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« June 2010 | Main | September 2010 » July 30, 2010Internet A Key Ally for Chinese Journalist Pursued By PoliceGreat investigative reporting wins readers and journalism prizes in the West. In China, it can turn reporters into wanted men, or worse. The recent case of Qiu Ziming, a business reporter for the Beijing-based Economic Observer, had a happy ending this week when he was able to come out of hiding after the police in the Eastern China province of Zhejiang were pressured to drop their efforts to arrest him for doing his job. For several days, though, the reporter was on the lam, because police put him on a national list of wanted criminals "for damaging a company's reputation." His crime: Writing stories that exposed insider trading and bribery at a powerful paper manufacturer in Zhejiang province.
On Wednesday, the journalism community in China began lining up behind the reporter, and the internet was the vehicle they used to publicize his plight. Several articles were published on blogs and elsewhere by supporters, and the reporter himself used his Sina.com account, China's version of Twitter, to defend himself and offer facts supporting the accuracy of his stories. Links to a satirical online wanted poster quickly became a trending topic on China's microblogs. Then, as is often the case in the China "news cycle," China's powerful traditional, government-controlled media reacted to the online buzz with reporting of their own. The China Daily reported the story and the broadcaster CCTV ran a segment that revealed further questionable activities at the paper company. By Thursday evening, Qiu Ziming was no longer a wanted man. (Accounts of the story as reported in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are available for more details.) The situation ended well, but is still a troubling reminder that a commitment to doing quality journalism can still be bad for your health in China. I've written about this before, and there are frequent, less publicized cases of journalist bashing. Literally. Some journalists from CCTV, for example, were recently beaten when they uncovered a story about local officials in Shanxi province who were building private villas on land meant for a public reservoir. Aggressive reporting is certainly becoming more common in China, with publications vying for readers, journalism schools producing vast numbers of young idealistic reporters, and the central government becoming increasingly tolerant of the media's role in exposing corruption at the provincial and local level across China. The trend is making for a more readable, watchable and influential media community. But it is clearly the internet, and its ability to marshal the powerful force of public opinion and outrage among the country's 350 million social media participants, that is giving me reason to be optimistic about the future of honest news reporting in China. (Update, Aug. 2: A series of new reports of aggression directed at Chinese journalists surfaced over the weekend and brought more calls for reform and newsgathering protections. Details in the Global Times, and China Daily.) Posted by markhass at 12:23 AM CommentsPost a comment| TrackBackJuly 14, 2010BangqiuThe last time the National League won baseball's All Star Game, China did not have a Great Firewall or a Starbucks. In 1996, if you were lucky enough to be among the handful of people with an internet connection here, you could freely surf across what was then called the World Wide Web. You could drink all the tea you wanted, but getting a decent espresso was impossible. The great Chinese leader and father of China's modern day economic miracle, Deng Xiaoping, was still alive, even if the economic reforms he launched had yet to transform this country. And the word "baseball" would have been as foreign on the streets of Beijing as the concept of a hot dog.
