Sounds like the name of a deranged redneck death metal band…but no. 

h/t ESWN.

No, she’s not; but the former bureau chief of CNN in Beijing is clearly exasperated [use a proxy in China] with some sloppy stenography and misunderstandings that resulted in a story claiming MacKinnon does not see Hong Kong as a part of China, among other mistakes.

Well, everybody makes mistakes, and MacKinnon wisely points out that this is a perfect example of why anti-CNN’s campaign to convince the Chinese that Western media discriminate against them and always put China in a bad light is simply false.

[Th]is incident is instructive for the anti-CNN people out there who believe CNN is at the forefront of a vast Western media conspiracy against China. It’s not.

A lot of errors happen because editors and reporters are under pressure to churn out volumes material on short deadline with inadequate staff and funding. There is often an over-reliance on interns and lack of staff to supervise them properly. As a result, on American cable and satellite TV news outlets (I don’t want to speak for other countries’ TV broadcasters or for print or radio organizations without first-hand experience of them), major mistakes get made by people whose work should have been checked before going out. Photos get cropped for websites without adequate thought. Agency material gets mis-labeled as being from one country when it was actually from another. Names of leaders get mixed up. Things get mis-translated. Errors go on air or get published online before somebody notices. It happens all the time. Believe me. Ask anybody who has worked in the business. I even know of one instance in which video of Michael Jackson the pop star was erroneously put in a report involving a NATO general by the same name – a video editor was under time pressure and followed written instructions without thinking about the report’s substance at all.

Please, my Anti-CNN friends, study those words and use them to broaden your perspectives. Try to realize the innocence in much of what you perceive to be bias. Try to realize that every politician in America has horror stories equal to or greater than yours about how their words were misconstrued by the American media and their photos butchered by layout editors. Try to realize this is a friend to CNN and she had to deal with the same stuff that you feel marks you as unique victims. MacKinnon, however, knows she has not been victimized, only that some sloppy work was done and that it’s an everyday occurrence.

Needless to say, I don’t have high hopes for this lesson to stick, as victimhood is one of the most difficult things to give up. It comes with all kinds of benefits and privileges, such as always being right, and having a license to whine ad infinitum about imaginary prejudice. Of all the propaganda programs in China, Anti-CNN is the most successful and sophisticated, pushing all the right buttons in a slick and compelling format. I can actually understand why so many intelligent Chinese people, including my own good friends, fall under its sway. Let’s hope they all read MacKinnon’s words [too bad her site is harmonized] and start to get that accidents happen, people are fallible, and most of what they see as bias and loathing is actually an innocuous oversight, a bit of human error, or simply nothing at all.

Those who follow sports will know that the starters for the NBA All-Star game are chosen by fan ballot, originally this was done at the arenas but with the Internet and the internationalization of basketball most voting is now done online.  As a result of fan voting presumably from China and, possibly, Newark, Yi Jianlian, the 21 or 24-year old forward for the New Jersey Nets, has surpassed several established stars and is threatening the starting position of Boston Celtics superstar Kevin Garnett.  Yi is a solid NBA player, but he’s hardly in Yao Ming territory, never mind KG.* This week the Beijing Youth Daily questioned whether or not A-Lian, as he is known, deserves to be an all-star.

According to a summary published in the China Daily:

China’s 350 million basketball fans have become an important group for the NBA, so it is not surprising that Yi, a Chinese national, rank thirds in the voting. They believe the votes cast by Chinese fans should carry equal weight with those cast by American or German fans, and they have called on others to be self-confident in participating in the vote.

But others argue that Yi’s skills are not good enough for him to become a starter in the All-Star game. They say some fans have voted for him repeatedly or even resorted to manipulating computer software in an attempt to give him enough votes to be included on the All-Star game’s roster. Those that believe Yi’s skills as a basketball player are below par say the level of All-Star game is lowered by such tactics, which constitute cheating. They also note that forcing the NBA’s global fans to accept the voting results of Chinese fans is not good for the future development of Yi, whom they believe is not qualified to take part in the All-Star game at present.

Interesting dilemma…support the democratic rights of the large number of Chinese fans who want to see Yi hoop it up against the NBA’s best** or else insinuate that such large-scale movements can be a detriment to overall interests and goals.***

——–

*Yi’s also out for the next four weeks with a broken pinkie.

