Danwei Model Workers 2014

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Danwei has been publishing the Model Worker awards – our list of the best websites, blogs, Twitter feeds and podcasts on China since 2005 (there are links to the earlier awards at the bottom of this post). This year, we’ve decided to award the Model Worker award for the best China website to one that does not publish news or commentary on current affairs at all but focuses on the intangible cultural heritage of Chinese accents, dialects, and languages.

Phonemica is an all-volunteer labor of love and we think it best expresses the possibilities of the Internet for independent people, unfunded by corporate or government interests, to engage intelligently with Chinese culture and build an archive of disappearing stories and language that will be of growing value as regional accents and dialects dissolve in the flood of standardized Mandarin on TV and the Internet.

Aside from choosing a different type of website as winner this year, we’ve also re-arranged the categories a little, for example instead of choosing one overall Twitter winner, we’ve chosen ten winners who cover different fields.

Continue reading

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A Brief Guide to China’s Media Landscape – May 2014

The table below shows mainland China’s most important websites, newspapers, and broadcast news organizations, together with numbers for website traffic, circulation and audience.

The numbers are guesstimates based on media reports, listed companies’ public filings, media advertising rate cards, Alexa.com and Danwei interviews with media insiders. We also use numbers from the biannual reports issued by CNNIC, the state-owned Internet statistical organization (their December report is available here in Chinese only). Like all numbers in China, they should be taken with a pinch of salt, for reference only. This list is updated every three months.

Notes and updates since the last version of this report (published in February 2014):

• Weibo use continues to slow after the company’s IPO; their filings state a daily active user count of 61.4 million, but we believe that it is lower than that;
• WeChat use continues to grow, although not at anything near its blazing speed in 2013. The deletion of a number of popular accounts that published news feeds to subscribers in Marchput paid to the notion that WeChat might replace Weibo as a platform for freewheeling discussion of sensitive matters.
• In December 2013, CNNIC reported that China had 619 million Internet users, including 500 million people who connected via a mobile phone; the number has no doubt grown since then.
• A report by Gartner in January this year stated that China had more than one billion mobile phone users.
• The strict monitoring and censorship of news and social media in the last half year continue with no letup in sight.

Internet

Tencent WeChat Mobile text & voice messaging, friend networks 396 million active users monthly
Sina Weibo Microblog 100 million active users monthly/40 million active users daily
Sina.com.cn News portal website 37.2 million IP visitors daily
Tencent Weibo Microblog about 540 million registered users/220 million active users monthly
Tencent Qzone Nickname SNS, blogs, home pages 632 million active users monthly
QQ.com News portal website 51 million IP visitor daily
Baidu Post Bar Forum and Q&A over 10 million registered users and over 200 million monthly active users
Baidu Search Engine Search engine over 80 million IP visitors daily
Taobao and T Mall Online mall and C2C ecommerce over 71 million IP visitors daily (combined); over 1 trillion RMB sales in 2012
Youku & Tudou Companies have merged; video sharing and viewing, including TV shows Youku: over 10 million IP visitors daily Tudou:over 1 million IP visitors daily
Douban Interest based, nickname SNS 79 million registered users and over 200 million active users monthly
Renren Real name SNS 45 millionactive login users monthly
Sohu News portal website 27 million IP visitor daily
Netease News portal website 17 million IP visitor daily
iFeng News portal website 9.7 million IP visitor daily
Caixin Financial business & politics news one of the leading websites in finance, 204 thousand IP visitor daily
Yicai Financial & economic news one of the leading websites in finance, 38 thousand IP visitor daily

Print Newspapers

Reference News
参考消息
Newspaper 3.4 million copies
People’s Daily
人民日报
Newspaper 2.8 million copies
Global Times
环球时报
Newspaper 2 million copies
Southern Weekly
南方周末
Newspaper 1.7 million copies
New Weekly新周刊 Magazine focusing on current events and lifestyle 310,000 copies
Southern People Weekly
南方人物周刊
Magazine focusing on interviews 200,000 copies

Radio and TV

China National Radio
中央人民广播电台
Radio Over 700 million listeners
CCTV
中国中央电视台
State television broadcaster in mainland China with mutiple channels 200 million to around a billion viewers
HunanTV
湖南卫视
Top provincial satellite TV station focused on entertainment programs 65 to 800 million viewers

Further reading on China’s Internet and media

Danwei Model Workers
Our list of the best English-language specialist websites about China

Wired
The Great Firewall of China (1997)
by Geremie R. Barmé and Sang Ye

The China Story Yearbook series
Behind the Great Firewall (2012); China’s Internet: A Civilising Process (2013)
by Jeremy Goldkorn
Discontent in Digital China (2012)
by Gloria Davies

The Economist
A Giant Cage – A survey of China’s Internet
by Gady Epstein

The Atlantic
“The Connection Has Been Reset”
by James Fallows

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Air pollution policy making and social media in Beijing, 2011-2013

The results of a Google.com image search for 雾霾 (wumai), the Chinese characters for smog.

This article is by Johan van de Ven, whose undergraduate dissertation at Oxford University examined the effects of factors such as environmental movements, diplomacy and social media on air pollution policy-making in China.

In a study conducted from June to December 2013, I quantitatively and qualitatively examined a variety of social media and mainstream media articles related to air pollution  and compared the results with government statements and policy making events, with the aim of answering the question: Was social media primarily responsible for government action on air pollution in China?

The results of a Baidu.com image search for 雾霾 (wumai), the Chinese characters for smog.

The results of a Baidu.com image search for 雾霾 (wumai), the Chinese characters for smog.

PM2.5
Surrounded on three sides by mountains and in close proximity to a large number of coal-fired power plants, Beijing has been afflicted by serious air pollution for many years. This pollution is exacerbated by the rapidly increasing number of cars in the Chinese capital, but only since 2011 has the noxious air been a topic of day-to-day online and offline conversation in Beijing. 2011 was also the year that the government began providing more accurate and comprehensive data on the problem, and announced measures to reduce air pollution in the capital. One word has been critical in this drive: PM2.5.

