Blocked on Weibo

富女 (rich woman / fùnǚ) is a term for a woman with money. [Note:...

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:05:00 -0400

富女 (rich woman / fùnǚ) is a term for a woman with money. [Note: the term was blocked for most of 2012, but has been unblocked since Oct 2012.] It may refer to one who is independently wealthy due to her job, but more typically it is used derogatorily online to criticize the obscene wealth of the wives, mistresses, and daughters of rich businessmen and government officials.

Why it is blocked: The term was blocked because of a June 2011 incident involving a 富女. Twenty-year-old Guo Meimei (郭美美), who listed her job title as commercial general manager of the “China Red Cross Chamber of Commerce,” had been posting for months about her glamorous lifestyle on Weibo, which included photos of her horseback riding, flying in first class, and flaunting her prized possessions: Hermès handbags, an orange Lamborghini, and a white Maserati luxury car. When Internet users discovered her account, investigations and outrage spread throughout Weibo. Eventually, netizens identified Wang Jun, a board member at a company who organized charity drives for the official Red Cross Society of China, as perhaps being Guo’s boyfriend, and he subsequently resigned from his job. (Though some news reports claimed that the luxury cars were actually Wang’s, Guo claimed in a TV interview that Wang had gifted them to her. Further confusion was sown when Guo and her mother claimed that Wang Jun was merely a close family friend and Guo’s “godfather.”)

Chinese Red Cross officials denied any connection with Guo, though they admitted her supposed organization did exist. Netizens demanded a full accounting of where their donations had gone, and the Chinese Red Cross launched an investigation, which turned up improprieties. However, despite the thorough investigation, the Chinese Red Cross’s reputation was already seriously damaged, and donations fell by nearly 60 percent in 2011 compared to the previous year.

The Chinese Red Cross scandal was just one of a series that shook Chinese confidence in charities—which are supposed to be tightly regulated by the government. One of the most notorious occurred in the pre–social media age: in 2001, reporters uncovered vast corruption in the China Youth Development Foundation (CYDF) program Project Hope, which aimed to help impoverished children get an education. In August 2011, another rich female was ensnared in a charity scandal: twenty-four-year-old Lu Xingyu (卢星宇), the daughter of billionaire Lu Junqin (卢俊卿), was accused of extracting exorbitant management fees of over $20 million from her charity China-Africa Project Hope, another CYDF-affiliated program. Her rambling defense of the charity was lambasted by netizens. And on an individual level, actress Zhang Ziyi was accused of charity fraud and of not fulfilling donations as promised in 2010. In an interview she tearfully admitted to an oversight on her part and donated the balance of what she had pledged.

When Sichuan Province—decimated by a major earthquake in 2008—experienced more deadly tremors in April 2013, Guo Meimei’s name re-entered news stories, with her past corruption serving as a cautionary tale for anyone who sought to donate money to state charities. Chinese Red Cross was mostly shunned while private charities, including online ones run by Internet companies like Sina, flourished. More controversy erupted online when a video of Hong Kong politician Raymond Wong Yuk-man berating officials who sought to donate government money to relief efforts went viral. Wong and his strident criticism of corrupt charities and the mainland government became a trending topic on Weibo, even beating out Iron Man’s much publicized movie opening. It’s very possible that these events—all stemming from a lack of trust in state charities—would not likely have come to pass without Guo Meimei’s “efforts” as a 富女.

Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on China’s Version...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:07:00 -0400

Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on China’s Version of Twitter (And Why)

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here on this blog yet, but I’m excited to announce that a book I wrote is coming out this summer. (Above is an advance reader’s copy that my publisher The New Press shared.) It’s basically a version of this blog, also aimed at giving general readers the context for why certain topics in China are sensitive. There are over 150 entries, about a 100 of which are brand new, and the others which come from this blog are updated. You can pre-order online now at your favorite online store or you can pick it up at your local bookstore in August. As we get closer to the publication date, I’ll start posting entries from the book more regularly. Thanks to everyone for their support of this project over the past year: couldn’t have done it without you Tumblr and everyone else who follows this blog!

Weibo censors delete post of masked Mao portrait criticizing...

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 22:27:00 -0500

Weibo censors delete post of masked Mao portrait criticizing Beijing air pollution

Apparently the censors at Weibo are still quite touchy about the recent “airpocalypse” in Beijing, when the U.S. embassy’s air quality monitor seemed to go off the deep end and reported record high levels of pollution in the city back in January. The above image was found in the latest roundup at FreeWeibo, which relies in part on data from Weiboscope, a University of Hong Kong tool that checks popular Weibo feeds to see what posts have gone missing (that is, deleted/censored). Weibo posts with these images have gone missing on a number of feeds (1, 2, 3). Apparently the combination of Mao + criticism of Beijing’s air quality are a no go.

Translations:

Look at these two clever pictures! Haha. (看到两张神图！[哈哈])
Just as the great leader said: The people, only the people, are the driving force in the creation of world history. Netizens are truly gifted! So creative. (【正如伟大领袖所言：人民，只有人民，才是创造世界历史的动力！网民太有才了！太有创意了！】)
[Pitiful emoticon] [可怜]

Update 3/11: An anonymous tipster writes in to remind that The Economist ran a cover during the 2003 SARS crisis with Mao wearing a surgical mask. He notes that “the China chief was called in to the responsible party official, and told that ‘the highest levels’ of government were very displeased. Turns out it wasn’t because of the surgical mask, but because The Economist was using Mao to represent China.”

Where do Weibo users live? City and provincial breakdown of various Chinese Internet statistics

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 06:54:00 -0500

They live in Guangdong (well, many of them do at least):

Some background: Now that I finally got around to playing with Weibo’s API, I’ve been collecting (you might call it hoarding…) a lot of fun data. I’m currently engrossed in this dataset I’ve developed of anti-Japanese comments and I’ve been doing a lot of spatial analysis—all of which is only possible because Weibo neatly provides a wealth of detailed location data included with every post/comment. Whereas Twitter offers whatever location a user supplies (“In your head”; “Your mom’s house”) along with a time zone (geo-coordinates and detailed location info are only available on a tiny percentage of tweets), Weibo’s API neatly gives you every user’s province, city code, and chosen location. The options are selected, not filled-in, so the data is super clean and crisp (well, outside of people who lie about their location).

Thus, seeing as it might be helpful for my other projects to know where Weibo users are blogging from (or at least say they are), I conducted a data expedition, grabbing the latest 200 posts from Weibo every five minutes for one full week. After discarding repeat messages (Weibo’s API doesn’t guarantee the posts are the absolute most recent, though for the most part, the majority of the posts matched my download date-time), I came up with a sample of 283,109 unique users, 236,611 of whom live in mainland China and which I used to generate the map above and chart below (this whole exercise was basically an excuse to show off some of Google’s super easy-to-use Fusion tables and an unnecessary distraction to my thesis writing, sigh).

direct link

The above map doesn’t differ too much from the information which others have already collected. For instance, Tech in Asia summarized a report last year that showed largely the same breakdown, albeit in less detail:

Obviously Guangdong is the primary source of all Weibo posts, but now we can put a number to it: roughly 23% of all Weibo posts come from there, which extrapolated across 400 million Weibo users (caveats about bots and inactive users of course), comes to over 90 million users.

