By Qian Gang — I often urge my friends and colleagues in Hong Kong to come to grips with the paradoxical pattern of “step, standstill and back-step” (进步/止步/退步) that characterizes China’s development today. I try to explain how China does not lend itself to simple labels like “free” or “unfree.” As we broach this now exceptionally sticky question of Internet freedom in China, I encourage readers to step back and take the same vantage point.
On January 24, a spokesperson from the State Council Information Office asserted, among other things, that “the achievements of China’s Internet have drawn worldwide attention,” and that “China protects online freedom of expression in accord with the law.”
The spokesperson said in support of these statements that, “China now has more than one million online forums, and more than 200 million blogs, with Web users making more than four million blog posts each day, and new posts to various chat forums each day too numerous even to count.”
And yet, as hundreds of millions of Web users have borne witness, many forums and blogs have also been shut down completely. Countless blog entries have been swiped clean from China’s Internet, and postings in response to news stories, or gentie (跟贴), are obliterated in great numbers every passing moment.
Is the Information Office spokesperson completely in the dark about these practices?
Conversely, it is impossible to support the assertion that China’s Internet is a bleak and sunless place where no word or thought can grab hold.
In recent years, more and more news facts have been broken first by Internet users. More and more corrupt officials live in dread of the “human flesh searches,” in which Internet users dig out and display their dirty deeds before national audiences of netizens. It is also true that the Internet has enabled the distribution of bolder writings by more and more people inside China.
So, can we say that China’s Internet is controlled, or not? What sort of control are we talking about?
Internet controls, in fact, are something every Internet user in China experiences and understands on a very intimate level. And the statement on Internet freedoms issued by the Information Office can itself be taken as an example of how control works.
What we call the “long tail phenomenon” (长尾现象) can be seen as one of the defining characteristics of China’s Internet. The “long tail” refers to the chain of Web user comments and discussion that trails after online news stories. These can be exceptionally long tails. In fact, some news stories on major Internet portals can draw hundreds of thousands of comments, the plainest illustration of how enthusiastic Chinese feel about the right and the opportunity to speak their minds.
Obviously, the recent statement from the Information Office on the topic of Internet freedom, an online story that was billed at the top of most major news portals in China for two straight days earlier this week, was guaranteed to draw the attention of Chinese Internet users. And this is also a topic we can expect to generate strong feelings and opinions.
But when I searched through ten of China’s most high-traffic news portals on January 28, I discovered that four sites had no comments posted whatsoever.
At China’s two leading official news sites, People’s Daily Online and Xinhua Online, there were very few comments. Sina.com, one of China’s biggest commercial Internet portals, indicated 373 comments, but only one page could be viewed — and all the comments visible were denunciations of Google and the United States.
If, as the Information Office spokesperson said, “Chinese web users can fully express their views within the scope permitted by the law,” this is certainly a most unexpected outcome.
Are we to believe this is a faithful reflection of Chinese public opinion?
It has long been rumored that China has vast teams of “50-cent Party” members working online for the party and government, who are paid for making posts that favor the interests of the CCP, but these claims have been difficult to clearly substantiate.
On January 19, Lanzhou’s Western Business Post (西部商报) reported that Gansu province had decided to build a team of 650 online commentators, the official term for these “50-centers.”
The report read:

Online commentators will regularly visit Websites, bulletin-board sites (BBS), blogs, etcetera, in order to understand the information circulating online and make timely posts on hot-button issues receiving concern from Web users, in order to correctly channel public opinion in society.

