Online encyclopedia closes in China Internet crackdown

by Verna Yu Thu Aug 10, 7:19 AM ET

BEIJING (AFP) - A Chinese online encyclopedia has closed down due to government pressure as China continues to crack down on Internet information it sees as dangerous, an international rights group has said.

e-Wiki, a collaborative Internet encyclopedia modelled on the hugely successful
Wikipedia, closed itself down in late July, Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

e-Wiki decided to close under government pressure after it called Taiwan the "Republic of China" and posted information on James Lung, a Hong Kong activist who is close to the banned Falungong movement, the press watchdog said.

Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province awaiting reunification, and Falungong are two extremely sensitive issues for the nation's Communist Party rulers.
"It is regrettable that government threats forced e-Wiki's editor to censor himself," Reporters Without Borders said on Thursday.

"We understand that he felt in danger in the current context, as the authorities have significantly stepped up their control over online publications."

A notice on e-Wiki's now otherwise non-functioning website appeared to confirm the media watchdog's assertions.

"We all aspire to freedom, but we live in the embrace of the motherland so we have to be subjected to relevant restraints and cannot cause trouble for others," the notice said.

"e-Wiki has temporarily shut down and we apologize for the inconvenience."
Wikipedia has been blocked in China since late 2005, although a similar but heavily censored online encyclopedia was launched by popular Chinese web portal Baidu this year.

The Chinese-language version of Wikipedia, which relies on voluntary users and contributors, was enjoying soaring popularity until Beijing blocked access to the site.

The report that e-Wiki had closed down came as US-based Human Rights Watch called on the United States and Europe to introduce laws to stop Yahoo, Google and other Western companies helping China censor the Internet.

In a 149-page report Human Rights Watch documented how some of the world's major Internet companies had a hand in stifling online free speech by helping China's "Great Firewall" become more effective.

"China's system of Internet censorship and surveillance is the most advanced in the world," the report said.

"This system is also aided by extensive corporate and private-sector cooperation, including by some of the world's major international technology and Internet companies."

Human Rights Watch said laws were needed to "end this race to the bottom and establish a level playing field so that the Chinese government can't pick off companies one by one."

Last month 14 human rights groups urged the US Congress to pass legislation aimed at punishing US technology companies for cooperating with China over online censorship.

In response to the report, Alibaba.com, an e-commerce firm which owns Yahoo China, said Internet companies operating in China were having a positive influence.

"What should not be lost in the debate outside China is that Internet companies inside China are having an overwhelmingly positive effect on the lives of ordinary Chinese," a statement said.

The government maintains a tight grip over information flow on the Internet, fearing it could sow the seeds of thoughts and ideas it regards as dangerous.

Reporters Without Borders ranks China 159th on a list of 167 countries in its global press freedom index and describes the Chinese government as an "enemy" of the Internet.

China's censors shine spotlight on karaoke

August 7, 2006

BEIJING: With their control over newspapers, television, magazines and the internet secure, censors in China are now turning their attention to the nation's karaoke parlours.

The Ministry of Culture has issued new rules to prevent "unhealthy" songs from ringing forth in the sing-along bars, and to safeguard intellectual property rights.
The Government has picked three cities, Wuhan, Zhengzhou and Qingdao, to test the program, under which member businesses will choose songs from a central database. If successful, the program may go nationwide.

"All the songs in the database for use by karaoke parlours and consumers need to be censored" to ensure content meets government standards, Liang Gang, from the Ministry of Culture, told state media.

Media analysts said Beijing's karaoke initiative was aimed at wiping out songs with sexual or vaguely political lyrics or those that seeped across the border from Taiwan and Hong Kong bearing foreign slang.

"It would really bother me if I wasn't allowed to sing a song I liked," said Song Zhu, an 18-year-old student, standing in front of the Cash Box karaoke parlour in Beijing. "I'd be especially peeved if I'd practised and got really good at it."
Tens of millions of Chinese sing in karaoke establishments each year in a multibillion-dollar industry.

At $US6 ($7.80) for a private sound room at Cash Box for an entire weekday evening, this form of entertainment is affordable to many workers and students, as well as to wealthier business people.

Tao Wei, who produces youth-related plays and films for the Government, said: "I think it's a policy to control content, but also to control who gets the money. If a new song wants to enter the system, you have to pay and the Government gets the proceeds."

China's 'Justice' System

By Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times
June 18, 2006

With President Bush on the ropes, the most important person in the world right now may well be President Hu Jintao, as he presides over 1.3 billion people and the rise of China.

But while China is one of the great successes on the world scene, Mr. Hu increasingly looks like a loser.

He has disappointed many Chinese intellectuals and Communist Party officials with his Brezhnevian approach to political reform. Former President Jiang Zemin and former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji are among the party officials who are said by insiders to be unhappy with Mr. Hu's reign.

Mr. Hu has a brilliant mind and is pragmatic in economics and diplomacy, managing both well. But in politics he has been a throwback to the ideologues of the past (like his own patron, Song Ping), and he has attempted to tug China backward by clamping down on the news media, law, religion and the Internet.

China now imprisons some 32 journalists, more than any country in the world. A religious crackdown has led to underground Christians being arrested and sometimes tortured, particularly in rural areas. And China has tried harder than almost any country to neuter the Internet by filtering out obscene words like "human rights."
And yes, it is personal. I spent Friday outside the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court, as a New York Times colleague, Zhao Yan, was enduring a farcical secret trial on Mr. Hu's orders. Mr. Zhao, a researcher in The Times's Beijing bureau, has already been imprisoned virtually incommunicado for the last 22 months, and he may now face a decade or more in prison.