However, is Sina’s Guangdong-centric userbase that totally out of line? For this, we can compare it against a number of Chinese statistics on Internet usage. First, let’s look at population: according to China’s 2011 Statistical Yearbook (which is out best source for now until China releases its 2010 census), Guangdong’s population as of 2010 year-end was 7.83% of China’s total population. Here’s a map of the other provinces which show the greatest differential between percentage of Sina users in my sample and their share of national population:

Guangdong and Beijing soak up most of the bright green, but out west, Tibetan netizens have adopted Weibo much more widely than their neighbors, with their estimated Weibo share roughly in line with their population. Guangdong leads the pack in raw percentage point difference—with each percentage point difference representing roughly an additional 5 million more or less Sina Weibo users than expected (if you’re interested in relative difference, scroll to end of above chart). Shandong (CN-37 in the map; see the chart if you don’t know your Chinese province codes), which lags the pack at -3.76% points difference between their estimated share of Sina users and their share of the national population, likely has 15 million less Weibo users than would expected, which is surprising considering Shandong, as a whole, isn’t particularly poor, with a GDP roughly in the middle of the group.

We can look at other statistics to see whether Shandong citizens’ reluctance to adopt Sina Weibo is driven by non-Weibo reasons. For instance, places where lots of folks don’t have Internet service might be a hindrance toward Weibo adoption (duh). For Internet access measures, CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) releases a bi-annual report on Internet usage in China. Their year-end report looks particularly good, with solid sample sizes and broad reach. I’ve included the past 3 years of CNNIC’s Internet user breakdown in my chart above (I manually generated the Dec 2010 Internet penetration number, which was not reported by CNNIC). From there, we can do the same check: which provinces have a percentage of Weibo users that is more or less than reported Internet users?

While most other folks fall roughly in line with the CNNIC Internet stats—Guangdong, Beijing, and Shanghai are the clear outliers on the positive side—Shandong is joined by Hebei as laggards in terms of Weibo adoption according to this measure.

One final provincial metric: the China City Statistical Yearbook also reports numbers of households with “international” Internet connections at the city/prefecture level (thanks to Zhang Haihui for cluing me in onto the source). China Data doesn’t have the most recent editions, but if you search around online, you can dig up some nice pirated copies. The data looks a but iffy—whoever is reporting data from Shanghai clearly has a very different idea of what an Internet household is, with numbers that are greater than their total population for several years running—but it’s the only official city-level breakdown of Internet usage that I’ve seen (please do let me know if you know of others). So after adjusting Shanghai, Chongqing, and Fujian’s numbers to match their CNNIC provincial shares (I thought about dropping them altogether, but that inflates everyone else’s numbers), you have column AE above, which doesn’t differ too much from what we’ve shown thus far, except perhaps Liaoning’s rather high household Internet connection rate according to the City Yearbook makes it appear to be less connected to Weibo than expected.

Before we go on to the city-level breakdown, here’s a map of Weibo’s international users (I told you this was all just an excuse to show off some Google tools):

Takeaway? USA for the win—though the scant 48 people posting from India are notable. For a neighbor with a giant population and an avowed interest in engaging China, India doesn’t seem to have caught the Weibo bug. Then again, the Chinese population in India is tiny, roughly the same size as that in Italy or Laos. But—then then again—there are less Chinese in Brazil, and yet, Brazilians outnumber Indians 2:1 in my sample. But then then then again, these are relatively small numbers. But then then then then again, the sample size is huge, and if I were the kind of person who carried around stats tables, I might be able to tell you how super confident I am in these numbers.

Now for the city breakdown (click here to open it in a new window if you don’t want to scroll up and click on the third, fourth, or fifth sheets). Sheet 4, “CityStats,” reflects the 2011 China City Statistical Yearbook data for households with Internet that I mentioned previously. “WeiboByCity” is the location data I pulled from my sample, broken down by city. You’ll notice in the “WeiboByCity” data there are a number of rows with no city codes; those reflect users who apparently didn’t specify a city or merely chose a blank field when asked to provide their city (which contrasts with the province code, which all users were required to provide). Also note: the four municipalities—Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing—are different in that they are broken up by county and county-level districts, and thus when you look at the “CityStats” sheet those four aren’t broken down since they have no city/prefecture-level districts to report. You’ll see further down in the “WeiboByCity” sheet a category also devoted to people who literally chose “Other” as their province as well as a breakdown of non-mainland China and Taiwan data. For the following preliminary analysis’ sake, I dropped those who didn’t select a specific city code and assumed that those who didn’t would have been evenly split up amongst their fellow provincial citizens. Obviously, that’s something I’d have to more rigorously test before I use this level of data, but for now, it’s good enough to get going.

Here’s a breakdown of my sample versus the Internet using-households by city code. 1 indicates that the user/household lives in the capital city of the province. As you can see, Weibo users apparently tend to cluster in capital cities (which here is a sort of proxy for urban) as opposed to standard Internet users. (Honestly, I have no good reason for presenting this as a pie graph except it looks moderately cool, or as cool as vanilla pie graphs can get.)

One last map. This is each city (note: Chinese “cities” here refers to an administrative region that is the primary sub-unit of provinces, also known as prefectures; cities are really big and contain lots of counties and towns; the dot on the maps are somewhat deceiving in that most cities encompass a much larger area than depicted here) coded by the difference between the percentage they made up in my sample and the percentage of population they contain out of mainland China as a whole. Blue is greater than .5% (meaning the city’s share of mainland Weibo users is higher than it’s percentage of the national population) and red is below .5% (yellow means it falls in between). Not surprising, we have a cluster of blue in Guangdong and various other pockets throughout (warning, the map seems to be buggy on my version of Chrome; try zooming in further and then zooming out to fix any display glitches). The data here is slightly skewed because not every “city”-level district has population statistics reported in the City Yearbook, particularly those from autonomous regions. Thus, depending on how you think the missing data would’ve affected the true share of each reporting city’s population, the difference between their Weibo shares and population shares might change (though only fractionally; the City Yearbook data enumerates over 1.2 billion people, a less than 100 million person difference between the 2010 NSB number; a big number, but probably wouldn’t mess up the shares too drastically depending on how the two differ in reporting). There are other metrics at hand to show something similar without having to deal with missing data, but I just wanted to show what was possible from this data.

link

Here’s the same map with the difference in percentage points divided over the population share in order to give you a sense of relative deviation from what we expect in Weibo numbers based on the city’s population. Large red points represent a percentage rate of Weibo users that is more than 90% less than the city’s share of national population (small red is between -75% to -90%). Conversely, large blue points represent a Weibo rate that is 90% greater than its population share (small blue is between +75 to +90%).

link

This new map isn’t drastically different, though now smaller cities are more fairly represented with those big blue and red points (representing extreme deviations). For example, while on the whole Guizhou citizens lag behind the rest of the country in terms of Weibo adoption, Guiyang’s 3 million citizens, which make up a shade under 20% of Guizhou’s population, are much more likely to use Weibo (I’ll confirm it statistically once I re-code everything properly in Stata). You wouldn’t be able to tell simply by looking at the raw percentage difference as displayed in the first map since Guiyang’s population isn’t massive, but this second makes clear that Guiyang’s citizens use Weibo at a much higher rate than expected based on population (or household Internet connectivity; the City Yearbook number puts Guiyang’s share of the province’s Internet households at 20%, the same as its share of the province’s population).

