China's Internet Boom, Games, Addiction & other news

I too am against the practice of censorship in China, but it is not because I believe in such vague concept as "freedom". After all, who's the ultimate authority to decide what's free and what's not anyway? Rather, my view on censorship is that it is the wrong way of approaching a media war. China should stop putting its head in the sand and starts studying how anti-China/anti-Chinese organizations conduct their propaganda.

It saddens me to see that China's propaganda department still hasn't learn much from the lessons of 2008 Tibetan Riots and the 2009 Xinjiang Violence. Need to defame others without evidences? Start learning from the US; need to portray itself as the most victimized group on the planet? Go take a class from Dalai Lama. Need to ensure 100% loyalty from your own citizens? Go look at how FLG ensures 100% loyalty from their followers. This is war -- a war of words, and those working in China's propaganda department should wake up and realize that a war is happening right now and it isn't going to be won by a purely defensive stance.

Now to Google. Some here believes in Internet freedom -- assuming it means free flow of information. Good, all the more power to you then. But putting Google in a good light simply because censorship is bad is not sound at all, and contradicts your very own "two wrongs don't make one right" argument. China's censorship being bad is one thing, but that doesn't mean Google can just disagree and ignore the law. Giving the benefit of the doubt for Google here that it has no ulterior motive, Google is like a very rich person having done some charitable acts. Now, does that mean the person should just go smoke in a no-smoking zone because he disagrees with the law? Should the person drink-and-drive just because he thinks the law violates his freedom? Should he be racist because he believes it is his freedom to do so? No! And so it is not justifiable for Google to break Chinese law, because regardless of whether one agrees with it, Chinese law is still law.

Lol. That's really funny.

Inframan, your argument goes like this.

You don't like Richard Gere. Let's ban the entire IDMB website because of him. Its right to do this because Gere is a stinker anyway.

If you don't like Bill O'Reilly, let's ban the entire Fox Network.

If you don't like Howard Stern, let's ban the entire Sirius XM network.

That's basically how the Chinese censorship operates.

I don't know if the Tienanmen "Tank Man" picture is banned. Let's assumed that it was, and I believe it is banned. Let's say, a website like Sinodefence uses the Tank Man picture in the entry for one the T-54/55 or T-80 tank just to say the tank used in this famous picture is an example of this model. SD gets banned in China just because of this picture but without telling you why. You get lumped with all the extremists, activists, splitists and separatists and all the rest.

Heavy handed behavior extends to YouTube. Someone uploaded a video of the Tibetan related uprising and the entire site gets banned. If someone uploads an app about the Dalai Lama or a pro-Dalai Lama song into iTunes, the entire iTunes gets banned. By the way, IMDB isn't banned because Hollywood is corrupt since it wasn't banned before until two days ago. Someone uploaded something that the censors didn't like and the entire site gets banned.

All your rants now are like this---so typical: You refuse to see what's wrong with China now by continuing to point out its US government, Google, US corporations and Hollywood that is as corrupt---never mind, that Chinese government, corporations, movies, and its own Hollywood does steal and does everything much of the same. In other words, you justify evil because others do evil. That's hypocrisy.

Wow, you talk about lecturing about corporations like they're evil. Don't forget that China has some of the biggest corporations now. Its entire government acts much like a corporation too, with similar structures---Chairman, CEO, board and stockholders (the Party). Corporatism or rather State Corporatism is much stronger in China than it is in the US. Feel free to talk about entire districts, villages, towns being demolished to make way for infrastructure, like office buildings that are never fully occupied anyway, or the inability to implement pollution controls and ecological measures.

Yes, I compare Russia to China. They're an authoritarian state that clamps down here and there as well. Yet they got nothing to fear from the Internet, like Facebook while Chinese censor bureaucrats does. By the way, what's Russian nuclear arsenal related to facing Facebook anyway? So you're saying Russians are not afraid of Facebook because of their Nukes?

Google is not Hollywood, nor the US government. Yes, it is a US corporation, though one that is run mainly by geeks. In the center of Google is an algorithm---a machine---that sees no difference what is left, what is right, what is center, what is communism, socialism, capitalism. Its a freaking machine that treats everything equally. You ask a question, you get a result. That's all there is to it, but Chinese government doesn't even see that as right, because you have to tilt things to sound favorable to them. How can you teach machine politics? How would a computer know first hand if the person starting an email account is a right wing, left wing, Tibetan splittist, Taiwan separatist, blah blah blah.