And baseball, the 2010 All Star game specifically, was shown live today for the first time on Chinese TV. China's embrace of America's pastime is still tentative. Yet, the willingness of Chinese TV executives to share the game live with a potential audience of 350 million people in China's southern provinces, the nation's temperate areas where the government hopes to nurture the nation's appetite for balls and strikes, feels like a milestone to me. There are no effective audience measurements tools in China, so we may never know how many viewers actually tuned in. But the power of big numbers (300 million is about the total population of the U.S.) suggests that the potential audience in China today for the game could have rivaled that in the U.S. That's why Major League Baseball is so eager to create a taste for the sport here. They do the math, just like every other western brand, and calculate the huge upside in potential viewers, participants and future players if their marketing efforts succeed. And even though only 4 million people in China now play baseball, the game's marketers have their sights set on duplicating the success of the NBA, which claims 100 times as many people in China play that sport. The cultural obstacles of creating a nation of baseball fans will be substantial, of course. It's worthwhile to read a delightful op-ed by Matt Forney that appeared in the New York Times in 2008 following a spring training game played in Beijing. The headline serves up the gist of the piece: "Major League Baseball Arrives in China, but Traditions Don’t Quite Translate" But while the MLB may be years behind the NBA, it is still investing and trying to catch up. This September, it will open a developmental center in Wuxi, near Shanghai, that it imagines will eventually tip the scales in its favor. The facility will provide professional baseball training for talented middle- and high-school players and serve as a baseball boarding school, where small groups of players will attend academic classes while they learn the finer points of hitting the cut-off man and hitting the curveball. The hope is that these kids will fill the future ranks of China's national teams, seed the start of a professional league in China and ignite a mania for a sport that the world has long linked to American culture. (Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?) Jim Small, the MLB's vice president for Asia, likes to note that China was the first place in Asia where baseball was played. He told The China Daily recently: "Bangqiu, the Chinese word for baseball, which literally means “stick ball”, can trace its roots in the country to at least 1863, when the Shanghai Baseball Club was formed by an American medical missionary named Henry William Boone. Studies say baseball virtually disappeared in China with the commencement of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when Red Army cadres attacked all sports as an “unwanted extravagance” of Western decadence. Baseball coaches were ridiculed and persecuted, and some were killed." (Sounds like what New York fans do when their teams lose.) But now, baseball is back. The Chinese government has even paid to move the dormant Wukesong baseball field, which was used for the 2008 Olympic Games and then dismantled, to Xiamen in Fujian province. The stated reason for the move south was the government's interest in promoting future baseball games in the facility between China and Taiwan (who says the world has not changed). Is this the potential Yankees-Red Sox rivalry of Asia if MLB marketers play things right? When the 2009 World Series trophy was toured in China earlier this year, small, but enthusiastic crowds led Randy Levine, the general manager of the world champion Yankees, to imagine the future: “The dream of kids all over the world is to play in Yankee Stadium," he said. "One day that will be a Chinese kid’s dream.” For me, waking up today and knowing that the All Star game was live on TV here wasn't quite a dream come true, but it was enough to get me happily through a summer day in Beijing, made even sweeter when the National League pulled off the win.
Posted by markhass at 4:12 AM CommentsPost a comment| TrackBackJuly 7, 2010.中国 and .中國 ... .香港 ... .台灣 and .台湾
If you speak and write Chinese, you will officially become a full-fledged member of the world's internet community next month, when the Chinese characters in this blog's headline, known up to now as .cn, .hk and .tw respectively, will make their internet debut as top-level domain names. The agency that manages internet URL names, ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, announced that the language now spoken by 20% of the world will soon be all you'll need to surf the night away. Up to now, users could almost complete a web or email address with just a Chinese keyboard. Almost. But once the user got to the characters that follow the final dot (.com, .org, .cn, etc), only Latin letters would do. For the world's English speakers, the web has always been a language-friendly place, where our Latin characters were the basic typographical currency. If you wrote Chinese, or Arabic, or Russian or Hebrew you were something of a second-class citizen. ICANN has made a big deal about this move, which is part of a larger initiative they call IDNs (they love acronyms), which stands for international domain names. Arabic speakers were the first to benefit from this change earlier this year, and before long non-English writers everywhere will be freed from the tyranny of typing their two-letter country designation at the end of an address in a language other than their own. "One World, One Internet, Everyone Connected" is the happy slogan invented to make these changes seem to fit some larger, more important context. Many in the Chinese media have wrapped the change in nationalist slogans, heralding it as an important move to protect Chinese culture and heritage, and pointing to it as further evidence of the decline of Western culture and the rise of the East. Some have even cynically noted that another change announced the same day, the creation of a special top-level domain for pornography (.xxx), received much more news attention globally than did the addition of Chinese characters to the top-level domain club. The real impact of this change, of course, will be minimal. People in China will access the sites they've always accessed in much the same way. Sites with the .com domain will still require users to type those three characters, just that same way. Most importantly, though, most web sites are now accessed through embedded links or other methods that don't require users to type an address, so who really cares about URLs anymore? They are quickly becoming the invisible code of information access, rather than a branding platform or an object of pride. 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