Update Mar 3, 2013: A perhaps slightly easier way of thinking about what the above map actually represents is how many Weibo users per capita are in each city. I rescaled the stats to represent this in the below map. Suppose there are 400 million Weibo users (or, more accurately, accounts since some people have multiple accounts) in mainland China; rounding China’s population to 1.2 billion, that would mean there was one Weibo account for every three citizens in the country, or .33 Weibo users per capita. Thus, the below map has blue arrows representing cities that have over .6 Weibo accounts per capita (Shenzhen leads with over 6 Weibo accounts per citizen! EDIT 3/3/12: though now that I’m double-checking, the City Statistics show Shenzhen’s population to be 2,598,700, which is a rather severe undercount of what should be something like 10 million; by contrast, the other cities in Guangdong report populations more in line with what they should be, so this may be a blip of a reporting error); blue dots = .22 to .6 (.22 is 75th percentile); yellow dots = .06 to .22 (.22 is the median); red dots = .02 to .06 (.06 is 25th percentile); and anything less than 2 Weibo accounts per hundred citizens is represented with a red arrow.

link

I ran a couple of simple cross-sectional regressions on various variables in the above chart, and thus far, after controlling for population of the city, population of the province, and provincial GDP, the number of households with Internet connections in city districts (as opposed to the city as a whole when both are included in the model) as reported by the City Yearbook is highly significant and the best predictor of how many users in the sample were from that city (I’ll report back once I do a more thorough examination):

/end update

Final summary data about my sample:

Female/male: 56.57%/43.43% (markedly different than Weibo’s reporting of 50/50 split; the female heavy split was shown in both my week- and day-long samples; this 2012 GMI China infograph says the split is 52/48 female, while this DCCI one says 57% male; I imagine you could unearth dozens of these things, but I’m not a market research guy so I’m going to stop here.)
Verified: 3.33%. A logistic regression with female as the independent variable is significant and shows females to be 63% less likely to be verified.
Followers count: median of 167, mean of 4,623
Friends count: median of 153, mean of 299
Number of posts: median of 366, mean of 1,561 (takeaway from these three: most folks are casual users, but a few super-heavy duty users skew the mean)
A large percentage of the users who posted in my sample had, unsurprisingly, recently signed up to Sina Weibo. Median number of days for how long a user had had their account for: 783; mean: 786 days (putting their sign up date in January 2011; the “oldest” users in my sample signed up Aug 26, 2009. Newer account are more likely to be verified (real-name registration effect). Here’s a graph showing that:
A whole heckuva lot of Weibo users post from their iPhones or iPads. (Yes, I can tell you which brand of phone Weibo users are posting with.)
Over 20% of posts contained at least one emoji. 143 posts (.05%) contained one emoji, and nothing else.

Cautions and notes about data collection: As mentioned, I pulled the data from Sina using its public timeline API, but as Sina warns, it’s not strictly real-time, but as I’m simply trying to collect user demographic info, that wasn’t too big of a deal (I haven’t yet thrown it into Stata yet, but after eyeballing the data, I’m fairly certain that the correlation between the date-time downloaded and the date each post was made would be super high). However, the way I sampled, by hitting Weibo every 5 minutes, would ensure that I oversampled from users who posted at off-peak hours, as proportionally, they would have a higher chance of being selected by me. Understandably, this was a major concern of mine since theoretically, my sample could have way too many people from overseas, but hopefully, by extending the sample period to a full week and by taking so many samples (roughly 1,700 unique/usable samples per hour), any over-representation would diminish to acceptable levels over time and eventually I would recover the actual mean (thanks to Prof. Landry of the guidance on this front). As a dry-run, I did a 24 hour long sample the week before, results for which I’ve reported above. As you can see, the results I pulled seem to line up with each other, though it does make me pause to see that overseas posts actually ticked up in my week-long sample. That may be because I’m overthinking this proportionality issue. Trust me, I thought way too long about how I would implement some true proportional sampling method that would take into account time, but with with the tools available to me, a non-高级 level Sina developer, this was the best I could be.

Furthermore, this is only one week’s worth of data capture. Thus, in order to generalize it out to Weibo users as a whole, I am assuming in this exercise that the composition of Weibo users hasn’t changed that much over the past 3 years. But if this is not the case, if for instance, most Weibo users during the early days were around Sina’s headquarters in Shanghai and there are less of them signing up and posting today, then my sample would under-represent them as a group. Thus, a remimder that this sample is of recent active posters. Those who comment and don’t post to their own timeline are not captured, nor obviously are those who only use Weibo to read posts. However, if all provinces/cities have similar percentages of non-active users, then this sample can be generalized upward.

Finally, all this is moot—my whole approach for sampling Weibo users—if for some reason the Sina public timeline API didn’t randomly draw from its pool of public tweets. I don’t know the nitty-gritty behind how it works, but if it somehow favored folks who posted via, say mobile phone, and more folks post from mobile phones in certian regions, then my time has been wasted (well, my computer’s time, mostly).

Wen Jiabao (“温家宝”) unable to be posted on Weibo;...

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 20:47:00 -0500

Wen Jiabao (“温家宝”) unable to be posted on Weibo; error message returned

I’m not certain when this began, but as of right now, you can’t post any message on Weibo with Wen Jiabao’s name (“温家宝”). Doing so returns the following message (full size image):

抱歉，此内容违反了《新浪微博社区管理规定(试行)》或相关法规政策，无法进行指定操作。如需帮助，请联系客服。

Rough translation: Sorry, this content violates “Sina Weibo’s Community Administrative Rules” or other related regulatory policies, and we’re unable to execute the intended action. If you need assistance, please contact customer service.

FreeWeibo shows posts containing Wen Jiabao still being deleted today. Searches for Wen’s name have been blocked continuously for some time now (he was unblocked briefly during the Party Congress and for the ten days after), but being unable to post his name at all is another more extreme step. Attempting to post “彭博社” (Bloomberg) also returns the same error message. By comparison, I checked several hundred other sensitive politician’s names in the past week and no one else had this form of censorship. Can folks confirm that they are unable to post 温家宝 on their end as well?