PM2.5 is now a household term in China. But as recently as January 2011 this was not the case. It was only on January 13 2011 that Baidu Index, a service that tracks Internet activity on given search terms, began to return results for “PM2.5″ (data available here, requires registration). PM2.5 is particulate matter of less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter, and is emitted by all types of combustive activities (see Airnow.gov for more information). It is particularly dangerous because PM2.5 particles can lodge deeper inside the lungs than most pollutants and because it typically contains materials of high toxicity.

This chart displays the results of the Baidu Index for “PM2.5″ for 2014 (both its use an Internet search term and its appearance in news articles), compared with mentions of “PM2.5″ on Sina Weibo:

Chart

World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines indicate that a safe limit for PM2.5 exposure is 10 micrograms per cubic meter on an annual average basis, and 25 micrograms per cubic meter on a 24-hour average basis. According to data obtained from the United States embassy, which has monitored PM2.5 levels in Beijing and published them on Twitter since 2008, the average concentration of PM2.5 at the embassy compound in eastern Beijing between February 17 2009 and April 5 2013 was 90.45 micrograms per cubic meter, over three times more than WHO 24-hour exposure guidelines. Furthermore, concentrations reached over 700 micrograms per cubic meter on at least one day in every year since monitoring commenced.

Between 2011 and 2013 there have been a number of key advances in how both national and local environmental protection authorities deal with air pollution. On December 22 2011, following an autumn of heavy pollution in the capital, Environment Minister Zhou Shengxian 周生贤 announced that a national PM2.5 monitoring network would be in place by 2015, with initial implementation beginning in Beijing on January 21 2012. Following an early June 2012 spat between the US State Department and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Relations, who saw the American embassy’s Twitter feed as an affront, the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau began publishing data recorded at 20 monitoring stations across the city on September 28 2012.

Airpocalypse
A tide of rhetoric promising to bring further improvements came in early 2013 after pollution reached extreme levels in the January 2013 “airpocalypse.” Reuters reported:

January 15 — Days after choking smog blanketed China’s capital, the country’s premier-designate added his voice to appeals to curb the toxic haze, but he offered few specifics and said there was no quick fix.

The comments from Vice Premier Li Keqiang, who is expected to take over as premier at a national congress in March, marked the first time a member of the ruling Communist Party’s seven-member Politburo Standing Committee has addressed the pollution levels that reached record levels during the weekend.

Conditions had eased somewhat by Tuesday, but the hazardous air sparked angry comments from some of Beijing’s 20 million residents and enlivened a usually compliant state media to criticize government inaction.

“There has been a long-term buildup to this problem, and the resolution will require a long-term process. But we must act,” state radio cited Li as saying on Tuesday, three days after the pollution measures soared past previous records.

Beyond piecemeal contingency measures, real reforms did not actually materialize, but the publication by Beijing authorities of an official air quality monitoring app on January 25th joined with the words of political figures such as Li to bring some relief to public concern.

The question is, what motivated both national and local environmental pollution authorities to take steps to address the issue of air pollution in Beijing?

The results of a Google.com image search for 雾霾 (wumai), the Chinese characters for smog.

The results of a Google.com image search for 雾霾 (wumai), the Chinese characters for smog.

NGOs and citizen activism
Over the last two decades, a variety of environmental organizations have emerged in China. Both local and international, many of these groups have focused their efforts on bringing about change by galvanizing public opinion in the hope that this will force the government to take action. Some groups have attempted to achieve this through citizen participation. One such project is Green Beagle 达尔文自然求知社, which launched a citizen monitoring campaign whereby the organization loaned out a portable PM2.5 monitor to local residents so that they could develop a more accurate perception of the air they were breathing. Green Beagle also maintains Nature University, a side project providing resources and training to inspire so-called “citizen journalists.”

The FLOAT Project uses retrofitted versions of traditional kites to monitor air quality, attaching pollution monitoring devices and colored lights to the kites so that they would serve as a visual indication of the basic state of the air in which they were being flown. The air monitoring kits were distributed online and through workshops which also focus on design and pollution awareness.

Greenpeace launched a citizen monitoring campaign, which is similar to that of Green Beagle. Greenpeace has also expended significant effort in public education and Internet-based campaigns, such as its portal on PM2.5 awareness. China Dialogue, a bilingual website focusing on environmental affairs, has facilitated and publicized debate and commentary on pollution-related issues by publishing articles simultaneously in English and Chinese by specialists and journalists from China and the rest of the world.

But these groups have not been successful in building widespread public environmental awareness in China. Efforts at citizen monitoring have been hampered by the fact that both Green Beagle and Greenpeace only have one portable PM2.5 monitoring unit to loan out, while the struggles of all these groups to build a presence in Chinese-language mainstream and social media is also indicative of their failure. One key illustration of this is that Greenpeace’s attempt to build a viral campaign on Weibo using the hashtag #好空气不要等 (I can’t wait for good air) was used only 364 times as of December 18 2013 .

The US Embassy and the power of diplomacy
It was a combination of diplomatic and celebrity activism which was most influential in the reforms made since 2011. Efforts by Beijing diplomatic missions to obtain better air pollution information began in 2008, when the United States embassy in Beijing began monitoring PM2.5 concentrations. Since then, the embassy’s Twitter feed, @Beijingair, formed the most prominent part of the public diplomacy drive, the implicit aim of which was to galvanize Chinese public opinion and thus influence the decision-making of the Chinese government. This has been accompanied by periodic spats between the US State Department and the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While NGOs were not successful in influencing public opinion, the disputes demonstrate that @Beijingair achieved the basic success of forcing MEP officials to continue paying attention to this issue. It was also successful in directing public opinion on the issue, with the Global Times 环球时报, a newspaper that frequently rails against US interference in China’s internal affairs, printing an editorial noting the effect that the Twitter feed had had on residents’ perception of air quality.

