Saw a cartoon today that showed the famous Teinemin Square picture with MS flags on the tanks.
Microsoft Defends Censoring a Dissident's Blog in China
By KATHY CHEN and GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 6, 2006; Page A9
Microsoft Corp. has shut down a popular Chinese-language blog that has published content potentially offensive to Chinese authorities, amid China's ongoing efforts to control information on the Internet.
Microsoft's MSN Spaces, which lets users create their own Web sites or Web logs, closed down the blog, written by Chinese journalist Zhao Jing under the pen name Michael Anti, on Dec. 30. The site had criticized the government's firing of top editors at a progressive Beijing newspaper late last month. Efforts to access the site from inside and outside China trigger a notice that "the space is temporarily unavailable."
[Linking Up]
Brooke Richardson, MSN's lead product manager, confirmed in a statement yesterday that Mr. Zhao's site "has been blocked at this time."
The statement also said: "MSN is committed to ensuring that products and services comply with global and local laws, norms, and industry practices in China. Most countries have laws and practices that require companies providing online services to make the Internet safe for local users. Occasionally, as in China, local laws and practices require consideration of unique elements." Microsoft declined to provide further details on why it took this action.
Microsoft's action in this case isn't extraordinary. As a rule, U.S. technology companies abide by the laws of other countries in which they operate locally based sites. In 2000, Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc. prohibited the sale of Nazi memorabilia on Web sites in European countries upholding a Nazi ban, and later both companies more broadly banned Nazi and hate-related items from their auction sites.
But Chinese regulators' efforts to retain control over information flow across the country's growing number of Internet news sites and blogs are problematic for foreign technology companies as they seek to balance business interests and values-laden issues like free speech.
In an interview last year, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Google Inc.'s vice president for Asia-Pacific and Latin America operations, said: "We are all very aware that entering China requires us to balance two specific needs: the needs of our users and the need of operating within a political climate and a set of government regulations, as we do elsewhere in the world."
The restrictions and censorship standards that China applies to the Internet are among the most comprehensive in the world, approached only by Iran, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. "Compared to similar efforts in other states, China's filtering regime is pervasive, sophisticated and effective," noted a study last year on Internet censorship by OpenNet Initiative, a nonprofit partnership comprising the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University.
In some cases, the Chinese government has issued rules aimed at tightening its control over the Internet: It is now shutting down blogs and other sites that have failed to register with local authorities, for example. Last fall, Beijing issued rules prohibiting bloggers and other online publishers from posting content that "goes against state security and public interest."
But industry executives say self-censorship is also widespread among both Chinese and foreign players, who don't want to risk being shut down by Chinese authorities. "Everyone is very careful. This is what you do in China," says Anne Stevenson-Yang, a partner of Blue Bamboo Ventures, a China-based Internet company.
Some big technology companies have drawn fire for accommodating the Chinese government. Cisco Systems Inc. has been criticized by free-speech advocates for selling equipment to China that helps censors block Web sites. Cisco has said it doesn't participate in government censorship but acknowledges that its equipment can be used to filter access to Web sites.
Human-rights activists have condemned Yahoo for helping Chinese police identify a Chinese journalist who allegedly used his Yahoo email account to relay the contents of a secret government order to an overseas Web site. The journalist is now serving a 10-year prison sentence. Yahoo has said that it seeks to "balance legal requirements against our strong belief that our active involvement in China contributes to the continued modernization of the country."
Before being shut down, Mr. Zhao's blog, which featured sarcastic commentary on Chinese political and media developments, attracted more than 7,000 visitors each day on average, peaking at 15,000 hits daily in December, when he was criticizing the government-mandated shake-up at the Beijing News, according to his posting.
Urging Beijing News readers to cancel their subscriptions, he wrote: "The ever-bulls-ing Guangming Daily has taken over the newspaper ... I would rather eat crap than subscribe to Guangming Daily or its mutations." Guangming Daily is the paper's conservative parent.
This isn't the first time 30-year-old Mr. Zhao has had a run-in over his blogs. A former reporter for the 21st Century Global News, a liberal newspaper that was closed by authorities in 2003, Mr. Zhao first set up a blog on Blog-City, owned by a Scottish company. That site was blocked after he commented on an internal conflict at another Chinese newspaper.
Mr. Zhao declined to comment on the shutdown of his MSN Space, saying he was seeking clarification from Microsoft.
Blogging has quickly become a mainstream activity in urban China. Duncan Clark, managing director of technology consultancy BDA China Ltd. in Beijing, estimates that the number of Chinese blog sites totals about three million and is doubling every five months or so, in line with the global rate. (Chinese IT consultancy Analysys puts the number much higher, estimating that China had 33.4 million registered blog accounts by third quarter of 2005, more than double the figure for 2004.)
Unlike the U.S.'s feisty online political discussions, most of China's bloggers "mainly write about their own lives," says Fang Xingdong, founder of Chinese blog portal Bokee.com. Popular sites include one started by two college students calling themselves the "Back Dorm Boys" and featuring videos of them lip synching to songs by the Backstreet Boys. Now they perform their act on Chinese television, too.
But some Chinese bloggers get political -- especially the increasing numbers of professional journalists who post their notes and opinions on their blogs, even if the information gets edited out of newspapers. Largely because of blogs, news of everything from riots to excess formaldehyde in Chinese beer now spreads despite government attempts to limit discussion.
To stop this sort of activity, China's censors, estimated by free-speech activists to number as high as 30,000, employ an increasingly sophisticated net of filters. Typing forbidden phrases such as "human rights" and "democracy" into some automated blogging systems, including MSN Spaces, will net only an error message such as "The title must not contain prohibited language." Chinese Web portals have their own in-house censors who work with government officials to take down posts that are deemed inappropriate, and sometimes block entire Web sites.
Many Chinese bloggers say it is difficult to find a reliable blog server host overseas because a bad post by another blogger using the same system can cause the government to block access to the entire server.
Rebecca MacKinnon, a research fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, says her attempts to set up Chinese-language blogs via MSN Spaces with content that might irritate Beijing -- such as references to "Tibetan independence" -- have been blocked or removed. "In the short term, [acquiescing to China] gets you into a market you perhaps couldn't be in otherwise," she says. But "in the long term," she adds, "is this good for your corporate global image and your image in China, that you go along with censorship?"
Microsoft has several ventures in China, including a wholly owned subsidiary and two software joint ventures, and employs more than 900 people there. MSN, the company's online-services division, has enjoyed strong growth in the country: Microsoft says the number of MSN Messenger users jumped 25% to nine million in four months after the Chinese version was launched last May, and the number of visits to MSN Chinese-language Web sites was up 133% over the same four-month period. |