Sina Weibo introduces "Rage Face" emojis, a la 4chan/Reddit rage comics

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 19:48:00 -0500

Major breaking news everyone: Sina Weibo introduced this month a new series of emojis (you know, those popular smiley face images that are found in many text messaging apps), bringing up the number of unique animated gifs that you can embed into your tweets to over 1,000.

What makes these curious are they fact that they aren’t your typical, cutesy 可爱 emoticons (even a pile of poo is cute when rendered into emoji form). They come from the so-called “rage comics” which originated from the anything-goes imageboard 4chan and were further popularized by the website Reddit, both of which are English-language (and primarily American) websites.

Based on some cursory searching of Weibo posts for the rage comic emojis, they seem to have started appearing around January 17. They aren’t heavily used in posts, with most of these emoji having less than 20 search results (which doesn’t include usage in comments).

Why does this matter? No particular reason (I was joking about this being major news by the way), but it is notable that someone at Sina thought it worth implementing a whole panel worth of emoji that began strictly as an English-language meme—and an often times mean-spirited one at that. Rage comics are rather passe now in America, having peaked in popularity a year or two ago. However, as Shangaiist reported back in December about the existence of Chinese rage comics, they seem to be picking up in popularity in China due in part to the website 暴走漫画 (Baozou Manhua).

Here’s a list of the 71 emoji: the code you type to create them followed by the rough Chinese translation (plus the animated gifs from the site that you can download):

宪法法院 (constitutional court) blocked during Southern Weekend controversy

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:08:00 -0500

宪法法院 (constitutional court / xiànfǎ fǎyuàn) is the court charged with adjudicating cases that concern the constitution. In some countries, it is distinct from a supreme court, which is the highest court in a country and the court of last resort for non-constitutional cases. In the United States, the Supreme Court does both tasks. China’s Supreme People’s Court serves in the model of a supreme court and does not currently have the power of constitutional review.

Why it is blocked: The power of the courts is a controversial issue in China. The modern Chinese court system is often a less–than-independent entity and there is no separation of powers between the courts and the state to prevent the state from abusing its authority. In recent years under Xiao Yang, the president of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) from 1998-2008, a number of reforms held promise. In 2001, the Supreme People’s Court agreed to rule on a case and decided that a student, Qi Yuling, should be awarded damages after another student stole her identity and test scores to attend college. But what made the case more interesting was not just the decision, but the argument: the Court premised their ruling on the Chinese Constitution, arguing that according to the document, Qi had the right to an education, the first time the Court had asserted its ability to oversee the Constitution. As the case was decidedly non-political, legal scholars saw this as a gradual introduction of constitutional review into the Chinese legal system. However, those hopes were temporarily dashed after the Communist Party re-asserted its power over the courts and issued a doctrine known as the Three Supremes: “In their work, the grand judges and grand procurators shall always regard as supreme the party’s cause, the people’s interest and the constitution and laws.” It held that judges must consider political ramifications and social stability in addition to the law. In 2008, Wang Shengjun, who does not have a law background, was appointed as the new President of the Supreme People’s Court, and in 2009, the landmark Qi Yuling ruling was withdrawn, an indication that the SPC was stepping away from making constitutional judgments.

The question of what role the courts should play and the importance of upholding China’s constitution exploded at the beginning of January 2013 when the highly-respected Southern Weekend (also known in English as Southern Weekly) magazine’s editors objected to the severe editing (cough, censorship) of their annual New Year’s editorial. The editorial, which concerned the need for improved constitutional rule, was replaced by a paean to the Communist Party. Southern Weekend editors and staffers went on strike and the drama—which involved public demonstrations by citizens, coded messages of support from media outlets and companies fed up with censorship, a teary-eyed refusal to print an editorial attacking Southern Weekend by its sister magazine, and even calls of solidarity from glamorous celebrities—served as an inauspicious start to the Xi Jinping era. Eventually a truce was struck: Southern Weekend staffers returned to their offices while several officials either lost or will lose their jobs (reportedly including the despised Guangdong propaganda chief who started the tempest, Tuo Zhen).

My records show the term has been blocked for over a year, and thus has been sensitive for some time. However, according to GreatFire.org, it was unblocked in November 2012, before becoming re-blocked some time in late-December—around the start of the Southern Weekend controversy.

Perhaps the block is coincidental, but depending on when exactly the block of 宪法法院 took place, one could make a credible case that it is related to the event.

宪政民主 (constitutional democracy / xiànzhèng mínzhǔ), closely...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 19:14:00 -0500

宪政民主 (constitutional democracy / xiànzhèng mínzhǔ), closely related to liberal democracy, is generally classified as a government that holds free elections, has a separation of powers between different branches of government, and maintains respect for minority and majority rights, among other principles.

Why it is blocked: Today, China is not a constitutional democracy, though it has attempted to initiate certain reforms in recent years to perhaps move it in that direction–if future party leaders so choose.* Direct elections take place at certain local levels, and the country’s Supreme Court appeared to be moving towards becoming an autonomous body during the 2000s before its power was curtailed. However, on the whole, any discussion of political reform is strictly suppressed. For instance, when Premier Wen Jiabao made references in a number of 2010 speeches to China’s need to take up more democratic measures, his own remarks were censored by state media.

Unlike 宪法法院 (constitutional court / xiànfǎ fǎyuàn), 宪政民主 has not been blocked throughout all of 2012 and does not appear to have been unblocked at any point. It’s “sensitive” nature pre-dates the Southern Weekend controversy.

*Chrystia Freeland reminds us that countries like China and Russia have cleverly exploited their spoken desire for greater freedoms in order to justify their current more illiberal practices—essentially, declaring that they are on the right path but just need more time.

There are NOT millions of Twitter users in China: Supporting @ooof's result and refuting GWI's conclusion

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 05:44:00 -0500

The question of how many Chinese Twitter users there are made headlines a few months back when the market research company GlobalWebIndex published results from a survey which claimed that 35 million people in China used Twitter. Media outlets ran with the story of how there was a huge secret upswell in “free” netizens in China who climbed the Great Firewall to access blocked sites like Twitter, with the seeming implication being that revolución! was just around the corner. Social/human rights progress may still indeed take place in China in the near future, but most smart social media watchers agree it won’t be because of Twitter: Chinese folks just aren’t on the service in the same numbers that they are on other local social media sites like Sina Weibo, RenRen, and even upstart mobile apps like WeChat/Weixin. People (and even companies in advertisements) don’t pass around their Twitter handle in the same frequencies as they share their Weibo contact info.

