Rebecca McKinnon has a highly interesting posting on her blog about recent research she has done at the University of Hongkong. (Unfortunately her blog cannot be easily accessed in mainland China. Even the RSS Feed in Google Reader is blocked.)
Following up on a conversation McKinnon had last year with BOB 2008 award winning Beijing lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan, she did some empirical study on how much chinese blog service providers (BSP) interfere with their hosted blogs on sensitive topics. It turns out that what Liu had observed with his own blogs is true: There is a high degree of variation. Of the 108 entries with sensitive content that McKinnon and her teams consistently posted on 15 different blogging platforms the most rigorous BSP deleted 60, the most lenient only 1!
There is an episode in the first season of West Wing in which the intended candidate for an open seat at the US Supreme Court, previously courted and won over for this job in a long and difficult fight, is dumped within minutes by President Bartlet and the senior White House staffers. The reason: An unsigned research note he wrote as a young scholar for the Harvard Law Journal which shows that he sees privacy as not protected by the US constitution, and thus easily subject to possible legal restrictions.
Privacy and data protection have been a big issue in german politics during the 80s. A legendary decision by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1983 granted the german citizens the “right of informational self-determination”. Countless laws and regulations securing that right have been introduced. German data protection was among the best in the world.
CIC has published the first two parts of their white paper “The Internet IS the Community”. Over the last years, Sam Flemming and his team in Shanghai have done a lot to bring the importance of the chinese Internet community to the attention of their target group, which consists, of course, mostly of business people interested in learning new ways of marketing their products. But the range of CIC’s inquiry is so broad that most of their publications are interesting also to a much wider audience.
The white paper parts, published on Slideshare, provide a wealth of neatly presented current data and numbers and some carefully picked examples to illustrate the enormous potential of the chinese online community (part 1) as well as some interesting insights into new ways to measure and analyze its dynamics (part 2).
And I think they should provide a bigger version of their beautiful chinese conversation prism for download.
There are two things we can learn about journalism by reading Peter Hessler’s wonderful Oracle Bones: First, good journalism and especially reporting is not only about the power of immediate observation, it also needs plenty of patience. There is no such thing as a story without a lot of communication to unearth it. Second, in the end it’s the people who count.
Oracle Bones is written in a blog-like first person point of view. It weaves a dense web out of four or five main story lines and a half-dozen sidelines. There is the ongoing story of some of Hessler’s former students from his time as a Peace Corps English teacher in Fuling, up the Chang Jiang River. There is the story of Polat, an Uighur businessman Hessler meets in Beijing’s Yabaolu quarter, a stronghold of Russian and Central Asian people near Ritan Park. There is the story of Cheng Mengjia, an old-fashioned writer and scholar who committed suicide during Cultural Revolution, and there is the story of chinese archeology and the oracle bones themselves, which develops into the stories of Chinese writing and of the country’s special relationship with history.
The first person perspective allows these lines to develop in a quiet rhythm of encounters, of long conversations with dozens of people, of stories told to the author, of letters written to him, with all the emotions accompanying memory as well as immediate experience. It’s not only the events, it’s also and even mainly about what they are doing to people, how the events are shaped and experienced by human beings. Hessler himself as narrator is always visible without ever unnecessarily taking front stage. Still we are always aware that his writing is also perspectival, is also a very personal view on his matters.
It is this inherent reflection on reporting and on journalistic work in general that raises Oracle Bones above being simply a very good book on contemporary China. Objectivity, so we can learn from Hessler, is not the absence of perspective. It is rather the result of communication, of multi-perspectivity, the depth of a picture showing its subject from many different angles, from many points of view. In the end it’s the viewers who count as least as much as what they are looking at or talking about. Oracle Bones is a book about China by giving voice to Chinese people. It is also a book about reporting by showing a very gifted and skillful reporter at his work.
Yesterday Deutsche Welle announced the winners of the Best of Blogs Award 2008. Winner in the chinese language section is the Beijing-based lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan (刘晓原). Liu, who blogs about all kinds of legal matters, has recently received some international press coverage when representing the mother of Yang Jia, the man who had killed six police officers in Shanghai on July 1st and had subsequently become some kind of popular hero with the chinese public, especially after some irregularities during his trial. Yang Jia has been executed on November 26.
Among the many virtues one can strive for I find courage of most value. Of course courage is most impressive when combined with wits, but intelligence without courage is something that leaves me underwhelmed.
Courage is required on so many levels, starting with observation: What do I dare to see in a situation? Lack of courage can be a dangerous filter on our perception. It goes on with evaluation: How do I dare to judge someone or something? Courage is related to generosity: What am I able to give? What can I forgive? What can I accept from others? It is also the most important ingredient in trust, and is such an essential part of love. Without courage there is no real freedom. What freedom do I have when I don’t dare to make use of it?
