No China Release for A Touch of Sin, Director Banned from Award Ceremony

Jia Zhangke’s controversial film has received global praise, but domestic cinephiles may never see it.
By J.T. Quigley

Chinese director Jia Zhangke

A November 9 release date for celebrated Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin has come and gone, with no indication that the controversial film will ever be screened in China. 

Over the weekend, Jia was also missing from the 50th Golden Horse Awards in Taipei – known as the Chinese Oscars – where A Touch of Sin was nominated for six awards. 

Though Jia claimed “personal reasons” for his absence, media outlets are pointing a finger at Beijing.
Jia posted a vague apology to fans on his Weibo blog and Joint Entertainment Inc., the Taiwanese distributor for his film, cited “schedule changes.” 

The director and his actress wife Zhao Tao – who has a starring role in the film – were also scheduled to give lectures in Taipei.
Jia, who The New Yorker called “one of the best and most important directors in the world,” is a regular on the international film festival circuit but largely unknown at home. 

His 2006 film Still Life won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and 2008’s 24 City was an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival. 

A Touch of Sin was also awarded best screenplay at this year’s Cannes, on top of winning the $100,000 grand prize for best feature narrative at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.
Jia’s latest work, which was inspired by true events, explores the human cost of China’s rise through the eyes of four main characters: a miner, a migrant worker, a sauna hostess and a factory employee. 

Each is pushed to desperation, and ultimately violence, due to economic inequality and political corruption.
A trailer for the film references the 2009 murder of a local government official who slapped a salon worker with a fistful of cash after she turned down his sexual advances, the 2011 bullet train wreck that killed dozens of passengers, and the highly publicized Foxconn suicides. 

These touchy subjects are viewed as obvious targets for censorship.
“It has come as little surprise that Jia’s film has languished in limbo, perhaps because of a change of heart by the censors,”said The New York Times. 

“[He] insisted in August that the censors, when they read the initial script of the film, had asked for few changes and were more concerned about snatches of dialogue than the blood-soaked violence. They did recommend that the killings be toned down and the body count lowered, but Jia rebutted them in a written reply, and they relented.”
Perhaps ironically, A Touch of Sin was partially financed by state-run enterprises in Shanxi Province and Shanghai.
Further complicating the film’s status is a leaked order from China’s Central Propaganda Department, allegedly issued in October, which directs media outlets to block its coverage.
“Do not conduct interviews, report, or comment on Jia’s film,” states the order, which was obtained by the University of California’s China Digital Times – a watchdog site that focuses on stories that are either blocked or deleted by state censors.
Though Jia’s latest feature may have struck a negative chord with Beijing, critics around the world are singing its praises. 

It’s currently rated 90 percent fresh on movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
“Epic and intimate, A Touch of Sin finally feels as big and complex, as contradictory and sad as, well, China,” wrote The Globe and Mail’s James Adams.
The trailer for A Touch of Sin (with English subtitles) can be seen below:

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China to Foreign Media: Get in Line or Get Out

Chinese leaders are showing that they're ready completely shut China off from the rest of the world (again).
By Tyler Roney

It’s no secret that China bans foreign news portals that offend its oh-so delicate sensibilities, swiftly and without mercy or explanation. 

This week has seen The Wall Street Journal and Reuters‘ Chinese websites blocked. 

There is, so far, no explanation for China’s blocking of these sites — could be anything from the Tiananmen attack reporting to Paul Mooney’s rejected visa — but signs point to a bleak future for foreign media in the Middle Kingdom.
This news comes as Bloomberg is under scrutiny for censoring sensitive stories to be able to report in China; their site has been blocked since July 2012 for running a story on Xi Jinping’s family wealth. 

This is not totally dissimilar to the censor’s axe that is still chopping on The New York Times‘ neck (Chinese and English language websites) for a story about Wen Jiabao’s family wealth. 

The message from China’s censorship czars is clear: get in line, or get out.
Annoying as it is that none of the above hyperlinks — online portals for some of the most widely-respected news organizations in the world — can be accessed in China without a VPN, everyone, from publishers to Hollywood, is struggling to keep up with China’s censorship whims. 

But the outside media — often the boogeyman in the Chinese government’s eyes — is under increasing pressure to keep the CCP’s propaganda gods happy.
However, not everyone is taking this new round of blocks lying down. 

Yesterday, it was announced that a group of activists behind GreatFire launched a mirror site to make sure the website is still accessible in China. 

Charlie Smith (a pseudonym) told Mashable: ”We were really upset by the news on Friday of these two blocks.” 

The activists entreated in a blog post, ”Mr. Xi Jinping, we hope you are listening. Just let this episode slide. Pretend it did not happen. Do nothing to stop this.”
But this sort of half measure provides for a dreary future for foreign journalism in China. 

NPR quoted Orville Schell, a journalist who runs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, as saying, “Every media outlet must cover China to be in the big top…If they get precluded, and this is true of individual journalists as well, whole careers can be completely destroyed if you can’t get access.” 

This is just as true for Paul Mooney as it was for Melissa Chan from Al Jazeera who got the boot for her excellent reporting back in 2012.
However, China is fast running out of things to block; the age-old method of censoring websites that offend is simply not enough because there’s not enough left to block — what with every major news organization trying keep the dragon at bay. 

But for organizations like Bloomberg that are already blocked in China, how much worse could it possibly get? 

A lot worse. 

Though China’s famous, paranoid online censorship grabs headlines, there is a lot more it can do to punish and bully news organizations and their journalists. 

Gady Epstein reports for the Economist: “They instead use forms of pressure that attract little attention, such as delaying visa requests interminably, while making clear that the media outlet’s future coverage should be ‘more objective.’”
When asked by The Diplomat what the greatest threat facing Chinese journalism is, Veteran Chinese journalist Wen Tao — who himself spent time in detainment for his relationship with famous artist and dissident Ai Weiwei — said: “It’s not self-discipline; it’s censorship.” 

However, as shocking as China being severed from the rest of the world is, it’s not the journalism conversation that’s being had on the ground. 

Right now, China is openly talking about the supposed blackmail journalism of Chen Yongzhou who was taken in by police, urged free by his newspaper and then confessed to his crimes via television. 

While this is a problem, it amounts to navel-gazing about the state of journalism in China while the elephant in the room eats state-censored newspapers from the coffee table.
Chinese leaders are showing that they’re not afraid to completely shut China off from the rest of the world (again) in their latest bid to control perception of current events — largely because the news organizations have a lot more to lose. 

With that in mind, and the knowledge that there is almost no way to effectively fight back against such blanket censorship, there could be darker days ahead.

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China Central TV: champion of the people with a blurred picture

Financial Times

©AFP/AP

The China Central Television (CCTV) complex (main photo) and Chinese journalist Chen Yongzhou, confessing on state television (inset)

At the end of October, a young journalist in handcuffs, green prison jacket and a freshly shaved head appeared on China Central Television, the state-owned national broadcaster, and confessed to taking bribes in exchange for writing negative articles about a large Chinese company.

Just days earlier, the newspaper that employed Chen Yongzhou, 27, had published front-page banner headlines calling for his release, while human rights groups had mobilised to defend him. But after his admission on national television, the issue quickly died away.

Mr Chen’s is the latest in a series of televised public pre-trial confessions that have aired on the CCTV in recent months and have included British and US citizens being paraded before the camera to admit their crimes.

The performances, reminiscent of an earlier age in which political “struggle sessions” and show trials were the norm, have raised concerns inside China about the damage that they cause to the government’s stated goal of improving the rule of law.

But they have also raised an important question about the role of the state broadcaster and the balance it must strike between being a global media organisation, a commercial moneymaking venture and a political mouthpiece for the ruling Communist party.