Even if our eyes told us that Twitter seemed to have attracted an active but small group of activists in China—but not many others in the country—was there a possibility that we were all missing something? Was there really a secret group of Chinese Twitter users being overlooked? Fortunately, after this week, I hope we can finally dismiss GWI’s 35 million number once and for all. Inspired by an SCMP story detailing the findings of the Chinese Twitter user @ooof (h/t Steven Millward of Tech In Asia)—who cleverly used data on the website Twiyia.com to conclude that roughly 18,000 people who posted a tweet in Chinese selected Beijing as their home timezone—this weekend I performed a similar test using publicly available tweets on Twitter utilizing its API. According to the data I extracted, there are most likely tens of thousands of Twitter users in China, not millions as claimed by GWI, a result that confirms @ooof’s finding.^[1a] The exact numbers @ooof and I come up with may differ, and only Twitter itself would be best able to reveal how many Chinese Twitter users there actually are, but our independent results are likely within an order of magnitude to the actual number of Twitter users in China, unlike GWI’s result which is about 2000 times greater than our calculations. The hard evidence backs up what our eyes are telling us.

If you’re interested in the technical information of how I performed this fairly rigorous (though certainly not at the level of an academic research paper) test, read on. (Apologies for the non-Weibo-related post; I hope it’s still of relevant to those who read this blog.)

Data collection

According to the publicly available search results data from Twitter, nearly 44,000 users posted a message that Twitter classified as a Chinese language tweet during the 24 hour period between 12:38 AM EST Thursday, Jan 3rd and 12:38 AM EST Friday, Jan 4th. I arrived at this finding by utilizing Twitter’s search by language feature which you can access via their advanced search tool or simply using the search term operator “lang:zh”. Switch it over to realtime searches (if you’re more familiar with the Twitter API, essentially changing the result_type from “mixed” to “recent”) and you have a Twitter stream of all recently posted Chinese tweets—or at least what Twitter guesses is Chinese.

Twitter, like other folks (for instance, Google Chrome, which can detect if a webpage you are visiting is in a foreign language and will suggest if you’d like to translate it into your native language), utilizes an algorithm for guessing what language a tweet is to be classified as. The algorithm is not infallible, and I noticed that a small percentage of tweets on Chinese Twitter users’ streams were being classified as Japanese. For instance, take someone who posts primarily in Chinese, like Michael Anti. If you examine his Twitter stream via the REST API ^[1] and look for the key “iso_laguage_code” you’ll see that the large majority of his posts are labeled as “zh”, which is the code for “zhongwen,” i.e. Chinese (中文), but as of right now, 7 of his last 100 posts are marked as Japanese (80 are Chinese and 11 as English).

Obviously, because of the overlap in Chinese characters and Japanese kanji, this is bound to happen for just about any computer-based analyzer. ^[2] I thought about just doing a search for a whole host of common Chinese characters that were less commonly used in Japanese in order to get a more “pure” and inclusive list of Chinese language tweets, for instance 是, 的, 好, 不, 我, 有, 小, 他, 也, 你, etc, but what actually gets returned is a messy mix of Japanese and Chinese posts (and not even all Chinese posts since some don’t include these words) and for it to be useful you’d then have to develop your own tool for separating out the Japanese posts. Thus, for my purposes—getting something like 80+ percent of all the Chinese tweets—Twitter’s internal classification of what is Chinese is good enough (I’ll verify this in a moment).

Next was how to download these tweets that were marked as Chinese (the language—not as from China itself, that requires another step to be explained in a moment). Twitter has a wonderful API and a ton of developer documentation. If you have a question while creating a Twitter app, someone probably has already asked it and gotten a good answer. It’s a great community, but due to some very valid concerns (remember what-used-to-be the ever-so-common fail whale?…), there’s some fairly extreme rate limiting on accessing the search and timeline API. You can only hit Twitter’s server a certain number of times an hour before it cuts you off. Plus, I couldn’t figure out a way to have the REST search API return a list of all Chinese tweets without including a search term (I get the error “You must enter a query” when I drop the “q=”).^[3] This caused me to use the public search widget mentioned above, which according to Twitter matches what you’d get from the REST version anyway.^[4] The great thing about the search widget was that I didn’t experience a rate limit like I would have with the REST search API, allowing me to simply keep scrolling endlessly as long as I wished (until the browser crashed due to memory constraints). I put a paperweight on my keyboard’s page down button,^[5] had lunch, and came back to copy the many thousands of Tweets now in my browser.

How many tweets exactly? 193,940. These 193,940 tweets were all the original Chinese-language tweets (native retweets^[6] as well as, according to Twitter, messages detected as spam, were filtered out from this public search) posted between 12:38 AM EST Thursday, Jan 3rd and 12:38 AM EST Friday, Jan 4th and able to be found via the Twitter search API. Due to time limitations and a burning anxiety to get cracking, I only did a 24 hour period. If this were an academic paper or such, I would have captured a full week’s worth of tweets or possibly even more, but, well, I didn’t feel like waiting. According to @ooof’s graph, he used a whole month’s worth of tweets, which explains why his number of active users is more than mine.

An important note: these 193,940 tweets do not include every possible tweet that someone in China might have posted. Users who have made their tweets private obviously don’t have their posts show up in public search nor did my method collect tweets from people posting in non-Chinese languages from China (thus, ex-pats in China, unless they write in Chinese, are not included in this data). But otherwise, it sure looks like everything: it even includes a Chinese-language tweet that I, a self-classified English-language user in an American timezone, sent to @ooof. But to more rigorously assess the public search’s performance, I again went back to Michael Anti’s timeline and looked at all the 14 original tweets he made during my observation period. Of the 14, I found 11 in my downloaded data (and 1 more as an old-school retweet by someone else). I checked the 3 missing tweets and they are all listed as Chinese, so perhaps Twitter classified them as spam or simply didn’t capture them in the search; regardless, 11 out of 14 isn’t bad for my purposes, and, if I wanted, I could check other user’s timelines to see how many of their tweets were included in my download and adjust my numbers accordingly to account for those missing tweets. However, the takeaway is that the tweets I downloaded are, if not absolutely everything, than fairly close, and though any calculations I make might be off by some percentage, it’s at least within the correct order of magnitude.

Analysis

Having the set of all tweets during this 24-hour period, it was then trivial to extract out all the unique usernames (because some users posted multiple tweets during that time period), leaving us with 43,784 users who posted something in Chinese. We can then use Twitter’s GET stauses/user_timeline to look up a user’s timezone, language setting, self-described location, and geo-coordinates (here’s what mine looks like) and use a JSON parser to extract the information cleanly.

Due to rate limiting, it’s not feasible to check all 43,784 users, so I took every 73rd user (ordered by when they most recently made a post) to come up with a sample of 608 users. 165 were missing any timezone classification (two of them because they had switched to private mode, thus taking away access to their timezone info), comprising 27% of the sample, and 110 were listed as located in Beijing’s timezone,^[7] 18% of the sample, numbers which largely mirror @ooof’s conclusion (see below table).

