Last week, a Google spokesperson announced that Google.cn’s Chinese Internet Content Provider (ICP) licence had been renewed to 2012.
When Google stopped censoring search result in 2010 and left mainland China to set up in Hong Kong, Google’s ICP renewal by the Chinese government looked doubtful. But to the surprise of many, in July 2010 its licence was successfully renewed. This year, after Google’s announcement, Chinese journalists looked at WHOIS, a Chinese website for checking domain name information noticed that the licence has been extended to March 17 2012.
Experts in China, particularly state media commentators, suggest it is likely Google managed to wrangle this renewal through some sort of compromise. International Finance News, a newspaper run by the state mouthpiece the People’s Daily, suggested this is a sure sign that Google does not want to leave the biggest internet market in the world, and was willing to compromise. According to the local technology provisions issued on 26 August 2011, foreign companies cannot evade censorship by any method, without their government contract being terminated.
In another development, today Google launched Google Shihui, a group buying discount site under its Chinese platform Google.cn. Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based consulting firm Marbridge was quoted in PC World saying that “[Shihui is] a fairly safe neutral area of business in which Google can participate without risking as much.” But Google’s insistence on staying in the Chinese market will mean that it will face continued, and possibly tougher, censorship from the government in the future.
The news earlier this week that two popular Beijing newspapers will now come under the capital’s propaganda department has raised concerns that the two hard-hitting dailies will face tighter control.
The Beijing News and Beijing Times were previously under the control of state-level propaganda authorities.
We talked to David Bandurski, editor of the Hong Kong-based China Media Project, and asked him what this means for the two papers and why it was happening now.
The thing to understand about this story is just how important the power of cross-regional reporting and top-down media monitoring has been for Chinese media in recent years.
Essentially, publications registered in one city or province are less able to do hard-hitting reporting of local issues because, according to China’s press bureaucracy, they are directly controlled by the Party leaders immediately above them. For example, top city leaders in Guangzhou have fairly direct control through their own propaganda department over any newspaper registered under the city level there. So these papers won’t generally do investigative reporting on corruption in the city government.
By contrast, a paper registered in another city or province can more safely conduct such monitoring because they have little to fear from these leaders. This is what cross-regional reporting, or yidi jiandu, is all about.
He added,
But another important tool is top-down monitoring, which means that a publication registered at a higher administrative level can more easily and safely report on stories about lower-level Party or government institutions.
This was the case with both the Beijing News and Beijing Times. The former was administered by the Guangming Daily Group, under the Central Propaganda Department, and published jointly with the Nanfang Daily Group of Guangdong.
City leaders in Beijing could not control the newspaper through their own propaganda department because the paper was senior.
The Beijing News, which has had a strong professional tradition of reporting — part of its legacy from its southern Chinese co-publishers — certainly exploited this administrative position to its advantage, doing harder coverage of local issues in Beijing.
You can imagine that in some sense, from the standpoint of Beijing leaders, the paper was like a sword of Damocles, constantly hovering over their heads.
The only way for them to deal with the paper was to do so through negotiation with the paper’s managing institutions.
The Beijing Times, as a commercial spin-off of the central Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper, was in much the same position.
So this action by the Beijing city leadership is a clear move to deal with Beijing-based publications that have been beyond their control.
One of the most interesting questions, though, is exactly what sort of behind-the-scenes power shifts made this change possible. I leave that as an open question.
There is little question that this change will have a clear impact on the conduct of watchdog journalism, or “supervision by public opinion”, by both papers on local Beijing issues.
Theoretically, it will still be possible for them to investigative stories in other cities and regions, but the impact on reporting in Beijing should be immediate. This is something we’ll have to watch closely.
Of all the contentious cultural material China’s censors could crack down on, an inoffensive 1990s boy band ballad seems like an odd option.
China’s Ministry of Culture this week issued a new blacklist of 100 songs including the innocuous I Want it That Way by the Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry’s Last Friday Night and Beyonce’s Run the World (Girls). Although the majority of the blacklisted tunes came from Taiwan or Hong Kong, Lady Gaga leads the pack with a total of six banned tracks: The Edge of Glory, Hair, Marry the Night, Americano, Judas and Bloody Mary. Music websites must remove by 15 September or face prosecutions.
There is still no word on whether Guangzhou’s very own Back Dorm Boys have also been blacklisted.
After serving a three-and-a-half year sentence for inciting subversion, Chinese activist Hu Jia was sent home on Sunday.
But like Ai Weiwei, who surfaced from detention last week, Hu is far from free.
His wife told the BBC that he is being held under conditions “equivalent to house arrest.”
Media have published plenty of photos today showing crowds of non-uniformed police outside their apartment block in Beijing’s eastern suburbs.
Hours after his release, Hu spoke by phone to Hong Kong media, telling them that he will be careful in the future.
“Once I saw my family, I understood how much I owe them, especially my parents, my wife and my kid,” Hu told iCable News. “I realise I’ve done nothing for them. There is a Chinese saying that ‘patriotism and filial piety don’t go hand in hand’.”
Both Hu and Ai, once strident critics of aspects of the Chinese political system, now appear hobbled and cowed.
And this is just how the government wants them to appear, as a lesson to other would-be critics of the Party.
True to form, the English-language Global Times, a Chinese state mouthpiece, has an opinion piece today on Hu. The paper frequently covers news Chinese domestic media tend to shy away from.
It also warns Hu that his time in the limelight will be short-lived.
“The West will forget about China’s “social activists” soon, just as the “democratic activists” of 20 years ago [an oblique reference to the Tiananmen Square activists] have been gradually marginalized in Western society.”