I was allowed into the courthouse by mistake — I drove through the gate with two colleagues, and nobody stopped us when we walked in — and it's a gorgeous building with more magnificent courtrooms than I've ever seen in the U.S. But the courthouse was mostly empty, and finally we found out why: people aren't allowed in the People's Court. A group of indignant plainclothes police officers swarmed in and herded us outside.

The courthouse is a perfect symbol of Mr. Hu's vision of China today: a dazzling building with lavish facilities, but empty in every sense. It's all infrastructure, no software. It's as if Mr. Hu thinks that building a modern judicial system is about high ceilings and padded seats rather than about laws and justice.

The trial was conducted in secret, and we didn't even get a glimpse of Mr. Zhao. The trial ended in one day without a single witness giving testimony for either side. The verdict will be handed down soon, and it's almost a foregone conclusion that Mr. Zhao will be sent to prison for a long sentence.

This case originally arose after Mr. Hu was irritated by a scoop by The Times's Beijing bureau chief, Joseph Kahn, and ordered that the leaker be punished. The State Security authorities couldn't find the real source, so they arrested Mr. Zhao instead because they didn't like his reporting about rural unrest.

I'm still a believer in China, partly because Mr. Hu and his aides have managed the economy so well. Mr. Hu has also done well in canceling the agriculture tax and taking other measures to try to address the destabilizing income gaps in China (there, 1 percent of the population now controls 60 percent of the wealth, whereas in the U.S., 5 percent controls 60 percent of the wealth).

Yet ultimately, Mr. Hu's efforts to create stability by clamping down just risk more instability. Most Chinese don't want upheavals, but they are fed up with corruption and lies, with being blocked from Google and Wikipedia, with having to waste time studying political drivel like Mr. Hu's "Eight Honorables and Eight Shames" campaign. Wags call it "Hu shuo ba dao," a clever pun that translates as "utter nonsense."

Indeed, Mr. Hu's crackdown has been singularly ineffective, annoying people more than scaring them. Many Communist Party officials worry that crackdowns just anger and alienate the public; that is why some have talked of allowing people to let off steam through greater freedom of the press and more elections. In one province, a poll found that 85 percent of officials themselves wanted to speed up political reform.

But Mr. Hu seems paralyzed, altogether the weakest Chinese leader since Hua Guofeng in the 1970's. The result? Brace yourself for turbulence ahead in China.

China to censor online videos

BEIJING (AFP) - Online videos, an increasingly popular form of independent media, will face new censorship restrictions in China, state media said.
Websites which broadcast short films will need approval from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television when regulations are issued in late August or September, Xinhua news agency said.

Only the well-known Chinese-language portals -- Sina, Sohu and Netease -- have been pre-approved by the administration as authorized providers of online videos.

The shorts, often parodies of classic movies or events in everyday life, have quickly grown in popularity on the Internet in China as elsewhere around the world.

However they have stirred controversy in China about morality and intellectual property rights protection, Xinhua said.

In one case deemed controversial by authorities, a 10-minute video used clips from a 1974 patriotic film about the Chinese revolution, "Sparkling Red Star". But it converted the heroic boy in the movie to a would-be pop star who competes in a television singing contest.

The parody also substitutes the evil landowner who brutally exploited tenants to a foolish judge taking backdoor bribes, and changes the boy's father from a Red Army soldier to a Beijing real estate tycoon.

The video attracted millions of clicks, Xinhua said.

Another online prankster, Hu Ge, unexpectedly became famous after posting a parody of famed Chinese director Chen Kaige's latest epic "The Promise" on a website this year. Chen threatened to sue Hu.

Some commentators believe satire should not go too far and the distortion of heroes and China's revolutionary history is immoral and unacceptable, according to Xinhua.

The move is likely to be seen in the West as another attempt by Communist Party rulers to stifle free expression and control the flow of information on the Internet.

International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranks China 159th on a list of 167 countries in its global press freedom index and describes its government as an "enemy" of the Internet.

谣言一则: GOOGLE助日本隐瞒真相？

这谣言实在可笑的不值一驳。
只可惜一些网民的素质太低，缺少基本的网络知识，被蒙蔽利用了还自以为爱国。
我不厚道地揣测幕后有百度的影子。
以下是这则谣言的内容：

以下是在QQ群上看到的一则消息，最初以为是开玩笑，试了一次却发现事实如此，我不知道这是为什么，请各位来分析一下：

您使用googLe吗？？网友新发现！ 我不喜欢废话，只举个例子，大家一试便知！
请大家打开GOOGLE首页，搜索"南京大屠杀"或"钓鱼岛"，你们自己看看能搜出结果吗？出现的无非是："该页无法显示"的提示，而且在以后的短时间内，你将不能使用GOOGLE进行搜索。
但是如果你搜索"尖阁列岛"(即我中国钓鱼岛的鬼子叫法)，就可以搜到结果。 这摆明是对我中华人民共和国，对所有华夏儿女的蔑视！
丑恶的美国鬼子企图从互联网上对我国进行信息封锁！用心极其险恶！
请大家亲身实验一下，如果我说的对，就转发一下，让所有中国人都知道！坚决抵制googLe，把googLe赶出中国！ 我自己验证www.google.com确实不能搜索南京大屠杀，并且导致一段时间内无法登陆www.google.com ...