David Bandurski, Author at China Media Project

China Launches Cybersecurity Week

Written by David Bandurski on 18 September 2017. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

Over the weekend, Liu Yunshan, China’s propaganda chief, attended a ceremony at Shanghai’s Xijiao Conference Center to provide the official kickoff for China Cybersecurity Week, a nationwide push to implant knowledge about the risks of internet technology “deep in the hearts of the people.”
The official theme of this year’s conference: “Cybersecurity for the People, Cybersecurity Depending on the People.”
Attending the conference were officials from various government departments — including the Ministry of Education, the Public Security Bureau and the Office of the State Commercial Cryptography Administration (OSCCA) — and representatives from internet companies, many (like Li Xuyang of Tencent’s Anti-Fraud Lab) dealing in some way with content regulation or data security.
Here is a quick translation of the gist of the cybersecurity event as reported by Xinhua News Agency via Caixin :

Liu Yunshan said that since the 18th National Congress of the CCP, General Secretary Xi Jinping has accurately grasped the trends of the times, standing firmly in our country’s experience developing and governing the internet, and surrounding the question of what is an internet power, and how to build an internet power, [he] delivered a series of new ideas, viewpoints and demands, leading cybersecurity and informatization in our country to important achievements. [We] must continue to direct our experiences of cybersecurity according to General Secretary Xi Jinping’s internet power strategy, steadfastly traveling a path toward development of an internet with Chinese characteristics (中国特色网络发展道路) . . .
Liu Yunshan pointed out that cybersecurity is for the people, and cybersecurity relies on the people. We must persevere in raising the consciousness of the people, and technical training, about cybersecurity issues, and we must use the platform of China Cybersecurity Week to energetically spread knowledge about cybersecurity . . .
Liu Yunshan emphasized that both Party and government at all levels must faithfully implement a responsibility system for cybersecurity, establishing local responsibility for cybersecurity. . . Internet enterprises must strengthen their social responsibility and moral responsibility, playing their necessary role in the preservation of cybersecurity. The masses of internet users must abide by the law in going online, acting in a civilised manner online, being positive practitioners of our nation’s cybersecurity. We must strengthen construction of online content, foster a positive and healthy online culture, and develop and expand online positive energy, further cleaning up the online space.

The appeal for the active involvement of Chinese citizens is more than rhetorical. As the Global Times reported last week, in the midst of a separate cybersecurity conference in Beijing, China is putting great effort into “mobilizing its masses of internet users” against a range of cyber threats. According to the Global Times, China will launch a national campaign later this year to beef up cybersecurity education in the country’s universities. And many local governments are already recruiting teams of volunteers to help police live-streaming and other online content.
David Bandurski is a Richard von Weizsäcker fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.

The Great Hive of Propaganda

Written by David Bandurski on 16 September 2017. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

In December 2012, just weeks after Xi Jinping took the reins of the Chinese Communist Party, the official People’s Daily ran a front-page editorial called, “The Internet is Not a Land Outside the Law.” While it is “unrealistic,” the piece said, to demand that “everyone say the correct thing in the correct way,” all Chinese “must have consciousness of the law, being responsible for their words and actions.”

The People’s Daily article came months ahead of a crackdown on influential “Big V” users on Weibo. It predated by more than a year the creation of Xi Jinping’s Central Leading Group on Cyberspace Affairs, and its powerful new Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Looking back, however, the editorial appears to have presaged an era of obsessive law-making on the internet — until these days, it seems, there is no end to the regulations governing the hills and valleys of Chinese cyberspace.

On China’s internet today, there truly is no land outside the law. The myriad laws governing cyberspace are designed not to delineate the rights and security of Chinese citizens, but to re-consolidate and legitimize the Party’s dominance over public opinion as a matter of political necessity.

Make no mistake: however “unrealistic,” the demand is most certainly what the People’s Daily disavowed back in 2012, that “everyone say the correct thing in the correct way.” And this demand is borne out quite explicitly in the most recent law to drop from the CAC.

Front page of the December 18, 2012, edition of the *People’s Daily*. The editorial on the internet and the law is at the bottom of the page, to the right of the image.

Regulations released last week on the management of chat groups on social media services like WeChat, QQ and Baidu Post Bar, show us the extent to which media controls are now centered not, as they were in the past, solely on the gatekeeping media, but on users — which is to say, citizens — themselves.
As others have reported, the regulations require that those operating chat groups set up credit rating systems for the online conduct of users. But most worrying is the way the regulations extend to individual users political controls that once targeted Chinese media, and were the bane of reporters, editors, publishers and website monitors alone.

Let’s take a quick look. The regulation first defines, in Article 3, the two groups toward which the rules are directed: the “service providers,” those platforms that operate group chat services, and the “users,” who include “those who set up chat groups, those who manage them, and those who are members.” Users are, in short, everyone.

And what obligations do we have, all of us, if we are chatting on China’s internet? Here is Article 4:

Article 4 Providers of information services through internet chat groups on the internet, and users, must adhere to correct guidance, promoting socialist core values, fostering a positive and healthy online culture, and protecting a favorable online ecology.