This news story from the Western Business Post marks the first time ever that that the work of the “50-centers” has made a formal, official debut in the news, and a number of Websites quickly picked up the story. Before long, however, the story was expunged from the Internet.
The secret is now out of the bag, and the deletion of the Western Business Post story should make plain to everyone exactly what Internet control with Chinese characteristics entails.
The Information Office spokesperson’s insistence that the figures for the rapid growth of Web users and Websites in China sufficiently illustrate the correctness of the government’s policies and practices on Internet control, that they indicate that Internet freedoms are protected in China, is unconvincing.
The rapid development of the Internet in China is principally the result of strength of information technologies themselves. The Internet presents us with all sorts of possibilities — not just freedom of expression. It encompasses the media, and yet is not equivalent to the media. It serves at the same time as both a public instrument and a tool for personal use.
In China, the Internet and other new technologies are political double-edged swords, allowing citizens to resist silence and fight despotism, and at the same time assisting the political leadership in its own objectives (one example being the recent building of a massive mobile phone messaging network by which CCP policies and directives can be quickly filtered down through the bureaucracy).
The Internet will remain a market of immense potential in China, and investors, whether public or private, will head there with the hope of striking it big. In fact, Chinese leaders both love and hate, spurn and desire, the Internet. From time to time, more moderate officials will express their goodwill toward Internet users, resulting in patches of occasional openness.
A number of overlapping factors have made for what some have seen as dazzling changes in China’s Internet. More than 384 million users, and 3.68 million sites — certainly, these are achievements of China’s Internet.
But can we chalk these up as achievements of our leaders?
What is more, the most important factor in the expansion of online freedoms has been China’s citizens themselves, who have not set aside their constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of expression. Every moment they fight to make their voices heard, and they pay the price. These are spaces we push into and hold, little by little, not spaces granted to us by the leadership.
China’s Internet is a chaotic space. There are times when controls are more strict, and other times when controls momentarily relax. Some places in China are controlled more tightly by local party leaders, while others are more open.
The only true constant is the government’s determination to exercise control. And the government does not merely control, as the Information Office spokesperson said, information that is “subversive,” “destructive” or “seditious.”
Most of the content routinely “harmonized” — as the process of censorship has come to be referred by Internet users — are observations or remarks about party leaders, angry protestations about corrupt officials, or discussions about the necessary direction of political reform, things of that nature . . .
In most places outside China, including here in Hong Kong, this sort of content is protected by the law. According to internationally accepted norms, they fall into the category of freedom of expression.
China’s control of the Internet is swimming against world trends. It is not open. It is not transparent. And it is still a great distance from “rule of law.”
We should also take note of the fact that Chinese leaders are not only resolutely defending the Internet. Over the last two years, they have adjusted their tactics, and applied national capital to launch a strategic offensive in the Internet realm.
A good friend of mine formerly served as editor-in-chief of a well-known Internet portal in China. About six months ago, he resigned from his position. In a letter, he wrote:

What I feel most sad and dispirited about is that China’s Internet is being rapidly transformed into an internal network. That the global Internet and overseas sites are being blocked goes without saying. But their strategy of nationalizing the Internet is already going ahead with full force. [They] use the charge of low-brow or indecent [content] to blacken the name of commercial Internet sites. They use the specter of Internet addiction to demonize the Web itself. They squeeze out small and medium-sized sites by restricting domain registration and filing requirements. Finally, they use the financial might of state assets to promote national Internet TV and Xinhua News Agency video content. And what’s more, they won’t stop there. In the future they will use state-owned search engines, state-owned real-time communications and online games, etc. Any Internet product that is of a media nature will be gradually nationalized and monopolized.

This state of affairs for China’s Internet is not an isolated occurrence. It is an inevitable byproduct of the swelling and expansion of state capitalism, and the progressive deepening of the monopolization of politics, the economy, society and culture.
Internet freedoms are a microprint of civil rights in China. Will we be able to hold on to the small freedom that we have claimed for our own to this point? How much more freedom will we be able to claim in the future?
We must all watch closely.
[Posted by David Bandurski, January 28, 2010, 3:55pm HK]
[Homepage photo by wysz available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license].

By David Bandurski — On the heels of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on Internet freedoms last week, China’s English-language Global Times characterized her remarks as “a disguised attempt to impose [U.S.] values on other cultures in the name of democracy.” The newspaper then dragged out another snarl word to denounce Clinton’s overtures on freedom of speech: “information imperialism.”
Fond as we are of buzzwords here at CMP, we decided to pry a bit deeper into this term. We don’t claim that our findings are exhaustive — and we encourage reader input — but here they are.
The earliest use we could find of the term “information imperialism” appeared in the September 26, 2002, edition of People’s Daily. (I would show you the actual news page, but People’s Daily began charging for use of its digital archives on January 1 this year.)
The piece, apparently drawn from remarks made by the editor-in-chief of Indonesia’s Antara (Indonesian National News Agency), is called “Media on Both Sides [of the China-ASEAN Relationship] Should Build High-level Dialogue.”
The version still available online is clipped, including just the first three paragraphs, but the original newspaper piece offers a much lengthier call for cooperation between Chinese media and the media of ASEAN member states:

First, media on the two sides should build high-level dialogue, and carry out high-level exchange at various levels and in various areas, promoting mutual understanding and trust between media, and building constructive cooperative relationships. I hope that media from various organizations in ASEAN member states can come to China and see China’s development for themselves, furthering understanding of China’s current situation. The Indonesian delegation hopes that after the hosting of the first forum in China, other ASEAN nations can host annual conferences in rotation.
Secondly, media from both sides should strengthen cooperation and exchange, furthering dialogue and cooperation on a range of issues. Differences between the two sides should be resolved on the basis of mutual respect and the seeking of common ground. The media of China and ASEAN should carry out so-called media diplomacy (媒体外交).
Lastly, I want to argue that in the 21st century, China will exercise great influence over the Asia-Pacific region. China has the fastest developing economy in the world, and it will establish strong economic partnerships with Southeast Asian nations. We have a responsibility as news media to go and support this sort of harmonious cooperative relationship between China and ASEAN member nations . . .
Su Huiming (苏惠明), chief editor of the international edition of the Singapore Straits Times, wrote in a recent editorial that the greatest challenge facing Asian media was information imperialism. While we have access to a wealth of information, all of this information is in fact full of Western ideological prejudices. [NOTE: A reporter for the Singapore Strait’s Times assured CMP that 1) there is no “international edition” of the newspaper and 2) that no-one named Su Huiming has ever been an editor at the paper].
When 90 percent of all the news reports published by publications across the world are from the three major newswires of the West, including Reuters, the Associated Press (AP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP), how can we possibly tell our readers that “we truly know what is going on in our world”? In fact, news reports today are not comprehensive, are not impartial, are not objective. So we must clearly recognize that in this process, the world as it is reflected in these reports is not very complete. For years now, the West has monopolized media across the world. We certainly can call this a kind of information imperialism.
We Asians must oppose a worldview that is monopolized by Westerners. We also have the ability to break through the monopoly of Western newswires, to break through the control of news events by Western newswires. News breaking in the Asian region needs to be reported by Asians. We can not push the responsibility we have to report this news onto these outsiders who do not understand the Asian region.

There seemed to be a small spike in attention to the issue of information and “imperialism” in 2007.
A March 15, 2007, article in China’s Globe Weekly, a weekly magazine of the official Xinhua News Agency, mentioned fears of the Internet as “information imperialism” in the context of anti-globalization protests outside the World Economic Forum in Davos.
But here the term was used outside the us-versus-the-West construct of the earlier People’s Daily article:

In recent years, under attack from a wave of economic globalization, the door to India’s retail market has begun to open. While the opposition has not flagged, it seems there is no way to stop the march of Wal-Mart into India.
“Globalization” has at the same time put pressure on all developed nations. On January 24 [2007], the annual World Economic Forum opened in the the small city of Davos in eastern Switzerland . . . Outside the meeting, a series of protests and demonstrations went on all across Switzerland [in opposition to the meetings].
In the view of some anti-globalization activists, globalization is a form of “new imperialism.” The Internet has now become a form of “information imperialism,” the World Trade Organization amounts to “market imperialism,” the International Monetary Fund amounts to “financial imperialism” and the United Nations is a form of “political and foreign policy imperialism.”

Also in March 2007, scholar Pan Qiuyu (潘秋瑜) wrote in China’s Legal System and Society journal about the threats posed to China as Western media and culture infiltrated (as he described it) the country. Pan opted for a different buzzword: “media imperialism” (媒介帝国主义):