If I extrapolate out those percentages to my total population of 43,784 users, I get roughly 12,000 missing and 8,000 in Beijing. Of course, this 8,000 is the least it could be; as mentioned, it doesn’t include those who set their accounts to private, doesn’t include folks who may have their timezone mistakenly set elsewhere, doesn’t include users who didn’t post in that 24 hour period (these 7,921 might be considered hardcore daily Tweeters and certainly doesn’t include the roughly 20-40% of users who have never tweeted),^[7a] and may miss out on any users whose tweets accidentally were marked as spam or were not captured in Twitter’s search API.^[8] All of those reasons explain why my number is likely an undercount of the total number of Chinese Twitter users, but as demonstrated previously, it likely isn’t off by a whole lot. The primary reason why my number is so much lower than @ooof’s is because his data collection period appears to have lasted for a month, and thus he captured the more casual Chinese Tweeter; otherwise, my percentages largely confirm his.^[9] Here’s the more detailed breakdown of which timezone user’s reported themselves as being in:

As for the other data I collected on this sample, location info was largely useless since it is user-specified. If folks decided to enter anything at all, it sometimes came in the form of fake locations like “In your HEAD” and “On your bed.” Of the 364 who did supply a location, 40 contained either “China” or 中国, and if I had time, I could sift through the rest and try and figure out if they might also be candidates to be China-based users.

Finally, I looked at the primary language a user specified in their settings, which looks like it suffers from a much greater than expected number of English language users, likely to to Twitter defaulting to English. I’m not certain how Twitter chooses your initial language, whether it’s always English unless you manually set it, or if it takes the language of the browser or perhaps your IP address (which perhaps redirects you to a location/language-specific signup page), but this data is flawed. Regardless, here’s a pie chart of the percentage of languages specified in the 608 person sample in case you’re curious.

Conclusion

I can’t conclusively say whether there are 10,000 or 18,000 Twitter users in China, but based on the data I pulled and the method I used to analyze it (and without knowing more, probably a method quite similar to what @ooof used), I can say conclusively that there are NOT 35 million Twitter users in China. If there were indeed that many, you’d see it in the quantity of Chinese-language tweets.^[10] Looking at the Twitter stream, there just aren’t that many Chinese language tweets. However, despite the various limitations mentioned above in my data collection process (only one day, doesn’t include private accounts, doesn’t include non-Chinese language posts from China), the number of active Twitter users in China is almost definitely between 10,000 and 100,000, several orders of magnitude less than what GlobalWebIndex calculated from their social media in China survey.

Notes

[1a] UPDATE Jan 6, 2013: My metric for Twitter user is different than GWI’s, which has a more expansive definition (h/t to Josh Ong of Tech in Asia for pointing this out). Because of time constraints, I was only able to look at users who made a post during a 24 hour period—the potentially most active of users. I believe @ooof used an entire’s month worth of data and culled his user list from there—which is why his number is larger than mine. GWI’s definition includes those who simply “Use or contribute to the service,” and thus my data would miss out on those who use it for reading tweets and posting occasionally. Even so, based on statistics supplied by Twitter, other sources, and even GWI itself, one could adjust for those who only “listen” or post occasionally, and still not even get close to a million (see footnote 7a below for more).

As for why it matters how many Chinese Twitter users there are, I believe Martin Johnson and the folks at GreatFire.org said it best:

GlobalWebIndex claims there are 70m Twitter users and 125m Facebook users (63.5 million active) in China. That means that at least 125 million netizens in china have either bought a VPN service, are using a proxy or have the technical know how to bypass the great firewall. This is highly unlikely. If it was true, there would be so much online China activism about important issues that it would be hard to ignore. This is what we hope happens in China’s future and that’s what we are fighting for but it certainly is not the reality now.

The last thing we want to see is people saying that Chinese netizens have free and open access to social media around the world. They don’t! They are prevented from looking at many foreign web sites and they are also prevented from accessing information on Chinese web sites! Chinese netizens, for example, are unable to search for “Xi Jinping”, the country’s next leader, on Sina Weibo, a leading Chinese microblog. The great firewall is not some myth, it’s a sad reality. Chinese censorship authorities will be delighted to see this news as it makes the rest of the world believe that censorship is not happening here.

[1] Version 1, which is apparently on its way to being mothballed in favor of 1.1 which will require authentication, so this link may not work in a couple months. ^

[2] Though based on what I’ve seen, Twitter’s algorithm, though serviceable, could definitely be improved. ^

[3] If someone knows what value to set q= to, by all means let me know on Twitter or via the contact form. Apparently if you have Firehose access, you don’t have to deal with rate limits. Also, if I’m reading things correctly, Twitter’s new streaming API supposedly lets developers hook into the public stream and just suck up tweets that match certain criteria with a much greater range than the simple search API that I relied on, which, as Twitter warns, is not exhaustive, supposedly with spam messages and the like being filtered out (a rather good side effect of having to use the search API rather than the streaming API). As I don’t have access to the former, which is apparently very hard to come by, and a lack of time in learning the second, I went with the quick-and-dirty approach in this investigation. If this were for a research paper or something where I needed much more precision, certainly, the streaming API would be the way to go, but as I mention later in the post, my method was for the most part good enough. Someone who has an extensive database of tweets like the folks at Sysomos claim could arrive at an even more precise number than we have. ^

[4] According to Twitter, this REST version of the search API is the exact same thing as what you’d get with the general search tool/widget: “The Search API (which also powers Twitter’s search widget) is an interface to this search engine.” ^

[5] I told you, not super scientific was I in this task, but this was by far the fastest way and didn’t sacrifice anything in the data collection. ^

[6] Native retweets are the ones where you just click the retweet button in Twitter and they appear instantly on your timeline with the other person’s profile photo. Old-school retweets, which are included in my set of downloaded tweets, are when you manually copy and paste a persons tweet and append an RT in front. Excluding native retweets hopefully reduces the amount of robot accounts which do nothing but aggressively retweet. ^

[7] My sample also had 3 users who selected Chongqing as their timezone. I grouped that into Beijing for the above pie chart, but broke it down in the table. ^

[7a] UPDATE Jan 6, 2013: The percentage of Twitter users across the entire service who have never posted fluctuates depending on the report and the date. Twitter reported in 2011 that 40% of users didn’t post. Two other reports from 2009 put the number at 21% and 40%. For its part, GWI reports that their survey shows 66% of their Chinese respondents who used Twitter hadn’t posted a tweet in the past month. Even if that’s the case and ooof or I need to adjust our numbers upward to account for those who would go missing in our data, the number would still only rise to roughly 50,000 (18000*(100/100-66)=52,941). In order to adjust 18,000 upwards to 35 million, roughly 99.5% of actual Chinese Twitter users would have to have never posted in the past month, a very unlikely occurrence which is out of line with not only worldwide data but also GWI’s own survey.

