Some called it ‘historic.’ State media calls it “totally wrong.”

Here is state media’s take, via Xinhua:

BEIJING, March 23 (Xinhua) — Google has “violated its written promise” and is “totally wrong” by stopping censoring its Chinese language searching results and blaming China for alleged hacker attacks, a government official said early Tuesday morning.

The official in charge of the Internet bureau under the State Council Information Office made the comments about two hours after the online search service provider announced it has stopped censoring its Chinese-language search engine Google.cn and is redirecting Chinese mainland users to a site in Hong Kong.

“Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks,” said the official.

“This is totally wrong. We’re uncompromisingly opposed to the politicization of commercial issues, and express our discontent and indignation to Google for its unreasonable accusations and conducts,” the official said.

Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond made the “stop censoring” announcement in a blog post at about 3 a.m. Tuesday Beijing Time, more than two months after the company said it had been attacked by hackers supported by the Chinese government and was considering pulling out of the Chinese market.

To get a sense of how the news is playing in China, check out this screen grab from People’s Daily, the voice of the Communist Party:

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

The Chinese government appears to be prepping for the fall out—by aggressively downplaying it.

Meanwhile, in a letter published by state broadcaster CCTV, 27 Google advertisers said they wanted news now.

The Washington Post reports:

The Chinese government on Tuesday appeared to set the foundation for Internet giant Google to pull out of the country, with one spokesman contending that the company’s potential departure would be an “individual business act” and another warning Google to obey Chinese law whether it leaves China or not.

The comments — by the spokesmen for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce — followed strong indications that Google, which has been locked in a dispute with the Chinese government over censorship, was preparing to leave China.

Chinese online advertisers are advising their clients to switch their accounts to Google’s Chinese competitor, Baidu. And government officials from several ministries have privately predicted that Google soon would shut down its operations.

Shares of Google fell nearly 3 percent in regular trading Monday to close at $563.18, Reuters reported. Shares of Baidu, the No. 1 search engine in China, rose 4.8 percent, to $576.84.

via China appears to be preparing for Google departure – washingtonpost.com.

Advertisers aren’t pleased, as WSJ.com reports:

A group of Google Inc.’s partners in China have sent a letter to the Internet giant, saying their businesses are in jeopardy if Google closes its Chinese search engine and demanding to know how they will be compensated. The company said it received the letter and was reviewing it Tuesday.

Read the whole letter here.

Image via Wikipedia

‘Hurt Locker’ won Best Picture, but  ‘Avatar’ won China’s heart.

China Daily offers a post-Oscar look at why Chinese fans prefer blue creatures to bomb diffusers.

Raymond Zhou:

Chinese film fans were mostly disappointed by the unexpected shutout of Avatar in the major categories at the 82nd Academy Awards. Most bet on the $2 billion juggernaut for the Best Picture award, and when my fellow guest at Sina.com’s Oscar show openly rallied for The Hurt Locker, he instantly received text messages denouncing him.

It is understandable why Chinese filmgoers prefer Avatar. It is a runaway hit, and is still packing them in at all 3D venues. People can read all kinds of messages into it and many regard a trip to Pandora as their best movie experience.

The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, is harder to decipher. Most here tend to misinterpret its message. Even the normally liberal Beijing News reckoned it was Pentagon propaganda. It’s a war movie, but it does not offer much fun or gratuitous violence. The impact of war on the protagonist and the morbid nature of his fascination with danger, simply eludes those not familiar with the culture, or not interested in anything except the explosions.

This gap between Oscar voters and movie viewers in China is a clear testament to the power of movies as escapist or fantasy fare to audiences here. People do not want to go to the theater to watch a sharper replica of reality, but to forget about it

[Emphasis added]

*If Zhou’s reference to ‘interpreting’ Avatar seems vague, it may be because the film was widely ‘read’ as a critique of forced evict in China. Touchy subject.

