The following post relating to the 1989 Tiananmen protests by Zhang Qianye (张倩烨), a reporter with the Hong Kong newsmagazine Yazhou Zhoukan (亚洲周刊), was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 12:05pm Hong Kong time today, April 26, 2012. It was posted yesterday, April 25. Zhang Qianye currently has just over 7,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].
The post from Zhang Qianye shares an image of the front page of the People’s Daily on April 26, 1989, with its lead official Party editorial, “We Must Take a Clear-Cut Stand in Opposing Disorder” (必须旗帜鲜明地反对动乱).

The hard-line editorial, published in the midst of pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing that year, is notorious in the eyes of many for having pushed the government into a position of direct opposition to protesting students. One of the goals of hunger strikes by students in May 1989 was to force a retraction or revision of the April 26 editorial and its position.

Let us remember this “tomorrow” in our history, for the sake of all of our future tomorrows.

The original Chinese post by Zhang Qianye follows:

记住这个历史上的“明天”，是为了我们的每一个明天。

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

On April 25, 2012, the government of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (SAR) announced that private hospitals would cease admitting pregnant mainland Chinese women hoping to give birth in the city and obtain Hong Kong residency for their children beginning in 2013. In recent years, rising numbers of mainland mothers in Hong Kong hospitals have put pressure on the territory’s health system, and Hong Kong campaigners have pushed for limits. In early 2012, the issue became rancorous in Hong Kong, with many Hong Kong locals referring to mainland mothers seeking entry to the territory as “locusts.” In this cartoon, posted by artist Shang Haichun (商海春) to QQ.com, a pregnant couple with their bags packed ambles up to a door labeled “Come to Hong Kong to Give Birth”, but find that a large hand blocks their way.

Two weeks ago, we wrote at CMP about how China’s central leadership was actively controlling and using the news media — including commercial newspapers and websites — to push its message on the Bo Xilai case. The heavy hands-on tactics, including orders that all papers run the April 13 People’s Daily editorial and explicitly mention its source on the front page, hearkened eerily back to China’s propaganda past, in which the dominance of Party propaganda “mouthpieces” was uncontested. This was also one of the keenest reminders we’ve had in the recent two decades that China’s Communist Party leaders still firmly uphold the Mao Zedong-era principle that “politicians run the newspapers.”
As the Party maintains its stranglehold on the Bo Xilai story, it might be convenient to forget just how much China’s media environment has changed since the early 1990s — even as control, or “guidance,” has been consistently maintained as policy, and principles like “politicians running the newspapers” have been reaffirmed openly by the likes of Jiang Zemin (in the midst of his anti-Falun Gong obsession).
Yes, we repeat here, yet again, our emphasis on Qian Gang‘s Three C’s, control, change and chaos, to describe China’s confusing (there’s a fourth “C”) information landscape.
Control remains in the form of propaganda policies, restrictive regulations, and a recalcitrant political culture of secrecy. But change constantly shakes the snowglobe of the Chinese status quo (economic development, globalization, media commercialization, a savvier population, new technologies, developing ideals of journalistic practice, political decentralization, advancing approaches to control). The result is a chaos of overlapping and self-contradicting factors.
Control is undeniable, but so is opportunity. Which is why we see the constant emergence of public opinion flashpoints in the newspapers and on Weibo; and why we are treated to regular pleasant surprises in the form of hard-hitting investigative exposes by the likes of Wang Keqin (王克勤).
The buffeting blows of CONTROL can often make it seem as though change is constantly in retreat; it can tempt us to the cynical view that those apparent signs of change (like the introduction of open government information legislation in May 2008) are no more than window-dressing for a determined authoritarian regime.
But conscientious observers of China have an obligation to grapple with the complexity, to avoid simplistic readings — including the oft-heard suggestion that China is too exceptional, mysterious or complex to understand.
With apologies for that harangue of “C’s” . . .

China. Control. Change. Chaos. Confusion. Complexity. Conscientious observation.