The problem is that Chinese law is not quite as well defined. Where do you set the boundary? What is pornography and what is art? What constitutes as politically acceptable or correct and what is deemed seditious? Chinese authorities appear to use these measures arbitrarily, subjectively, and as a whim. Constantly shifting the boundary without some hard empirical rule.

By the way, Google has not broken Chinese law. What they are saying is that the trends of intensifying censorship continues, they will move their servers out. They didn't really say they're leaving China. Microsoft by the way, doesn't even have its search engine in China; Bing is outside of China and they got no plans of bringing them in. At least Google has made that effort to bring its servers inside China and try to localize the results as possible. For that, they still have a hefty 30 to 40% of the market that's worth 600 million US dollars in revenues. Bing's share of the Chinese market is like maybe 3% only.

Google machine algorithm just does what it does. So it displays some results. Who arbitrarily decides if those sites are porno or not? Some bureaucrat decides by whim, its porn. The entire search site gets blocked. Please note Bing has been bad in filtering out porn results until recently.

So yes, you cannot do business in an environment where bureaucrats alter the bar for the rules at whim here and there arbitrarily, often without warning. Maybe Baidu responds to such changes because of advanced inside information but that seriously disadvantages investing foreign companies to suggest the only way you can be competitive and viable in this country is to have inside connection to the ministries.

And yes, you get spied at all the time. But here you are the foreigner coming to live on the neighborhood, and the authorities take extra measures in spying on you while not on the natives. You honestly want to live on that situation? Yes, you came to invest and seek opportunities in the local markets, you can suck up all the spying but that is up to a point, especially if the local government is the one saying and enticing foreign investment to the local community and is not living up its side of the table protecting foreign investors. Seriously, that must have been a frightening attempt in breaching corporate security. You don't come to the area as a guess to invest and expect your secrets stolen away. Nor do you expect that the information people entrusted to you, confidentiality of the email box, should be broken otherwise, people won't do business with you. That will be like banks being forced to give up the account numbers of their clients or forcing Catholic priests to testify what their people confessed to them in the confessional.

I don't support censorship, privacy violations, and attempts at monopolies from Hollywood, from Google, from any corporation, from China's government, and from the US government.

Crobato talked about Russia's Internet freedoms better than China's Internet freedoms. I don't know much about Russia, so I'll listen to what other people have to say. Nonetheless, Russians are restricted to 2 fundamental options: nuclear weapons and carbon-based fuel reserves. Without the two, Russia might be in chaos or in even worse condition than today. If you call chaos freedom, then go ahead, but I don't consider chaos to be freedom.

Some people believe a RICH KID who eats all the candy and junk food she wants is more free than a POOR KID who is forced by her parents to eat balanced meals. I disagree. Freedom has to be refined by intelligence and self-control, or else freedom leads to poor decisions which leads to degradation.

It's bad enough Chinese people have an oppressive government. What's worse is a foreign company masquerading as a liberator further oppressing Chinese people. If Google was really the good guy, if the Jewish founder was really a good guy, then they would have directed their attentions at far more pressing issues (Israel's atrocious oppression of Palestine, India's far worse poverty problems, Brazil's horrible crime rate and poverty problems, Google working with the US government to spy on people, etc.). If Google really wanted to help China, instead of expanding Google's bottom line and influence, then Google should have gradually teamed up with increasingly more Chinese to improve China's information freedom. Now that's real people power.

I know Chinese American businesspeople who run their businesses in China while operating schools and training facilities. Some of them have to run businesses while opening schools/training facilities, because they are forced to by the Chinese government. They even help Chinese people travel around the world for education and training. Once again, the Chinese government forces some of these Chinese American businesspeople to send Chinese abroad for education and training. That is empowering the Chinese people and liberating the Chinese people.

Unlike Google, these Chinese American businesspeople don't throw temper tantrums about lacking enough power to liberate China like Google. These Chinese American businesspeople complain about Chinese people's problems and China's government's problems, but they do their best to get everyone on their team. They have been successfully hammering away at China's problems for at least a decade now. I don't see the US corporate media highlighting these real heroes. I see the US corporate media and Google promoting false heroes who boost their wealth and influence.

The key is that the Chinese people, the American people, and everyone else are in control of their very own destiny.

crobato said:

Not being able to compete with Baidu? Last few months showed Google kicking.

Google's share actually reached a high as 46% of the Chinese market as of last December. On mobile search as in doing searches from wireless, Google's share is about equal as Baidu.