Against this vast backdrop, our nation’s media industry gained some space by which it could demonstrate its strength and uniqueness. At the same time, however, the entry of overseas capital into our nation’s news industry, the influence of Western ideologies on our people, and the infiltration of our cultural sector by overseas culture, have all exerted new pressure and presented new challenges to our country politically, economically, and culturally, as well as to our media industry. The struggle for leadership in the arena of discourse through the media has become obvious [as a national challenge]. Politicians with ulterior motives in the West routinely use the media to disseminate deliberate lies and verbal attacks. For example, our nation’s scholars have already used mountains of unassailable facts to reveal the “demonization” of China by American media. Moreover, they [Americans] have used the hegemonic media power under their own control to spread the so-called “China threat theory.”
Therefore, giving our [media] students the ability to obtain, analyze and transmit information in the the information age is just one aspect and task of media education in our country. Developing them into qualified individual citizens with a sense of the times, a high-level of political sensitivity [for the party line and China’s unique national circumstances] and a sense of social responsibility should be the higher demand of media education. Moreover, we must strengthen students’ alertness to media hegemony, so that they recognize the harmful nature of media imperialism and the importance of the independent development of our nation’s news media . . .

Finally, in August 2007, the term “information imperialism” was mentioned once again in the context of China’s media relations with ASEAN member states.
Akhmad Kusaeni, deputy editor-in-chief of Indonesia’s Antara news agency, delivered an address at a “10+3” forum (10 ASEAN member states plus China, Japan and South Korea), hosted by China’s official People’s Daily newspaper, in which he railed against “Western domination of the world view” through its news media, with special scorn reserved for “parachute journalists” [original Chinese HERE]:

Yes, my friends, it is not right for Western news agencies to control information on Asia. It is no fair for Western media to dictate what they wish to cover and how they should cover the news in Asia, our very own backyard. It is not fair they call the shots and set the agenda as to what stories should or should not appear in the headlines of Asian media . . .
Ladies and gentlemen . . . We must resist Western domination of the worldview. We must fight information imperialism.
Developing countries, including those in Asia, have called for the establishment of a new order of spreading information since the 1960s when they were fighting against unfair information controls exercised by Western developed nations. And yet, the imbalances and differences of information flow between the developing and developed countries have not been narrowed by disputes for decades. Even now, there is a gap within the world information flow. And that is why the world is not flat . . .
Asian media must convey Asian opinions and strive to end disequilibrium in the global media where the loudest voices are of Western origin. We as Asian media must be heard. We need to strengthen media cooperation and together deliver Asian voice on international arena. The image of Asia depends on how the world media describe it .

Relations between the Indonesian news service and China have continued strong. Back in October 2009, Antara chief executive Ahmad Yusuf met with He Ping (何平), the editor-in-chief of Xinhua News Agency, to discuss further cooperation and exchange.
I’m not quite sure what to make of these relationships and views on journalism between China and ASEAN members, at least as glimpsed through China’s own official media. For the moment, I’ll avoid speculating and just leave it there.
In closing, I would like to point readers to an interesting and related story about media dialogues among ASEAN nations that appeared last year.
On October 1, forty-five delegates from Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Philippines and Malaysia reportedly attended the general assembly of the 16th Confederation of Asean Journalists (CAJ).
Quoted in Malaysia’s News Straits Times on October 2, 2009, a Malaysian government minister reportedly urged journalists from ASEAN member states to “work together” for a “common struggle and destiny.’
Whether it is in any way representative of how journalists in Southeast Asia view their own roles and responsibilities, I cannot say. But the News Straits Times article voiced a view on the professional obligations of “Asian” journalists that I certainly found unsettling — that journalists from ASEAN member states should refrain from critical coverage of other member states as a matter of course.

Journalists in Asean member nations should work together if they want to be a force to be reckoned with, Human Resources Minister Datuk Dr S. Subramaniam said yesterday.
He said they should cooperate as they shared a common struggle and destiny.
“If we fail as a region, we have also failed as a nation,” he told a press conference after opening the 16th Confederation of Asean Journalists (CAJ) general assembly yesterday . . .
National Union of Journalists Malaysia president Norilah Daud, supporting the call for Asean journalists to have a single voice, said the matter would be raised at the assembly.
“We have our Asean code of ethics. We cannot write negatively about each other’s countries as we are comrades.”

Personally, I would be among the first to wait in line for news coverage from a credible Southeast Asian newswire — and I would camp out overnight for a credible Chinese one.
But with all this language about comrades and the ethical imperative of having a “single voice,” I think I’d prefer for the moment to stick with the “big three.”
[Posted by David Bandurski, January 28, 2010, 9:55am HK]
[Homepage image by summervillain available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license].