The question is increasingly important to multinationals such as Apple, KFC, Volkswagen, Starbucks and Samsung, which have all been targeted in the past year by the broadcaster and accused of varying degrees of malfeasance or unfair practices in the Chinese market.

For major global companies, understanding why they have been singled out and on whose orders is crucial to avoiding one of the most dangerous pitfalls that can befall their businesses in the country.

In a recent book entitled Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television, author Ying Zhu says: “CCTV is full of serious-minded creators who regularly experience bouts of self-doubt, philosophical ambivalence and in some cases clinical depression.”

She also describes: “certain common themes, about ideals distorted or altogether thwarted by commercial and political pressure”.

Founded in 1958 as the country’s first TV station, CCTV did not convert to colour or extend its programming beyond a couple of hours in the evenings until the late 1970s.

Xinwen Lianbo: China’s Top Gun of news

Nowhere is the tension at CCTV between idealism, politics and commercial imperatives more obvious than at 7pm every night on its “Xinwen Lianbo” main news programme, which all regional television stations in China are required to broadcast.

A popular Chinese joke says that if anyone were to rely on this show for their information about the world they would come away with the following impressions:

After the first 10 minutes, which invariably features the activities of senior Communist cadres, they would believe that China’s leaders were all very busy.

The next 10 minutes of the half-hour broadcast would convince them that everyone in China was happy and prosperous, while the final segment would lead them to understand that everybody outside China was living in an abyss of suffering and extreme misery.

The format has barely changed in three decades, and the broadcast remains one of the most important ways for the Chinese government to issue decrees and political messages to the nation.

But in the age of social media, the show has borne the brunt of popular cynicism and ridicule over state control of information.

Ordinary netizens are quick to jump on mistakes or inconsistencies, such as when the show focuses heavily on negative events in western countries but ignores similar stories at home.

In 2011, a report about a new Chinese fighter jet showed the aircraft blowing another one up with a missile but ordinary viewers soon worked out that the footage in the news story was in fact taken from the 1986 Hollywood movie Top Gun and the featured fighter jet was American.

As late as 1978, fewer than 10m Chinese people had access to a TV, but today CCTV boasts more than 1bn potential viewers for its 45 channels that broadcast mostly soap operas, historical dramas and variety shows.

The broadcaster now earns billions of dollars a year in advertising revenue and its direct funding from the state accounts for a relatively minor part of its annual budget.

But it remains a vice-ministerial level government department and is always led by a senior Communist party official who has worked his way up through the party propaganda system.

The boss of the network, Hu Zhanfan, raised eyebrows in 2011, not long before he took the job, when he declared that the “first and foremost social responsibility [of journalists] is to serve well as a mouthpiece tool; this is the most core content of the Marxist view of journalism and it is the most fundamental of principles”.

According to current and former CCTV employees, the constant and pervasive censorship and political orders make it easy for individuals to become jaded.

So when they are presented with the opportunity to make money through unethical or, in some cases outright illegal deals, the temptation is heightened by their sense of disillusionment.

“The corruption inside CCTV is extremely serious,” says Hu Yong, an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University and a former CCTV employee. “For example, [CCTV employees] will blackmail interviewees by threatening to expose them publicly or they will become public advocates for their interview subjects in exchange for economic benefits.”

Shi Feike, a senior journalist who once had close ties with CCTV, has a more nuanced view.

“The corruption inside CCTV is not necessarily more serious than in any other monopolistic state-owned enterprise in China,” he says. “There are some highly professional and ethical staff working at CCTV and the situation varies depending on the department, the channel and the individual programme.”

CCTV said: “CCTV has strict requirements regarding its employees’ professional ethics, and employs comprehensive disciplinary measures to restrict their activities.

In the wake of serious food and product safety scandals, CCTV has taken on the role of self-appointed public watchdog, with a focus on the transgressions of multinationals operating in China.

In recent weeks, the broadcaster has targeted smartphone maker Samsung for allegedly unfair after-sales policies, while earlier this year it directed similar charges against Apple that prompted the company to apologise to Chinese consumers.

Other companies such as KFC, McDonald's, Volkswagen, and Walmart have all been targeted by similar reports that appear to concentrate less on large Chinese companies, in particular state-owned monopolies that are often derided by consumers for their substandard products and services.

“The reasons for this bias towards reporting [negatively] on foreign companies are complicated; sometimes it is political as in the case of Google, often it is rent-seeking [trying to force large companies to buy advertising or pay bribes] and sometimes it is just the path of least resistance,” says Mr Shi.

“They cannot touch state enterprises because they will be censored so it is much safer to beat up on foreign companies. It will get on air without any trouble [from the censors] and it will gain support from nationalists.”

The negative campaigns do not always have the desired effect.

In late October, CCTV aired a seven-minute segment lambasting Starbucks for overcharging Chinese consumers for its coffee.

With more than 1,000 outlets across China and plans for the country to become its second-largest market after the US by next year, Starbucks wants to avoid a fight with the propaganda apparatus at all costs.

But on this occasion the reports were mostly greeted with derision rather than outrage from the wider public.

“Coffee is not a necessity for life, the price is determined by the market and it is up to Starbucks to charge what it wants,” said one user of China’s Twitter-like Weibo service whose message went viral. “If CCTV really cares about high prices why can’t they pay attention to prices that are actually related to people’s livelihoods?”

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Chinese leaders control media, academics to shape the perception of China

How Chinese officials shape and limit what Americans learn about China.

By Fred Hiatt

Paramilitary policemen stand in formation as they pay tribute to the Monument to the People's Heroes on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, November 17, 2013. China's new national security commission will enable the government to speak with a single voice when it comes to dealing with crises at home and abroad, state media cited President Xi Jinping as saying.

It’s well known that Chinese censors shape and limit the news and history their people can learn. 

What may be more surprising is how Chinese officials shape and limit what Americans learn about China.
Last month, a cultural attache in the Chinese embassy in Washington invited Perry Link to attend a Forum of Overseas Sinologists in Beijing in December.
Given that Link is one of America’s eminent China scholars, this might not be surprising — except that he had not received a visa to enter China since 1996 for reasons the Chinese have never explained.
Link replied that he would be interested in attending, but would he receive a visa?
Absolutely, he was told.
You’re sure? Link e-mailed back.
Of course, the attache replied. 

Just send your passport, “and I can help you to finish the visa application.”
Link sent his passport and application, and on Nov. 8 received the following message: “After review, I’d like to inform you that you will not be invited to the forum.”
The Lucy-and-the-football quality of this exchange is striking, but Link is far from the only foreign scholar to be blacklisted. 

In 2011, 13 respected academics who had contributed chapters to a book on Xinjiang, a province of western China that is home to a restive Muslim minority, found themselves banned.
Link, who has forged a distinguished career at Princeton and the University of California at Riverside can survive a visa ban. 

But for a young anthropologist seeking tenure, the inability to do field research could be terminal. 

And because China never explains its refusals or spells out what kind of scholarship is disqualifying, the result is a kind of self-censorship and narrowing of research topics that is damaging even if impossible to quantify.
“The costs to the American public,” Link told me, “are serious and not well appreciated... It is deeply systematic and accepted as normal among China scholars to sidestep Beijing demands by using codes and indirections. One does not use the term ‘Taiwan independence,’ for example. It is ‘cross-strait relations.’ One does not mention Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who sits in prison... Even the word ‘liberation’ to refer to 1949 is accepted as normal.”
Academics understand the code, he added, “but when scholars write and speak to the public in this code, the public gets the impression that 1949 really was a liberation, that Taiwan independence really isn’t much of an issue, that a Nobel Prize winner in prison really is not worth mentioning.”
Increasingly, foreign journalists are subject to similar pressure. 

