Black and White Cat

On the first day of term, Southern Metropolis Daily asked primary school children in Guangzhou what they want to be when they grow up. Here are some of the answers:

(After much head scratching) “I don’t know”

“A photographer”

“A painter”

“A pilot”

“A fireman, because firemen can help people put out fires”

And then there was this girl:

“I want to be an official”
“What kind of official?”
“A corrupt official, because corrupt officials have a lot of things.”

Postscript:
Since Southern Metropolis Daily posted the video, it’s generated a huge amount of interest and comment on the Chinese internet and, to a lesser extent, in English as well. For some strange reason, the paper decided to delete that page, but the video is available on Youtube.

So, what does it mean? Nothing really. It’s funny and that’s it.

None of us have any idea what this particular six-year-old thinks “a corrupt official” is. Her mother reportedly explained it to her, but we don’t know what that explanation was or how much of it she understood. Neither do we know what the girl was thinking when she gave her answer. Without knowing these things, we are simply transferring our own adult views onto a child.

I prefer to think that she was joking and was quite pleased with herself for saying something so unexpected. But this is just another opinion, like everyone else’s, with no evidence whatsoever to back it up.

Xu Lai just before the attack on Feb. 14

This news is now three weeks old, but I only just noticed it and no one else seems to have mentioned it in English. The man who stabbed the blogger ProState in Flames (journalist and writer Xu Lai) at a book signing on Valentines Day was sentenced to four and a half years in prison early this month.

The attacker, Yang Chun, was arrested in Suzhou less than a week after the stabbing and a court in Beijing accepted the case in June. (See Danwei.) The prosecution alleged that Yang Chun had carried out the attack because he believed Xu Lai had damaged his friend’s reputation.

Yang had previously been in prison for embezzlement. He was also reportedly kidnapped last year.

A Southern Metropolis Daily report on August 7 confirmed internet speculation that Yang Chun’s “friend” was Peking University professor Kong Qingdong (Yang was Kong’s assistant) and that Yang was angry about one particular blog post:

Chairman Mao’s old warrior Kong Qingdong taken away for suspected involvement in North Korean spy case.

According to informed sources at Peking University, plainclothes police officers from the State Security Bureau came around 7pm to the university security office and asked to see Professor Kong Qingdong. They informed Kong that he was suspected of providing information to North Korea through his Beijing University Sovereign Thoughts Study Group and took him away for interrogation.

(See cat898 in Chinese and ESWN in English)

The rumor caused a bit of a stir, but it was quickly dispelled and that surely should have been the end of it. Instead, for some peculiar reason, Yang Chun landed himself back in prison for an utterly pointless attack. He also had to pay 70,000 yuan in compensation for Xu Lai’s hospital bill and lost earnings.

One of the things that puzzles me is that reports back in February referred to two attackers, not one. Maybe this is because eyewitnesses were confused. I don’t know.

Xu Lai still hasn’t started blogging again.

Xu Lai after the attack

ABC News:

We arrived at one of Urumqi’s biggest mosques with about 80 journalists in a convoy of about six or seven mini-vans.

Almost every journalist still left in Urumqi was there, because there was almost no violence on the streets. There’s very little else left to cover.

NO, NO, NO! There’s a huge amount left to cover. Here’s one crucial thing that we still know almost nothing about and we will never know if journalists don’t start doing some serious digging. What exactly happened on Sunday evening? How did an initially peaceful protest by Uygur students turn into the mass murder of more than a hundred innocent Han civilians? So far, we have almost no information on this at all. Two of the most detailed accounts are by Yazhou Zhoukan and The Economist. But they don’t even come close to being enough.

ESWN’s translation (scroll down 3/4 of the page) of Yazhou Zhoukan’s account of the earlier events:

The locals recalled that the young Uighur women of Urumqi began to wear scarves on the afternoon of July 5. According to local custom, this means that something big was about to happen. At around 6:20pm that evening, more than 200 persons gathered at People’s Plaza. They were persuaded to leave. This group included many Uighur students. Eyewitnesses said that the proceedings was controlled by certain Uighurs persons who clashed frequently with the Hans. The police was only interested in clearing the streets and they did not interfere with the march.

