Now microblog users can go directly into their topics . . .
Fourth, is their micropower (微动力). In my view, micropower is nothing more than each individual taking responsibility. “Micro” is about every ordinary citizen. “Power” is about translating language into action. Through “micro-information” and “micro-conversation” we can together exercise “micropower” and influence the development of conscience in Chinese society.

A report by veteran investigative reporter Wang Keqin published last week in China Economic Times has sent ripples through China’s media and sparked widespread public concern. The result of months of hard-nosed reporting, Wang Keqin’s report exposes how vaccines that had been improperly stored and distributed throughout Shanxi Province resulted in the death of several children and seriously injured many others.
Vaccines are bio-products that have to be handled with extreme care, and the entire distribution process, from manufacture to injection, requires cold transport and storage. But beginning in 2006, the Shanxi Center for Disease Control entrusted vaccine manufacture and distribution throughout the province to a businessman who claims that his enterprise was “a sub-unit of the Ministry of Health.”
According to Wang Keqin’s investigation, this businessman paid 3.8 million yuan to the Center for Disease Control in exchange for exclusive rights to the sale and distribution of vaccines in Shanxi Province. Fixing the market with the blessing of a provincial government body, this enterprise was able to draw in an estimated 120 million yuan over two years.
It was also during this time that many vaccine stocks in Shanxi were damaged by heat exposure. Vaccines that were harmful and should have been immediately destroyed were instead administered to children throughout the province.
The facts revealed in Wang Keqin’s article point to extreme carelessness and negligence on the part of the company involved in this scandal. One eyewitness remarked that in 2006 and 2007, the owner of the company in question instructed employees to move vaccine stocks from cold storage to another room so that they could be labeled with stickers advertising the vaccines as products approved by provincial authorities – the stickers apparently would not adhere while the boxes were in cold storage.
“It was summer, and everyone was wearing shorts, but still as usual they were working every day in the sweltering lobby to stick labels [on the vaccines],” the eyewitness said.
A driver interviewed for Wang Keqin’s story said that at the time “the refrigeration was broken for the storage truck used to deliver vaccines all over the province, and it was never fixed. When we were out on trips, especially in the summer, [the truck] became a stifling hot tank.”
In 2007, the newspaper China Youth Daily exposed the problem of monopoly control of Shanxi’s vaccine market, pointing to unsavory deal making between the company and provincial health officials. But news stories at the time never went deeper into the possible consequences.
As vaccine stocks damaged through heat exposure were not recalled, children in Shanxi were being administered with these potentially harmful vaccines up to the end of 2008.
Wang Keqin’s investigative report comprehensively documents the awful effects of the vaccines, and the report has caused widespread concern and outrage.
A Web user in Shanxi fumed:

Playing games with the lives of children, using the lives of children for filthy profiteering — this scandal is every bit as big as the Sanlu milk powder scandal [of 2008!

Another wrote:

If a society, for the sake of personal gain, cannot even spare its own young generation, can such a society possibly have a future?

