Two stories have shocked the Chinese press: 7 deaths in an internet cafe in Guizhou province caused by “chemicals illegally stored in an adjacent room” (China Daily), and a fire at a Sichuan grassland where “the dead are comprised of 15 soldiers, five villagers and two forest workers.” (China Daily)
Inside, the New Express contrasts the two events on the same page. The Yunnan Information Times shows the full carnage of the explosion in Kaili city, Guizhou province:
As worries about inflation in China grow, it’s worth remembering the inflation scare of 2008, as seen in this Sexy Beijing video.
Anyone who has used Wikipedia over the past few weeks will recognize the man staring out from the cover of the City Evening News.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is appearing in banner ads with a “personal appeal” on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, calling for users to donate to the project.
In the City Evening News advertisement, Wales appeals to reader on behalf of Maurice Lacroix, a Swiss timepiece brand. “Free access to the sum of all human knowledge, some called it impossible, I call it Wikipedia,” reads the ad copy.
The paper’s top headline reports that Russia has been awarded the right to host the 2018 World Cup.
Today’s other big story, not carried on the front page, involves the release of Wang Peng, a resident of Lanzhou, Gansu Province, who had been arrested by police from Ningxia Province after he claimed that a civil servant had obtained his position through back-door channels. Wang’s arrest incensed free-speech advocates; two officials in charge of the Ningxia police force have been dismissed.
Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks website, is wanted by Interpol, today’s Dongguan Times announces under the headline “You Know Too Much”.
The framing of the story, with Assange’s mouth blocked in the front-page image and an inside page headline quoting Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin charge that WikiLeaks had been deceived, give the impression that Interpol’s “Red Notice” was issued in response to the website’s whistle-blowing activities. In July, the website published a huge cache of confidential documents dealing with American activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this week it released 250,000 classified diplomatic cables.
The actual reason — Swedish prosecutors are seeking Assange in connection to allegations of sex crimes and requested the international police organization’s help in extraditing him — is first mentioned in the story’s third paragraph, by which point the reader is inclined to believe the theory that the charges are part of a smear campaign against WikiLeaks.
Today’s top headline: “Public and private kindergartens may adopt unified pricing.” A three-year nationwide early-education campaign has kicked off, and Dongguan is doing its part to solve the problem of expensive kindergartens. It has the ambitious goal of satisfying the public within five years.
Xinhua News Agency is happy that Chinese thinkers have made the Foreign Policy magazine, especially People’s Bank of China governor Zhou Xiaochuan (周小川) and post-80s writer representative Han Han (韩寒). However, in a post deleted from Xinhua and People’s Net, the cover of the special issue also showed another figure, the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo. The post is now gone from websites.
Chinese state media (China News Net via Sina) has picked out the others that are in the top 100:
No# 4 Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of People’s Bank of China
Reason for selection: Controls the lifeblood of world economics, he is very important for the stability of world economy
No# 44 Zheng Bijian (郑必坚), a geostrategist
Reason for selection: Raised the “peaceful rise of China” concept
No# 60: Fan Gong (樊刚), Director, National Economic Research Institute
Reason: Clarifying to the world that China isn’t just the factory of the world
No# 82: Hu Shuli (胡舒立), the editor-in-chief of New Century Weekly
Reason for selection: Expanding China’s room for discussion
No# 86: Author Han Han (韩寒)
Reason for selection: One of the mot popular writers in the world, his blog is widely read in China
From an interview by Time managing editor Richard Stengel with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange:
In fact, we believe it is the most closed societies that have the most reform potential. The Chinese case is quite interesting. Aspects of the Chinese government, Chinese Public Security Service, appear to be terrified of free speech, and while one might say that means something awful is happening in the country, I actually think that is a very optimistic sign, because it means that speech can still cause reform and that the power structure is still inherently political, as opposed to fiscal. So journalism and writing are capable of achieving change, and that is why Chinese authorities are so scared of it. Whereas in the United States to a large degree, and in other Western countries, the basic elements of society have been so heavily fiscalized through contractual obligations that political change doesn’t seem to result in economic change, which in other words means that political change doesn’t result in change.
This doesn’t quite make sense to me.
More about Assange’s thinking and China:
• Gady Epstein on ForbesAssange slams China’s WikiLeaks copycat: ‘Very dangerous to do it wrong’; see also full transcript of interview with Assange by Andy Greenberg.
• Julian Assange and the computer conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”: a blog post examining some of Assange’s previous writings that explain his motivations.
Today is World AIDs Day, and two newspapers in Suzhou dedicate covers to the event. City Business News and Suzhou Daily.
The more commercial of the two, City Business News (which is owned by Suzhou Daily) claims that Suzhou now has 913 AIDs suffers, within these numbers there are 247 people who are HIV positive and 96 have died. The same article stipulates:
The situation of AIDS in our country is quite serious, approximately there are 740,000 suffers, but the number reported has surpassed 370,000, the main method of contamination is sex.
The more serious Suzhou Daily goes with handmade AIDS crosses from Shandong. In other news, Yunnan Information Times (云南信息报) goes with the pun, “Love because it’s AIDS (因为”艾,” 所以爱).”
Jinbu Shehui (“advance society”) is a new website that promotes what passes for leftist thinking in China. Articles on the website criticize anyone who has sympathies to the West or criticizes the Chinese government.
It’s masthead includes this amusing picture of a bamboo leaf chewing, AK47 toting panda bear.