Paul Mooney, a veteran Asia journalist for Reuters, recently was denied a visa, with no reason given, according to the agency. 

Knowledgeable China hands for Bloomberg News, the New York Times and The Washington Post have met similar fates.
Bloomberg provides a telling case. 

Last year it published groundbreaking investigations on the wealth that China’s elites are accumulating. Corruption is a sensitive issue for Communist Party leaders, and, given Bloomberg’s business interests in China, the journalism took courage.
After the reports, Bloomberg’s Web site was blocked to Chinese viewers, and journalists were denied visas. Recently, according to the New York Times, Bloomberg spiked an investigative report about a billionaire’s connection to Chinese leaders, with its editor in chief arguing that it was important to maintain his reporters’ access to the country.
The editor denied the report, telling the Times that the stories remain “active and not spiked.” 

Until they appear, Chinese officials are emboldened to believe that their hardball tactics can succeed in shaping what Americans read — and don’t read — about their country.
Visa denials are only one way the Communist Party attempts to influence how China is depicted. 

American universities increasingly depend on money-making campuses in China and on Chinese students paying full tuition here. 

Hollywood rewrites scripts to ensure access to China’s screens.
As Sarah Cook of Freedom House writes in her recent 67-page report, “The Long Shadow of Chinese Censorship: How the Communist Party’s Media Restrictions Affect News Outlets Around the World”:
“In many cases, Chinese officials directly impede independent reporting by media based abroad. However, more prevalent — and often more effective — are methods of control that subtly induce self-censorship...”
Many Chinese-language newspapers outside China have become more pliant because of pressure on advertisers or threats to relatives of journalists still inside China.
But what the Communist Party sees as propaganda success may not help the country in the long run, for at least three reasons.
Debates overseas on the most contentious issues — Tibet, Taiwan, the one-child policy — are waged by the sharpest partisans, while China scholars who might bring more nuance to the discussions stay silent.
The leaders’ desire to have China be seen as a confident new power on the world stage is undermined by their apparent fear of honest scrutiny.
And stifling scholarship and journalism doesn’t just harm Americans’ ability to understand the complexities of the world’s most populous country, it also limits information and analysis for China’s decision makers. 

In the end, that can’t be an advantage.

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How LINE Censors Users in China (and How to Get Around it)

By University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab

A longer version of this post originally appeared on Citizen Lab’s research blog.

Screen capture of notification users receive when attempting to transmit a keyword on the blocked list.

A new generation of instant messaging apps — offering social networking features, video and photo sharing, e-commerce, gaming, and more — is dominating markets across Asia and moving into countries beyond the region. 

New research from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto investigates government pressures on Asian companies developing instant messaging apps, information controls in the apps, and implications for users.
The Asia Chats project from the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto is dedicated to analyzing instant messaging (IM) applications used in the region with an initial focus on WeChat (Tencent, China), LINE (LINE Corporation, Japan1), and KakaoTalk (Kakao Corporation, South Korea). 

Our reports will include technical investigation of censorship and surveillance, assessment of the use and storage of user data, and comparison of the terms of service and privacy policies of the applications. 

The first report by Senior Security Analyst Seth Hardy examines the implementation of keyword censorship for LINE users based in China and introduces a tool we developed that allows users to circumvent censorship in LINE. 

A concise overview of our findings follows.

LINE’s rapid growth and privacy concerns
Released in June 2011, popular instant messaging app LINE now has 280 million registered users. 

Outside of its original market of Japan, LINE has 18 million users in Thailand, 17 million in Taiwan, and 14 million in Indonesia. 

In December 2012, LINE launched a Chinese-branded version of the app, Lianwo 连我, in partnership with Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd.2 

The head of LINE’s Chinese division has said that they aim to make it the second biggest mobile IM company in China, after Tencent’s WeChat.
As more and more people begin to use chat apps like LINE, governments have asserted an interest in monitoring communications over these applications for “criminal activity”. 

A close look at LINE suggests that the app, intentionally, provides ways for law enforcement to eavesdrop on private communication. 

Citizen Lab researchers verified that LINE chat traffic is sent unencrypted over 3G networks on the latest version of the client. 

A person with the capability to intercept these messages can obtain chat history, which includes everything from the date and time of the chat to the content of the chat itself. 

Although mobile 3G networks are encrypted by default, this encryption is implemented at the carrier level, meaning that Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms can decrypt the traffic. 

Commentators have speculated that LINE has intentionally left 3G unencrypted to allow authorities to access data at the carrier level.

Regionally-based keyword censorship
On May 20, 2013, Twitter user @hirakujira found a list of 150 blocked keywords within the iPhone version of LINE intended for users based in China. 

To learn more about how censorship in LINE works we reverse engineered the Android LINE application version 3.9.3,3 downloaded from the Google Play store. 

We found that when a user’s country is set to China during installation, the censorship function is activated. 

A list of censored keywords is then downloaded from Naver’s server and messages that contain any of these keywords are blocked.
When LINE is installed, it asks for the user’s country and phone number. 

The service will send an SMS to this phone number with a four digit code for verification. 

If the country code of the phone number and the region selected do not match, the program will display an error and suggest the user try again later. 

Users began sharing instructions for changing their region settings in order to access regionally-specific downloadable content such as stickers (e.g. LINE in Indonesia, for instance, had stickers to celebrate the holy month of Ramadhan.) 

Downloadable content such as stickers is one of the ways LINE monetizes its service. 

The previous method for changing regional settings no longer works because newer versions of LINE now encrypt region data, likely to prevent users from changing their region settings and have access to downloadable content that they would otherwise not have access to or have to pay for.
Our research shows that LINE has been capable of censoring specific keywords since at least version 3.4.2, released on January 18, 2013.4 

LINE was launched in China in December 2012 and it appears that keyword censorship was enabled soon after the launch. 

It is likely keyword censorship for users based in China is maintained by Qihoo 360, but exactly how it is managed is not clear. 

Comparing the mechanism and targeted keywords for censorship in LINE with those used by Qihoo 360 products and WeChat is an interesting area for further research.
LINE’s censored keyword-list includes content related to disgraced former Communist Party of China (CPC) politician Bo Xilai, the June 4 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square, infighting or factions within the CPC, Falun Gong, and various controversies like the fatal Ferrari car crash that involved the son of a party official close to President Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao family’s secret wealth. 

Citizen Lab Research Fellow Jason Q. Ng has translated both the original keyword list discovered by @hirakujira, and the latest versions we extracted from Chinese to English and describes the context behind them. 

The first keyword list discovered by @hirakujira is described in a series of blog posts (full list available here) and the most recent keyword list uncovered by Citizen Lab and translated by Ng is available here.
Interestingly, LINE’s censored keyword-list and the lists that we found in our previous research of two other Chinese IM clients, TOM-Skype and Sina UC, are not identical. 

While some of the topics are the same (e.g. June 4, Falun Gong, etc) only 27 keywords out of the 370 in the LINE list are exact matches with the 4,256 unique keywords in the TOM-Skype and Sina UC dataset.
This lack of overlap suggests that no common keyword list was provided to these companies by government authorities. 

Previous studies on censorship in blog services and search engines localized for the Chinese market have found similar inconsistency between products. 

Overall, these findings suggest that Chinese companies may be given general guidelines from authorities on what types of content to target, but have some degree of flexibility on how to implement these directives.

How to get around keyword censorship in LINE
As the keyword censorship implemented in LINE is only active if a user’s installation is set to China, it can be disabled if the client is configured to another region (e.g. Canada or the US). 