. . . let us turn to a story in China today that illustrates quite well just one aspect of change in China’s media, the way news reporters in China do increasingly antagonize government representatives over issues in the public interest.
At a press conference on “green travel” (绿色出行主题) organized by the Shenzhen city government yesterday, reporters from four different Chinese news outfits pressed for specific figures on the number of “public vehicles” being used by government officials.
So-called “public vehicles,” or gongche (公车), are often luxury sedans or SUVs purchased with public funds (from taxpayers, that is) for use by government officials. The use of such vehicles for private purposes — such as weekend sightseeing or taking one’s kids to school — is a sore point and regular source of public friction in China.
The questioning over public vehicles was kicked off yesterday by a reporter from China Youth Daily, who asked the deputy head of Shenzhen’s transit authority, Xu Wei (徐炜), if he could reveal how many of the two million vehicles reported to be on the roads in Shenzhen were public vehicles. Xu Wei responded by passing the hot potato to another office: “As to the situation concerning the management of public vehicles, I’d like to ask Director Cai of the Development and Reform Office to answer that,” he said.
The question thrown into his lap, Cai Yu (蔡羽), the deputy director of the Shenzhen Office for New Energy Vehicle Promotion (深圳市新能源汽车示范推广办公室), talked about the various ways the city had sought to exercise oversight to ensure public vehicles were not misused. He offered no numbers for public vehicles in the city.
The next opportunity for a question fell to a reporter from the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily (深圳特区报). As the question about public vehicle numbers was still hovering in the ether, the reporter decided to tack the question to one of his own . . . And if you could also answer the question about the number of public vehicles?
After Xu Wei answered the reporter’s first question, all eyes turned back to Cai Yu, according to an account in today’s Southern Metropolis Daily. The host broke the awkward silence that followed by inviting another question.
The microphone was passed to a reporter from Guangdong’s official Nanfang Daily, who asked again, along with a second question: “Right now, what is the approximate situation concerning public vehicles in Shenzhen?” Suspension was in the air, the Southern Metropolis Daily reports. Reporters began whispering among themselves. Why was this question so intractable?
After the Nanfang Daily reporter’s second question had been addressed, all eyes turned back to Cai Yu.
Finally, Cai Yu spoke up, saying China applies strict management standards to public vehicles, and determined public vehicle numbers on the basis of official personnel numbers (在编人数). But just as everyone was expecting the long-awaited number to drop, Cai instead tossed the hot potato across to another unsuspecting official.
“According to my understanding,” said Cai Yu, “public vehicles in Shenzhen are all managed and allocated by the province. The handling of public vehicles in the city falls to the transport department (交通运输委), which assists [the province] in handling management and allocation. I think this question is something the transportation department can help you to answer.”
Cai turned to his left and set his eyes on Yu Baoming (于宝明), the deputy head of Shenzhen’s transportation department. The room was again silent. “Facing every eye in the room,” the Southern Metropolis Daily wrote, Yu Baoming “did not immediately respond.”
At this point, a reporter sitting on the back row of the hall called out, not waiting for an invitation: “So what is the number?”
Patience was waning.
Finally, Yu Baoming opened his mouth, offering reporters their fourth, and most involved, non-answer:
“Everyone cares a great deal about this question. First, there is the question of how to define public vehicles. Public vehicles can include many different types. One type is the allocated vehicle that people tend to think of. According to national regulations, these numbers are determined by the provincial government. These vehicle numbers are subject to strict examination procedures according to national regulations. Other vehicles are for the purpose of administrative management, production and other uses and are bought without the use of fiscal funds, but they are managed uniformly and subject to partial reimbursement with public funds, for example for daily operation costs, including parking and fuel, etcetera. Therefore, in calculating the number of public vehicles consistent statistical requirements must first be determined.”
Given the sketch of complexity I outlined at the outset, how exactly should we read this story. Is it an illustration of failure? An indication of hope?
I don’t claim to have a definitive answer, but perhaps I can make amends by offering a joke Shenzhen journalists would no doubt appreciate:
QUESTION: How many Shenzhen officials does it take to answer a simple question?
ANSWER: No one knows yet.

Chinese media reported in April 2012 that high levels of hormones and antibiotics were being used on Chinese milk cows and to reduce inflammation. Responding to public concerns, the head of the China Milk Association (中国奶协) did not deny that antibiotics were being used on stocks, but said that milk produced while milk cows were being medicated was discarded and not introduced to the market. In this cartoon, posted by artist Kuang Biao (邝飚) to Sina Weibo, the “x” of a pair of bandages and a suture scars an udder depending from a red and white pill, a graphic illustration of the concern that milk products in China might be super-charged with antibiotics to the detriment of consumers.