[8] So long as a user had even one tweet get listed in the Twitter search, they were included in my total of 43,784. If you wish to verify, check any user who made a Chinese post on Jan 3 and check to see if they are on this list. If not, do let me know. ^

[9] The only one where we differ greatly is Tokyo, with his data concludes that under 1% reside there while mine puts it at over 3%. This could simply be a matter of our samples or something else; otherwise, everything else matches fairly well. ^

[10] If you search for all the English-language posts on Twitter the same way I did for Chinese, you’d have to scroll for a very, very long time before you even go back through a single minute’s worth of tweets. ^

The Chinese Communist Party’s 18th National Congress:...

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:31:00 -0500

The Chinese Communist Party’s 18th National Congress: Which CCP politicians are blocked right now

马凯 (Ma Kai), 邱进 (Qiu Jin), 韩正 (Han Zheng), 令计划 (Ling Jihua), 回良玉 (Hui Liangyu), 刘延东 (Liu Yandong), 孙国相 (Sun Guoxiang), 杜青林 (Du Qinglin), 李书章 (Li Shuzhang), 李鹏新 (Li Pengxin), 杨洁篪 (Yang Jiechi), 张德江 (Zhang Dejiang), 陈世炬 (Chen Shiju), 陈炳德 (Chen Bingde), 尚福林 (Shang Fulin), 周本顺 (Zhou Benshun), 俞正声 (Yu Zhengsheng), 栗战书 (Li Zhanshu), 徐才厚 (Xu Caihou), 郭伯雄 (Guo Boxiong), 章沁生 (Zhang Qinsheng), 梁光烈 (Liang Guanglie), 屠光绍 (Tu Guangshao), 傅政华 (Fu Zhenghua), 曾庆红 (Zeng Qinghong), 戴秉国 (Dai Bingguo), 向巴平措 (Xiangba Pingcuo)

Above names return 0 results or a blocked message on Sina Weibo as of Nov 8, 2012 6AM EST.

[full size image]

Ah, that’s the Sina I know and love! Back to good ol regular search blocks. Will have full...

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 07:30:00 -0500

Ah, that’s the Sina I know and love! Back to good ol regular search blocks. Will have full list of re-blocked pols in an hr #blockedonweibo
— Jason Q. Ng (@jasonqng) November 8, 2012

Who in Wen Jiabao's family is blocked on Weibo

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 14:05:00 -0500

Note: 0 is the new blocked (results below are from Sina Weibo, Nov 4, 2012)

温家宝 (Wen Jiabao): 0 results
张蓓莉 (Zhang Beili, wife): 0 results
杨志云 (Yang Zhiyun, mother): 0 results
温家宏 (Wen Jiahong, younger brother): 0 results
温云松 (Wen Yunsong, son): 0 results
杨小萌 (Yang Xiaomeng, daughter-in-law): unblocked
温如春 (Yun Ruchun, granddaughter): unblocked
劉春航 (Liu Chunhang, granddaughter’s husband): unblocked
张建明 (Zhang Jianming, brother-in-law): unblocked
张剑鹍 (Zhang Jiankun, brother-in-law): 0 results
于剑鸣 (Yu Jianming, Wen Yunsong’s classmate and business partner): 0 results
段伟红 (Duan Weihong, investor): 0 results
郑裕彤 (Chen Yu-tong, investor): unblocked
李嘉诚 (Li Ka-shing, investor): unblocked

image source: NY Times, The Wen Family Empire

All sensitive terms on Sina Weibo now show 0 results

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 12:39:00 -0500

As of the beginning of this month, Sina Weibo has made a number of changes to the way they handle their censorship of search results. I’ve previously tweeted about a rising number of searches that are “partially blocked” rather than blocked wholesale with the typical “According to relevant laws, search results are not displayed” message.

Instead, this is the new normal:

Instead of blaming laws for their inability to serve the user what it wants, Sina Weibo has decided to unilaterally shift to a more non-transparent error message stating that no results are found for sensitive keywords.

Of course, this isn’t totally non-transparent. If you’re searching for a common term that you expect results for, for instance the name of Wen Jiabao’s son, and you get zero results returned, it’s pretty obvious that it’s actually blocked. However, the shift in language is rather foreboding (though perhaps quite overdue; why Chinese government officials who monitor the Internet have tolerated such messages stating the obvious—and still do for other sites—is beyond me).

A check of Baidu and Tencent Weibo (the number two most important micro-blogging site in China) still shows the “According to relevant laws” message for various known sensitive keywords, so Sina’s step was perhaps done all on its own and not part of a broader push to move Chinese sites away from announcing to their users that search results have been filtered. The timing of this is no doubt related to the upcoming government transition, and perhaps Sina will go back to the standard blocked error message when they deem it comfortable to do so. However, in a curious twist, a number of keywords that have long been blocked, even blocked up until last week, have since been unblocked totally, for instance, 罢工 (strike), 讣告 (obituary), 咪咪 (breasts), to name but a few. So in some ways, we have one step backward, one step forward. Very curious to see how this plays out in the coming weeks…

空凳 (empty stool / kōngdèng) is a reference to the empty chair...

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 08:56:00 -0400

空凳 (empty stool / kōngdèng) is a reference to the empty chair between Thorbjørn Jagland and Kaci Kullmann Five during the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize…

Why it is blocked: …an award that the recipient, Liu Xiaobo, was unable to receive because he was in prison. One of the iconic images of the evening was head of the Nobel Committee Thorbjørn Jagland placing the Nobel medal onto the vacant chair. Hong Kong media and netizens used the phrase to recognize Liu’s situation and accomplishment. China’s most recent Nobel winner, novelist and short story writer Mo Yan for literature, made headlines when he called for the release of Liu.

Coincidentally, the Hong Kong musician, Danny Summer (夏韶聲), the “father of Hong Kong rock-and-roll” (not to be confused with Cui Jian, “the father of Chinese rock”) and writer of the classic Tiananmen Square tribute song “Mama, I Didn’t Do Anything Wrong,” had penned an unrelated ballad to his dead father also entitled 空凳 in 1985.

(空凳 was blocked at the end of 2011 and is now currently unblocked.)

组织者 (organizer / zǔzhīzhě) is a person who organizes. Why it is...

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:57:29 -0400

组织者 (organizer / zǔzhīzhě) is a person who organizes.

Why it is blocked: Like the English definition, 组织者 has a mostly neutral connotation. In Chinese, it can refer to the organizers of a meeting or a conference as well as the organizers of a union, community, or political party. It can even refer to an athlete like Steve Nash or Peyton Manning who organizes teammates around him during a play. Of course, it’s not for sports reasons that “organizer” is blocked: it’s the organizing of labor strikes, independence movements, and democratic reform that worries authorities.

罢工 (labor strike / bàgōng) is a refusal to work by employees. It...