To assist users the Citizen Lab has released the LINE Region Code Encrypter Tool for changing regions in the LINE client to disable regionally-based keyword censorship.

Future research
LINE is facing a perennial tension between appealing to a broad user base and complying with government-mandated information control regulations (as in China). 

These challenges demonstrate the difficulty of operating an application in multiple jurisdictions and the unique characteristics of Asian markets with restrictive communications environments. 

As Asian IM applications continue to grow in popularity, so too will pressures to enact information controls and disclose user data. 

The Citizen Lab will continue to analyze the rise and implications of these applications in the Asia Chats series.
For a detailed technical analysis of the findings described here see this report by Citizen Lab’s Senior Security Analyst Seth Hardy.

Footnotes
1. Originally the application was developed by NHN Japan the Japanese arm of Naver Corporation (formerly NHN) based in South Korea. Following the success of the application Line Corporation was formed as a subsidiary of Naver.
2. Qihoo 360 obtained a business license for LINE to operate in China and it is licensed by LINE to promote and provide its services.
3. This is the most recent Android version of LINE as of November 14, 2013.
4. We accessed these versions using APK files found at AndroidDrawer.

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Discussions of Wen Jiabao's daughter censored in China as more foreign media sites blocked

While censors in the mainland have been quick to strike down any discussion of 'Lily Chang', both the Chinese language websites of Reuters and The Wall Street Journal are blocked in the mainland
By Amy Li

A combination photo of the JP Morgan office in New York, former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao and his daughter, Wen Ruchun.

“Who is Lily Chang?” the same question has been repeated again and again on China’s social media since Thursday morning. 

Yet even without mentioning Wen Ruchun, which according to the New York Times is the real name of the the woman in question and daughter of China’s former prime minister Wen Jiabao, most microbloggers have seen their posts censored within minutes.
On Thursday The New York Times revealed investment bank JPMorgan’s ties with a consulting firm run by Wen Ruchun or ‘Lily Chang,’ an alias she was reported to have adopted.
Both The New York Times’ English and Chinese language websites have been blocked in China for more than a year, since the Times published a series of articles examining the assets of Wen Jiabao's family members. 

The publication’s recently-launched Chinese-language site for T Magazine, its culture and lifestyle publication, also appeared to be inaccessible in mainland China for two days this week.
Craig Smith, the China managing director of the New York Times, told the South China Morning Post in an email sent on Friday evening that the Chinese-language site for T Magazine was unavailable for 48 hours due to technical problems. 

"We are back up, and our problems had nothing to do with those affecting Reuters or WSJ's Chinese sites," he said.
As of Friday morning, both the Chinese language websites of Reuters and The Wall Street Journal appeared to be blocked in the mainland, according to users in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. The Chinese website of Reuters could still be accessed from its mobile app, according to users.
When reached by phone, editors at the Beijing bureaus of the two organisations declined to comment.
Nor would they confirm that their websites had been blocked.
It is unclear if the blocking of these foreign media websites are related to recent stories they have written about Chinese politics, or just part of stepped-up censorship efforts in recent months.
The South China Morning Post's English and Chinese language websites have also been occasionally blocked in China.
In the latest instance, the Chinese-language site, SCMPChinese.com, has been inaccessible in mainland China for almost two weeks.
Meanwhile, China’s internet users quickly began discussions about the business led by ‘Lily Chang’ and how she managed to get ahead by using a double identity – a stunt many would have found practically impossible and legally problematic in China.
According to the Times’ report, JPMorgan contracted a little-known consulting firm run by Wen Ruchun to secure deals with state-owned Chinese companies.
The bank paid Wen’s firm US$900,000 annually from 2006 to 2008 – a total of US$1.8 million, said the report.
It was not entirely clear why Wen Ruchun had adopted the alias "Lily Chang."
Chang is a common Chinese surname, but it could also be an alternative form of English spelling for the widely used Chinese last name Zhang, often used by Taiwanese or overseas Chinese.
Zhang is the surname of Wen Jiabao’s wife, Zhang Peili, a geologist and a former vice-president of the Chinese Jewelry Association.
While her adopted surname matched that of her mother’s – with the Taiwanese spelling, ‘Lily,’ the English first name Wen Ruchun picked, seems to have partially reflected her mother’s given name, ‘Peili’.
Though adopting an alias to cover up a notable family background is believed to be common practise among the children of the elite, bloggers pointed out that forging ID documents is a crime under the law in China.
“Should our ‘sister house’ Gong Aiai be given her innocence back since ‘Lily Chang’ is also holding double identities?” wrote Guangzhou-based microblogger Li Tie. 
Li alludies to the case of Gong Aiai, a deputy bank chief in Shaanxi province who gained nationwide notoriety after she was accused of purchasing dozens of properties using false identities.
In September Gong was sentenced to three years imprisonment for faking IDs.
“But if a second ID card is issued by government agencies [and not forged], it’s still considered legal,” Hou Jing, a Chengdu-based lawyer, pointed out to the South China Morning Post on Friday.
Other bloggers said they were shocked by the lucrative deal Ruchun’s two-man consulting firm received from JPMorgan.
“The most greedy family in China is that of ‘Lily Chang’,” one wrote.

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From Chen Yongzhou to Weibo, China struggles to keep a lid on stories

There are boundaries that journalists are not supposed to cross, but the state's version of events is starting to be challenged on social media
By David Hearst

Journalist Chen Yongzhou who was arrested on 'suspicion of damaging commercial reputation'. 

It's known in China by a term used to describe a shot in table tennis. 

Da cabianqiu is the phrase for playing a line ball, a ball so close to the edge of the table that it tests the limits of the permissible.

It's an image that defines what some Chinese journalists are trying to do today.
Chen Yongzhou, 27, is one of them. 

He wrote a series of stories earlier this year about the financial affairs of a construction machinery company, Zoomlion, based in Changsha, in central China. 

His reports alleged that the company exaggerated its profits, bumped up its advertising fee, and was involved in widespread sales and financial fraud. 

Zoomlion's shares, which are listed on the Shenzhen and Hong Kong stock exchanges, tumbled.
Then, unusually, two things happened. 

Chen was arrested by police who arrived in a company car owned by Zoomlion. 

Usually the police use their own transport. 

The charge under which the investigative reporter was being held was "suspicion of damaging commercial reputation". 

Instead of disowning its cub reporter, his newspaper, the Guangzhou-based New Express, stuck by him – at least initially. 

They ran a front-page story under a banner headline "Please release him" and repeated that with another front page call: "Again, please release him". 

A senior executive for the New Express denied Zoomlion's accusation that Chen's reports were fabricated. He said: "We did not discover Chen did anything that was against professional ethics and laws."
The reaction to Chen's arrest was unprecedented. 

For a while, the third largest newspaper in the province and a significant number of journalists openly challenged the actions of the police, an important local employer, and by extension the actions of the provincial authorities. 

The All-China Journalists Association urged local authorities to provide a convincing explanation of Chen's detention.
Further, it was claimed on the internet that the company was well connected, politically. 

According to reports, Zhan Chunxin, the chairman of the board of Zoomlion is the son of the former director of Hunan provincial high court, and his wife, Wan Ziaoli, is the daughter of the former second party secretary of Hunan province.
The riposte came swiftly. 

Chen appeared last weekend, his head shaven to denote guilt, in a nationally televised confession. 

In his confession, he stated he had been bribed by a commercial rival to Zoomlion and said he did not even read some of the reports that were written in his name.
This struck colleagues as a curious extra detail, because Chen was known as a compulsive checker of his facts. 

Was he trying to indicate that his confession was forced out of him, in return for a more lenient sentence? Within hours of Chen's confession, his newspaper New Express retracted, apologising for failing to check Chen's reports. 