Reading all of the interesting reporting this morning on the Bo Xilai case from the Financial Times, Bloomberg, the South China Morning Post and others, I felt I had to share the news with my Chinese readers on Sina Weibo. Here is an English translation of my original Chinese-language post.

A special work team from Beijing has arrived in Hong Kong to investigate BXL’s [Bo Xilai’s ] assets there and his relationship to Zhou YK [Zhou Yongkang]. The Financial Times reports that Zhou YK faces investigation for discipline violations. http://t.cn/zOWR7WT

The post was made at 9:47:13 am, and deleted within 13 minutes. At 10:00 am I received a notice from Sina Weibo featuring Sina Weibo’s signature eye icon wearing a blue police cap. It read:

We are sorry, your post “A special work team from Beijing has arrived in Hong Kong . . . ” has already been secreted [or “encrypted”] by managers. This microblog post is not appropriate for making public to the outside (对外公开). If you require assistance, please contact support (Link: http://t.cn/z0D6ZaQ)
抱歉，您在2012-04-23 09:47:13发表的微博“北京的专门工作组到达香港调…”已被管理员加密。此微博不适宜对外公开。如需帮助，请联系客服（链接：http://t.cn/z0D6ZaQ）

The following re-post with comment by Chinese media scholar and former CMP fellow Zhan Jiang (展江) about China’s ongoing poison drug capsules scandal was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 9:05pm Hong Kong time on April 20, 2012. Zhan Jiang currently has more than 665,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

The health minister even says [people] need to have confidence. // @XueManzi: //@ZhaiXingshou010: In officialdom at present, what is most deficient is a culture and sense of shame. Since Ding Guangen (丁关根) resigned his post as railway minister in 1988 following a train disaster, we haven’t again seen anyone courageous enough to show a sense of shame. Thousands of students died in shoddy buildings during the Wenchuan Earthquake, and the minister of education gave not so much as a single apology.

The original Chinese post by Zhan Jiang (including the posts from previous users) follows:

卫生部长还说要有信心。 //@薛蛮子: //@摘星手010: 现今官场最匮乏的，是耻感文化。自1988年铁道部长丁关根因火车事故辞职以来，再不见知耻近乎勇者。汶川地震校舍倒塌，死难学生数千，教育部长连句道歉的表示都没有。

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

In China’s world of public opinion guidance, everything is just fine and dandy until we’re told it’s not. That, at least, is the ideal. Thunder might roll across China’s microblogs, but until those who exercise political control over the media are good and ready for a storm, the waters must appear perfectly calm on major political stories. So it was with Bo Xilai (薄熙来), and so it might prove with Zhou Yongkang (周永康), the ninth-ranked member of China’s powerful Politburo Standing Committee, whose fate is now the subject of intense speculation outside China.
In early March, as the annual National People’s Congress was in session, there seemed to be little more than ripples surrounding Bo Xilai weeks after an embarrassing episode in which his former police chief, Wang Lijun (王立军), sought refuge in the American consulate in Chengdu. As he addressed an audience at the Great Hall of the People, Bo seemed poised, though the uncharacteristic caution suggested turbulence just below the surface.
The storm came full force on April 10 and 11, as the official Xinhua News Agency issued three notices that signaled a dramatic change in Bo’s political fortune. He is now under investigation for unspecified “serious discipline violations,” and his wife is a chief suspect in the alleged murder of a British national. He has become a political pariah, used by the Party (or perhaps more accurately, by his political opponents) to shore up the Party’s image of clean governance and rule of law.
Will the next political storm pulverize Zhou Yongkang, who is known to have been one of Bo Xilai’s closest allies, and around whom rumors swirled of a coup attempt in late March?
The Financial Times has reported that Zhou is already facing a probe over possible disciplinary violations, and the South China Morning Post quotes a source today as saying that a working group charged with investigating financial issues “relating to Bo and Zhou has already arrived in Hong Kong.”
In today’s edition of Taiwan’s Apple Daily, Jiang Chunnan ( 江春男) jumps the gun and refers to Zhou Yongkang as “the biggest sacrifice of the Bo case.”