But who is this ‘beggar prince’ (aka ‘Brother Sharp’) with the furrowed brow and the ‘penetrating’ gaze?

China’s human flesh searchers had been wondering the same thing. They tracked down his family and orchestrated a reunion. Some details (Xinmin via China Smack):

‘Brother Sharp’s’ real name is called Cheng Guorong, born 1976, and is from Poyang county of Jiangxi province…  According to “Brother Sharp’s” younger brother Cheng Guosheng, “Brother Sharp” has two children attending school in his hometown, that his wife and father suffered a car accident last year and both have passed away…

…Cheng Guosheng said his older brother came to Ningbo in 2000 with others from his hometown to find work, had still been in contact with his family the past few years, but beginning in 2003,  information from him had stopped. Family members have previously came to Ningbo to find him multiple times, with the most recent time being the year before last.”

Cheng Guorong’s brush with fashion fame is both fascinating and tragic. Judging by the comments left online, his fans seem more interested in his cheek bones that his well-being. Said one:

China truly has innumerable handsome guys, Brother Sharp, you are truly too handsome.”

Another:

That frowning look…
Ai yo! My little heart!
Really so handsome!”

As the Independent notes, ‘homeless chic’ is not unique to Ningbo:

The suggestion that homelessness can be cool chimes with a fashion trend that many have considered tasteless: in January, the designer Vivienne Westwood presented a “homeless chic” show in which models were styled to look like rough sleepers, a move prefigured by Ben Stiller’s satirical film Zoolander, which featured a similar show called Derelicte. Two years ago the supermodel Erin Wasson revealed the homeless were her fashion inspiration, saying: “When I… see the homeless, like, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they’re pulling out, like, crazy looks and they, like, pull shit out of like garbage cans.’”

Ai yo, indeed.

Image via Wikipedia

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has a great piece on China’s ‘human flesh search engines’ (read my take here).

The writer, Tom Downey, outlines the history of web-vigilantism in China and makes two great, counter-intuitive, points about the Chinese web:

1. China’s internet is not all about censorship—it’s about community, too:

The prevailing narrative in the West about the Chinese Internet is the story of censorship — Google’s threatened withdrawal from China being only the latest episode. But the reality is that in China, as in the United States, most Internet users are far more interested in finding jobs, dates and porn than in engaging in political discourse. “For our generation, the post-’80s generation, I don’t feel like censorship is a critical issue on the Internet,” Jin Liwen, a Chinese technology analyst who lives in America, told me. While there are some specific, highly sensitive areas where the Chinese government tries to control all information — most important, any political activity that could challenge the authority of the Communist Party — the Western media’s focus on censorship can lead to the misconception that the Chinese government utterly dominates online life. The vast majority of what people do on the Internet in China, including most human-flesh-search activity, is ignored by censors and unfettered by government regulation. There are many aspects of life on and off the Internet that the government is unwilling, unable or maybe just uninterested in trying to control.

[Emphasis added]

2. On China’s web, online forums are tremendously influential:

FOR A WESTERNER, what is most striking is how different Chinese Internet culture is from our own. News sites and individual blogs aren’t nearly as influential in China, and social networking hasn’t really taken off. What remain most vital are the largely anonymous online forums, where human-flesh searches begin. These forums have evolved into public spaces that are much more participatory, dynamic, populist and perhaps even democratic than anything on the English-language Internet.

[Emphasis added]

I’ll give him participatory and populist, but ‘more democratic’ seems like a stretch. Thoughts?

Image via Wikipedia

China’s ever-cautious president, Hu Jintao, shocked the intertubes this week by signing up for the Chinese-equivalent of Twitter.

But would-be followers were left hanging when his profile quickly vanished .What’s with the disappearing act?

I have two theories.

Either, (a) The president quit after he realized his title “General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, Chinese President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission,” would barely fit in one post.

Or, (b) He decided that, if the Dalai Lama was micro-blogging, he’d better not.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Remember those White-House approved Dalai pics?