This piece of devilry is one of the most specific indications we have yet of the Party’s atomization and personalization of censorship, of the way the relationship between propaganda and the public is being transformed by digital communications.

Since 1989, it has been incumbent principally on Party media to abide by “correct guidance,” and to lead the policy of discipline of public opinion. In the traditional media age, this project was exercised through the Central Propaganda Department, which dispensed orders and bans, and actively disciplined journalists, in order to maintain “correct guidance of public opinion.” In this old regime of “guidance,” the Party media played the dominant role in setting the tone, as far as possible, for commercial and internet media that at many points in the past two decades straggled away from the Party line.

In the age of mobile technology, when we are all, quite literally, hooked on cyberspace, the game has fundamentally shifted. The digital technologies many thought might disrupt the Party’s dominance of the agenda (“That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.”) have given the Party a direct line to the individual consumer — a line that can be controlled and manipulated. The internet, as enjoyed especially through those portable personal computers we call smartphones, brings a bounty of convenience, empowering us in a hundred different ways. But it is also now a Trojan Horse, inviting the state into our most intimate conversations.

We talk still, when we refer to China’s vast system of technical and regulatory controls on the internet, about a “Great Firewall” meant to insulate China from the contagion of the outside. It is probably more suitable now to think instead of a Great Hive of firewalls around the individual, a buzzing nest of connections from which users may be insulated at will. All may share in the collective illusion that they are part of a thriving, humming space, but all are joined to the Party’s re-engineered project of guidance and managed cohesion — and all are buzzing more or less at the same frequency.

In a hardline speech on media and public opinion policy in February last year, President Xi Jinping said that “all media must be surnamed Party,” that all media must “love the Party, protect the Party and serve the Party.”

Here’s a little buzz you may not have heard. He was talking about you.

The Arithmetic of Party-Speak

Written by David Bandurski on 5 September 2017. Posted in China Newspeak.

As anyone whose profession it is to parse the language of Chinese Communist Party can tell you, reading Chinese discourse is a frustrating and bewildering exercise, full of rigid and ritualistic formulations that come and go, ebb and flow. Sum up Party-speak with a jingle and it might go something like this:
Deng Xiaoping had Four Basic Principles,
Jiang Zemin, Three Represents
Xi Jinping has Two Undeniables.
And nothing at all makes sense.
Given the opaque nature of Chinese politics, however, the official language of the CCP is one of the best clues we have to the internal dynamics of the leadership. Which people, or which ideas, can we see being advanced or elevated in official-speak?
Whether or not Xi Jinping is referred to a “the core” may seem trivial to your average news reader — but it can be a very real reflection of the power he commands internally, as is the question of whether or not he will get a “banner term” (旗帜语) that includes his name, something that has not happened since the days of Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory.
With the 19th National Congress of the CCP just around the corner — though we still don’t know how far around the corner — it is prime time for China’s official discourse. In the coming weeks at CMP, we will be watching the discourse closely for any possible signs.
But let’s start first with the language coming out of President Xi’s “important speech” (a label familiar to discourse watchers) on July 26, 2017, just before top leaders headed off to the seaside resort of Beidaihe to consult, confabulate and contrive — in what more than one Western media outlet referred to as China’s “game of thrones.”
That speech, made at a two-day gathering in Beijing, was all about preparations for the 19th National Congress. And the official Xinhua News Agency reported that General Secretary Xi Jinping had “pointed out that socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new development phase,” and that he “profoundly laid out a series of major theories and practical questions in adhering to and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics under new historical conditions.”
Zzzzzz . . . Are you asleep yet?
Well, suffering students of Chinese discourse, I’m here to tell you that there are CliffsNotes versions of these befuddling speech acts. China’s official state media understand that official-speak is here to stay — despite official pledges , even by Xi himself, to tone it down — and that it is a dialect of Chinese that few, even well-read, Chinese can understand. Enter state media products like “Xi Speak in Pictures” (习语图解), which set out to demystify (sort of) official speeches like that Xi Jinping made on July 26.
In this case, the magic numbers are: 2, 3, 5, 9, 8, 3, 2. And here is what they add up to, according to Xinhua News Agency.

A graphic text representation of the “2 Tight Grasps,” produced by the official Xinhua News Agency.
The 2 Tight Grasps
1. Tightly grasping the special characteristics of our country’s development
2. Tightly grasping the yearning of the masses for a good life

Cybersecurity Law gets its first big investigation

Written by David Bandurski on 11 August 2017. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

In the first clear example of China’s new Cybersecurity Law being cited to target major social media platforms, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued a notice today saying that WeChat, Sina Weibo and Baidu Tieba — a popular online community linked to Baidu’s search services — were under investigation for violations of the new law, which took effect on June 1 this year.
The investigations will be carried out, the notice says, by the CAC’s Beijing and Guangdong offices. While Weibo and Baidu are based in Beijing, Tencent is based in Shenzhen.