But US public diplomacy also enjoyed greater success than the environmental NGOs because it formed part of a two-pronged approach, the other half being discrete engagement between the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Ministry of Environment Protection, as well as between the EPA and the National Development and Reform Commission. While there is limited public evidence for the effectiveness of the cooperation, the fact that it has continued to the present since at least 2005 is indicative of basic success. The embassy Twitter feed was important for stirring up popular opinion and directly pressuring MEP officials, but it is the continuation of existing ministerial cooperation that is critical to ensuring future development of air quality management in China. However, while diplomatic missions were vital in pressuring national-level air pollution authorities to act, the reforms made in Beijing hinged on the local Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau. In terms of influencing local officials and galvanizing the local public, missions such as the US embassy played a distinctly secondary role.

Note: In April 2014 the US State Department published a large set of data from the US Embassy’s readings of PM2.5 in Beijing. Visualizations of the data can be seen here and here.

The Big Vs and the influence of social media
It was a group of celebrity Weibo users which was most successful in pressuring local officials and in coalescing the local populace in the drive for reforms to air pollution policy. Known as Big Vs, figures such as real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi 潘石屹, the children’s author Zheng Yuanjie 郑渊洁, and the angel investor Xue Manzi 薛蛮子 from 2011 to 2013 regularly reposted data from the @Beijingair Twitter feed (theoretically inaccessible in China after the blocking of Twitter in 2009) and also published online polls and essays. Zheng was the first to use a poll on environmental issues, asking his followers in November 2011 what they thought of air quality in Beijing. 6,993 participated, far in excess of the 364 who took part in Greenpeace’s attempted viral campaign. Moreover, 89% of respondents to Zheng’s poll voted for the option that “Beijing air quality is getting increasingly bad.”

This marked the start of a campaign that was to continue through January 2013, when it reached its apogee: on January 29, Pan Shiyi published a poll asking whether the government should establish a clean air act. Over 55,000 people took part, with 99% of them voting “yes.” The scale of this activity indicates that the Big Vs oversaw a genuine “blooming discourse”, like that which Yang and Calhoun imagined for China’s green sphere. Over the following weeks, public pressure remained high on the government to act. As detailed earlier, the response revolved around piecemeal measures such as factory slowdowns. While a clean air act has yet to come to the table at the National People’s Congress, such legislation has been discussed at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress. This shows that Weibo Big Vs successfully directed popular opinion on the issue of PM2.5 pollution between the years 2011-2013.

The influence they accrued is underlined by the measures that have since been taken against them, which also fall within the context of an ongoing campaign to crack down on Weibo celebrities and “public opinion leaders”. Xue Manzi is now in prison after being arrested on charges of soliciting prostitutes, before then being shown on CCTV’s prime time news program confessing to the abuse of his position as a Big V. Pan Shiyi was subjected to an interview on Chinese Central Television in which he was made to state concerns regarding irresponsible social media usage. The very fact that the government considered men such as Pan and Xue to be a threat indicates how much they succeeded in influencing popular opinion.

But ultimately, despite the effectiveness of different aspects of Big V campaigning and public diplomacy in influencing public opinion, the policymaking power of the central government is largely invulnerable to the weight of public opinion. Concessions are made, but far-reaching responses are absent. Just as Pan Shiyi only began campaigning for air quality improvement after his wife developed a cough, so the leaders in Zhongnanhai will likely prove correct William Alford et al, who found in their study of Anqing in Anhui Province that people became concerned about coal pollution when they or their family developed health problems. Only when the Chinese leadership or their families develop air pollution-related health conditions will a Clean Air Act for China have real probability.

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A Brief Guide to China’s Media Landscape – February 2014

The table below shows mainland China’s most important websites, newspapers, and broadcast news organizations, together with numbers for website traffic, circulation and audience.

The numbers are guesstimates based on media reports, listed companies’ public filings, media advertising rate cards, Alexa.com and Danwei interviews with media insiders. Like all numbers in China, they should be taken with a pinch of salt, for reference only. This list is updated every three months.

The major changes since the last version of this report (published in November 2013) are continued growth of Internet users, and the rise of the mobile device as the most common means of accessing the Internet:

“The number of Internet users in China had hit 604 million as of the end of September [2013], with mobile phones becoming the favored means of accessing the web, the State Internet Information Office announced”according to the China Daily.

2013 also witnessed a significant downturn of activity on Sina Weibo (often glossed as “China’s Twitter”). According to recent reports released by China Internet Network Information Center, 22.8% netizens reduced their usage of Weibo, including visits from mobile devices. In December 2013, there were 196 million mobile phone Weibo users, which is 5.96 million fewer than at the end of 2012. The decline is widely blamed on several factors, including the rise of Tencent’s WeChat messaging and mobile app service; government censorship, especially the”Big V Crackdown”; too much advertising and commercial “noise” on users’ Weibo feeds; and a lack of innovation from Sina (see this article for more on the factors behind the decline).