**Just for the record: My all-star picks were Devin Harris, D-Wade, KG, Lebron, and Dwight Howard from the East with Chris Paul, Kobe, Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, and Yao in the West.  That Yi Jianlian is getting more votes than Chris Bosh, Danny Granger, or Paul Pierce just kills me.

***Yes, I’m being tongue-in-cheek here. Sorta.

[Update: For a superb look at this issue from multiple perspectives, go here now.]

If you want to understand why groups you would expect to be banging the drum for Charter 08 – Falun Gong, the DPP, the Dalai Lama, and even the mainstream foreign media – you can find some interesting answers here. Apparently, everyone with a beef against the CCP can find something about the document that dissatisfies them enough to steer clear, mainly because Charter 08, while calling for dramatic reforms, is, to them, not critical enough of the current system.

I found this so interesting:

More curious, and changing, reactions, came from Falun Gong, or FLG, a religious and political group that has been banned in mainland China. A search on FLG’s Chinese language website Sunday came up with 100 links cheering “Charter 08,” with titles such as “Reform Is Dead, Long Live Revolution!” However a click on any of those links gave only a blank page. Remnants of posts here and there indicate that FLG originally found “Charter 08” an exciting sign of the coming revolution and supported it whole-heartedly. Later, though, they made a 180 degree turn after the FLG leader deemed the manifesto not revolutionary enough, but rather a “ghost shadow” of the communist party.

Understandably however, revolution is favored by few Chinese, whether supporters or contenders of Charter 08. In contrast, many pointed out the legitimacy of Charter 08 in accordance with China’s constitution.

For a little while I thought we were going to see a media avalanche. Looking at the tiny number of publications on Google news that have run with the story, I’m now a lot less certain.

Yes, Xinhua really did insist on these things – however, there’s one small catch.

This is becoming an increasignly thorny issue for the CCP.

On Dec. 8, the police took Zhang Zuhua into a room in Beijing and sat him in a chair.

For 12 hours, they questioned him. They brought him water, but no food. And they debated the document that had led him here: Charter 08, a call for sweeping political change in China.

It’s gotten to be an old story here: A clutch of activists challenges the government; the government jails one or two to scare others into silence.

But the movement around Charter 08 is different, say human rights groups and Mr. Zhang, who helped draft the document.

A month after its release, Charter 08 is still making waves in China. A wide cross-section of citizens has expressed support online. And the government, nervous about social unrest and the approaching anniversary of Tiananmen Square, has contacted – and in some cases, interrogated and threatened – at least dozens of the manifesto’s original signers.

“This text is having a lot of impact – people are debating and signing it online,” says Nicholas Bequelin, China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “This is a landmark in terms of its appeal, and [the] attention that it has provoked.”

Charter 08 calls for an end to one-party authoritarian rule and lays out a vision for a rights-based society – an electoral democracy, under the rule of law, with equality for peasants and city-dwellers and protected freedoms of speech and expression.

Today, Asia Sentinel dubbed Charter 08 the most serious threat to the party since 1989 and, in a misguided but interesting article, Daniel Drezner goes so far as to prophesy either the complete collapse of the CCP or the iron-fisted crushing of massive demonstrations. (The commenters straighten him out on this.) Also, note the three or four (at this moment) comments to the Asia Sentinel piece. Right out of the party’s talking points, from the obligatory swipe at the Dalai Lama to the argument that democracy is rash and dangerous.

I hope you can read through the CSM article, which leaves the impression that many people in China are taking Charter 08 to heart (some 300,000 website now link to it), and some are even willing to risk jail to support it. When people are that passionate about something, it can spell big trouble for a government that depends of lock-step thinking and sloganeering to keep their citizens’ minds pure.

It will be fascinating to watch this unfold, right at the time when China’s leaders most fear a disruption of the harmony they worked so hard to achieve. I don’t think it will bring them down, but it’s already created a colossal headache. 1989 inevitably comes to mind. Cheers to the people who had the courage to launch Charter 08 and the fortitude to propel it into the global consciousness.

Go listen. A great reporter, Fallows explains why China invests and saves the way it does, how the global financial crisis is rocking China more than many had predicted, and why China cannot “save the world” from the crisis. He also discusses our good friend, China’s Net Nanny, and why the CCP bothers blocking and monitoring Web sites, which he calls “subtle repression” that’s worked better than many of us realize. On CCP propaganda, he quips, “It’s like a whole country run by Fox News.” Not that far off. Strongly suggest you listen to it all.