[Former President] Jiang Zemin (江泽民) retired but did not withdraw [from politics]. He and [former Standing Committee member] Zeng Qinghong (曾庆红) have placed a lot of hindrances before Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, and Hu has used the Bo case to further cancel out the power of the Jiang faction, particularly in the case of Zhou Yongkang (周永康), this secretary of the CCP’s Politics and Law Committee who was pulled up by Jiang Zemin and has a hold on the police apparatus and the power of stability preservation, and who is Bo Xilai’s most important political ally. He [Zhou Yongkang] is the biggest sacrifice of the Bo case. Moreover, there is now greater validity to Hu’s holding on the post as chairman of the Central Military Commission because of the Bo case.

All of this news and speculation outside China contrasts starkly with Zhou Yongkang’s image as it continues to play out in China’s media. He is a man busy with the responsibilities of office, meeting overseas leaders and urging on the ranks below in China’s police and judicial systems.
In China today, Zhou Yongkang — whose official business reportedly took him on an inspection tour of Hubei province from April 18 to 20 — appears in just three newspapers, all in Hubei province. They include Hubei Daily, the province’s official Party mouthpiece, Chutian Metropolis Daily, a commercial spin-off of Hubei Daily, and Changjiang Daily, the official Party mouthpiece of the top leadership in the city of Wuhan.
Zhou appears on the front page of today’s Hubei Daily, with two prominently placed photographs of him smiling as he makes his tour. In the paper’s commercial spin-off, Chutian Metropolis Daily, a large headline at the top of the front page announces Zhou’s visit, but readers are directed to page two, where the report appears.

[ABOVE: News of Zhou Yongkang’s April 18 visit to Hubei province appears on the front page of today’s Hubei Daily].
While news of Zhou’s visit to Hubei did not appear in the People’s Daily or other central-level Party media, concluding on the basis of this alone that Zhou is being at once featured and sidelined would be premature. But of course it’s tempting to suppose that he’s playing a high-wire act, like that unrelated photo on the front page of today’s Chutian Metropolis Daily.

[ABOVE: News of Zhou Yongkang’s April 18 visit to Hubei province appears in today’s edition of Chutian Metropolis Daily].
Zhou was in the news last week (on April 18-19) after meeting in Beijing on April 17 with a senior Communist Party of Cuba leader, Victor Gaute Lopez. Coverage of that meeting did appear on the front page of the overseas edition of the People’s Daily two days later, but not in the official China edition of the People’s Daily on either April 18 or 19.
The very same day as his meeting with Lopez, Zhou reportedly held a so-called “judicial agency construction summary and commendation videophone conference” in which he addressed those “on the front lines” of “judicial agency construction” and “represented the Central Committee of the CCP and the State Council in commending 100 ‘national model judicial agencies’.” News of this videophone conference was reported by both the official China News Service and the Economic Daily on April 18.
If the news being reported outside of China has any basis, Zhou Yongkang could already be the political walking wounded. But until the top leadership is ready to weather another political storm, they will no doubt do their best to give the impression that everything is business as usual.

The following post by legal scholar and poet Xu Xin (徐昕) sharing a recent report about Bo Xilai’s son Bo Guagua in The New York Times was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 11:59am Hong Kong time today, April 20, 2012. Xu Xin currently has just under 88,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].
The post from Xu Xin draws from a passage in the report that reads: “One former government employee with party ties said the leadership tolderated a certain level of corruption among top officials or their relatives as long as it was kept out of public view.”

A long report on the front page of The New York Times talks about the dissolute life of Prince B, and says the general rule is: “Corruption is ok, but you can’t show corruption openly as this challenges the game rules.”

The post was accompanied by the following image of the New York Times, which is headlined: “.”

Despite the deletion of this post, CMP did note that other versions of the NYT article on Bo Guagua were readily available on Weibo on August 20, using the search term “Prince B”, or “B gongzi” (B公子).
The original Chinese post by Xu Xin follows:

【一般规则】《纽约时报》头版长文，讲述B公子奢华浪荡生活，说一般的规则是：“腐败可以，但不能以公开腐败挑战游戏规则。”http://t.cn/zO0xdHJ

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

In recent years, many Chinese have criticized the way the country’s education system has been twisted and constrained by political priorities. In an article published in the journal Freezing Point in 2006, Chinese historian Yuan Weishi argued that children in mainland China were being raised on “wolf’s milk”, the twisted accounts they read in official history textbooks feeding a sense of xenophobia and unthinking nationalism. In this cartoon posted to Sina Weibo on April 18, 2012, Shanghai-based user Chen Huhua (陈沪华) recapitulates this criticism of China’s education system. Chinese children sit at attention at their desks as the teacher points to two large characters — on the left a white character for “black” on a black background, and on the right a black character for “white” on white background. “Let me emphasize again: white is black, and black is white,” the teacher explains.