By Qian Gang — Admonishing tones have hung in the air this month over the issue of anti-corruption in China. One factor driving the coverage, and the speculation, is apparently intensified activity at the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the body charged with pursuing corruption within the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party.
The 17th Session of the CCDI held its fourth general meeting in September last year, emphasizing the need to “exert great pressure to punish corruption.” Just last week, the CCDI held its fifth general meeting, at which President Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) reiterated the importance of “recognizing the long-term, complex and arduous nature of the struggle against corruption.”
As some have noted, it is highly unusual to see China’s top anti-corruption body holding two general meetings so close together.
But the anti-corruption buzz has also been fueled by news headlines with eye-grabbing figures about capital flows out of China as corrupt officials flee the not-so-long arm of discipline inspectors.
A report run on various major Websites on January 10 and 11 bore the headline: “4,000 corrupt officials have fled our nation with an estimated 100 million yuan each in the last 30 years.” [Another link HERE].
According to some reports, these figures were given by CCDI deputy secretary Li Yufu (李玉赋) at a recent press briefing.
When I saw these figures being tossed around, I was quite surprised. It wasn’t the enormous figure given for embezzled assets that took me aback, but rather the frankness with which the figure had apparently been shared by a senior CCDI official.
When I followed up on Li’s statement in news coverage about the press briefing, however, I could not find any mention of the figure, and it quickly became clear that basic blunders had multiplied through the news media.
The CCDI held two press briefings recently, on January 7 and 8, and there were two official news releases, which can be found HERE and HERE.
When Beijing’s Legal Mirror used information from the press briefings in a January 9 report, the newspaper added its own background information:

Media have reported openly before that in the last 30 years, about 4,000 corrupt officials have fled overseas, taking with them roughly 50 billion US dollars, for an average of 100 million yuan each.

The Legal Mirror reporter made it quite plain that “the above figures come from a research report issued by the Ministry of Commerce.
This suggests, of course, that the figures given in recent reports about the theft of funds by corrupt officials have no relationship at all to recent information given in press briefings by the CCDI.
Searching on, I found that the Ministry of Commerce did indeed produce a report in which they said that “officials fleeing overseas numbered around 4,000, and had taken an average of 100 million yuan each.” But this report was made back in 2004.
Written by Mei Xinyu (梅新育) and others at the Ministry of Commerce, the research report was called, “A Study On the Problem of Cross-Border Asset Flows Between China and Offshore Financial Centers” (中国与离岸金融中心跨境资本流动问题研究).
The figures on asset embezzlement originated with the 2004 report.
In August 2004, Guangzhou’s Yangcheng Evening News, Wuhan’s Changjiang Daily and other media reported the news that “the Ministry of Commerce had revealed that 4,000 corrupt officials had embezzled 50 billion US dollars overseas.” Guangzhou’s 21st Century Business Weekly revealed that the Ministry of Commerce research project had begun in early 2003, and was completed in early 2004.
Premier Wen Jiabao had reportedly added his written instructions to the report, demanding that more be done to prevent the flight of capital in the hands of corrupt cadres.
These figures from the Ministry of Commerce were used by media a number of times in the intervening years. On December 10, 2009, a report at Shanxi News Online, “Getting ‘naked officials’ out in the light of day,” used the figures, and said that a number of officials had dispatched family members and assets overseas, remaining in China to hold official posts.
According to the Shanxi News Online report, these officials were referred to in popular jargon as “naked officials” (裸体做官). A number of “naked officials” reportedly had visas and green cards at the ready, so that all would be prepared when there was lightning on the horizon.
As it turns out, the news everyone has dwelt on recently about “corrupt officials running off with 50 billion US dollars” is a figure already more than six years old. That means, of course, that these figures are in need of serious updating, and there is no question they should be revised upwards.
In the past six years, there has been a meteoric rise in crony capitalism in China. Corrupt officials are driven by a more powerful engine now than ever before.
According to figures released by the CCDI, between January and November 2009, discipline inspection authorities in various regions took disciplinary action against more than 100,000 people, with reported cases increasing 4.7 percent, cases pursued increasing 4.5 percent, and cases resulting in punishment going up 2.5 percent.
The number of cadres disciplined for accepting bribes in excess of one million yuan was up 19.2 percent.
This case of recent news coverage on anti-corruption is a memorable and though-provoking one. There is not necessarily anything wrong with taking old figures and using them as background in a news story. It is certainly wrong, as some media did, to take these figures and present them as recent numbers from the CCDI, or to suggest they are figures “for the last 30 years.”
But the real problem here is not fabrication of the news, nor is it inflation or exaggeration. On the contrary, the problem is that not enough was actually made of the figures.
The degree of attention these old figures garnered from the media and from readers across the country tells us that there is a need for much greater transparency on the part of the government. But the CCDI has never formally released figures on capital flows out of China a a result of official corruption. As one Southern Metropolis Daily editorial pointed out back in November 2006, we really can’t say for sure just how much money has been whisked away by corrupt officials.
The general population in China faces numbers like this with a numb fury. As these old Ministry of Commerce figures were breathed with new life this year, the point was not really the figures themselves, but the opportunity they offered for the public and the media to vent their frustrations.
If you trolled through the comments left in the wake of the news stories at major Web portals, it was quite clear that these were being purged by Internet authorities. But there were still traces of appropriate anger in a few responses. “Hasn’t anyone reported these figures to the Guinness Book of World Records? Aren’t we usually really eager to rank first in the world at things?” wrote one netizen. “Why aren’t there corrupt American officials fleeing to China?” another asked wryly.
And a precious few hit closer to the center of the target: “Who created the conditions for them to run off with all that money? It’s this [political] system, that’s what!”
Certainly, it is unusual for the CCDI to hold two general meetings in the space of three months.
Some press reports noted that in his speech to the second CCDI meeting, President Hu Jintao employed the word “system” some fifty times. To combat corruption, he said, “[We] must focus on establishing and improving various systems of punishment and prevention, with the powers of restraint and monitoring at the core.”
But when I studied and compared the pair of bulletins coming out of these two general meetings of China’s top anti-corruption body, it became clear to me that there were no new ideas whatsoever. There was no mention at all, for example, of the need for “declaration of assets by government officials” (官员财产申报).
If the rumblings surrounding these meetings are what passes for boldness and vigor at the senior levels of power, there seems little doubt that yet more corrupt officials will challenge the commission’s authority in the future and ride off into the sunset with China’s riches.
[Posted By David Bandurski, January 18, 2009, 10:03am HK]
[Frontpage image by cbcastro available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.]