It kind of feels like deja vu all over again. I was just thinking tonight about SARS and the first time I heard about the mysterious new disease back in 2002. Then a friend of mine called and told me about a confirmed case of bird flu in Beijing, just announced today. The woman was only 19 years old.

A 19-year-old woman has died of the H5N1 bird flu virus in Beijing after coming into contact with poultry, health authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong said on Tuesday.

This human H5N1 case would be China’s first in almost a year. Experts said while the case was not unexpected as the virus is more active during the cooler months between October and March, it points to holes in surveillance of the virus in poultry.

With the world’s biggest poultry population and hundreds of millions of farmers raising birds in their backyards, China is seen as crucial in the global fight against bird flu.

“The woman fell ill on December 24, was hospitalized on December 27 and died on Monday (at) 7.20 am,” the Beijing Municipal Bureau said in a faxed statement….

China’s official Xinhua News Agency earlier reported that the woman from eastern Fujian province had bought nine ducks at a market in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, and then gutted the birds. She gave three ducks to her father, uncle and a friend and kept the other six ducks, the agency reported.

I think we had all forgotten that bird flu, long touted as the world’s next and long-overdue pandemic, even existed. This may bring the story back with a vengeance, especially considering that this happened right here in Beijing and not off in the countryside.

At the height of the SARS scandal in 2003, I wrote a characteristically florid and dramatic post about Internet censorship and its role in the tragedy. It was sincere, if overwrought, and others have since borrowed its headline (what can you do?). That very day the government conceded it had staged a massive cover-up of a deadly disease, and vowed to open up and let the light stream in. This was my key point, addressed directly to an unresponsive Hu Jintao:

Since you are now encouraging free communications and honest dialogue, I urge you to look at the greatest roadblock to these noble goals — your custom-made Internet censorship mechanism, lovingly referred to as The Great Firewall of China. You cannot have it both ways. Either you are transparent and in favor of dialogue, or you are a frightened deer caught in the headlights, terrified of what your people see and think.

The blocked Internet is a glaring symptom and symbol of your fears. It reinforces the perception of you as paranoid ideologues. It reminds the world that your past eagerness to block communications (which, in the case of SARS, resulted only in more unnecessary deaths and unending streams of rumors) is alive and well, and thus you are still not to be trusted….I am a personal victim of your censorship, unable to read this very site, thanks to your terror of the exchange of information.

All we ever got in return for this simple request was a lot of disappointment and several broken promises. Things soon returned to normal, journalists were discouraged to do their jobs, control over the Internets only tightened (with a brief Potemkin Village-style hiatus around the Games), and nearly all the news on openness under Hu has been decidedly grim.

This week, news about China’s New & Improved firewall lit up the blogs once again, perhaps because the story it’s such a vintage example of dazzling technology being used for the most ruthless and primitive of purposes (repression):

China’s government is stepping up internet scrutiny by equipping its web censors with more advanced software that allows them to spot risks of subversion much earlier and root it out more efficiently, according to the country’s internet security market leader.

The revelation from Beijing TRS Information Technology, China’s leading provider of search technology and text mining solutions, that it is thriving on the government’s desire to better “manage” public opinion, comes as the political leadership is facing growing challenges, mostly voiced through the internet.

Currently, the security forces are cracking down on intellectuals associated with Charter 08, an appeal for democracy and human rights that many see as the most significant such document since 1989 and which has, defying Beijing’s net censorship, been collecting signatories over the web.

Traditionally, so-called internet cops look for subversive content via keyword searches on Google or Baidu, He Zhaohui, marketing manager at TRS, told the FT. But, he claimed that TRS is increasingly selling advanced text mining solutions enabling censors to monitor and forecast public opinion rather than take down dangerous talk after it happened. Mr He argued, for example, that state-of-the-art internet spying could have prevented the Shanxi brick kiln slavery scandal and the damage it did to the country’s image.

I do want everyone to think about that last sentence for a moment. This guy is actually boasting that if only his group’s technology had been around in 2007 China could have keep secret for all time the plight of kidnapped children sold into slavery to labor in a Shaanxi brick factory? The guy actually said that on the record? (Or am I misreading something?) And that we should all be grateful this technology will allow the CCP to hide the truth faster and more easily? This raises the Nanny to a new level of sinisterness, potentially morphing from a site blocker and nuisance to a network of Thought Police ready to swoop down on people before they even do anything.