Referring to its banner headlines, the newspaper's statement read: "After the incident, our newspaper took improper actions, seriously damaging the credibility of the media and this is a profound lesson for us."
Chen's fate divided his Chinese colleagues in Nanjing who participated in a week-long exchange programme with foreign journalists organised by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. 

Some believed what Chen had originally written and concluded he had been thrown to the wolves. 

The majority, however, thought his confession was genuine and that he had accepted bribes by a rival firm to write stories that would benefit it commercially. 

It happens all the time, one said. 

The internet is full of lies.
All, however, accepted that in their own professional lives they worked under very specific constraints. 

They survived by observing the red lines that people like Chen, innocently or not, had crossed.
These red lines were plain for all to see. 

The day that foreign journalists arrived, Beijing announced that Nanjing's mayor had been arrested on corruption charges. 

Before this scandal, the Nanjing Daily would carry a full 800-word report a day on its front page about something the hyperactive and ever-present mayor said or did. 

As the cloud moved over his head, the mayor was relegated to page two. 

During the whole of the week following his arrest, the city's main paper only devoted a small 250-word story on the man who had only too recently dominated their pages. 

The ex-mayor had not only become a non-person. 

He had become non-news too.
"It's a shame for the city. People don't want to talk about it, not because they are frightened. They just want to keep away from the issue. There is a culture or tradition here of avoiding talking about issues like this," one journalist said.
So little trust in placed in official media, and even newspapers with private funding, that Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, has assumed an inordinate role in the life of the average Chinese internet user. 

Of the country's 500 million internet users, 300 million of them have Weibo accounts.
There is however an essential difference between Twitter and Weibo. 

One has been shaped by the traditional media, and is an extension of it. 

Weibo, on the other hand, fills the gap between the official account of things on the mainstream media in China and what actually happens on the ground. 

Within three days of a high-speed train crash in Wenzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, the Weibo account for the crash had 10 million users online.
The authorities recognise this and attempt to use microblogging to hone their government communications. 

In 2009 there was a problem about rural pupils attending school. 

Using microblogging they found that the problem was that pupils could not afford the school meal. 

The answer was to launch a nutrition project for rural schools.
The speed with which Weibo reacts to the news undermines efforts to maintain a consistent official line. 

An unexplained absence by the president-elect Xi Jinping last year sparked rumours on the microblogging sites which were deleted by the state censors. 

Chinese microbloggers got around the problem by using English words which evaded the digital dragnet, but conveyed the same meaning in Chinese: "Where's he?"
The arrests of microbloggers on Weibo are only one part of an increasingly active tug-of-war between the Chinese Communist party and China's market-driven and increasingly questioning media. 

Even if those challenges are happening at the fringes, they are still happening and more frequently than before.
Chen Yongzhou has been declared guilty before any case has been heard in court. 

The clean-up on the internet has already begun. 

The links in the South China Morning Post that deal with his original allegations and the front-page pleas by his newspaper are already unobtainable. 

All that remains are his confessions of guilt. 

The record may be wiped clean, but the challenge that he and others posed remains. 

It is one that the authorities will find it increasing hard to answer.

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How to Say 'Truthiness' in Chinese

Chinese citizens don't think their government should have a monopoly on rumors.
BY DAVID WERTIME

"Official rumors" is more than just an oxymoron. 

The phrase -- pronounced guanyao -- has become a useful weapon in Chinese Internet users' linguistic guerrilla warfare against government censorship. 

That battle has intensified during a government-led crackdown on "online rumor-mongering," which has sought to rein in China's rambunctious social media, partly through the arrest or detention of several high-profile online opinion leaders. 

Making things worse for China's Internet users is a new judicial interpretation, issued on Sept. 9 by China's highest legal authorities, stating that posting defamatory messages read more than 5,000 times or shared more than 500 times can lead to up to three years in jail.
In the face of these assaults on their right to speak out, grassroots Chinese are trying to turn the mirror back on officialdom by calling out instances where officials or state-owned media made statements that turned out to be false. 

The result is two types of "rumors" in Chinese argot: minyao, or rumors spread by Chinese citizens which may or may not be true, and guanyao, official rumors, which are falsehoods uttered by Chinese authorities.
According to Baidu, China's most popular search engine, mentions of guanyao -- a pun for state-owned kilns (guan) that churned out the finest porcelain (yao) for emperors in China's dynastic days -- date back at least to mid-2010. 

But searches and media mentions for guanyao spiked in early Sept. 2013, as the government's crackdown on online speech heated up. 

Since then, the term has rapidly entered the Chinese lexicon as netizens try to turn the proverbial tables, complaining that citizen lies and official lies are held to two different standards. 

On Sina Weibo, China's Twitter, alone, the term has received over 600,000 recent mentions.
Although guanyao can refer to any untruths by government authorities, the typical manifestation occurs at a particular point in the life cycle of a P.R. crisis, when officials or official media react to accusations of wrong-doing with denials or counter-accusations. 

On Oct. 18, the liberal-leaning Beijing News published a graphic detailing six archetypes of official rumors: "practicing deception," "admitting [the truth] after higher government authorities intervene," "covering up," "not admitting a mistake before seeing the [incriminating] video," "self-deception," and "biting back."
Examples abound. 

The Beijing News cited the downfall of Liu Tienan, the former chief of the Chinese National Energy Administration (NEA), the entity that governs China's energy infrastructure, as an example of "biting back." In December 2012, journalist Luo Changping took to Sina Weibo to accuse Liu of taking bribes; Liu was removed from his post and put under investigation in May, but not before the NEA's press office insisted Luo's claims of corruption were "pure slander and rumor."
For a classic "cover-up," Beijing News recapped the downfall of Tian Hongzhi, propaganda bureau chief for the medium-sized city of Xiangcheng in Henan province. 

One May evening, a nightclub in the provincial capital of Zhengzhou had the bad judgment to greet the official with a bawdy neon sign, reading in part, "A Warm Welcome to Xiangcheng Bureau Chief Tian." 

By late May, a photograph of the sign had spread rapidly on Chinese social media. 

Tian was removed from his post and punished by month's end, but not before a spokesperson for the city government claimed that none of the six bureau chiefs surnamed Tian had been out of town on business that evening, so the incriminating photographs were "maybe a prank, or maybe the nightclub's effort to stir up hype." 

As the popular official newspaper China Youth Daily opined, Tian's punishment "should be praised, but in the process, someone lied to the public, and that person was not punished. This should not happen."
The rise of guanyao as a counterpoint to minyao does not mean that the two are equivalent. 

There's no denying that good old-fashioned grassroots rumors -- minyao -- are legion on the Chinese Web, as they are in any other countries. 

Officials and ordinary citizens may be equally prone to bend or break the truth, but when officials do so, they have the power of the state behind them. 

As an Oct. 20 article in the local paper Chongqing Times explains, "Perhaps officials have authority. But authority does not represent the truth, and at least sometimes, officials use their authority to hide the truth." That hypocrisy sets the wrong tone for the government's anti-rumor campaign -- one accompanied by official statements about the need to guide public opinion to be more "constructive." 

Weibo user Yan Zuyou, a Shanghai writer, put it most succinctly: "To punish citizen rumors, you first must punish official rumors."

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Authors Accept Censors’ Rules to Sell in China

China’s 560 publishing houses are required to employ in-house censors, all of them faithful party members.
By ANDREW JACOBS

The dumpling sentence has been removed from the Chinese version. 