 

Internet

Sina Weibo Microblog Over 500 million registered users/65 million active users daily
Sina.com.cn News portal website 40 million IP visitors daily
Tencent Weibo Microblog about 540 million registered users/220 million active users monthly
Tencent Qzone Nickname SNS, blogs, home pages 620 million active users monthly
Tencent WeChat Mobile text & voice messaging, friend networks 272 million active users monthly
QQ.com News portal website 51 million IP visitor daily
Baidu Post Bar Forum and Q&A over 10 million registered users and over 200 million monthly active users
Baidu Search Engine Search engine over 80 million IP visitors daily
Taobao and T Mall Online mall and C2C ecommerce over 67 million IP visitors daily (combined); over 1 trillion RMB sales in 2012
Youku & Tudou Companies have merged; video sharing and viewing, including TV shows youku: over 10 million IP visitors daily tudou:over 1.26 million IP visitors daily
Douban Interest based, nickname SNS 79 million registered users and over 200 million active users monthly
Renren Real name SNS 184  million active users
Sohu News portal website 25 million IP visitor daily
Netease News portal website 16 million IP visitor daily23 million unique visitors daily
iFeng News portal website 11 million IP visitor daily
Caixin Financial business & politics news one of the leading websites in finance, 153 thousand IP visitor daily
Yicai Financial & economic news one of the leading websites in finance, 54 thousand IP visitor daily

Print Newspapers

Reference News
参考消息
Newspaper 3.4 million copies
People’s Daily
人民日报
Newspaper 2.8 million copies
Global Times
环球时报
Newspaper 2 million copies
Southern Weekly
南方周末
Newspaper 1.7 million copies
New Weekly新周刊 Magazine focusing on current events and lifestyle 310,000 copies
Southern People Weekly
南方人物周刊
Magazine focusing on interviews 200,000 copies

Radio and TV

China National Radio
中央人民广播电台
Radio Over 700 million listeners
CCTV
中国中央电视台
State television broadcaster in mainland China with mutiple channels 200 million to around a billion viewers
HunanTV
湖南卫视
Top provincial satellite TV station focused on entertainment programs 65 to 800 million viewers

Further reading on China’s Internet and media

Danwei Model Workers
Our list of the best English-language specialist websites about China

Wired
The Great Firewall of China (1997)
by Geremie R. Barmé and Sang Ye

The China Story Yearbook series
Behind the Great Firewall (2012); China’s Internet: A Civilising Process (2013)
by Jeremy Goldkorn
Discontent in Digital China (2012)
by Gloria Davies

The Economist
A Giant Cage – A survey of China’s Internet
by Gady Epstein

The Atlantic
“The Connection Has Been Reset”
by James Fallows

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Gree interested in investing in Meizu?

Fans of mobile phone brand Meizu were recently allowed a rare glimpse of J. Wong, the reclusive founder of the brand of sleek Android-powered smartphones based in Zhuhai, Guangdong province. In a two-hour speech posted online, Wong announced that he was going to resume his daily work routine at his company office, which he had stopped visiting following his semi-retirement in 2011.

Wong also talked about an incentive program, which aims to transform employees into shareholders as well as bring external strategic shareholders to raise one billion yuan in capital. Gree, China’s leading home appliance brand, was mentioned as one potentially interested investor. Wong also commented positively on Lenovo’s recent deal to buy Motorola, which he believes will help the company gain headway in overseas markets.

Meizu, a pioneer in the Mainland Chinese smartphone market, has been surpassed in terms of sales by its competitors in recent years. Xiaomi, for example, outsold Meizu by a factor of three in 2013. While some industry commentators believe that Wong’s return is an effort to save the company from crisis, others suggest that the prospective cooperation between Gree and Meizu, if it occurs, will help Gree, a traditional industry manufacturer, to establish its Internet pedigree and tap into the smart appliances market.

Companies and brands affected
Gree Electric Appliances Inc. of Zhuhai (SHE:000651)

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Police bust PR companies for illegal deletion of news and social media postings

On December 5, the People’s Daily published a report about a police investigation into companies that offer services to delete news items and social media postings from the Internet.

The article does not, of course, mention that the biggest deleter of information from the Internet is the government itself and that because of censorship and self-censorship, deleting news articles and social media posts is entirely natural behavior for editors and other staff of Chinese Internet companies.

Nonetheless, it’s worth a read to get a sense of how filthy the Internet PR business is in China. And to permit ourselves some self-promotion, paid deletion and spam are key reasons that why Danwei’s social media tracking and media monitoring services do not rely only on automated, technical solutions and always have experienced human editors checking all of our findings.

The original Chinese report is here, below is a translation.

China’s biggest case of illegal operations by Internet PR company cracked

Charging fees from clients and bribing website administrators: Recently, Bejing police discovered a website that provides illegal services with unlawful revenues exceeding 10 million yuan, making it the largest Internet PR company on record that has engaged in illegal activities since the Supreme Court released the latest interpretation regarding Internet crimes.

Recently, in the nationwide campaign against organized online rumor mongering and other Internet crimes, Beijing police discovered that six PR companies including Beijing Koubei Interactive Marketing (北京口碑互动营销策划有限公司) have engaged in paid information deletion and other illegal activities. Under the unified directions of the Ministry of Public Security, police authorities of more than ten provinces made scores of arrests, with 10 million yuan of illegal revenues seized.

The cost of deleting a post ranges from a few hundreds to more than twenty thousand yuan. Big corporate clients usually pay annual fees for such services.

Koubei, founded in 2007, was relatively well known in the Internet PR world. Its revenue mainly come from media monitoring, brand image maintenance and Internet marketing. The company has almost 50 clients, which are mostly well-known large companies and listed companies with annual revenues exceeding 70 million yuan.

According to Li Dong, deputy chief of Beijing police, Koubei uses Internet image marketing as a disguise, bribing related parties to provide paid information deletion service.

According to the police, Koubei has a PR department, social media department, media-monitoring department and a customer relations department. The PR and social media departments are directly involved in deleting negative information from news portals and Internet forums. If they found negative information concerning their clients, they would send an alert to the client and let them decide whether to pay to remove the information.

The company priced its services according to the amount of effort required to remove the articles with prices ranging from a few hundred yuan to just under three thousand yuan. A Mr Yang, the PR manager said: “In addition, some big companies usually pay a monthly and annual fee to monitor, release information and delete negative information.”