Image by Sinchen Li available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.
The notice suggests the investigations were prompted by “reports made by web users” (language not uncommon in the enforcement of online controls), and that the three platforms “host content including violence, fabrication and rumor, obscenity and pornography, and other information shared by users that harms national security, public safety and social order.”
A translation of the notice follows:

Tencent’s WeChat, Sina Weibo and Baidu Tieba Under Investigation for Violations of the Cybersecurity Law
Cyberspace Administration of China / August 11, 2017, 10:00
Recently, the Cyberspace Administration of China directed its authorities in both the city of Beijing and Guangdong province to carry out investigations of Tencent’s WeChat, Sina Weibo and Baidu Tieba in accord with the law. According to reports made by web users, with preliminary investigations made by CAC authorities in Beijing and Guangdong, the three websites WeChat, Weibo and Tieba all host content including violence, fabrication and rumor, obscenity and pornography, and other information shared by users that harms national security, public safety and social order. The three website platforms are in violation of the Cybersecurity Law and other laws and regulations, and did not fully take on their management responsibilities toward information posted by users that are prohibited by laws and regulations. Follow ups on the cases will be issued by the local CAC authorities.
A spokesperson for the CAC said that the offices of the CAC will seriously implement the Cybersecurity Law and other laws and regulations, further expanding the vigor of enforcement and supervision of information on the internet, investigating in accord with the law various forms of illegal online conduct. [The agency] welcomes tips about violations of laws and regulations from the expanse of web users, and the online report center for harmful information operates 24 hours a day. Telephone for reports: 12377. Reports web address: www.12377.cn, e-mail [email protected].

Big Data, Big Concerns

Written by David Bandurski on 20 July 2017. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

A near tragedy unfolding earlier this year on the outskirts of the bustling Chinese business hub of Shenzhen offered both a promise and a stark warning about the power of big data.
At roughly 4PM on January 26, a man walked into the local police station in Shenzhen’s Longgang District to report that his three-year-old had gone missing. The child, it was feared, had been abducted by child traffickers — a frightfully common problem in China, where it is estimated that tens of thousands of children are kidnapped and sold every year. Police leapt into action. They quickly obtained video footage, captured by an unspecified surveillance camera, showing a middle-aged woman making off with the child. Next, they isolated an image of the suspect’s face, which they ran through a facial recognition program, “locking down [the woman’s] identity,” as Chinese media later reported. Finally, learning that the woman had boarded a train for the city of Wuhan, police were able to intercept her upon arrival, rescuing the child. The entire saga, from the first police report to the location of the abducted child, lasted just 15 hours.
Naturally, we should breathe a sigh of relief, along with the child’s parents, at this happy outcome. At the same time, however, we should read between the lines, recognising the immense potential for abuse in these 21st century reservoirs of big data that can be trawled for information about each and every one of us. Sure, criminals might be exposed — but then, so might we all be.
In many respects, China leads the world in the application of big data and machine learning to questions of law enforcement and social control. The above success story tells us that local police in China have expedient access not just to residential and other surveillance cameras, but also to national identity databases that can be matched in real time against train or other ticket purchases requiring identification. This, in fact, is just the tip of the iceberg. China is now applying a big data approach to every manner of problem, betraying a dangerous faith in the liberating power of technology, with no public discussion whatsoever about how these assumed advances might entrap citizens within the all-seeing lens of state-controlled machine data.
China is certainly not alone in the development of such technologies. But it stands apart in their actual deployment, which is happening quickly and in the utter absence of scrutiny.
In April this year, Intellifusion, the company whose facial recognition technology was behind the child abduction breakthrough, worked with traffic police in Shenzhen to install a new jaywalking detection system exposing pedestrians who cross the street in violation of traffic laws. The system, based on facial recognition technology, apparently maintains a database of pedestrians — so that it can search out, instantly, repeat offenders. Shenzhen traffic police are also trialing the use of sonar imaging technology that could help combat what the China Daily newspaper calls the “annoying misuse of car horns” in heavy traffic by isolating the offending vehicle and capturing images of both the vehicle plate number and the driver, who may receive surprise notification of a fine of around 65 Euros.
In an interview earlier this year, Intellifusion co-founder and CEO Chen Ning gleefully reported that his firm was now working on technologies to predict criminality. “Some clients, as they come to understand Intellifusion’s technology system, will raise a concept from science fiction: prediction of criminality,” said Chen. “A few months ago, we began research in this area, which is basically about digging clues out of big data and then setting a number of behavioral parameters. In fact, right now we can do this to a certain extent, making predictions about behaviour.”