BEIJING — Chinese readers of Ezra F. Vogel’s sprawling biography of China’s reformist leader Deng Xiaoping may have missed a few details that appeared in the original English edition.
The Chinese version did not mention that Chinese newspapers had been ordered to ignore the Communist implosion across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.
Nor that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, purged during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, wept when he was placed under house arrest.
Gone was the tense state dinner with the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev when Deng, preoccupied by the throngs of students then occupying the square, let a dumpling tumble from his chopsticks.
Mr. Vogel, a professor emeritus at Harvard, said the decision to allow Chinese censors to tinker with his work was an unpleasant but necessary bargain, one that allowed the book to reach the kind of enormous readership many Western authors can only dream of.
His book, “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,” sold 30,000 copies in the United States and 650,000 in China.
“To me the choice was easy,” he said during a book tour of China that drew appreciative throngs in nearly a dozen cities.
“I thought it was better to have 90 percent of the book available here than zero.”
Such compromises, almost unheard of just five years ago, are becoming increasingly common as American authors and their publishers are drawn to the Chinese market.
With a highly literate population hungry for the works of foreign writers, China is an increasing source of revenue for American publishing houses; last year e-book earnings for American publishers from China grew by 56 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers.
Chinese publishing companies bought more than 16,000 titles from abroad in 2012, up from 1,664 in 1995.
This month, Chinese book agents and publishers flocked to the Frankfurt book fair, aggressively bidding on the works of Western writers and offering handsome advances, especially for titles by best-selling authors. China can also be a gold mine for royalties.
Last year J.K. Rowling took in $2.4 million here, and Walter Isaacson, the author of the biography “Steve Jobs,” earned $804,000, according to the Huaxi Metropolitan Daily in Chengdu, which publishes an annual list.
But while best-selling mysteries like “The Da Vinci Code,” by Dan Brown, or classics like Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” are often faithfully translated, the authors of sexually explicit works or those that touch on Chinese politics and history can find themselves in an Orwellian embrace with a censorship apparatus that has little patience for the niceties of literary or academic integrity.
Some books, like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the erotic blockbuster by E.L. James that has been published in more than three dozen countries, may be beyond salvaging.
A Chinese publisher who reportedly paid handsomely for the rights last year has so far been thwarted from bringing it to press, according to industry executives.

Qiu Xiaolong has refused to allow his fourth novel, “A Case of Two Cities,” to be printed in China.

Foreign writers who agree to submit their books to China’s fickle censorship regime say the experience can be frustrating.
Qiu Xiaolong, a St. Louis-based novelist whose mystery thrillers are set in Shanghai, said Chinese publishers who bought the first three books in his Inspector Chen series altered the identity of pivotal characters and rewrote plot lines they deemed unflattering to the Communist Party.
Most egregiously, he said, publishers insisted on removing any references to Shanghai, replacing it with an imaginary Chinese metropolis called H city because they thought an association with violent crime, albeit fictional, might tarnish the city’s image.
Mr. Qiu, who writes in English but was born and raised in China, said that he had reluctantly agreed to some of the alterations, and only after heated discussion, but that others had been made after he approved what he thought were final translations.
“Some of the changes are so ridiculous they made the book incoherent,” he said in a phone interview.
Having been burned three times, he said he has refused to allow his fourth novel, “A Case of Two Cities,” to be printed in China.


The title of "When Red is Black" was changed to "A Farewell Song to Shikumen" in China. According to the author, Qiu Xiaolong, the words "red" and "black" were considered too politically sensitive.

Other authors have resisted, too.
In 2003, Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered her memoir “Living History” pulled from Chinese shelves after she discovered that large sections of the book had been excised without permission.
More recently, a Chinese version of Alan Greenspan’s “Age of Turbulence” was shelved after he refused to approve significant changes to the book.
James Kynge, a columnist for The Financial Times and the author of “China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future — and the Challenge for America,” walked away from a potentially lucrative deal last year after one publisher demanded that an entire chapter be cut.
“As a journalist committed to accuracy,” he said, “I felt it would be terrifically hypocritical to waive that principle just to gain access to the Chinese marketplace.”
But such stands, it seems, are becoming increasingly rare.
Many writers say they are torn by their desire to protect their work and the need to make a living in an era of shrinking advances.
For others, it is simply about cultivating an audience in the world’s most populous country, a rising superpower that cannot be summarily ignored.
“As an academic who doesn’t write for a large publication, I’m always happy to have a readership that extends beyond the three people in my family,” said Rebecca Karl, a professor of modern Chinese history at New York University whose book “Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History” was recently purchased by a Chinese publishing house.
She said most of the cuts demanded by her publisher, Hunan People’s Publishing, were relatively painless, although she fought back on every one of them.
“It’s about what I expected,” she said.
What she did not expect was that the book would be withheld from publication.
The book was rushed to publication for the coming 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth, but when Ms. Karl came to China for the launch in June, it had been canceled.
“It could end up never being published,” she said.
Jo Lusby, managing director at Penguin Books China, which has published 250 foreign titles in the past eight years, said she often finds herself trying to ease communications between indignant Western writers and the Chinese editors whose job it is to iron out passages they deem unacceptable.
In most instances, she said, the Chinese side refuses to bend.
Even if the process remains opaque and unpredictable, publishing executives say the broad outlines of China’s censorship regime have changed little in recent years.
Topics that deal with ethnic tensions, Taiwan and Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, are off limits, and books that contain even a passing reference to the Cultural Revolution or contemporary Chinese leaders can expect fine-toothed scrutiny.
Gone are the days of the 1990s when Chinese publishers would buy boundary-pushing titles from abroad and hope to sneak them past the censors.
The country’s 560 publishing houses are required to employ in-house censors, all of them faithful party members.
Then there is the General Administration of Press and Publications, whose anonymous apparatchiks can order the removal of chapters or kill an entire book. (The administrative agency did not respond to requests for comment.)
But it is the editors at Chinese publishing houses themselves who often turn out to have the heaviest hands. “Self-censorship has become the most effective weapon,” said the editor in chief of a prominent publishing house in Beijing that publishes more than 300 foreign titles a year, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“If you let something slip through that catches the attention of a higher-up, it can be a career killer.”
For Western writers, the process can be time-consuming and confounding.
Mr. Vogel, whose Chinese publisher, Sanlian, is one of China’s most respectable publishing houses, said it took a year to settle on a final translation, which was adapted from the unexpurgated version published in Hong Kong.
Friends of Mr. Vogel told him the book was considered so sensitive that even the children of long-deceased party luminaries mentioned in the book were given a chance to comment on the galleys.
Many deletions involved passages that detailed squabbles between top leaders or specific adjectives, like those describing Mao Zedong as “paranoid” and “vindictive.”
Edited out, too, was the phrase suggesting that Deng, then in his 80s, was aloof from the yearnings and complaints of ordinary Chinese.
“The impressive thing is how much actually got through,” Mr. Vogel said.
Michael Meyer, whose 2008 book, “The Last Days of Old Beijing,” laments the destruction of the city’s historic fabric, had a similar reaction after seeing the final galleys of the Chinese edition last year.
“I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said.
In the end, editors made a few predictable deletions — including a reference to the Tiananmen Square crackdown and a passage in which the artist Ai Weiwei criticizes the city’s leaders — and a title change that sought to cast the book as a nostalgic love letter (“See You Again, Old Beijing”).
For Mr. Meyer, the most amusing changes involved two text messages sent to him by a New York architect who was attending a municipal planning session in a large coastal city.
The first described the presence of a young woman, who was hanging on the arm of a middle-aged man with a comb-over and loudly sucking on a lollipop.
The second message announced that the man was the mayor and the woman was his mistress.
The passages were removed.

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A Muzzled Chinese Artwork, Absent but Speaking Volumes

By JANE PERLEZ

A work called “Silence" was supposed to be a star attraction, but the center did not submit it to the authorities for review, believing it would be rejected.