According to Mr. Li [a different person from Li Dong], a Koubei employee, the company set up a QQ account for every employee, and gave them contact info for many employees of news websites. When a project commences, the responsible person would contact the editors of the websites. “Once the removal of a post is confirmed, the company will send money to the person [at the website] who did it.” Li then said: “Sometimes when the contact can’t be reached, we would post a message on the QQ group, then some third party agent would take care of it.”

Deleting Internet posts, making pocket money, website editors become a key link in the interest chain

According to Li Dong, “this year after the Supreme People’s Court issued an interpretation on Internet crimes, Koubei held special meetings to discuss countermeasures. Some contracts were revised, with the clause about “deleting negative information for customers” being rewritten to hide the the nature of the service. Yet the illegal activity did not stop.

Meanwhile, in order to reduce risks, Koubei specified that all deletion should be done by third party agencies. According to the police investigation, during the period between January and September this year, Koubei paid 470,000 yuan to such agencies.

Among them, Mi Le (pseudonym) is one of the contacts that Koubei made regular contacts. “If there were no PR companies like Koubei, or corrupt website editors, we agents would never be able to make money.” Mi Le said that he had been commissioned by Koubei scores of times. Each time, he was paid 200 to 1000 yuan.

According to the police, one of Mi Le’s contacts is a Mr Zhao, who is an Internet engineer at Eastday.com. “Deleting posts is part of my day job. Aside from deletion required by the company, I also takes requests from friends like Mi Le and I make some pocket money.” Said Zhao.

“We don’t delete popular posts, or those that have received large amount of clicks, or those that appeared on prominent locations as those are too risky.” Armed with this form of self-protection, Zhao and Mi Le worked together for two years. “Each piece of information cost 200 yuan and sometimes I would earn more than my salary if I deleted enough posts.”

According to the police investigation, Koubei and other companies rely on website administrators that have the power to delete posts to conduct their illegal activities. So far scores of websites have been found to have engaged in such activities. Some of them are influential mainstream websites. Some employees of the such websites have become a key link in the criminal interest chain.

Justified deletions have legal channels: companies need to strengthen management to resist temptations

The reporter learned from Beijing police that at the moment, some involved in the crime have already been put under detention for the crime of illegal business operations, bribing non-government employees, and the crime of acceptance of bribes of non-governmental employees. 19 suspects have been arrested.

“Never count on your luck. No matter how many companies are involved, how much business you have, breaking the law will have great impact on the company,” said Mr. Yang, president of Koubei, “All companies should have a clear idea of what they should do and what they shouldn’t. They also have to renew their knowledge about new laws and regulations.”

As the one who is directly responsible for the company’s paid deletion line of business, PR director Mr. Yang said “I hope I will never do this again. It does no good to anyone and nobody should do anything illegal.”

“Everyday, many people came to us asking if we can help delete some posts. The offers were so tempting that we gave up our principles,” Confessed Mr. Zhao. He also said that there were legal means to delete posts, and that all websites have specialized people to deal with legitimate complaints. If a post infringes on someone’s legal interests, the infringed party can contact the website’s customer service and provide evidence (to support the request to delete it).

As regards PR companies, agencies and website employees conspiring in crimes, the police suggest that on one hand, websites should have smooth channels of communication with clients; on the other hand, websites should strengthen the self-discipline of editors.

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Internet Poll on changing China’s strange public holiday system

While much of the world looks forward to official holidays that can be predicted years in advance, China’s annual muddle over the coming year’s holiday schedule has long been a reliable source of confusion. But yesterday the Holiday Office published three potential replacement schedules for public input “to make the official holiday schedule planning of our country more scientific and rational.” Sina has put up a poll about it.

Perhaps unique to mainland China is the practice of stealing a day off from a neighboring weekend if necessary to ensure a full three-day vacation. Among the three new options, however, the most popular so far retains the weekend-swapping ways of the current setup, perhaps because it is also the only proposal to grant seven full days off to both the Spring Festival and National Day holidays.

Those dismayed by the current results can take heart in the fact that the only option that would end almost all weekend swaps is currently in second place, only 4,000 or so votes behind. Below is a translation Sina’s poll number of votes for each as of yesterday evening.

How would you change the official holiday schedule?
In accordance with The National Method for Scheduling Days Off for New Years and Memorial Holidays, to make the official holiday schedule planning of our country more scientific and rational, with opinions raised from every aspect of society having been collected in a previous questionnaire survey, three adjusted holiday schedule proposals have been put forward for publication to solicit opinions. Participation is welcome.

1. Which of the following holiday schedule proposals would you choose?

Proposal A: Spring Festival holiday of 3 days, borrowing a day off from the neighboring Saturday, with Sunday becoming a seventh day of the long holiday. National Day holiday of 3 days, with no changes to other days off, and the vacation period being set as Oct 1 to 3, to be shifted to later date if it falls on a weekend. New Year’s Day, Tomb Sweeping Day, International Labor Day (May Day), Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival all get one day off, with no changes to other days off–only those days will be off, with the following Monday off should they fall on a weekend. (11,144 votes)

Proposal B: Spring Festival holiday of 3 days, borrowing a day off from the neighboring Saturday, with Sunday becoming a seventh day off. National Day holiday of 3 days, borrowing a day off from the neighboring Saturday, with Sunday becoming the fifth day of the long holiday, and the vacation period being set as Oct 1 to 5. New Year’s Day, Tomb Sweeping Day, International Labor Day (May Day), Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival all get one day off, with no adjustments to other days off if one of these holidays falls on a Wednesday–only those days will be off. If one falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, a day off will be borrowed from the neighboring Saturday [and used on Monday], with Sunday becoming the third day of the short long holiday. If one falls on a Saturday, the following Monday will be off. (5,381 votes)