By David Bandurski — We wrote in our last post that Google’s row in China should be seen partly against the backdrop of intensifying Web controls in the country. The CCP leadership’s crusade against so-called indecent Internet content has gone on for months now, but grew more tense last month as China announced new Web regulations. And there are some reports that morale in the industry has been seriously shaken.
Now, several days after the Google announcement, there seem to be fewer Google-related posts and editorials in China that include across-the-bow shots at Internet censorship. This might suggest, although it is difficult to tell, that there have been directives from the propaganda department telling editors to dial it back.
One of the strongest editorials in the newspaper pages today is not directly about Google, but gives us an interesting glimpse at other aspects of China’s intensifying campaign to bring information technologies to heel.
Writing at Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily, CMP fellow and People’s University of China professor Zhang Ming (张鸣) explores the implications of new measures to combat indecent mobile text messages.
As Zhang points out with no small measure of humor, even setting aside the issue of exactly what kind of content classifies as “indecent” (and, we would add, the issue of whether other types of content are being targeted as well), the mechanics of this new campaign should be worrying to the average citizen.
Guangdong’s official Nanfang Daily newspaper first reported on January 13 that new measures were being taken against “indecent text messages,” in which service would be suspended for individual mobile phone users who engaged in the communication of violating content.
The new campaign does seem to be national in nature, carried out by China Mobile in cooperation with the Public Security Bureau.
A January 14 editorial from Information Daily praised the move, saying it was about time.
But there were quickly voices of dissent too, including this look into the legal issues involved by columnist and blogger Wu Yue San Ren (五岳散人). One columnist, writing at Changjiang Daily, questioned the wisdom of entrusting a for-profit enterprise like China Mobile with censoring personal communications.
In a January 14 story, Sichuan’s Huaxi Metropolis Daily reported the case of a mobile user in Dongguan who found that his mobile phone could no longer send or receive instant messages. Hoping to resolve the problem, he changed out his SIM card, but there was still no service. Finally, when he approached China Mobile about the issue, he was told his service had been suspended because of an “indecent text message” (黄段子) he had sent out after receiving it from a friend.
The mobile user was told, according to Huaxi Metropolis Daily, that he would have to present his identification card to local police and fill out a letter of guarantee that he would no longer send indecent messages — only then would his SMS service be restored.
The reporter at Huaxi Metropolis Daily looked further into the practice and was told by someone at the service desk of the local mobile company — presumably a China Mobile affiliate — that they were working with the Public Security Bureau to control illegal mobile messages.
In the arena of information controls, 2010 is certainly getting off to an inauspicious start in China.
Zhang Ming’s editorial in Southern Metropolis Daily, which follows, fortunately adds a much-needed dose of humor to an intelligent discussion of information control and citizen’s rights.