BEIJING — A wood sculpture of a larger-than-life man’s head whose gaping mouth is stuffed with a plug — a piece of Chinese protest art from more than 30 years ago — was supposed to be a star attraction at a retrospective here.
The startling visage, called “Silence,” born as a cri de coeur against the censorship of the period after the Cultural Revolution in China, was shown briefly during an artistic spring in Beijing in 1979 and 1980, before being banished.
Even today, says the creator of the work, Wang Keping, who lives in exile in France, his signature sculpture is too hot. 

“Silence” is notably absent from the exhibition of his works from his years abroad at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in the fashionable 798 Art Zone in Beijing.
“If it were part of the exhibit, there would be no exhibit,” Mr. Wang said as he showed a visitor dozens of dark-wood abstract sculptures, some of them hinting at the bodies of men and women, made in his studio outside Paris.

The Chinese sculptor Wang Keping at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

These newer pieces, including two towering black sculptures that in style and shape faintly recall the heads on Easter Island, proved acceptable to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture. 

The bureau must see in advance the number and subject of artworks imported for exhibits.
The Chinese authorities were in fact never given a chance to judge “Silence” anew.
The Ullens Center decided that the current chill on expression in China — most obvious in the detentions in recent months of freewheeling commentators on China’s microblog sites — made it unlikely that “Silence” would be accepted, said the director of the center, Philip Tinari. 

The entire show would have been put at risk if “Silence” were submitted for approval, he said.
Similarly, the organizers of a current show of Andy Warhol’s works at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing said they decided in advance not to hang Warhol’s well-known depiction of Mao.
Mr. Wang comes from an illustrious Communist background. 

His father was a writer, and his mother was an actress, and both were favored by the party. 

From that standpoint, he has an acute antenna for China’s changing political moods, and he assesses the current atmosphere as more depressing than the heady days when he led an avant-garde art movement and marched in the streets bearing a banner that said “Demand for Artistic Freedom.”
“One big difference between now and then is that in 1979 and 1980, artists actually believed there was going to be great change in society,” he said. 

“Nowadays, artists believe there won’t be any change in the next 20 or 30 years. The artists don’t believe they have the strength to change. Their lives are comfortable, but they feel they don’t have any freedom of expression.”
In the fall of 1979, Mr. Wang, then a 30-year-old fledgling sculptor, was the leader of a daring group of artists who detected a slight thaw in the atmosphere after the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, a period when social realism was the only permissible art form.
With two dozen friends — many of them, like him, self-taught — Mr. Wang organized an impromptu and illegal art exhibit in September 1979 outside the National Art Museum of China that has gone down in the annals of modern Chinese art as the “Stars” show.
The artists propped their paintings against an iron fence and hung some from trees, and Mr. Wang strung his sculptures across the top of the fence.
Photographs show curious onlookers, dressed in drab Mao-style suits, with one man with flashy sunglasses peering intently at the paintings, woodblock prints and sculptures. 

There were run-ins with the police, but the museum directors at the time supported the artists.
On Oct. 1, 1979 — National Day — Mr. Wang led a demonstration of about 1,000 protesters that ended up with a speakers’ platform on the steps of the Beijing municipal party committee building.
A month later, the artists persuaded the authorities to move the exhibit to a less secretive place at Beihai Park, the largest park in Beijing at the time. 

The Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times, Fox Butterfield, wrote that it was Mr. Wang’s “brazenly political, often grotesque sculptures that stole the show.”
In August 1980, the artists secured a show inside the halls of the National Museum. 

In the 18 days of the exhibit, an astonishing 80,000 visitors showed up.
But soon, another political chill swept through Beijing, and the fleeting liberty vanished. 

Mr. Wang married a French teacher at Peking University, Catherine Dezaly, and moved to France in 1984, taking with him “Silence,” an unflattering sculpture of Mao called “Idol” and dozens of other radical pieces. 

At about the same time, the now-famous maverick artist Ai Weiwei, a young member of the Stars group, moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The exhilaration has long since dissipated, Mr. Wang said. 

“We felt in those days some people in the Communist Party would support us,” he recalled. 

“Control over the lower ranks was more relaxed.”
It was a period when the government was seeking foreign investment and was worried, at least a little, about rebuke from the outside world.
“Now they don’t need foreign approval; now they are not afraid,” he said. 

“If they were afraid, they wouldn’t do stupid things like arrest Ai Weiwei and crack down on the Internet against people critical of the government.”
As the opening of his current show approached, he was tempted, he said, to smuggle the sculptures “Silence” and “Idol” in his luggage on the flight to Beijing from Paris. 

But he was persuaded not to. 

“I didn’t want to bring trouble onto the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art,” he said.
The two pieces were displayed at the Asia Society in Hong Kong this year at an exhibit of art from the Cultural Revolution. 

Now they are back in his house in France, where he keeps them in a bathroom, safe from theft.
What would have happened if he had stayed in China? 

“My life would be a lot better,” he said. 

“I would have a big studio, a lot of assistants, a driver and mistresses. Chinese artists all live very comfortably, as long as you don’t oppose the government.”

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Milder Accounts of Hardships Under Mao Arise as His Birthday Nears

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Yang Jisheng has come under fire from those seeking to play down the famine deaths that resulted from Mao Zedong’s policies.

HONG KONG — The famine that gripped China from 1958 to 1962 is widely judged to be the deadliest in recorded history, killing 20 to 30 million people or more, and is one of the defining calamities of Mao Zedong’s rule. 

Ever since, the party has shrouded that disaster in censorship and euphemisms, seeking to maintain an aura of reverence around the founding leader of the Communist state.

But with the approach of celebrations of the 120th anniversary Mao’s birth on Dec. 26, some of his supporters and party polemicists are stepping beyond the longstanding official reticence about the famine to argue for their own, much milder version of the disaster and to assail historians who disagree.
They deny that tens of millions died in the famine — it was at most a few million, some of them say — and they accuse scholars who support higher estimates of fanning anti-party sentiment.
“The big rumor that 30 million people starved to death in the three years of hardship,” said a headline in September in The Global Times, an influential party-run tabloid.
The headline accompanied a commentary by a mathematician, Sun Jingxian, who has won publicity for his claim that at most 2.5 million people died of “nutritional fatalities” during the Great Leap Forward. 

He argues that bigger estimates are an illusion based on flawed statistics.
Mr. Sun asserts that most of the apparent deaths were a mirage of chaotic statistics: people moved from villages and were presumed dead, because they failed to register in their new homes.
A new book, “Someone Must Finally Speak the Truth,” has become a touchstone for supporters of Mao, who deny that the famine killed tens of millions. 

The author, Yang Songlin, a retired official, maintains that at most four million “abnormal fatalities” occurred during the famine.
That was indeed a tragedy, he acknowledges, but one for which he mostly blames bad weather, not bad policies. 

He and other like-minded revisionists accuse rival researchers of inflating the magnitude of the famine to discredit Mao and the party.
“Some people think they have an opportunity, that as long as they can prove that tens of millions of people died in the Great Leap Forward, then the Communist Party, the ruling party, will never be able to clear itself,” Mr. Yang said by telephone from his home in Zhengzhou, a city in central China.
China’s leaders have not publicly commented on the controversy. 

But Mao’s reputation remains important for a party that continues to stake its claims to power on its revolutionary origins, even as it has cast aside the remnants of his revolutionary policies. 

And Xi Jinping, the party leader installed in November, has been especially avid in defending that legacy, even though his family suffered more under Mao than did the families of his recent predecessors.
The Great Leap Forward started in 1958, when the party leadership embraced Mao’s ambitions to rapidly industrialize China by mobilizing labor in a fervent campaign and merging farming cooperatives into vast — and, in theory, more productive — people’s communes. 