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Can you please provide a source for this? So far I haven't seen a number quoted as this high

Seems like any Chinese activist can be labeled as a Tibetan extremist or activist. Its still not the point. The attacks targeted gmail. That goes right to the very heart of the company---trust.

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And what proportion of gmail accounts compromised were "human rights activists"? Was it really targeted or it just so happened that it included some politically useful people?

Google used their own hackers to track down the servers involved in the hacks. At least 20 companies were hacked, including Cisco. The gmail attacks may have been coverup, and that the attacks were not really after Chinese activists or Tibetan extremists but to obtain code on key technologies. iDefense, Symantec, McAfee, and Juniper now involved in the investigation. The attacks proved to be very sophisticated, pointing to a state sponsored operation, or (perhaps in the West, people don't know the magnitude and skill of the hacker cults in China). Obama adminstration hesitant at first due to the lack of concrete evidence, but now appears it has enough to send a formal protest.

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They still have no proof. The command and control servers are in Taiwan. It is just as likely that it is industrial espionage by entities in Taiwan. They just happened to also breach some human rights activists' accounts in the process, and this is used as an excuse to finger China.

The real issue is the Great Firewall. You think the GFW is benefiting China and the Chinese Internet user? By turning the Chinese web you are creating an intranet and cutting yourself off to the rest of the world. With isolationism, you start your own path of stagnation, kind of like the way Japanese Shogun cut Japan off from the rest of the world. Think of what happened to Japan's mobile industry once they created their own national intranets---they became irrelevant to the rest of the world.

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The issue of the GFW was purposely made an issue by google out of the hacking. There is no logical link between these two things. This point I want to emphasize so I will write it again: There is no logical link between these two things. I am astounded that people swallow this as if there is no problem. It's like saying the US sold me some bugged 747s so US cyber monitoring is bad and we should get rid of it. The hack attacks were just a convenient media splash to bring attention to the latest US push to get rid of censorship in China, so it has a free and open channel to propagandize and destabilize.

The problem of GFW is that it cuts off Chinese expression to the rest of the world. Chinese people themselves cannot defend or correct and express their viewpoints to the world as well.

I mean, what's the point of censuring Facebook, Twitter, IMDB, etc,. The Russians are running a defacto authoritarian government too, and they're not blocking Facebook, heck they're made some big investments on it.

Open, peer to peer exchange of information is vital to the Internet. Even this boosts personal productivity and GDP. There are two forces in China running headlong against each other; the outflow of information brought about by technology changes and creation, often by China's own technological industries, and those who want to police and control this outflow, inevitably to the long term detriment of those industries.

Point is, the policing has reached ridiculous proportions in China. You got a bureaucracy out of control. Even SMS messages are being monitored.

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Yes yes, we've all heard the arguments against censorship again and again. But after the riots in Xin Jiang, organized through the web and probably sms, there is a legitimate need to prevent these future incidents.

Ultimately, the problem is that google reports to the US's alphabet agencies, as seen by the intercept system. Will google share the intercepts with Chinese authorities? The Chinese government has no power to demand any information from google. It is outside Chinese sovereignty. From the Chinese government's perspective, why allow this when you can foster local companies which are within your sovereignty?

An issue with the current internet is that it is transnational, which makes enforcement of national laws difficult, especially when you have ideological differences which promote foreign parties to break laws. Just take the on-line gambling fiasco between the US and Britain as a relatively tame example. Plus, the recent examples of on-line organized protests show that the internet can be a political weapon for destabilizing and maybe even toppling governments. These are genuine concerns of some of the internet's stakeholders which must be addressed before "free flow of information" is viable. So far, the US and many people have been only able to see their own perspective as the possibly correct one, without any regard to other nation's or people's concerns on the issue. The US can afford to do this because it is the top dog, it can come down hard on things that violate its own sensibilities (gambling, software piracy, radical Islamic websites, etc). It can make the rules and force others to accept them. Of course, other nations will not take this with a smile, hence the proliferation of national firewalls. This is just the latest in a long history of ideologically sticking the US's nose where it does not belong. My, the tyranny of good intentions.

crobato said:

Lol. That's really funny.

Inframan, your argument goes like this.

You don't like Richard Gere. Let's ban the entire IDMB website because of him. Its right to do this because Gere is a stinker anyway.

If you don't like Bill O'Reilly, let's ban the entire Fox Network.

If you don't like Howard Stern, let's ban the entire Sirius XM network.

That's basically how the Chinese censorship operates.

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Yes, I agree that the GFW needs more sophistication.

I don't know if the Tienanmen "Tank Man" picture is banned.