Proposal C: Spring Festival holiday of 3 days, borrowing a day off from the neighboring Saturday, with Sunday becoming a seventh day off. National Day holiday of three days, borrowing a day off from the neighboring Saturday, with Sunday becoming the seventh day of the long holiday, and the vacation period being set as Oct 1-7. New Year’s Day, Tomb Sweeping Day, International Labor Day (May Day), Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival all get one day off, with no changes to other days off if one of these holidays falls on a Wednesday–only those days will be off. If one falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, a day off will be borrowed from the neighboring Saturday [and used on Monday], with Sunday becoming the third day of the short long holiday. If one falls on a Saturday, the following Monday will be off. (15,162 votes)

2. How old are you?
Under 20 (754 respondents)
Between 20 and 40 (22,026 respondents)
Between 40 and 60 (8,353 respondents)
Over 60 (554 respondents)

3.Occupation
Enterprise staff (19,865 respondents)
Party or government organ civil servant (3,419 respondents)
Self-employed in industry/commerce (1,347 respondents)
Peasant (193 respondents)
Retired worker (618 respondents)
Student (2,690 respondents)
Unemployed (317 respondents)
Other (3,238 respondents)

Update: Earlier this week, Beijing Youth Daily reported on abnormalities with Sohu.com’s hosted version of the poll after 60,000 votes disappeared from its tally in the early morning on November 28.

The article raised the possibility of double voting by some netizens, and an unnamed Sohu representative was quoted as saying users couldn’t vote more than “once per 20 minutes”. In a sidebar interview, the leader of the Holiday System Reform Task Force Cai Jiming criticized the online poll for lax standards and for not taking into account the opinions of those who don’t often use the internet.

But soon thereafter, the apparent support of over half of online respondents for “option C“ (7 days off for both Spring Festival and Golden Week) was seemingly corroborated by the similar results of an offline poll of 762 people across 12 provinces conducted by the People’s Daily Network, as reported by Legal Evening News. Despite a massive outpouring of votes and public interest, it is unlikely that any of this will actually have any effect on next year’s holiday schedule.

Links and sources
Original poll
Current results
Detailed description and hypothetical calendars for the three proposed schedules

This tranlsation is by Danwei contributor Hudson C. Lockett IV, a Beijing-based freelance writer and photographer. Follow him on Twitter here.

Other stories by Hudson Lockett on Danwei

Six Days in Hong Kong’s Occupy Central
Photos of Hong Kong’s anti-national education protest
Xie Yan and the fight against bad conservation laws
The uncertain return of Beijing wildlife

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Hybrid cars: BYD’s new Qin

In a confident move, BYD is offering 1,000 yuan to any driver that can beat the company’s pre-release Model Qin in 400-meter drag races. The Qin, a hybrid sedan, is being marketed mainly for two new features: a 0 to 100 km/h acceleration time of 5.9 seconds, and better fuel economy than most petrol models and hybrid predecessors.

Many video clips of races involving the Qin in various cities have been posted online (see for example here and here), and these show the Qin going head-to-head with the Audi TT, the Porsche 911 and various other models. Based on the great numbers of comments generated by these videos, BYD’s promotion campaign appears to have been quite successful in garnering some buzz.

GW.com.cn, a business website, ran a story on November 26 quoting an unnamed BYD marketing manager as saying that the company had already received over 2,000 pre-orders and its factory in Xi’an was gearing up production to ensure supply after the Qin’s official launch date, scheduled for December. The source also said that the government’s release of a list of new environmental protection model cities has sped up the Qin’s launch.

Companies and brands affected
BYD Company Limited (HKG:1211)

Image source: Autoblog Green

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A Brief Guide to China’s Media Landscape

The table below shows mainland China’s most important websites, newspapers, and broadcast news organizations, together with numbers for website traffic, circulation and audience.

The numbers are guesstimates based on media reports, listed companies’ public filings, media advertising rate cards, Alexa.com and Danwei interviews with media insiders. Like all numbers in China, they should be taken with a pinch of salt, for reference only. This list will be updated every three months. This version was first published on November 21, 2013.

Update: “The number of Internet users in China had hit 604 million as of the end of September this year, with mobile phones becoming the favored means of accessing the web, the State Internet Information Office announced” on November 29.

 

Internet

Sina Weibo Microblog Over 500 million registered users/46.2 million active users daily
Sina.com.cn News portal website 163 million unique visitors
Tencent Weibo Microblog About 540 million registered users/100 million active users daily
Tencent Qzone Nickname SNS, blogs, home pages 626.4 million active users monthly
Tencent WeChat Mobile text & voice messaging, friend networks 235.8 million active users monthly
QQ.com News portal website 284.1 million unique visitors
Baidu Post Bar Forum and Q&A Over 200 million registered users
Baidu Search Engine Search engine Over 72.9 million visitors daily
Taobao and T Mall Online mall and C2C ecommerce 46.1 million visitors daily (combined); over 1 trillion RMB sales in 2012
Youku & Tudou Companies have merged; video sharing and viewing, including TV shows Youku: over 8.53 million visitors daily Tudou:over 2.1 million visitors daily
Douban Interest based, nickname SNS Over 100 million unique visitors monthly
Renren Real name SNS 184  million active users
Sohu News portal website 175 million unique visitors daily
Netease News portal website 23 million unique visitors daily
iFeng News portal website 5 million visitors daily
Caixin Financial business & politics news 79,000 visitors daily
Yicai Financial & economic news 64,200 visitors daily

Print Newspapers

Reference News
参考消息
Newspaper 3.4 million copies
People’s Daily
人民日报
Newspaper 2.8 million copies
Global Times
环球时报
Newspaper 2 million copies
Southern Weekly
南方周末
Newspaper 1.7 million copies
New Weekly新周刊 Magazine focusing on current events and lifestyle 310,000 copies
Southern People Weekly
南方人物周刊
Magazine focusing on interviews 200,000 copies

Radio and TV

China National Radio
中央人民广播电台
Radio Over 700 million listeners
CCTV
中国中央电视台
State television broadcaster in mainland China with mutiple channels 200 million to around a billion viewers
HunanTV
湖南卫视
Top provincial satellite TV station focused on entertainment programs 65 to 800 million viewers
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Li Xiaolai, Bitcoin millionaire

Hidden in a pedestrian-only lane in Beijing’s tech district of Zhongguancun, Cheku Café (车库咖啡厅) is not easy to find and appears to be an unassuming eatery like its neighbors. But if you climb up the dark staircase, you’ll blunder into what appears to be a university library: youngsters scattered around scores of desks in a large, cavernous room, gazing, typing on the glowing screens, chattering, laughing and napping.