Okay, so we all know how bad this system of censorship is, and we all know why the CCP invests so much time and money to ensure complete control of the pipes. We all know it’s getting worse, not better. And yet I can’t get out of my head a discussion I had with a group of journalists and Web 2.0 luminaries several weeks ago when this topic arose. One of them, a well-known techie writer who knows China better than most of us, had this to say:

“When Americans see the Chinese Internet, they say, ‘Look at this! Look at how many sites are blocked! Look at all the censorship and how the government is denying its people information.’ And then the Chinese people look at the same Internet and say, ‘This is amazing! We have never had so much information made available to us before. It’s like a dream.'”

And this conversation brought to mind yet another post I can’t forget from 2006, written, ironically, shortly before the blogger himself was arrested for pointing his video camera at the wrong places. In the post he outlined the pros and cons of the censorship argument from the Western and Chinese perspectives in a brilliant set of bullets:

1. Progress or Backwards? the extent of censorship vs information availability
a. Internet is growing rapidly in China. Chinese are having access to exploding amount of information which they couldn’t have fathomed a decade ago.
b. The information is censored, especially in politics, history and news. Chinese are being goaded by the government to think in certain directions.
c. But smart people can get around the Great Firewall via proxy servers. And if one reads English, there’s no much censorship to speak of unless one considers:
that BBC (blocked) offers much superior and often exclusive content compared to CNN and NY Times, or that speeches on Falun Gong, pro-Taiwan-independence and anti-Communist-party (I mean politically anti) are unalienable rights for the average Chinese.

2. Why are the laowais so ga-ga?
a. Why are the foreign media working up so high a frenzy over this? Don’t they know they can’t impose their will on China, if Chinese don’t want to change themselves?
b. Of course the foreigners care, because that’s in the core of their value system. Without them being ga-ga over this, the situation in China would be worse.
c. Worse. Hmm. Really? That’s very conceited. Do they want to repeat Iraq in China?
d. And who says free speech is essential to an acceptable society? Look at Singapore. Look at all the democracies that can’t feed their own people. Press freedom is not the most urgent issue in China.
e. What’s the urgent issue in China then? Without press and political freedom, none of China’s current major problems can be solved satisfactorily.

3. Do Chinese care?
a. The average Chinese I know doesn’t. Of course we can always argue about my sample size, and the predisposition in my observation.
b. But if given the chance (free speech in education and public discourse), would Chinese cherish the freedom then?
c. And why do we care about the “average” Chinese? Every individual deserves the full human rights declared in the UN charter.
d. That’s just a pipe dream! People want to make their lives better first.

And on it goes. My very favorite bullet comes at the very end:

Change has to happen. But the Chinese have to figure it out themselves. The foreign media can continue to go ga-ga over this. Will all the media attention serve much purpose beyond acting as the fad of the day though? I wonder.

Although it’s just one of many bullets, I strongly suspect it reflects the blogger’s opinion (at least before he suddenly found himself the guest of the system’s hospitality). It’s an interesting question: How excited should we (foreigners) get about China’s Internet censorship when the Chinese people, the alleged victims, are nearly unanimously complacent about a problem that to them doesn’t exist?

I don’t have answers. From 2002 to 2006 I was apoplectic outspoken on this issue. And then…. Well, when you live here long enough and you actually talk to the people your defending and fighting for, your perspective can change. Not about censorship: it’s always bad, and in China it has brutal and evil consequences. But you realize that if there’s going to be change, it’s going to have to come from within China. Hyperventilating about the censorship may feel soothing, and sometimes it seems like an entire cottage industry has sprung up, fueled by stories about blocked blogs and the latest censorship tools. God knows, I’ve contributed enough fuel myself, starting six years ago almost to the day. (I believe this was the first blog post about China’s blogspot ban, which was to remain in effect for half a decade.) And we should keep up the complaints and the noise and not let the world forget – and not let the CCP forget that the world is watching.

But. But we can’t distort what the actual situation is in China. 99.9 out of 100 people here will tell you this is not a problem to them, and even to those who see it as such, it does not rank high on their list of urgent needs. And, again, the breast-beating of “gaga foreigners” will not swing the pendulum over to the side of enlightenment. That’s something the Chinese people will need to make happen, though I will keep urging them on from the sidelines. And just as in the good old days, I still decry the foreign companies who got rich making the technology possible. This insidious system is China’s; it’s a shame the fingerprints of companies from the developed world are all over it.

Thank God they’re looking out for us. Make sure to avoid these sites at all cost.