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Actually, spelling it wrong is one of the ways to get past the simple filter.

Heavy handed behavior extends to YouTube. Someone uploaded a video of the Tibetan related uprising and the entire site gets banned. If someone uploads an app about the Dalai Lama or a pro-Dalai Lama song into iTunes, the entire iTunes gets banned. By the way, IMDB isn't banned because Hollywood is corrupt since it wasn't banned before until two days ago. Someone uploaded something that the censors didn't like and the entire site gets banned.

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The problem with sites that work on user-generated content is that it becomes too big to be policed by people, and difficult to police algorithmically. Plus, China cannot request a change in youtube's policies about acceptable videos. It can with local video sharing websites. Thus, youtube is out. This is just pragmatism and protectionism.

All your rants now are like this---so typical:

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To characterize someone's writing as rants is to insult their intelligence.

Google is not Hollywood, nor the US government. Yes, it is a US corporation, though one that is run mainly by geeks.

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With close ties with the US government. google leaders were part of the guest list to Sec. State Clinton's recent meeting about the new cyber freedom initiative that will be announced by Jan 21. google is clearly complicit in US geopolitical maneuvering.

In the center of Google is an algorithm---a machine---that sees no difference what is left, what is right, what is center, what is communism, socialism, capitalism. Its a freaking machine that treats everything equally. You ask a question, you get a result.

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I disagree. Google censors websites which may have child pornographic or copyright violating material. It is not just a blind search engine. But of course, this type of censoring is okay, because it doesn't violate the sensitivities of its main customer base.

Also, google's page rank system has never been made public. Thus, there is no way to prove there is no bias in the system.

A few years back simple tricks could significantly game the page rank, and even today, there are marketing companies who offer services in promoting page rank. So even if there is no in-built bias, organizations and individuals can work to bias it. I presume the US government can bias it quite well, through fiat or subterfuge.

The problem is that Chinese law is not quite as well defined. Where do you set the boundary? What is pornography and what is art? What constitutes as politically acceptable or correct and what is deemed seditious? Chinese authorities appear to use these measures arbitrarily, subjectively, and as a whim. Constantly shifting the boundary without some hard empirical rule.

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From another perspective, this is a strength. It is flexible and adaptable to the current political climate. When foreign powers stop threatening China with destabilization, stop supporting separatist movements, stop promoting the China threat and China containment agendas, then there would be less need for censorship and it can decrease without having to pass a law.

By the way, Google has not broken Chinese law. What they are saying is that the trends of intensifying censorship continues,

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This is false, there are snapshots of google.cn with some prohibited search results. Since then the situation has changed, probably through private discussion. However, google's infractions are well publicized (gloating, I would say), and I hope they are punished appropriately.

So yes, you cannot do business in an environment where bureaucrats alter the bar for the rules at whim here and there arbitrarily, often without warning.

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Companies which cannot adapt to China's unique characteristics are welcomed to seek fortune elsewhere. There are plenty of Chinese companies who are able to fill the void they leave.

Yes, you came to invest and seek opportunities in the local markets, you can suck up all the spying but that is up to a point, especially if the local government is the one saying and enticing foreign investment to the local community and is not living up its side of the table protecting foreign investors. Seriously, that must have been a frightening attempt in breaching corporate security.

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Again, you are condemning the government of China without proof.

pla101prc said:

then you lack the understanding of Chinese netizen's "disobedience"...of course they are only disobedient online, back in real life they are still chanting CCP slogans lol.

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Huh? I never did hint on anything about that in my previous comments. What I basically meant was that, after what the Chinese public have experienced during the riots in Tibet and Xinjiang, they are wary of the western media's true intention everytime they talk about media freedom.

Crobato, thanks for bringing contrasting viewpoints. Debates usually anger or scare people, but I enjoy debates, especially intelligent ones.

Red Mercruy, very well put. I, too, have noticed how Google says one thing but does another. I also noticed Google is working with the US government and US corporate media, and vice versa. This seems more like a massive coordinated move to expand their powers, but the pretext is how Google is really trying to empower the Chinese power (without giving Chinese people any significant power or primary power over their own Internet). I hear lots of noise from Google and the US government, but they provide ZERO actual proof they will empower the Chinese people. At the same time, they provide lots of proof they will try to dominate Chinese people.

If you read the full history of Haiti, which the US government and US corporate media attempts to hide and misreport, you'll read how US corporations, the US government, and other foreign entities liberated Haiti's economy and governmnet, but the liberation made Haiti worse off than before. So the liberation was really chaos. Like I said, out of the boiling pot and into the frying pan.