The well-known blogger Wu Yue San Ren struck a nerve when he wrote that “this was a deadly business done right under the noses of power.”
Wang Keqin is well regarded in China as a corruption reporter. We have hosted him twice here at the University of Hong Kong twice as a China Media Project fellow.
It was back in 2002 that China Economic Times ran Wang Keqin’s 30,000-character report on corruption in Beijing’s taxi industry. The report, which covered five pages in the paper, made quite a stir in professional journalism circles in China, and it defined a flurry of watchdog activity that followed.
Thanks to the tireless work of Wang Keqin and other dedicated investigative reporters, watchdog journalism was invigorated between 2002 and 2004. Since 2005, however, special interests in China have worked to strike out against investigative reporting and investigative reporters have borne the brunt of tightening media controls.
This latest report from Wang Keqin quickly brought pressure to bear on Chinese media. Even from Hong Kong I could sense the chill. I first read Wang’s report at the web portal QQ.com at 9:20 am on March 17, where it was featured prominently at the top of the news headlines. Just half an hour later the headline was removed and the report buried deep among run-of-the-mill news stories. At the same time, the government moved to control the agenda. A news release from Xinhua News Agency carried the response from provincial health officials in Shanxi, who denied the allegations in Wang’s report and said “Shanxi Province has never received any report indicating mass adverse reactions as a result of vaccinations.”
Wang Keqin’s report revealed just the tip of the iceberg. He traveled around Shanxi interviewing the families of scores of affected children
But there were limits on how far Wang Keqin could proceed with his investigation without the cooperation of authorities. Health authorities in Shanxi refused to speak to him, saying “interviews require approval from relevant departments.” They told him “take his questions to the Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection.” When he sought a response from the commission he was told that the “Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection has no time to receive interviews from reporters.”
Wang then tried to go directly to the division chief at the commission who would have been responsible for looking into possible official misconduct in the vaccine case, but he was again brushed off. “What is it you want to accomplish by looking into this case?” the division chief asked. Wang’s response was, “Watchdog journalism.” “We haven’t finished looking into the case yet,” the division chief said before hanging up.
Reading the full Wang Keqin report, I am left with many questions. Most crucial is the question of the role of China’s Ministry of Health in the whole affair. The negligence of provincial health authorities in Shanxi begs the question of exactly what sort of oversight role of the Ministry of Health was playing.
In November 2008, the Ministry of Health reportedly dispatched an investigative team to Shanxi Province. What were their findings? What persons, companies or agencies did they look into? As to the possible harm done to children by vaccinations, did the Ministry of Health conduct any sort of general survey or census? Did they adopt any emergency measures?
Even more seriously, how is it that this businessman who monopolized the market for vaccine distribution in Shanxi Province manage to use the label “a Ministry of Health enterprise”? Was this man just an ordinary charlatan working on his own? Or was he in cahoots with officials from the Ministry of Health?
At this year’s National People’s Congress Wen Jiabao spoke of “creating the conditions for the people to monitor the government.” The Shanxi vaccine scandal is the first test for the government since the NPC. The China Economic Times report is an act of monitoring of the government in Shanxi and of the national Ministry of Health.
As a government agency whose priority should be protecting the health and safety of the public, I encourage the Ministry of health to make the first move. Health Minister Chen Zhu (陈竺), how will you face the appeals made by the parents of children who were harmed? How will you face the questions raised by the media and the anger of Internet users? Will you, like Hubei Governor Li Hongzhong (李鸿忠), see the media as your enemy, or will you use the strength of public opinion wisely, conducting a thorough investigation of the vaccine incident beginning with your own ministry?
Everyone inside and outside China who cares about the country’s progress is watching closely.
[A version of this article appeared in Chinese at China Reform.]

By David Bandurski — The lead editorial in Saturday’s edition of Southern Metropolis Daily pushed for further investigation into the vaccination scandal in Shanxi Province, a story broken last week by investigative reporter and CMP fellow Wang Keqin. The commentary urged the government not to “sideline” the media, which it said should represent the interests of the people by exposing facts rather than coddle the public with positive stories about how leaders are handling the crisis.
A translation of the Southern Metropolis Daily editorial follows:

Pressing the Media to Pursue the Shanxi Vaccination Scandal to End
The series of China Economic Times reports on the “chaotic situation of vaccinations in Shanxi” has given rise to a very strong reaction. On the one hand, our hearts ache for those children who were harmed; on the other hand, we feel great indignation over the acts of collusion and profiteering by officials and businesses that lie in the background. Naturally, while the emotions of the public are cresting, Shanxi’s Provincial Health Department has categorically denied the “allegations.” Reading the China Economic Times report, people understand the seriousness of the problem. After seeing the “clarification” issued by the Shanxi Provincial Health Department, they might suppose the problem is not so serious. But there is only one version of the truth. So how serious is the problem?
Looking carefully at the two versions, it is clear that the most disputed question is whether the illnesses suffered by the children already recorded on the list [in Wang Keqin’s report] were in fact related to vaccinations. On this point, the China Economic Times and the Shanxi Provincial Health Department are not too far apart on their basic facts. It’s just that former holds that “the illnesses are clear, but they cannot be spoken of, no one dares speak [the truth], and in no area of Shanxi are the doctors willing to tell you the true cause of the illnesses.” The latter, meanwhile, resorts again and again to provincial medical experts who insist the illnesses are not connected to vaccinations.
The point here is that the core question has now become whether the opinions of health experts in Shanxi Province can be seen as reliable. Will is be possible for doctors from other areas to conduct their own investigations, or for those [doctors] in Shanxi who don’t dare speak the truth about the cause of the illnesses to stand up and come clean about the pressures they have faced [to keep quiet]? If we really hope to learn the truth, this will require the disclosure of more facts, and more investigation will be
needed.
Another important focus of the case concerns the relationship between the Huawei company [which controlled the local market for vaccines], the Shanxi Provincial Center for Disease Control and the Shanxi Provincial Health Department. It is clear from the China Economic Times report that a large number of facts support the conclusion that Huawei is a shell company melding business and politics for monopoly control of the industry to generate windfall profits. But the explanation given by the Shanxi Provincial Health Department for the “exposure of vaccines to high temperatures” is to say that the Ministry of Health has already looked into the problem and found nothing. As for the tagging of [Huawei] monopoly vaccines [with a provincial standard], the explanation given is that only in this way could they take responsibility for their own vaccines . . .
All this beating around the bush gives people cause for skepticism. Moreover, when it is the Shanxi Provincial Center for Disease Control that steps out to answer these questions that concern the center itself, when there are no statements from third parties — how can this sort of “clarification” be seen as credible?
Perhaps that report from China Economic Times on the “chaotic situation of vaccinations in Shanxi” is not 100 percent perfect, because the full facts no doubt have yet to be revealed. For example, we still need medical experts from outside Shanxi to make a determination about whether the illnesses from which these children suffer are related to vaccinations. And we need to know from what direction the pressure on doctors within Shanxi has come. We need also to know what relationship Li Wenyuan (栗文元), the head of the Shanxi Provincial Center for Disease Control, has to the company Huawei. We need to know why Li Shukai (李书凯), deputy head of the Provincial Health Department, would say publicly that a shell company with no business qualifications is “a company of the Ministry of Health, a large company that specializes in the distribution of vaccines.”
The report leaves many questions unanswered, which relevant departments in Shanxi Province must come out and address. And other media need to continue to follow-up and make further discoveries, until the full truth has been revealed. This is not the time for the media to “make light of matters.” This is the time to get to the bottom of things.
If the government wishes to deal with a major issue, and to set the public at ease, the only way is to step out and address their questions, to offer up the truth and hold those responsible to account. These matters concern the safety of the public, and particularly the safety our our children — it is not something that can simply be glossed over with vague explanations.
Many people have compared this vaccination incident to the poisoned milk scandal [of 2008 and 2010]. Only when poisoned milk emerged [as a problem] again this year did people realize that the problem was never really dealt with properly. Looking back on that shocking tragedy, we in the media feel a deep sense of guilt that matters were never fully dealt with at the time, that the people and chains of interest behind the affair were never fully held to account, and that the media was unable to pursue the issue of compensation for the victims [of the milk scandal].
To a certain degree, the reason the poisoned milk scandal could not be cleaned up all at once was because the media were unable to pursue it to the end — and the sidelining of the media meant the sidelining of the public. When we look back on other “major incidents” we find without difficulty that every time an ugly case causes broad public concern and mass anger, the media’s investigations come to a screeching halt. All we have then are reports about how “the situation is being handled,” so that the full facts behind the case are never discovered.
It’s as though the media only responsibility is to discover problems, after which the people cry out, drawing the attention of the government. And then [we are to suppose] the problem is solved!
Quelling the situation is the government’s responsibility. But the media must learn to push ahead and get to the bottom of the situation. Because the media’s obligation is to the truth. Because only when eyes are present to question the truth can we ensure that the handling of this situation has been clean and adequate. Because only when the full truth has been laid before the public can the public feel safe and secure. We press the media to push ahead and get to the bottom of the matter, because this is the best and surest way to calm the situation down.