The name Cheku, meaning garage, speaks of ambition by alluding to tech giant Apple’s rather humble origins. Some believe that China’s equivalents of the Cupertino tech giant may begin in this place: the idea of the café is to provide startup tech companies a communal office where rent is cheap and entrepreneurs can communicate, inspire each other and conceive ideas.

One evening last week I visited Cheku. At about six thirty, the room began to fill up. People conversed with familiarity, even though many had never previously met. For an outsider, the conversations were a little bewildering: “How many coins do you possess? How did you get them?”

Aside from its reputation as a tech hub, Cheku Café was chosen to host tonight’s event because of something that happened in March this year: an American student named Jake Smith asked if he could pay for his cup of coffee with Bitcoins. With hindsight, the 0.2 Bitcoins he handed over now looks a high price to pay for the beverage, though for some of the bitcoiners I met at Cheku Café believe the incident will go down in history.

Origins

In the second week of November, the exchange rate of Bitcoin to major currencies took a sudden jump, with its value more than doubling within a week. As of November 20, Bitcoin is trading around USD 500 per coin, triggering speculation that the Bitcoin “bubble” is being driven by strong demand from China, an argument that is supported by strong volume increases observed on Chinese Bitcoin exchange websites such as BTC China and Huobi.com.

The first “cryptocurrency” in the world, apparently invented by a person or group known to the word as Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin was born with the mission to solve the intrinsic flaws of fiat currencies and early digital currencies: inflation, double-spending, counterfeiting, cash robbery etc. The assumptions that the system is based on is that the majority of participants are honest. Every transaction need to be confirmed by all the participants. In theory, a group of cheaters could take control of the currency if they acquired more computing power than the all other users – a condition that hasn’t even come close to materialize. Yet, the protocol is open source and it offers transparency no banking system can compete.

Many believe that the most promising application for Bitcoin is for online payment. Unlike using a credit card, payment made in Bitcoin doesn’t carry a transaction fee (though one can opt to pay a small amount for faster confirmation speed) and though every transaction is documented, it can only be traced to the virtual account that hold the Bitcoin, but not real world payers. Thanks to this anonymity, Bitcoin gained a little notoriety for being used for drug sales and money laundering. In May, when the FBI shut down Silk Road, an online narcotics marketplace that used Bitcoin as primary currency, the exchange rate tanked more than 40% in one day.

A Chinese Bitcoin multimillionaire

Li Xiaolai (pictured above), was a speaker at the event I attended at Cheku Café. He is perhaps the most famous figure in the Chinese Bitcoin world. Li admitted on one occasion that his Bitcoin holding is the six digits. At the current exchange rate, that is more USD 50 million, but such comparison may not do Bitcoin justice as unlike 50 million dollars, 100,000 Bitcoins is about 1/100 of all existing Bitcoins. The world’s most famous Bitcoin millionaires are Winklevoss twins who own 120,000 Bitcoins.

Li, 41, studied accounting at college. Following graduation he worked as a salesman, and later as an English teacher. Li said on one occasion that English teaching is really just a type of sales in China: with millions of young Chinese aspiring to go abroad, English teaching is essentially selling a dream. Li also published several books such as “Breakthrough on TOEFL essential vocabulary in 21 days”, “How to get high scores in TOEFL essay”. But he did not make much money from these endeavors.

In the first two years after the first Bitcoins were minted in 2009, the virtual currency were used among geeks and worth no more than a few cents. Few people knew about them. Stories of a man spending 10,000 Bitcoins to buy a pizza and of a hacker attack that sent the price down by half began to interest the news media and global interest in the currency grew.

Li recounted his roller roaster trip starting from the year when his employer, the testing cramming school operator New Oriental, went public. As a new employee, Li was allowed to buy a small number of pre-IPO shares. While the company was well received at the New York Exchange, many of Li’s colleagues had fears that the company was overvalued and did not have a bright future, which Li described as “insider’s pessimism”. Li decided he wanted to invest his money elsewhere, and this was when he found out about Bitcoin.

Li described the moment when he learned the article as a moment of shock. The idea was so elegant and Li was so mesmerized that he wasted no time to find the paper by Satoshi Nakamoto on the Internet. Although he couldn’t understand it completely, it didn’t prevent him from selling all his shares and loading up with Bitcoins. He was convinced that this thing was going to be big. In days to follow, Li said he had many insomniac nights. But as his Bitcoins grew in value, he decided to expand his profits by investing in a container worth of computers for mining.

Mining

In the paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-peer electronic cash system, Satoshi Nakamoto explained Bitcoin mining: “The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.” One brilliant touch is unifying the self-interest and well being of community. Newly created Bitcoins are used to compensate miners who spent computing power and electricity to process transactions, and keep the network healthy. While the miners may be perfectly self-interested in their endeavor, their selfishness is essential to the system. The speed of new coins being injected to the system is also designed to slow down as time passes and more people join the Bitcoin economy. By artificially increasing the difficulty, the miners are forced to upgrade their equipment constantly, to gain advantage in the competition for coins. When Li realized this, he divested his mining venture. Today, he focuses on Bitcoin lending – large transactions of coins usually happen offline to avoid radical fluctuations of value. Since there is no law regarding Bitcoin trades, people like Li who have a reputation are usually invited to act as a guarantor in the deal.

