It’s sort of fun to catch the book and movie spin-meisters who trumpet seemingly favorable blurbs artfully extracted from otherwise bad or mixed reviews. They baldly turn criticism into praise as they try to get you to buy that movie ticket or paperback. But maybe it’s more of a problem when you see a government…
Global Voices Online noticed yesterday when guerrilla blogger Zola (Zhou Shuguang) began tweeting his own detention. His BlackBerry let the world know that local officials had intercepted him in the town of Fengmuqiao in Hunan province, and he posted updates as they forced him into a car to drive him home. If he leaves his…
First, a pointer to Rebecca Mackinnon’s Asia Wall Street Journal oped from yesterday, The Chinese Censorship Foreigners Don’t See . She makes many of the same points I did about how the Great Firewall is leaky, and the control of the Internet in China relies on much more than technology.
During the war in Vietnam, the daily press briefings by the American military were called the “Five o’clock Follies” by the foreign press corps that was on the receiving end of the military’s damage control aimed at controlling the story from Vietnam. The Beijing Games have their own daily press meeting, at 10 am, hosted…
NBC coverage of the women’s gymnastics team competition made incessant mention of the controversy over the Chinese athletes’ ages. Are they really 16, or are they underage? And what does that say about the awful and efficient “machine” that pumps out China’s Olympians? NBC announcers made sure that American viewers pondered the matter as the gold medal went to…
Kristin Jones has been doing a great job monitoring the Chinese media and the more unofficial online world. One of the realities she has pointed out is the similarity of coverage across China’s media when sensitive issues crop up. There is a reason for that. An interesting piece, “Screws tighten on mainland journalists,” ran in…
Bloggers in China know that certain words are easily picked out by censors’ keyword searches. So they don’t use them, and their posts stay up longer. But images are harder to detect, particularly if they aren’t labeled.Today, somebody calling himself Qian Tiexian started a thread at the blog aggregator Bullog with the title “Two children.”…
Before I bury them below today’s lengthy post, here are two quick items. If you are stuck behind someone’s filtering system, in China or anywhere else in the world, check out citizenlab’s guidebook in pdf. It tells you how to circumvent the restrictions. And today the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China updated its list of…
Despite reports of censorship, several Chinese newspapers have reported on the stabbing death in Beijing on Saturday of a relative of the U.S. men’s volleyball coach. But most of the reporting has been limited to official statements. Emphasizing that the attacker acted alone, Beijing Youth Daily yesterday quoted Beijing Olympic Committee official Wang Wei in identifying the victim…