The brief outage of the Great Firewall which took place at the beginning of January and allowed Chinese netizens to freely access banned Web sites - many foreign websites like YouTube, Facebook, Blogger or Picasa were blocked at the end of 2008 as a part of an anti-pornography campaign - is a reminder of the strong lid that the government maintains over the Internet in China.

That said, in spite of the sophisticated systems put in place by the government, some netizens are still able to use some of the banned communication media. There is no better example than Chen Yunfei, a writer and activist, who on New Year’s eve twitted from a policy station in Chengdu where is was held.  

In other words, not everybody is moving from the Web 2.0 to 3.0 at the same speed. Some countries - China housing for now and the foreseeable future the largest number of netizens in the world - actually seem to go backwards or at least sideways. Whether or not this will prevent citizens to communicate is another question: according to a report from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) among the top 77 incident that attracted wide attention in Chinese society, in 30% of the cases it was postings on the web that attracted great popular attention to the incidents.

1. Money is not a problem
2. What brother is smoking is not a cigarette, but loneliness!
3. Jia Junpeng - your mother wants you to go home to have some food
4. Life is like a tea table - with bitter cups placed all over it
5. Don’t be obsessed with brother - He is only a legend
6. My debts of gratitude have been repaid with my body
7. What makes you unhappy - Tell us to make us happy
8. You are left behind the times
9. Lei Feng does good without seeking recognition, but he records everything in his diary
10. This matter cannot be explained in detail

Explanations for these phrases can be found at: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20091230_1.htm

Chinese netizens are once again getting together to publicize a case of injustice involving wrong-doing government officials. In 2003 there was the Sun  Zhigang case - millions of Chinese netizens became involved in a national conversation - while Yang Jia became famous for killing six police officers in 2008.

This time the case is about a waitress in Hubei Province who stabbed an official to death and injured another in resisting their sexual advances. Deng Yujiao is being turned out into a national hero because she killed a presumably corrupt and certainly licentious official but also because she defended herself and her honor.

The reaction of support from the Chinese society is somewhat a reminder of “All Men Are Brothers”, a 12th century book of tales about 108 outlaws who outwit greedy, abusive officials.

An interesting report was released a few months ago in the framework of  the EU-China Information Society project.

The report compares data protection experiences in Europe and in China and is interesting in many regards. First because a number of central themes (e.g. principles, rules, scope and definition of data protection) are looked at from the European perspective and have recommendation from both sides, thus highlighting the differenct views.

For example, in Europe, data protection is about finding a balance between protecting human rights, and in particular information and allowing the free flow of personal data between the EU Member States. In China, there is still the need to define “personal data” - there is currently no personal data protection or privacy law in China, except a draft which was said to be out from a few years ago.

A new report by the National Labor Committee depicts the harsh conditions of Chinese workers who assemble the machines we are working from… that is if you are using keyboards and other peripherals from HP, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft or IBM.

The study was conducted in a factory - Meitai Plastics & Electronics - located in the South of China and employing 2000 workers. The statistics are rather appalling: workers sit on hard woodenstools twelve hours a day, seven days a week as 500 computer keyboards an hour move down the assembly line or one every 7.2 seconds. They are allowed 1.1 seconds to snap each key into place, repeating the same operation 3,250 times an hour, 35,750 times a day, 250,250 times a week and over one million times a month….

A number of NGOs across the world have been shedding light on this issue for the past few years. Isn’t it time for us consumers to ask for corporate social responsiblity to be globalized?

Remember Remember Jing Jing and Cha Cha?

They are the visible face of China’s Internet police force - estimates put the number of Internet officers patrolling the Chinese web at 30′000. The two characters even have separate websites: one for Jingjing and one for Chacha. One can even chat with the characters. The municipality of Beijing has implemented a similar scheme in 2007. In the latter version, the characters appear every half hour on 13 of China’s top web portals.

The idea behind the ”patrol” is to remind netizens that the Internet is not a place beyond law, something that applies to all countries. News are that China has already been exporting its skills to Bangladesh! Care to join the force?

China is working on wireless local number portability (WLNP) with the objective to roll out the new policy as early as 2009. Trials are already under way in Shenzhen and Tianjin. Experience has shown us that asymmetrical regulatory measures are usually needed to balance telecommunication operators and reduce market control of dominant/incumbent  operators.

Unfortunately they are not always as effective as expected. Only about 8% of customers said they would use WLNP service, according to an internal survey of operators. The low percentage is not surprising. It actually mirrors empirical studies. For example, in the Korean mobile market subscribers kept perceiving the switching barrier as high, hence discouraging them from switching carriers. Moreover carriers develop new subscriber lock-in strategies that make them stay with current carriers. In addition, there is a technical issue since some handsets may be incompatible with other networks (GSM, CDMA). Finally, some scholars have argued that under WLNP number prefix has no indicative power, thus reducing the level of information available to consumers.

P.S.: There is evidence that number portability has improved competition in the market (e.g. in the USA) despite the perception gap

It was not so long ago that the portrayal of the “other” China was the monopoloy of the odd-foreign journalist braving local authorities and self-censorship to cover sensitive topics (like Tibet, AIDS villages, public demonstrations, etc.).

YouTube (and the other video sharing websites) coupled with blogs are fundamentally altering this. Chinese netizens are posting increasingly daring comments on blogs (e.g. the Weng’An riot). They are also posting more and more videos (easily made with cellphones) on the Internet (e.g. the beating up of villagers by the village head together with a group of thugs as they refuse to leave their homes which will be demolished for a construction project - please note that the images are crude).

This is of course giving plenty of additional work to the Chinese cyber-police… at least for sites hosted within China.

The State Council (China’s top executive agency) launched an online mouring campaign: as part of three day mourning period related to the Sichuan earthquake, ALL websites were ordered to take down entertainment and game sections and to redirect to ones dedicated to commemorating earthquake victims. Some of the largest portals (Sina, Netease) immediately followed, re-directing frontpage entertainement.

In a sense, this reflects what is happening in other broadcasting media. For instance all TV stations suspended normal programming and only broadcast CCTV programs. Public entertainment will not be allowed either for the next 3 days.