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:57:00 -0400

罢工 (labor strike / bàgōng) is a refusal to work by employees. It is a form of protest aimed at forcing an employer to resolve grievances or to accede to employee demands.

Why it is blocked: Though striking itself is not technically illegal under Chinese law, the right to strike was removed from the Chinese constitution in 1982 (not that strikes were greatly tolerated before 1982). Therefore, unless a striker breaks other laws in conjunction with the work stoppage (which would probably be nearly unavoidable), he is technically free to do so without facing punishment. Of course, since the laws do not protect strikes, work stoppages are obviously not encouraged, though there have been times where central authorities have sided with workers in efforts to pressure local officials and employers to resolve unrest.

According to statistical yearbooks, in 2009, there were 684,379 labor disputes, 320,000 of which were officially dealt with in the court system. Workers are also able to take their grievances to their local trade union—but it operates as a mediator and not necessarily on the worker’s behalf. Though there are no official figures for the number of strikes, it’s been estimated that there are roughly 30,000-40,000 each year. Strikes do take place and in recent years some have been well-publicized (for instance a series of strikes in late-2011) and even successful (for example, the strikes in factories which produced Japanese auto parts and at the electronics manufacturer Foxconn in summer 2010) and there have been experiments in southern China with legalizing strikes. However, work stoppages, particularly ones that attempt to involve more than one workplace are strongly and often violently suppressed with beatings by hired thugs, mass arrests, and prosecution of organizers. Domestic media are usually barred from reporting about strikes. (For a great at-a-glance look of strikes that have been reported in recent years, see the the excellent China Strikes crowdsourced map.)

維多利亞 (Victoria / Wéiduōlìyà) is Latin for “conquer” and in Roman...

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 10:52:00 -0400

維多利亞 (Victoria / Wéiduōlìyà) is Latin for “conquer” and in Roman mythology she was the goddess of victory, equivalent to the Greek goddess Nike.

Why it is blocked: Could it be the Latin meaning? Or maybe those too sexy Victoria’s Secret models? The shadow of Queen Victoria and colonial emasculation? Or… Posh Spice? No, but rather because of Victoria Park in Hong Kong (searching for 維園, the first character in Victoria along with the word for park, is also blocked).

Every June 4, Victoria Park is the site of an annual candlelight vigil to observe the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. Hundreds of thousands attend each year to hear speeches against one-party democracy, to sing protest songs, and to honor the victims and their families. The park is also used for other demonstrations, including the meeting point for the annual July 1 marches. Of note is the fact that only the traditional characters for Victoria are blocked. Searching for 维多利亚 is unblocked (you’ll see links relating to Victoria, Australia and Victoria’s Secret in the sidebar). As noted, 維園, an abbreviation for Victoria Park, is also blocked in traditional characters, but is unblocked when converted to simplified characters, a clear indication that the block is targeted at Hong Kongers and Victoria Park in Hong Kong.

The top post on Weibo today is about friendship between China...

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 01:36:00 -0400

The top post on Weibo today is about friendship between China and Japan:

translation: Juanzi [1]: A few days ago a friend went on a business trip to Japan but had trouble leaving the country [2]. This morning he sent me a text [3] saying that last night he and a co-worker had been eating at a Japanese bar when it was uncovered that they were Chinese, after which they got a dish that had some words written on it. When I heard this, I was worried. But who would have thought it would be these words [4]. The bar owner said, “Thank you for being so willing to come to Japan, I hope there will be peace and friendship.” … I certainly was surprised. Patriotism: must we use xenophobia and hatred to express it?

[Larger image on Facebook… Any suggested edits to translation are welcome… I’ll be back to the regular weekly posts next Monday or Tuesday.]

(1) 涓子, name of blogger
(2) probably because of the cancellation of flights to and from China due to the protests and tension against Japan recently
(3) technically a WeChat message
(4) The words on the dish say: “Thank you China.”

UPDATE: All right! Now this is relevant for the blog! Not more than 10 mins after I posted this translation, the original Weibo post calling for friendship between China and Japan has been deleted from the site. It’s possible the author deleted it herself (maybe amongst the 30,000+ responses some were hateful?) or perhaps the censors stepped in? If so, it’s very sad that advocating for peace with your “enemy” can’t find a place on Weibo. UPDATE 2: In a follow-up message, the author says she deleted it herself (see comments) due to threats and pressure of some sort. [我删了。我自己也吓一跳 = I deleted it. I was a little scared.]

抵制日货 (Boycott Japanese goods / dǐzhì Rìhuò) and 抵制家乐福 (Boycott...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 14:11:00 -0400

抵制日货 (Boycott Japanese goods / dǐzhì Rìhuò) and 抵制家乐福 (Boycott Carrefour / dǐzhì Jiālèfú) were two separate grassroots movements in recent years aimed at demonstrating Chinese anger at Japan and the French retailer Carrefour, respectively. Though each took place in different years (For Japan: 2005, 2010, and 2012, among others; Carrefour: 2008) and for different reasons (Japan: continuing resentment over atrocities and occupation of parts of China during Sino-Japanese War, the cleansing of textbooks in 2005, former Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi’s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, disputes over islands in the South China Sea, among others; Carrefour: in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the Olympic torch relay was interrupted several times across the world by human rights protesters, most egregiously in France when the Chinese Paralympic fencer Jin Jing was tackled in her wheelchair while carrying the torch, and Carrefour, whose supermarkets are common in Chinese cities and reportedly also donated to Free Tibet causes, served as a convenient scapegoat), both were inspired by patriotic verging on ultra-nationalist sentiment that played up China’s role as a country that had been victimized in the past but would no longer be bulled.

Why it is blocked: For each event, anger was expressed virtually as well as with demon strations and a call to boycott goods. In each case, the central government appeared to support initial protests or made no strong efforts to tamp it down, but as demonstrations grew violent and out of control in each instance, the authorities reacted by reining in the outrage (most recently: ”Weibo calls for Japanese boycott to remain rational”; “China moves to quell anti-Japanese demonstrations”). The existence of a block of “Boycott Japanese goods” on Weibo seems to be a legacy of these previous demonstrations and is not new.

裤袜 (pantyhose, stockings, or tights / kùwà), literally...

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 12:03:55 -0400

裤袜 (pantyhose, stockings, or tights / kùwà), literally “pants sock” in Chinese, is legwear made of nylon or spandex typically worn by women for fashion or comfort. It was popularized by skirt-wearing women in the U.S. and U.K. who were required by social conventions to not show their bare legs in public or in the office. More about female fashion in the workplace is discussed in this NPR radio piece, which discusses, among other things, the female trouser ban in the U.S. Senate.

Why it is blocked: Probably because although the image search results for 裤袜 in Chinese aren’t as lewd as those for pantyhose in English (beware, NSFW if you have safe search turned off), they still are too sexy for somebody’s taste (no nudity, but still probably NSFW).