Screenshot of the website for Intellifusion, a Shenzhen-based start-up offering facial recognition and other services. The caption at bottom reads: “Creating science fiction-style sky-eye [surveillance] systems, allowing cities to be filled with a sense of security.”Screenshot of the website for Intellifusion, a Shenzhen-based start-up offering facial recognition and other services. The caption at bottom reads: “Creating science fiction-style sky-eye [surveillance] systems, allowing cities to be filled with a sense of security.”The promise made on Intellifusion’s website sums up well the company’s darkly utopian vision of artificial intelligence and big data analysis. “Creating science fiction-style sky-eye [surveillance] systems, allowing cities to be filled with a sense of security,” it reads.
But Intellifusion’s vision is little more than an echo of the much grander vision of China’s government and its public security apparatus. The country’s most ambitious, and most chilling, application of big data comes with its plans for a comprehensive national “social credit” system that by 2020 that would rate all citizens on the basis of wide-ranging data parameters, including spending patterns, personal behavior (like running red lights or honking too loudly) and online and social media activity. The plan, first outlined in 2014, would assess the credit-worthiness of citizens across four areas, including commercial activities, judicial records, administrative affairs and social behavior.
Building of the system was accelerated in 2016 as more than 40 institutions — including the police, the courts, the land and transport ministries, the railway ministry and the People’s Bank of China — agreed to the broad sharing of information about citizens within their respective systems. In one documented case this year that illustrates the implications, a Shenzhen resident was denied purchase of a plane ticket because his father had defaulted on a debt for a company in which the son owned shares.
Increasingly, private companies are joining the push for information cross-sharing. Back in April, 10 bike-sharing companies in China signed a pledge to share information on their consumers with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the agency responsible for overall strategies of national economic and social development, and a key force behind the development of the social credit system. Bike parking behavior and misbehavior could now be just one more data point in China’s social credit universe. Never to be outdone on innovative social control, the city of Shenzhen announced already last year that it was drafting plans to link illegal bicycle parking to personal credit records, and that data from bike-sharing companies might be part of that plan.
In a common refrain, one NDRC official told state media recently that a national social credit system is in the interests of everyone. Official state media constantly push the moral dimension of these tech-driven initiatives, which they say are about building a “sincerity culture.” The overriding interest, though, is that of the government. The national blueprint introduced three years ago states clearly that the strategy is about, in addition to building the “socialist market economy,” achieving “social harmony and the long-term peace and stability of the nation.”
But how, ultimately, can you ensure the integrity of a government-designed and operated system of imposed integrity when the government implementing the system faces no scrutiny from those being watched and monitored?
The answer, almost certainly, is that you can’t. The apparent offer on the black market of highly personal information already housed in government and police-run databases, exposed through a rare Chinese newspaper investigation last year, suggests that when integrity is digitised, it is just as quickly commoditized.
But China’s answer, for now, to this fundamental question for citizens of the 21st century is: Watch us and see.
This article previously appeared in Germany’s Die Tageszeitung newspaper.

Disrupting the Disrupters

Written by David Bandurski on 13 July 2017. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

Digital disruption has been the name of the game in China’s media space for several years now. The same technology wave that has inundated everything from transportation to brick-and-mortar retail has hit traditional media hard, leaving wreckage in its wake.
Late last year, the Beijing Times newspaper closed its doors after more than 15 years of operation, and on January 1, Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post, long one of the country’s leading commercial newspapers, also closed up shop. More such extinctions are to be expected, diminishing choice at the Chinese news stand.
But another important element of digital disruption is the radical re-envisioning of choice itself. Why browse the newsstand or fumble through the inky metro tabloids when algorithms can do the work for you? Show an inclination to check out real estate content through a news app like Toutiao (今日头条), or “Today’s Headlines,” and the app will pre-select for you, modelling your behavior to generate customized news feeds.
Toutiao and other apps powered by artificial intelligence technologies have been a space of fevered activity in China since around 2012. For Chinese authorities, however, this type of disruption apparently has its limits.
On July 6, the Party’s official People’s Daily ran a commentary piece called “News Must Not Be Hijacked By Algorithms.” The piece was read by many as a direct attack on Toutiao, the industry leader in the field of AI news.
The piece attacked news apps “promoting low quality content” to the detriment of “truth, comprehensiveness, objectivity and independence.” Recalling that the notion of “guidance of public opinion,” or ensuring social and political stability through media control, is the true value underlining the Party’s approach to information in China, one must wonder whether one of the perceived dangers in the rise of AI news apps is the way they might allow readers to select out the sorts of messages authorities would like them to absorb.
Perhaps China’s propaganda authorities are coming to realize that the selection methods now being advanced through these apps might be undermining the Party’s own efforts to “guide” the information and ideas to which the public is exposed.
A translation of the People’s Daily piece follows:

“News Must Not Be Hijacked By Algorithms”
By Lu Hong (吕洪) / July 6, 2017
Recently, news apps drunk on technologies and algorithms have become more and more “basic and coarse.” Just open a single article and they will rapidly flood your screen with related content, without even extending you the right of refusal. Some people even elected these news distribution algorithms to the plane of artificial intelligence, suggesting they are a major development trend representing the future of text, the future of content, and even the future of media.
What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence is the simulation of the information process of human thought. These algorithmic technologies based on social networks and click rates, and especially these small-time mechanisms of machine selection and their hard-pushing of content, cause users great annoyance.
Algorithms can have some positive impacts on news production. On the one hand, they can induce content producers to pay greater attention to content of interest to audiences, approaching content production from the reader’s perspective — so that no longer do they talk to themselves alone. On the other hand, they have diminished the time investment required of consumers and raised the efficiency of reading, to the benefit of enriching information and knowledge.
However, a number of apps, keen on news delivery and indulging in algorithms, have had a very negative impact on the future of news. Taking the so-called “free ride” of the algorithm, some news apps that were previously quite rich informationally are more and more bland, some content producers that were previously impartial are now rather biased, and the once broad reach of some news media has been increasingly narrowed.
In recent years, there have been many advancements in artificial intelligence in various sectors, but these have remained somewhat detached from ordinary people. Why is this? Because artificial intelligence to date has been unblemished to achieve breakthroughs in non-linear thinking, this mode unique to human beings. We click into a piece of horrific social news out of instinctual human curiosity — but instinct is not intelligence. When different viewpoints interact, or even face off, this potentially leads to greater thought or knowledge. To be introspective about our instincts, and to surpass them, is a development of human nature. A number of news apps, relying only on parsing people’s clicking habits and promoting low quality content, can only cause them annoyance.
But are we to be held captive by algorithms, traffic and hits, only showing those parts of the world that readers want to see — or do we uphold the truth, comprehensiveness, objectivity and independence, using quality content to shape our style? This is the question media people must think deeply about.
Traditional media must not act like so many Don Quixotes, being blind to algorithms and technology and avoiding progressive trends. But they cannot at the same time rely on these entirely, becoming slaves to algorithms and technology. Traditional media must actively strategise and must actively participate in the process of [media] transition and convergence. But in the process of media convergence, they must maintain their own styles and standards, safeguarding their own values and independent spirits, injecting the soul of traditional media in the online space — allowing algorithms and technology serve news of true value.
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Sweet Numbers (But Fresh Controls) for New Media

Written by David Bandurski on 29 June 2017. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

THIS WEEK the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released its latest blue book on the development of new media in the country, with special research chapters on topics ranging from notable trends such as live-stream broadcasts and media convergence, to more specialized topics like the use of emoticons by Chinese university students.
From the outset, the report strikes a familiar balance between sanguine assessment of the economic and political opportunities presented by media development, and the attendant risks.

Cupcakes bearing the logo for WeChat, China’s most popular social media service.
The report’s abstract begins by crediting the “Internet Plus” strategy announced by Premier Li Keqiang in 2015 — the idea that China can use “the unprecedented new technological revolution” of the internet to push economic transformation — with driving forward the process of informatization. It notes that China’s influence on global internet governance is expanding, and that it is “growing from a big internet nation into a strong internet power.”
Among the key problems, the report notes that “the entire world faces threats to the security of online space,” and that “financial risks on the internet have grown more frequent.” Finally, in what could be read as a warning to those companies offering online services, the report says “ethical problems in new media communication must be urgently regulated, and the social responsibilities of internet companies must be urgently increased.” (Interestingly, the official English translation of this section of the abstract is less direct, noting that ethical problems “have to be discussed.”)
One of the report’s statistical highlights is the dramatic growth in users of live-stream broadcasting services in China, which reached 344 million by December 2016 (47.1 percent of total internet users). The report estimates that by 2020, live-stream broadcasting in China will be a 100 billion RMB industry.
Over the past year, however, China has launched a sustained crackdown on internet services, including live-streaming. In September last year, the State Administration of Press Publications Radio Film and Television (SAPPRFT), one of the country’s key content regulators, pledged to strengthen oversight of live-streaming. Last week the agency went beyond that promise, ordering the shutdown of live-stream broadcasts on a number of platforms, including the Nasdaq-listed Weibo.
Under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, media control and development must always go hand in hand, and some of the development’s outlined in this latest report on media development in the country may be moderated by developments on the control side.
It is worth a read nonetheless.

China, Rhetorical Giant?

Written by David Bandurski on 24 June 2017. Posted in China Newspeak.

WHEN THE 19TH NATIONAL CONGRESS of the CCP is held this fall, the event will mark, among other things, the ten-year anniversary of the elevation of “soft power” as a notion of formal importance at the highest levels of China’s leadership. It was President Hu Jintao’s political report to the 17th National Congress in 2007 that spoke of enhancing culture “as part of the soft power of our country,” and of the need to advance a “system of socialist core values and make socialist ideology more attractive and cohesive.”
But culture can be a slippery business for authoritarian states, and China often manages its confines with cold, hard coercion — an awkward companion to the soft power essence of attraction. We had an explicit reminder of this just weeks ago as the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s super-agency for internet control, purged scores of WeChat public accounts, mobile apps and websites offering entertainment content. Its rationale? The defense of “socialist core values.”
Coercion and attraction maintain an uneasy tension at the core of China’s vision of soft power. But ten years on from the 17th National Congress you can detect a new swagger in the official discourse. China’s soft power is on the rise, the inverse of a decline in the appeal of the West.
He Yiting (何毅亭), executive vice-president of the Central Party School, the institution charged with the ideological training of Communist Party officials, wrote recently in the Study Times (学习时报) journal that China’s return to the global summit of “discourse power” is imminent, and that the “rejuvenation of Chinese discourse” will come hand-in-hand with what Xi Jinping has called “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