So courage is the one key to open so many doors. It has often been said that courage is not the absence of fear, but the overcoming of it. True enough. The last challenge to our courageousness is the passing of the final door that leads us out of our life. Death will come to all of us. It takes ultimate courage to look him straight into the eye. To see someone fighting this fight with openness and dignity is an incredible experience.
Living with ambiguities can be entertaining, sexy and fun. It can also be very exhausting in the long run. During a breathtaking climax of crises happening over the last weeks, one ambiguity in my life has just abruptly been resolved and turned into something rather ordinary and predictable.
Although this has removed a lot of magic from my life, it has also set free a lot of energy. Energy to face the rest of the current crises, especially those of a family-related and of a professional nature. Energy to re-establish some long-missed habits, like book-reading and meditation. Energy to turn my usual nervous and chaotic communication style – overeager immediacy on the one hand, negligence on the other – into something less impatience-driven.
And also, energy to find some new and magical ambiguities.
Life in the capital has been unspectacular during the last two weeks. Some small tasks, some language learning, and collecting evidence for some sidelines of my project.
There is, for example, the phenomenon of the Crowded Homepage: Chinese newspage design differs significantly from western design, the pages are huge, and packed with hundreds, if not thousands of headlines. There are nearly no teasers at all – what we consider the epitome of web news editing skill is mostly unknown in China. A homepage like the New York Times’ would strike the chinese reader as minimalistic and, probably, boring. Why is this so? I have been discussing this question with students in Wuhan, with no satisfying results. Now I have found some pertinent entries on expat weblogs that I’m going to follow up on.
Another interesting topic is the so-called Human Flesh Search Engine, which is not, as the title might suggest, related to pornographic content. It is simply a name given to the attempts by chinese netizens of nailing down persons whose alleged misbehavior has been documented somewhere on the web. It is a certain way of crowdsourcing, and its impact sometimes seems to be acceptable, in some cases dubitable, but at second sight, in its sheer extent, with bulletin boards sporting thousands of contributions, and with the moralistic self-righteousness almost always involved, it is nearly always a downright scary thing.
A third phenomenon I’m dealing with is called the 50 Cent Party. This is a name given to people who are suspected to be paid by government institutions to contribute to community discussions and influence them in a massive and coordinated way. Last summer there have been some discussions subsuming this under the label of censorship, until Paul Denlinger, a weathered public relations expert and blogger, got fed up and pointed to the fact that it is simply a form of astroturfing, a PR tactic similarly to be found in western countries.
Stay tuned for more facts, stories and reasoning circling around these and other topics on Orchis Tower during the next days. No, really.
Ah, and this weekend Beijing’s central heating system will be started. Yesterday two cheerful mechanics invaded my apartment and, after checking the radiators, chatted with me for something like ten minutes – happily ignoring the fact that I didn’t understand a word of what they’d been telling me.
Arrived for a one-week visit at the Huazhong (Central China) University of Science and Technology (HUST) in Wuhan, the official partner for my research project. I am warmly welcomed by my host, Prof Chen Shaohua, and his students. Will spend the next days lining out my humble contribution to a research project that aims at analysing the social and cultural impact of news websites in China and abroad.
HUST is a big university with 56,000 students. The campus is huge and park-like, full of trees and green space. There is the story that during cultural revolution, when Red Guards attacked the country’s intellectuals and many of them were sent to the countryside for ‘re-education’, this university solved the problem by establishing some on-campus farmland to spare their respected professors the humiliation.
I live in the comfortable university conference center guest house. Even though there are supposed to be several hundred foreign students and two international conferences going on, I have the feeling that I am the only ‘lao wai’ on the campus.
Der Kamerasatz für die Video-Klassen im Journalistik-Studiengang der HUST (Foto: LLM)
The new media department of HUST’s School of Journalism and Communication with its computer labs, video cameras and small TV studio feels very familiar. Prof Chen introduces me to all the staff, more friendly faces and chinese names than I can’t possibly remember. Two female students show me around, present the numerous campus facilities, sports playgrounds, a big food market, a cafe.
Today I venture out alone for lunch, to one of the several big student canteens. This one is a two-floor building with dozens of booths offering everything you might want to eat, pancakes, dumplings, all kinds of local dishes, soups, etc – provided you know the chinese names. I decide that it’s about time to learn more than the simple words, for pork, beef, chicken or fish. Fortunately some friendly student explains to me the easiest way to pick your lunch, a buffet for 7.5 yuan (around 80 cents).
Eine Mensa der HUST
After yesterday’s beautiful autumn sunshine the weather has changed for the worse, it is raining today and cold. Still, even on saturday, there is considerable life on the streets, the small campus buses are packed, people under their umbrellas stroll along the alleys. I find my temporary home and office in a spacy café at the HUST School of Management, providing the obligatory wireless internet access and a quite decent capuccino.