More than seventy troublemakers were taken away by the police and the rest dispersed. Those Uighurs who were chased away re-grouped in Erdaoqiao at Liberation Road South and Shanxi Lane. They chanted slogans and caused chaos at the scene. At the university with the most number of Uighurs — Xinjiang University — the Uighur students chanted slogans, assembled in the canteen and charged into the streets. Amidst the chaos, the rioters set two cars on fire in front of the Xinjiang University entrance. By 7:30pm, more than one thousand Uighurs gathered in front of the Women and Children Health Care Hospital on Shanxi Lane; at 7:40pm, more than 300 people blocked the road at People Road and South Gate.

The Economist:

The Uighur side of the story has been slower to emerge. Many Uighurs dismissed the government’s account that the July 5th riot was part of a separatist plot. But very few—such was the terror of police or Han recrimination—were willing to say much. One Uighur owner of a clothes shop, who claimed to have witnessed the riot from the beginning, said it started as a demonstration calling on Xinjiang’s governor to come out and talk about what had happened in Guangdong. In the fracas there on June 25th, Han Chinese workers had accused Uighurs of rape. At least two Uighurs were killed in the fight.

After about 90 minutes the police told Urumqi’s protesters to leave, said the man from the clothes shop. The police then began shoving and pulling demonstrators who refused to go. When some Uighurs responded by smashing windows, the police used greater force, beating people and firing their weapons. Violence by Uighurs then began to flare across the city.

Is this all we are able to learn? We need way more information than this if we are to make any kind of rational, informed assessment of that day.

Yazhou Zhoukan’s statement: “At around 6:20pm that evening, more than 200 persons gathered at People’s Plaza. They were persuaded to leave.” What does this mean? How were they “persuaded”?

“More than seventy troublemakers were taken away by the police and the rest dispersed.” What were the “troublemakers” doing and how were the rest “dispersed”?

I know it is not easy to get good information, but we need far more direct eyewitness accounts - and not hearsay and rumors. Eyewitnesses are not always reliable. When Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by British police on the London Underground, every single detail reported in the media from eyewitnesses was false. But that was a sudden event that was over within minutes, taking everyone completely by surprise. The conflict in Urumqi evolved over a number of hours. Maybe too many people are afraid to talk about it. Maybe too many people who could say more have been arrested as suspects. And maybe many of them have now left the city. But some greater attempt needs to be made to build up a bigger picture and the chronology of events deserves to be the main focus of articles, not just a snippet.

We cannot get the full story from the Chinese media, because they will not report anything that might possibly contradict the government’s story. And we cannot get anything reliable from exile organizations who repeat grossly exaggerated and distorted rumors.

Investigating the events of July 5 will take time and a great deal of effort. But it would be better to take that time and risk having no report at all than simply repeating the same sketchy details that everyone else is writing.

(WARNING: Some of the content of this post is not suitable for young readers. If you are under the age of 18, please go here immediately and download the Green Dam censorship software which should prevent your computer from being able to open this page ever again.)

When I started writing this, Google.com was blocked in China. That didn’t last. It never does. Google.com is often blocked on and off for a few minutes each time. The purpose of this is to gently nudge people away from the unrestrained world of “unhealthy information” and towards the much more controlled Google.cn and Baidu. This time the block lasted well over an hour, though, which is unusual. It’s now blocked again. Now it isn’t. And now it is yet again.

This may or may not be related to the coordinated campaign launched by the GONGO* China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre (CIIIRC) and CCTV against Google.cn’s “lewd links.”

(*GONGO: government-organized non-governmental organization or government-operated non-governmental organization.)

CCTV’s Focus Interview shock-horror report last week thoroughly exposed Google’s evil plot to corrupt young Chinese minds with smut. If, it was revealed, some innocent youth typed “boobs” into Google.cn’s image search, he or she would be presented with this deeply offensive page:

Not anymore. Google.cn no longer allows an image search for “boobs” so I had to get that screen grab from the Chinese edition of Google.co.uk. It’s not terribly offensive, really. Those pictures are less pornographic than many British Christmas and birthday cards. A Baidu search for “breasts” (Baidu had rushed to remove “boobs” as searchable image item), however, produced this clean and wholesome page:

Then there was Google.cn’s other dastardly technique intended to lure its unsuspecting users into a den of vice: at the time of CCTV’s broadcast, an innocent search for “son” resulted in suggestions for other searches that included sex between sons and mothers. Google wasn’t actually suggesting this. It just happened to be what a large number of Chinese-speaking people were looking for at that particular time - a disturbing thought. They weren’t looking for it the next day, however, which makes me wonder if someone had set up a bot to conveniently produce this result on the very day of CCTV’s report.