He Yiting, executive vice-president of the Central Party School, speaks at a meeting about the importance of educating leaders in the “Party nature.” Source: Party School of Jiangsu Province.
He Yiting’s essay reads like a Rocky Balboa story of Chinese discourse — the tale of a culture knocked to its knees after the glories of the Han and Tang dynasties and “the golden age of the Qing dynasty,” and rising to its feet again with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. “Sixty eight years,” writes He, “have passed in a flash.” And indeed they do in his retelling, the years passing in such a flash that we can blur right past the depredations of Maoist discourse from the 1950s straight through to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.
“China is a giant on the move,” He writes, “and it will ultimately become a powerhouse of discourse too.”
* * *

The 21st Century is the Century of the Rejuvenation of Chinese Discourse
By He Yiting
Discourse power is a pillar of the nation. Discourse is indispensable to the revival of a great nation.
Powerful discourses often prop up powerful nations. Since ancient times, the discourses of nations of central [importance] have in each age been the discourses that holding dominant status in the world, and those nations with strong comprehensive national power (综合国力) have in every age stood at the center of the world stage. Historically, China stood for a long period of time, for more than one thousand years, at the summit of the world. From the Han and Tang dynasties through to the golden age of the Qing dynasty, China’s agricultural civilization evolved to a peak of glory.
China’s classical discourse, with its brilliant inner qualities, it profound wisdom and grace, radiated out in all directions. Its nearest neighbors, the Korean Silla and Goryeo dynasties, Japan, the Ryukyu Kingdom, Vietnam and other regions in Southeast Asia — all were heavily influenced by Chinese culture. This influence was transmitted out into the wider world, inspiring cultures in such far-flung places as central and western Asia, Europe and Africa.
Ancient Chinese discourse has never suffered rupture, and the “Chinese cultural sphere” has become one of the world’s four major cultural spheres, revered along with the Western Christian cultural sphere (西方基督教文化圈), the Arabic-Islamic cultural sphere (阿拉伯伊斯兰教文化圈), and the Indian Hindu cultural sphere (印度婆罗门教文化圈).
The decline of a discourse often arises from the decline of a nation. In recent times, owing to social changes brought about by technological progress and advancements in production, the feudal systems built on the foundation of agricultural civilization have inevitably been eroded, supplanted and surpassed by capitalist systems built on the foundations of industrial civilization.
In terms of competing national power and national status, China declined steadily from the Opium Wars onward, under the onslaught of powerful Western gunboats, into a darkness half colonial and half feudal. The Chinese people were not just beat down in this state of backwardness, but they suffered from aphasia and were subjected to verbal abuse.
At the same time, Western discourse rose to become the dominant world discourse, and in its strength held the high ground culturally. It claimed the right to determine the content of discourse, to set the discourse agenda and to serve as the arbiter of discourse disputes. The West would either step out with sermons, elevating geographically specific discourse into a universal discourse, and with it seeking to colonise the world; or it would step out as judge, applying Western standards of true and false, nitpicking and making careless remarks about the discourse, conduct and worldviews of other nations. Along with rise of Western discourse, ancient Chinese discourse was thrust into the dark corners of history, deprived of the light it had once enjoyed.
The revival of discourse brings the hope of national rejuvenation, and the revival of discourse begins with national rejuvenation. The foundation of the People’s Republic of China was a moment of tremendous historical significance, marking the historic beginning of the journey toward national rejuvenation — and its was also the start at the middle of the 20th century of the march of Chinese discourse toward the world. The “Three Worlds Theory” of Mao Zedong, and the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” etc., were all contributions made to the world by Chinese discourse.
Sixty eight years have passed in a flash. China today is closer than it ever has been to the center of the world stage, closer than it ever has been to its goal of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and vested with more capacity and more confidence than ever before to realize this goal. After an interval of several centuries, China is finally at the doorstep of national rejuvenation; China’s return to the summit of the world is already determined as the historical trend of the 21st century. In China today, “material strength” is already becoming a reality, but this is not the full dream of the Chinese nation — and China cannot become a “lame giant” (跛脚大国) that is materially advanced yet spiritually impoverished. General Secretary Xi Jinping has said: “Reaching our development objective is not just about becoming materially strong, but also about becoming spiritually strong.” A China that is politically and economically powerful must also be a China that is just as powerful, if not more powerful, in terms of spirit and culture.
In recent years, as the Chinese nation has progressed toward rejuvenation, China’s economic discourse power and institutional discourse power internationally have increased substantially, and they have begun to match and advance our [comprehensive] national power. At the APEC and G20 summits, at the Davos Forum, at high-level international forums for the “One Belt, One Road” Initiative (OBOR), China has drawn the gaze of the world, and the slumping world economy and failing global governance look expectantly to Chinese proposals. China has not left the world disappointed, but has made illuminating responses.