In the midst of a state-pushed craze surrounding the propaganda icon Lei Feng (雷锋) back in early March, the English-language Global Times asked for my views on Lei Feng “as a foreigner.” Did I think, the reporter asked, that the “Lei Feng spirit . . . actually doesn’t only belong to China, but also applies to the world as well?”
When I explained to the reporter that I didn’t see Lei Feng as a symbol of altruism at all, they made a point of writing back and begging to differ. But I was pleased to see several days later that the English-language paper did publish my remarks:

“Seen in his proper political context, Lei Feng is a symbol not of altruism but of submission to political power. In my view, the image of Lei Feng is completely out of step with a modern China,” wrote David Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, in an e-mail to the Global Times. “What China needs today is a new model of active and critical citizenship, not of subservience,” he wrote.

The rest of my response, which for whatever reason did not run in the Global Times was:

Premier Wen Jiabao spoke not long ago about ‘creating the conditions for the people to criticize the government.’ An article in the Central Party’s School’s Study Times this week deals with the exact same issue. But would Lei Feng have dared criticize, or demanded more from those in positions of power?”

I thought of this exchange today when I read a story making the rounds on the internet — it was on the front page of QQ until this afternoon — about Lei Chuang (雷闯), who may be exactly the kind of new “model of active and critical citizenship” I suggested to the Global Times.
According to a report by The Beijing News, Lei Chuang, a 25-year-old graduate student in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University, submitted open government information requests to 53 central government departments on April 13, requesting that they release information about the 2011 annual salaries of ministers or directors [at their agencies].
As the basis of his request, Lei Chuang cited Chapter II, Article 9 of the Regulation of the People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information, which took effect on May 1, 2008.

Administrative agencies should disclose on their own initiative government information that satisfies any one of the following basic criteria: 1) Information that involves the vital interests of citizens, legal persons or other organizations; 2) Information that needs to be extensively known or participated in by the general public; 3) Information that shows the structure, function and working procedures of and other matters relating to the administrative agency; 4) Other information that should be disclosed on the administrative agency’s own initiative according to laws, regulations and relevant state provisions.

Apparently, Lei Chuang has already received a response from one government office. But that response offers a hint of how the government generally regards requests for making information available in a political culture that still thrives on secrecy.
Here is the relevant section from the report in The Beijing News:

Lei Chuang said that as of yesterday, he had already received a phone call from the State Food and Drug Administration, which said it had received his request and wanted to know his objective in seeking the information and how he would use it.
According to Lei Chuang, this employee [from the State Food and Drug Administration] said that as the head of its department was a deputy minister for the Ministry of Health, their wages were paid by the Ministry of Health, and therefore the authority on releasing [the requested information] was with the Ministry of Health. [Lei Chuang said:] “I requested that they respond in writing [to my request], and they said they would look into this, so they didn’t entirely avoid me. I’ll wait for their response.”

[ABOVE: Lei Chuang holds up a sign that reads: “Requesting officials’ salary figures by made available.”]
The Beijing News report on Lei Chuang’s open government information (OGI) requests in fact mixed together the issue of making the salaries of government officials known — Lei Chuang’s specific request — and making the assets of government officials known, a much bigger issue.
The newspaper noted that National People’s Congress delegate Han Deyun (韩德云) has submitted a proposal during each of the past six years calling for the creation of a system for making the assets of government officials public.
Zeng Kanghua (曾康华), the head of the School of Public Finance at the Central University of Finance and Economics, told The Beijing News that the question of making the assets of government officials public was “rather complex,” and that “under the current institutional arrangement in China there was not an institutional basis for this.” But from a “technical standpoint,” he added, “there should be no difficulty.”
Lei Chuang is apparently finding himself something of a celebrity today. He wrote on his Sina Weibo account at 3:16 this afternoon: “The matter of my submitting requests for open government information has already impacted progress on my research, so for now I’m no longer accepting media interviews. As for the whole process of my applications, readers can go to http://t.cn/zO0nQuQ . . .”