Haiti is only one example. There are more examples of fake liberations or failed liberations in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and other regions. Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Palestine are powerful examples of what happens when US corporations and the US government are allowed to do anything they want for liberation or whatever cover story.

I dislike many things about the Chinese government and Chinese people, too, but at least they ARE, without a doubt, controlling and improving their lives despite lots of interference from two-faced foreign entities. Every few years I really notice the Chinese people gaining more power over their own lives. The situation has been making failures, but, overall, it's working and improving, unlike most nations out there (even those nations receiving lots of US corporate aid and US government aid). I don't think the Chinese government and the Chinese people get enough credit for what they have accomplished, but they sure get a lot of interference (especially from certain factions).

A backgrounder:

double post

1st of the 2 interesting articles that looks at the bigger picture of Google vs China



Google and China: Silicon Valley Is No Longer King

The furor surrounding Google's bombshell announcement that it was contemplating withdrawing from business in China has centered on long-simmering issues of privacy, government control, and censorship. Google, a company whose DNA dictates that it "do no harm," is particularly well-cast in the role of defender of western values of freedom of expression and open access to information against a Chinese system that brooks no political dissent and reserves the right to forcibly prevent certain types of information ranging from political expression to porn.

But there is another story here, more prosaic but no less important to the future arc of global business and the global balance of power. Google has not been doing all that well in China, as many have noted in recent days, badly trailing the domestic Chinese search company Baidu. But it isn't just that Google has struggled. All of the New Economy western companies in the media and information business have failed to establish themselves in China. Before Google, eBay and Yahoo both made investments of years and millions upon millions of dollars to tap the fast-growing Internet generation in China, and like Google, they could not gain traction. Both companies ended up pulling the plug on their China ventures, with eBay losing out to domestic Chinese auction company Taobao, and Yahoo ceding its operations for an ownership stake in Alibaba.com (which also controls Taobao). (See the top 10 internet blunders.)

The failure of these New Economy players in China is in stark contrast to the success of brick-and-mortar companies. Consumer stars like Nike, food franchises like Kentucky Fried Chicken, industrial giants like General Electric and United Technologies, and technology behemoths ranging from Microsoft to Intel to IBM have prospered in China. In fact, mainland China has been the most impressive growth market for hundreds of global companies for the past decade. So how did Google stumble so badly?

The rap on China's growth is that there's lots of building and selling but not much innovation. In many areas of the economy, that's true — and the same could have been said for the growth of the United States at the end of the 19th century. But in the areas of media and the Internet, it isn't. There, China has a thriving culture of thirtysomething entrepreneurs, many with U.S. work experience, who are creating home-grown franchises catering to the burgeoning world of the web in China. Baidu, the rival search engine to Google, is most in the news lately; others include web portal and entertainment companies Sina and Netease; on-line, multi-user gaming company Shanda (which recently made an acquisition of an American gaming company and plans to expand to the United States); internet and mobile applications giant Tencent; and a host of others, some public, some still in start-up mode. (See the best business deals of 2009.)

These companies have a distinct advantage over foreign competitors because their founders and senior managers are part of the same elite class as the regulators who enforce the various and mostly unwritten rules of censorship. They have offices in Beijing, and they lobby the Chinese government through uncharted back channels and are in what amounts to a continuous dialogue about what is and what is not acceptable. This includes not only political censorship but morals — especially relating to porn and sex. Google may have hired its own cadre of Chinese executives but it — like Yahoo and eBay before — has always played catch-up to the more connected crowd of Chinese entrepreneurs and their companies.

Google and the Western media in general have effectively turned this imbroglio into a clash of morals. Perhaps. But it is also yet another symbol of the shifting balance of economic power globally. Other countries censor content, and not just rogue regimes such as the Iranian mullocracy. Web sites are blocked throughout the Persian Gulf and North Africa based on objectionable content and this hasn't created much of a furor. Other countries also engage in cyber espionage, especially Israel and of course the United States Government itself with the largest group of hackers in the world employed by the National Security Agency.

But China's efforts to censor and monitor the web represent a challenge to the uncontested hegemony of Western business and to the dominance of Silicon Valley in the world of new technologies. That story — of China's emergence and a burgeoning world of hungry entrepreneurs not willing to play second fiddle to America — is the backstory for the Google imbroglio and one that is about to assume center stage.

Zachary Karabell is the author of "Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends On it" (Simon & Schuster 2009) and president of River Twice Research ()

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