Infrastructure and industry

Many compare Bitcoin with a gold rush – not only that gold was hard to find but that those that sell shovels end up making more money than people who actually do the mining.

A Shenzhen-based company called ASICminer, founded in early 2012 by three new college graduates, has been making tens of millions by making specialized miners. Bitcoin mining computers need to have a special type of microchip that is an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC. In the early days, there were only three companies – two based in China, producing the Bitcoin ASIC chips, the margins were high: One mining machine that cost 2,000 yuan to build could be sold for 40,000 yuan.

ASICminer also uses a novel way of fund raising. The company issued virtual stocks which investors buy using Bitcoins. Dividends are also paid in Bitcoins. 796.com, a virtual share and futures trading exchange, has four stocks being traded, including ASICMINER. The stock is currently trading at 0.0048 Bitcoin per share, a fraction of what it was at the beginning of the year, though many investors have earned enough in dividends to cover their losses.

Li Xiaolai is an investors in ASICminer, and remains long on the company, but he said that he would not recommend it for the faint-hearted as radical fluctuations are common in the Bitcoin world.

Regulation may be around the corner

The idea of a decentralized currency means that Bitcoin can work with or without a government, something not all governments may accept with grace. Compounding the potential annoyance to governments is that sales made in Bitcoins are often untaxable, and once people start using Bitcoin in preference to fiat money, it will necessarily result in loss of tax income.

Many predict that governments will eventually bring the unruly Bitcoin under its reins. But perhaps not: the FBI itself has acknowledged that “Bitcoins are not illegal in and of themselves and have known legitimate uses.” In China, Bitcoin appears to still be off the government’s radar. However, that might change; the fates of Facebook and Twitter may serve as a warning.

The worst case scenario for Bitcoiners is that governments will seek to shut down the whole system. Many believe that it is impossible given its peer to peer decentralized nature. There is no central sever to take down. Unless governments begin a long and determined campaign of arresting people who own or use Bitcoin, it will be very difficult to destroy it, but a hostile stance from the authorities would undoubtedly hurt speculators’ confidence. If the US or Chinese governments outlaw Bitcoin, the value may take a big dive, but in the long term, many Bitcoiners believe, it will bounce back and grow as it did before.

For a dedicated Bitcoiner like Li, the ups and down only serve to make him identify with Bitcoin more strongly. A true Bitcoiner is not an investor in the typical sense of the word, since they see owning Bitcoins as even more desirable than owning fiat money and are determined to go through the odds, with great indifference to the financial outcome. At the Cheku Café event, rarely did anyone ask about other types of money: they just wanted to know how many Bitcoins you possessed.

Li said that he owns no real estate and no car, his assets are almost all virtual. He also described his own situation as a dilemma – if Bitcoin took a drop, he would lose a fortune, but only so when you think from the perspective of fiat money. From the perspective of a Bitcoiner, he would rather that Bitcoin lose value so he could do what he once was capable of doing: buy thousands of Bitcoins in one go.

Passport to the future and USA

“This is the first time in history that human beings have found a way to ensure the inviolability of personal property,” said Li in a celebratory tone, “If you remember, two years ago, I posted on Twitter that I would do something I called a ‘virtual immigration’.”

When I asked my travel agent to obtain a visa for me, he said it couldn’t be done because I had no house. No car – the car I drive is registered under my friend’s name, my bank account balance is a joke.

Do you know the easiest way to immigrate to the US? You get a travel visa and board an airliner, and you never come back. But if it is that easy, why most of you didn’t do it? Come on, be honest, you don’t want to live in this place, do you? The answer is that you have all your assets locked here.

Li  finally  got his green card. His story may be the start of a trend. The Winklevoss twins warned American regulators not to push innovation out of the U.S. and into China. While there is no sign of China beating U.S. in creating a Bitcoin economy, with Bitcoin making assets relocation so easy, one can foresee waves of Chinese Bitcoin immigrants hitting the American shores in a future not so remote.

Finale

Many believe that the fate of Bitcoin is connected to whether it will be adopted by enough people so that one can pay bills easily with it. Li does not believe Bitcoin will replace fiat money any time soon. As long as it stays a perfect speculative vehicle, Li is happy. “If you can’t buy a breakfast with gold, does it make your gold less valuable?” Asked Mr. Li rhetorically.

This gives rise to another question – As Bitcoin continue to appreciate, will it send the world into a deflationary spiral because it rewards hoarding and discourages spending? This is a view held by many Bitcoin critics, including prominent economist Paul Krugman. Some think that a coin that worth hundreds of dollars is a ridiculous idea.

Bitcoin’s answer to the deflationary spiral question is infinite divisibility. Even the world had only one Bitcoin, it is more than enough for all the people, because it can be divided infinitive times. My own observations at the Cheku Café event seem to indicate that people will not just hoard them. The American student who spent 0.2 Bitcoins didn’t cry for being overcharged. If anything, the true believers tend to be more generous as their way of seeing money has changed.

This year, shortly after an earthquake in Meishan, Sichuan Earthquake, Li Xiaolai organized a Bitcoin donation. About 40 bitcoins were raised to help the quake victims. Like many Bitcoiners, Li seeks to create a positive image for the community as charitable and responsible, rather than shady money grabbers or drug traffickers.

The event concluded on a hopeful note when the host proposed a Bitcoin trade. Anyone can buy and sell their coins. One offered to sell ten coins at a price one hundred yuan lower than the standard exchange rate that evening. The coins were quickly snapped up by two buyers. It seems that the Bitcoiners don’t have the resistance to parting with their coins that some economists see as the cryptocurrency’s biggest problem.

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