The Anti-Indecency Sweep Must Not Sweep All the Way Under Our Bed Sheets
By Zhang Ming (张鸣)
Southern Metropolis Daily
January 16, 2010
A news report said recently that if telecom users sent out indecent, or “yellow”, instant messages, their SMS service would now be suspended. If they wished to re-activate the service, they would have to first file a self-criticism with the Public Security Bureau pledging to refrain from such behavior in the future.
These days it’s fairly common to find indecent content, a bit of dirty humor, in text messages sent between lovers, or between husbands and wives. If this ban is actually enforced, I imagine people will simply turn to good old-fashioned phone calls the next time they get the itch.
But when you think about it, can these tactics really be limited to SMS messages? What should worry us even more is exactly what is going on behind the scenes here.
If you extrapolate from this control mindset, will mobile phone conversations and idle fixed-line chatter result in service suspensions if one is careless? And further, if people sit down to dinner and the conversation gets a bit raunchy, will they be ordered to hold their tongues just because someone happened to hear?
When a husband and wife are in bed together, should they, from this day forward, refrain from playful whispering? . . . Oh, forget it. I can’t go on speculating like this. Before long, I’ll be imagining everyone from the censor to the policeman and the city inspector so busy keeping our mouths shut that nothing else gets done. The guilty, with their mouths zipped shut, will form lines outside police headquarters or the city inspectors barracks to deliver their signed self-criticisms.
The strangest thing of all is: How exactly do the relevant [government] departments find out about a dirty message texted by some young person in the first place? Does this mean everyone’s text messages are being monitored? Are human beings listening in on us, or are machines being programmed to keep watch? If keyword filtering is being used, how is it possible for technology to make the judgement call so clearly? Won’t a lot of messages that aren’t actually dirty or indecent be filtered out too? Can’t we expect to have a lot of “unjust prosecutions” (冤假错案)?
In fact, there are already numerous restrictions on the sending of mobile messages to groups. If you do send dirty messages . . . these should belong to the category of interpersonal communication. And according to our Constitution, the freedom of communication between individuals is protected. That means that government departments cannot assign guilt or exact punishment on the basis of the content of interpersonal communications. If they do not concern issues of national security, nor can interpersonal communications be monitored.
This being the case, how is it that the youth’s SMS messages are being monitored in the first place? Why is his messaging service being suspended? Why is he required to file a self-criticism in order to restore it?
Fighting indecency is a really great pretense, a banner of uprightness. What reason can anyone muster to oppose fighting indecency. But when [the government] launches a sweep against indecency, they must not sweep into our very homes, and under our bed sheets.
Ordinary citizens and sweethearts still have the right to dirty it up a bit every once in a while in personal conversation. How can people not feel [given this policy] that their personal communications are being monitored all the time? In a normal society, the government’s authority does not extend into the homes of citizens, unless they are selling or using drugs or committing other such illegal acts. Even cases of domestic violence require reporting by a family member before the police get involved. The things that people write or say, no matter how dirty they are, do not constitute mass media . . .
If the government is permitted to intrude our private space at will, punishing us in the name of battling indecency, what sort of principle is that? . . .
Acting against indecency is necessary. But if we sweep on in this way, we will achieve exactly the opposite. We will find ourselves unable to put a stop to indecency, and we will kick up great storms of anger and resentment.

[Posted by David Bandurski, January 17, 2010, 1:07am HK]