China today is not only the defender, promoter and leader of economic globalization in the 21st century, but in fact has remade the new pattern of economic globalization in the 21st century on the level of worldviews and values — so that the world has a new understanding and acceptance of globalization. The United Nations, WTO, the World Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the BRICS economic block and other international organizations like them all strive to hear China’s voice, and China magnanimously shares its expertise. From “a community of shared future for humankind” (人类命运共同体) to “diversity of civilizations” (文明多样性), from “win-win cooperation” (合作共赢) to “mutual tolerance” (包容互鉴), China has offered the world a new vision of hope.
Of course, we also have our weak points. In an environment in which the situation of “Western strength and Chinese weakness” (西强我弱) has not fundamentally changed, on the international stage we face “a situation in which our voice is still rather small, we are often unable to convey our reasons, and when we do we cannot be heard.”
But our shortcomings do not arise from [deficits in terms of] culture and values, but from [lack of] consciousness and confidence about [our own] culture and values. They arise from the fact that we fall behind in terms of innovating and transforming traditional discourse, and that we lack sufficient preparation for breaking through the Western monopolization of discourse.
For example, modern Western capitalism has typically been contemptuous of such traditional Chinese values as benevolence (仁爱), people-orientation, (重民本), integrity (守诚信), justice (崇正义), harmony (尚和合) and seeking common ground (求大同), and we have even ourselves doubted these cultural values. But as the world today faces more and more serious environmental problems, [the traditional Chinese notion of] “the unity of man and heaven” (天人合一) is much-needed medicine for humankind in healing its own home.
. . . . .
The 21st century is the century of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and it is also the century of the rejuvenation of Chinese discourse. We can have this confidence and assuredness because the successful experiences of China already provide a rich ground, and the China path not only explains well the question of development in China, but also provides many ideas and methods to resolve problems in the world. The academic community in China has already developed a consciousness of the building of a Chinese discourse system, and Chinese characteristics, Chinese manners and Chinese style have already become points of focus in the building of discourse. We will no longer blindly follow the West, and no longer see Western discourse as the standard. Furthermore, international society has more desire than ever before to hear voices from China, and is willing to work to grasp Chinese concepts in order to understand Chinese logic — no longer simply using Western concepts to make comparisons. The fact that since last year a number of international organizations, including the United Nations, have written “community of common destiny of mankind” into their documents, is a sign of this change.
We have confidence and assuredness in the rejuvenation of Chinese discourse in the 21st century also because the series of important speeches by General Secretary Xi Jinping and his new concepts, thoughts and strategies on the management of state affairs include a full set of new discourse and new expressions that are clearly Chinese but have universal meaning. The expressions raised by General Secretary Xi Jinping, including the “Chinese dream,” “one belt one road,” “common values” (共同价值), “community of common destiny of mankind” (人类命运共同体), “a new international relations with win-win cooperation at the core,” have already become core agendas and a foundational consensus in international discourse.
The most important thing here is that the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation owes to the leadership of the Central Party with comrade Xi Jinping as the core, and the rejuvenation of Chinese discourse is led by the series of important speeches made by General Secretary Xi Jinping. Since the 18th National Congress of the CCP, the Central Party with comrade Xi Jinping as the core has led the whole Party and the whole people of the nation in following the past and heralding the future, in mapping a vision of governance, in bearing the banner to point the direction, in making strategic arrangements, in pressing through challenges, in firming up the foundations, in opening new horizons in the management of state affairs, innovating the work of the Party and the nation and greatly encouraging the spirit of the Party, the spirit of the military and the spirit of the people (党心军心民心). The blueprint for national rejuvenation has already been drawn, and the Chinese nation is already walking on the broad and open road of rejuvenation. So naturally there is a firm foundation for the rejuvenation of Chinese discourse.
We can expect that in the 21st century, the most successful example will be China, and the most stunning vision will be China. And the Chinese discourse that explains this example will without a doubt be the global discourse that most draws the focus [of the world]. We have reason to believe that not too far off in the future, China’s dominance in terms of development, institutions and governance will be transformed into discourse dominance on the international stage. The Chinese era of international discourse is at our doorstep.
China is a giant on the move, and it will ultimately become a powerhouse of discourse too.