Less amusing is its gallery of ‘slaves to the West’ (西奴), comprising a range of intellectuals and writers including bad boy novelist Han Han, famous Caixin editor Hu Shuli, rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong, Nobel peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, and history teacher Yuan Tengfei. Each photo has been doctored to show the “slave” with a hangman’s noose around his or her neck.
Interestingly, the person behind this website who hates the West so much is almost certainly living in the United States. The domain name jinbushe.org was registered with the American domain registrar GoDaddy.com and the website is currently hosted on a server in the U.S.
However, registration information for the domain gives the following information:
Registrant Name: Liu Shan
Registrant Street: Room 304, No.10 Jingsan Road,
Registrant City: Zhengzhou
Registrant State/Province: Henan
Registrant Postal Code: 450000
Registrant Country: China
Registrant Phone: +371.64498591
At around noon yesterday, forty-one schoolchildren were injured in a stampede in a stairwell at the No. 5 Primary School in Aksu, Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
The front page of today’s Shanxi Evening News shows an illustration of the incident, during which the force of the crowd bent the bars of the railing, with an inset photo of the injured students.
The headline is straightforward: “At a primary school in Aksu, Xinjiang, a stampede injures 41.”
By contrast, the Jianghuai Morning News (whose front page only mentioned the incident in a sidebar) took advantage of the fact that the students were headed downstairs for exercise to headline its full-page story with a vulgar pun: “Exercise: Of course you’ve got to do it, but you can’t crowd!” The character for “exercise” 操 (cāo) is also used, when pronounced slightly differently (cào), for “fuck.”
Editors who pick outrageous headlines for news stories are said to be members of the “headline party” (). Internet news portals, which are generally restricted to republishing the same articles from the mainstream press as their competitors, adopted the practice of picking the most salacious detail, no matter how insignificant, out of a story for use in an eye-catching headline.
The technique is not without controversy, and newspapers that step too far outside the bounds of good taste may face a backlash from readers. Perhaps that is why the Jianghuai Morning News has already removed the page from its online edition.
Is Western media coverage of dissidents and their activities good for them or for China? What have Chinese dissidents learned from the Communist Party about using the Western media?
The introduction and translated interview below are by Andrew Chubb, who completed an honours thesis at the University of Western Australia on the impact of foreign correspondents in China during the Democracy Wall period.
His research included interviews with several participants in the events, such Xu Wenli, the subject of the interview published here. He says his overall conclusion about the foreign journalists’ impact were that they “helped Deng Xiaoping take control of the Party, and probably hastened the Democracy Wall Movement’s suppression”.
Stop press: Oddly enough, as Danwei was preparing to publish this story, one of the other key figures in the Democracy Wall movement, Qin Yongmin was reported to have been released after a 12 year stay in prison.
by Andrew Chubb
The Democracy Wall period (1978-1979) can be seen as the start of the post-1949 Chinese democracy movement
It started with a wave of handwritten posters (dazibao) glued to walls in Beijing in late 1978. One stretch of wall at the busy intersection of Chang’an Avenue and Xidan Street was dubbed ‘Democracy Wall’. While personal stories of injustice were the most common content, some addressed political topics. At first this mainly involved expressing support for Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping and the Party’s proponents of “reform and opening up”, but numerous writers branched out into vigorous theoretical discussions. The most active participants even formed their own organizations to publish unofficial journals and news-sheets.
Xu Wenli was an editor and organizer of the April Fourth Forum, one of the best-known of these unofficial publications (the name refers to the 1976 Tiananmen Incident). He was jailed in 1981 for “counterrevolutionary” activity, despite maintaining his allegiance to Marxism and socialism. After his release from prison, Xu helped found the China Democracy Party, for which he was again jailed in 1998. He has lived in exile in the United States since he was granted ‘medical parole’ to travel there in 2002. Here he discusses Western journalists and the Democracy Wall Movement.
In 1978, how did the activists see the Western journalists on the scene at the Xidan Democracy Wall?
Many of the Chinese intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s who pursued freedom and democracy had studied abroad and had experience living overseas, so they saw relations with the Western media as quite normal and nothing to be afraid of.
For us in 1978 it was quite taboo. At that time in China, the people kept silent out of fear.
[1] The CCP made a lot of demonizing descriptions of the West, pinning all [Western countries’] past unfairness towards Chinese people and society on Western people as a whole. There was also the suspicion that Western journalists were spies. All this made people very afraid. So in 1978, the relationship between Chinese dissidents [2] and the Western media became extremely interesting.
To give the background, Mao Zedong and other Communist Party leaders understood well how to use the media. They managed to get people like Edgar Snow to visit Yan’an, who then magnified their success and their fake democracy, eventually convincing the whole world that only the CCP’s area, the so-called liberated zone, was democratic, and that the Chiang Kai-shek-led “KMT-ruled zone” was the most dictatorial and undemocratic. On this point the CCP was very smart, crafty, and when we use the word liyong [3] (to exploit), we are referring to their experience. I don’t believe everyone adopts an attitude of liyong.
But if you want to address the public you cannot possibly do it completely by yourself, you need to use [4] a medium.
The young dissidents in 1978 were mostly workers, myself included, so they hadn’t undergone higher-level education. But they had been influenced by the CCP’s ingenious methods of exploiting media, so they paid great attention to their relationships with the Western media.