So what about Baidu? It had quickly disabled this function for the word “son” so I tried a different search term: the letter “b”. Baidu helpfully suggested that I might also want to search for “馒头b” which I’m told means “bulging cunt.” Purely in the interests of research, I clicked on this and Baidu offered me further choices: would I like “white, hot, bulging cunts,” “beautiful girls’ bulging cunts,” “beautiful young girls’ bulging cunts” etc, etc. Clicking on any one of these… a seemingly endless chain of onanistic possibility opened up for our hypothetical youth. By Saturday evening, Baidu had discovered this and stopped suggesting any alternative searches for the letter “b”. For some reason, a Baidu image search for “馒头b” produces a page of pictures of Brian from the TV show Queer as Folk:

CIIIR and CCTV’s apparent double standard - attacking Google.cn, while ignoring Baidu - was quickly noted on the internet. One of the first to point it out was Jason Ng at Kenengba, translated into English by Oiwan Lam at Global Voices.

However, while many people considered this to be a very bad thing for Google.cn, Hecaitou saw it as a masterful PR coup by Google China’s president, Kai-fu Lee:

My ever-increasing respect for Mr Kai-fu Lee

After CCTV began to expose Google for the large amount of obscene content in its search results, my respect for Kai-fu Lee simply knew no bounds. The agility of his mind and the ingenuity of his PR skills simply lead one to wonder if he has come down from another planet; to have actually been able to make CCTV give Google free advertising.

Many people have associated the exposé of Google with the earlier exposé of Baidu at the beginning of the year. So, why don’t we take a look at the accusations CCTV has made against these two search engine companies:

Baidu — auctions off the top places in its search results, which include a large number of false advertisements.
Google — the search results include a large quantity of pornographic and obscene content.

You see what I mean? Baidu offers false advertisements, especially advertisements for medicine. This is an extremely serious accusation because taking the wrong drugs or going to the wrong doctor can kill people. What is the actual effect of pornographic and obscene content? Has there ever been a news report that in such-and-such a place a bunch of youths have died of dehydration from masturbating over Google?

As for the great mass of netizens, what is the most powerful motivator for them to visit a website? Sexual desire, of course. By far the largest number of searches on English Google are for “sex.” On Baidu, searches for pornographic films occupy an equally dominant position. The effect of a news item cannot be appreciated simply by looking at its literal meaning. HeeHeeTV’s condemnation appears to be moral criticism. However, most netizens fully grasp the underlying message: only Google’s got what they want! For the 270 million internet users, even the great mass of netizens who don’t even know how to copy and paste, this is a bright light to guide their path.

After years of hard struggle, Google’s share of China’s search engine market has finally exceeded 30%. However, Baidu still controls nearly 70% of the market. But that’s OK now. After this piece of news, netizens finally know where they can go to find what they most want to see. When you consider the reach of CCTV, with the whole country’s media following up on the story and all the major news websites making it their top item, this is an excellent example of negative news turning into good promotion. Countless numbers of website owners dream of such exposure, but this good fortune fell into the hands of Google. Thinking about the huge increase in traffic this will generate is enough to make one gasp in amazement.

The precise timing of this exposure, first criticizing Baidu for its false advertisements, then waiting until after Google had launched its Mp3 search, its Web Options and its Site Navigator and only then exposing it, shows that HeeHeeTV’s love for Google must be strong and deep [真是情深得紧]. Considering all of this, it’s impossible not to have a profound respect for Mr Kai-fu Lee. It’s not just that he knows where netizens’ G-spot is, causing tens of millions of willies to beat a path to his door. More than this, he understands how to grasp the media in the palm of his hand, enticing them all into his snare. We can now predict that Google’s share of the market will soar this year. Who knows how many stock options the honorable Kai-fu will exercise….

Surely, at Google’s next Christmas party, when the honorable Kai-fu accepts his award as man of the year, his first sentence will be: “Thank you, CCTV.”