Here is the picture Obama’s team didn’t want you to see: the Dalai Lama stepping over garbage as he leaves through the back door. Not the warmest welcome, eh?

(h/t @mtwirth)

Image via Wikipedia

The Dalai Lama met with Obama Thursday—but the press were kept at a distance.

Instead of shooting the event themselves, news agencies were handed a White House approved ‘handout’ picture.

The Associated Press refused to run it. Here’s why:

In a letter to customers and readers, the AP’s director of photography Santiago Lyon explains that the agency decline handout photos “wherever access would have been possible.”

Accepting a handout photo of the Dalai Lama in Washington “is the visual equivalent of being fed a completed news story by PR firm.” In other words, it’s bad journalism.

In countries that espouse democratic values, he argues, the press must demand open access. This includes access to “the public activities of the president of the  United States.”

I’m with him. By sitting on the fence (inviting the Dalai Lama, but restricting access) the Obama camp has managed to simultaneously rile China and the otherwise neutral-to-friendly domestic media

Unsurprisingly,Chinese state media are all over the meet and greet. A rep from foreign affairs said it “grossly violated the norms” of international diplomacy. Ambassador Huntsman was reportedly summoned for a talk.

What’s surprising, I think, is that Chinese officials didn’t offer Obama props for press control. A handout? That’s a move straight from the CCP playbook.

Image by gutter via Flickr

China announced Monday that they’d cracked an alleged hacking ring with some 12,000 subscribers. The site taught people how to launch cyber attacks and supplied malware

But the arrests were reportedly made back in November. Why brag about it now?

Since last month’s Google-China smackdown, China’s goverment has been busy polishing its image as a responsible cyber-citizen. Now, in what looks to be a refutation of Google’s claims, they’ve gone public with a high-profile hacking case.

My bet is that this is PR, not substantive progress, but we’ll see how tings unfold.

Here is the latest, via WSJ:

Three people were arrested on suspicion of making hacking tools available online, the state-run Xinhua news agency said. Their business, known as Black Hawk Safety Net, operated through the now-shuttered website www.3800cc.com and generated around $1 million in income from its over 12,000 subscribers, the report said.

The arrests took place in late November as part of a police investigation that spanned three Chinese provinces and resulted in part from Black Hawk’s role in domestic hacker attacks, according to Xinhua.

The delay in announcing the case wasn’t explained. But China in recent weeks has waged an aggressive public relations campaign on the issue of hacking, apparently at least in part aimed at discrediting allegations from Google Inc. last month that China was the source of sophisticated cyberattacks against the Internet search giant and numerous other foreign companies. After U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also raised concerns about hacking from China, for instance, Chinese state media said her comments were hypocritical and said Google had become a pawn in an American “ideology war.”

Developing…

Image via Wikipedia

Officials have restored access to the internet 27 Websites in Xinjiang. The province’s 20 million residents were cut off from the Web after violence erupted last July.

There are now a total of 31 sites available. Guess which ones made the list…

AFP reports:

The restored websites included official government services as well as commercial sites such as Taobao and Alibaba, and airlines and online games, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Partial access was also restored to the public discussion forums of official media such as the People’s Daily newspaper and Xinhua itself, Xinhua said.

Authorities in the Xinjiang autonomous region wanted to re-establish communication links “progressively,” following the recent reinstatement of long-distance phone calls and mobile phone text messaging to phones within the country, Xinhua said.

Far West China, an English blog covering the region,  suspects the government’s strategy is to restore Web access slowly, piece by piece, to prevent this from becoming news.

I believe China is strategically opening small parts of the internet and making headline news out of each event knowing full-well that the international media’s attention span won’t keep up. We’re already getting bored. 27 more sites are opened in Xinjiang today, 50 more next week…who cares?

Meanwhile the flow of information is being strictly controlled and authorities still take the opportunity to declare a state of freedom on the internet.