Xi Jinping’s Web of Laws

Written by David Bandurski on 3 May 2017. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

It was a busy day over at the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). On May 2, the agency, created in February 2014 to exercise overarching control over the country’s internet and every related enterprise, launched not one but three separate regulations, dealing with everything from “procurement of important network products and services” to “online news and information services.”
The bottom line?
These regulations, which will formally take effect on June 1 along with the Cybersecurity Law, mark the maturation of President Xi Jinping’s grand plan for information under the Chinese Communist Party in the 21st century. That vision centers on 1) cybersecurity as integral to national security, and grasps cybersecurity through the lens of regime stability and the core need for information controls at home and abroad, and 2) informatization, or xinxihua (信息化), the idea of internet and digital development as the new, perhaps even now primary, source of production, replacing industrialization at the heart of the national economy.

A banner across the top of the official website of the Cyberspace Administration of China shows President Xi Jinping and the words: “Without cybersecurity, there is no national security; without digitalization, there is no modernization.”
Xi Jinping fleshed out this vision when he addressed the very first meeting of his Office of the Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs (中央网络安全和信息化领导小组) in February 2014, speaking about the need to fashion China as an “internet power” (网络强国). In that address, Xi said: “Without cybersecurity, there is no national security; without informatization, there is no modernization” (没有网络安全就没有国家安全，没有信息化就没有现代化).
The internet was once a foreign problem and peripheral concern to China. There is no better proof of this than the fact that internet controls were, from the very beginning, placed not within the Party’s core —in the Central Propaganda Department, for example— but in the Information Office of the State Council, the government body tasked with all things foreign, the same body that publishes China Daily, the newspaper meant to explain China to the outside world.
Xi Jinping has progressively pulled the internet front and center, and the creation of the Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs, the body that subsumes the CAC, and of which Xi is head, is an institutional reflection of this dramatic change. Since the formation of the Leading Group and the CAC, Xi Jinping has stressed the need for these newly centralized controls on the internet to be further legitimized through laws and regulations. China must, he says, “govern the online space in accord with the law” (依法治理网络空间).
Addressing an important cybersecurity forum on April 19 last year, Xi Jinping urged the need for “legislation of cyber laws, improving legal supervision and resolving risks caused by the internet.” The Cybersecurity Law, which passed on November 7, 2016, is the centerpiece of this push for a newly legislated regime of information controls in China, and the regulations released yesterday are further pieces of the puzzle.
One hint as to the institutional significance of the regulations comes today in a report by Xinhua News Agency, which notes: “The CAC will become the new regulator of online news service, replacing the State Council Information Office.”
This is not exactly the nail in the coffin — not yet. But we can expect both the Information Office and the Central Propaganda Department to be increasingly sidelined as the CAC comes to dominate, with a flotilla of laws and regulations behind it.
It is not at all a surprise, then, to see that the Provisions for the Administration of Internet News, one of the three regulations released yesterday, clearly define the CAC’s role in defending the political and ideological line:

Article 3: The provision of internet news and information services must respect the Constitution, laws and regulations, adhering to a political orientation of serving the people (为人民服务), serving socialism (为社会主义服务), adhering to correct guidance of public opinion (坚持正确舆论导向), serving a public opinion supervision role (发挥舆论监督作用), promoting the creation of a positive, healthy and advanced online culture, and preserving the national interest and the public interest.

Is this a passing of the baton?
Xi Jinping’s cyber regime is still in formation. But we can be sure that as the news in China increasingly goes digital, and as television goes mobile, the CAC’s power will grow. Its web of controls, almost assured to be one of Xi Jinping’s most enduring legacies, will overlay China’s 21st century web of communications.

The Stench of the Market

Written by David Bandurski on 28 April 2017. Posted in Headlines and Hashtags.

IN A RECENT WORK REPORT on the state of radio and television production in China, the deputy director of the country’s print and broadcast regulator, Tian Jin (田进), offered acerbic criticism of certain “harmful trends” in the industry — including over-attention to ratings and box office results, and the “wanton spoofing and deconstructing of historical figures.”
“We must recognize,” said Tian, “that our broadcast sector suffers from both chronic diseases and new problems, all of which urgently await solution.”
In particular, Tian cited an obsessive focus on “box office, [television] ratings and [online] hits,” to the detriment of program quality — which he did not elaborate — and traditional culture. On the latter point, Tian briefly noted the phenomenon of “naked Peking opera” (裸体京剧), the flippant and sometimes indecorous treatment of one of China’s most celebrated forms of traditional culture.
Echoing recent actions against live video streaming in China, Tian Jin said that many “audiovisual products” online were of “vulgar quality,” and that online anchors, or hosts of live video streaming programs, often provided content that was of a violent or indecent nature. His agency would “deal severely with those responsible,” he said, but there was still a need to “raise the intensity of governance.”
Also in his report, Tian apparently praised the recent hit series In the Name of the People, a dramatization of the Communist Party’s anti-corruption campaign, and said regulators still felt that the overall trend was for Chinese programming with “main themes that resounded and were full of positive energy” — meaning, in essence, favorable to the state and to its understanding of public an private morals.
A still from the unexpurgated version of the 2015 drama Empress of China, aired on Hunan TV before being pulled by regulators for fresh edits.
Tian Jin, a long-time veteran of China’s original broadcast regulator, the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) — which in 2013 merged with the country’s press and publications regulator, GAPP, to form a new super-agency (SAPPRFT) — has in recent years been the public face of regulation in the entertainment industry.
It was Tian who fielded questions from reporters in 2015, when his agency pulled the popular television drama Empress of China for overhaul because it “contained scenes that harmed the healthy development of youth.” Translation: too much cleavage.
Propaganda officials and broadcast regulators in China go through cyclical periods of intense prudishness over entertainment content, and officials responsible for overseeing television — and now live video streaming — are especially notorious for their micro-managing of the country’s living rooms.
In March last year, Tian Jin’s agency, SAPPRFT, issued new television rules banning depictions of homosexuality, excess smoking and drinking, adultery and even reincarnation.
“If arts and culture lose their way in the roaring tide of the market,” Tian Jin said in his recent report, “if they they become slaves to the market, being covered with the stench of filth — then a series of problems will surely follow in a chain reaction.”

Author: David Bandurski

China Launches Cybersecurity Week

The Great Hive of Propaganda

The Arithmetic of Party-Speak

Cybersecurity Law gets its first big investigation

Big Data, Big Concerns

Disrupting the Disrupters

Sweet Numbers (But Fresh Controls) for New Media

China, Rhetorical Giant?

Xi Jinping’s Web of Laws

The Stench of the Market

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