The rush to build factories, communes and communal dining halls into models of miraculous Communist plenty began to falter as waste, inefficiency and misplaced fervor dragged down production.
By 1959, food shortages began to grip the countryside, magnified by the amount of grain that peasants were forced to hand over to the state to feed swelling cities, and starvation spread.
Officials who voiced doubts were purged, creating an atmosphere of fearful conformism that ensured the policies continued until mounting catastrophe finally forced Mao to abandon them.
Beginning in the early 1980s, restrictions on studying the famine began to ease. 

Historians gained limited access to archives, and sets of census and other population data gradually became available, allowing researchers to build a more detailed, albeit still incomplete, understanding of what happened.
Some scholars have concluded that about 17 million people died, while other counts go as high as 45 million, reflecting varied assumptions about the death rate in normal times as well as other uncertainties, including how much official statistics undercounted deaths during the famine years.
“Scholars disagree, but whether their estimate is somewhat higher or lower, that doesn’t affect the fact that the Great Leap Forward created a massive disaster,” Lin Yunhui, a retired party historian at the National Defense University in Beijing who has spent much of his career studying Mao’s time, said by telephone.

“My own estimate is that there were about 30 million abnormal deaths.”
Few if any mainstream historians place any credence in the revisionists’ claims, but they express alarm that the party, which in recent decades has tolerated more open research into the period, seems to be encouraging a retreat into deceptive orthodoxies.
“I’ve long been maligned and attacked for my research, but now there are these people who basically deny that there was ever a mass famine,” Yang Jisheng, 72, a historian and former Xinhua News Agency journalist in Beijing who has been the main target of the attacks, said by telephone.

He is not related to Yang Songlin.
“Tombstone,” Yang Jisheng’s landmark study of the Great Leap Forward famine — published in Chinese in Hong Kong in 2008 and in a modified, abridged English-language edition in 2012 — is banned in mainland China but has been read widely there through smuggled and bootlegged copies.
Mr. Yang estimates that 36 million people died because of brutality and food shortages caused by the Great Leap Forward. 

He called the denials of widespread famine more than half a century ago a disturbing symptom of present-day political anxieties.
“To defend the ruling status of the Communist Party, they must deny that tens of millions died of starvation,” Mr. Yang said. 

“There’s a sense of social crisis in the party leadership, and protecting its status has become more urgent, and so it’s become even more necessary to avoid confronting the truth about the past.”
China’s leader, Mr. Xi, is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a colleague of Mao who was purged in 1962 and endured 16 years of imprisonment and political ignominy.
Mr. Xi’s handling of the past, however, is driven by political imperatives, not family memories, said Edward Friedman, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was an editor of the English version of Mr. Yang’s book “Tombstone.”
Mr. Xi told officials in January that they should not belittle or doubt Mao’s achievements.
He has repeatedly cited the collapse of the Soviet Union as a warning of the costs of political laxity.
Mr. Xi approved a directive issued in April that identified seven main ideological threats to party rule, including “historical nihilism” — defined as attempts to “negate the legitimacy of the long-term rule of the Chinese Communist Party” by maligning the party’s record.
“They need their great leader to be pure,” Mr. Friedman said. 

“They need to have a vision of the past that’s worth being nostalgic about.”

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Busting China’s Bloggers

By MURONG XUECUN

BEIJING — A frequent topic of conversation among my friends here has been: Who will be arrested next?
Some of us met recently for dinner and started a list of potential candidates. 

We included outspoken scholars, writers and lawyers who have discussed democracy and freedom, criticized the government and spoken out for the disadvantaged.
Some of my dinner companions nominated themselves for the list. 

We agreed that the social critic Xiao Shu (the pen name of Chen Min) and Guo Yushan, a friend of the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng (now in the United States), should top the list. 

I’m right behind them.
Almost of all of us are active microbloggers. 

Some of us qualify as Big V, the widely used label for influential bloggers with millions of followers. (V stands for “verified account.”) 

It is our online activism that makes us prime targets of the government.
In August, the authorities launched the most severe round yet in their “campaign against cybercrime.” 

Ostensibly to curtail online “rumors,” they are rounding up and jailing outspoken netizens across the country. 

Judging from official media accounts and police reports, the number of arrests is in the hundreds, and many of us believe it may be in the thousands.
Charles Xue, a government critic and a Big V blogger with 12 million followers, who writes under the name Xue Manzi, was arrested as an early high-profile example. 

He was detained in August for allegedly hiring prostitutes, but the state-run news agency, Xinhua, made clear the true reason: “This has sounded a warning bell about the law to all Big V’s on the Internet.” 

The most infamous case was the arrest of a 16-year-old boy in Gansu Province. 

In early September, he posted two short messages commenting on the police’s handling of a mysterious death. 

His message included the phrase: “All officials shield one another.” 

He was arrested a few days later.
Meanwhile, the state media have published a steady flow of articles warning microbloggers to tone down their commentaries. 

An Aug. 24 editorial on Xinhua’s Web site said that popular bloggers who “poison the online environment” should be “dealt with like rats scurrying across the street that everyone wants to kill.”
It’s easy to see why the government feels threatened. 

The most popular microblogging service, Sina’s Weibo, has more than 500 million registered members and 54 million daily users, and has become the most important space for citizens to participate in public life — and expose government lies. 

Microbloggers dare to question the legitimacy of the one-party state. They expose corruption. They shame criminals.

And Big V bloggers don’t just express opinions; we act as information hubs. 

When we discuss issues online, people take notice. 

In 2010, I re-posted a news item about a protest against a forced eviction in Jiangxi Province in which three people resorted to self-immolation. 

The story was re-posted thousands of times and became one of the hottest news items of the year.
The vast state censorship apparatus works hard to keep us down. 

But posts race through Weibo so quickly that it’s difficult to control them with technology. 

Hence, the government is resorting to detainment.
The effect has been chilling. 

Since August, the Weibo community has collectively cooled down the political speech. 

The historian Zhang Lifan and others have dubbed the crackdown the “Internet anti-rightist campaign,” an echo of the anti-rightist campaign instigated by Mao in the late 1950s to crush dissent. 

Nearly 550,000 people were arrested or sent into exile. 

Just over a half-century later, the term “anti-rightist” still triggers fears that Chinese people have been trying to forget. 

And that is one of the government’s aims: to instill fear.
But these are different times. 

In 1957, Chinese intellectuals were on their own. They were defenseless and received no public support. 

In 2013, the Internet is like a giant public square where citizens can hear and support one another. 

Otherwise powerless people join together. 

When a courageous person steps forward, others follow.
I have been asked if I’m afraid. 

A couple of years ago, in the early days of my blogging, I was scared. 

Now I am not.

I think my shift is representative of that of many popular bloggers, who have been emboldened by the freedom we’ve found online, as my friends have.
My friends and I channel our lingering anxiety into jokes about being on a government hit list. 

But of course this is a serious matter — and really all we can do is prepare for the inevitable.
For example, Xiao Han, a legal scholar in Beijing, has prepared a statement to be released in the event of his arrest, and sent a copy to his friends overseas.

And he has preemptively decided on a courtroom strategy: If he is charged with disturbing public order or manufacturing rumors, he says he will counter-sue the government for its crimes and declare, “This is my court, too.”
The most I’ve done in preparation for arrest is to back up all my writing and give a copy to friends overseas.
As we contemplate the government’s next target, I keep my fear in check.

I understand that for China to change, some people will have to pay a price. 

Wang Xiaoshan, a publisher who was among my friends at the dinner, put it best when he said: Start with me.

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