Chinese lawyer detained for mentioning Twitter

Tang Jingling, a Guangzhou lawyer, was invited to the Guangzhou College of Vocational Technology on November 27 to lecture students on the internet.

Radio Free Asia reports:

[H]e was interrupted by a member of the campus security force who was auditing the class, and was told to show his identification before being led away by police.

Twitter is considered “a tool of subversion” by some Chinese security personnel, says local activist Bei Feng.

“As far as I know, leading Chinese Web sites and forums were all cautioned not to discuss Twitter, which may now be monitored by special task forces,” Bei said.

Huawei captures attention along with no. 2 slot

The International Herald Tribune and New York Times had a go at the Huawei story this week after it snared Telenor's LTE business.

To take business away from Nokia Siemens on its Nordic home turf makes for one of the Chinese vendor's sweetest and most important wins. Huawei now has the chance of rolling out a showcase 4G network with a tier 1 European carrier.

The other prompt for the story is Huawei overtaking NSN to become the no. 2 wireless network supplier in Q3 (it's not the second biggest in the industry overall just wireless).

The milestone is worth a shout. In no other hi-tech business is a Chinese firm so close to a leadership position, and not just as a low-end assembly operation.

Like every Huawei story, the IHT/Times piece asks the Huawei question. It gets the Huawei answer from European marketing director Edward Zhou:

“No government or government-linked organizations have any ownership stake,” Mr. Zhou said. “Huawei has no connection to the Chinese military, and none of our directors hold, or has held, any positions with, or serves or has served as a consultant or adviser to, any Chinese government or agency.”

For those who don't know, Huawei was founded by ex-PLA officer Ren Zhengfei - now CEO - and others in 1987. Unlike all of its competitors, including cross-town rival ZTE, it's privately-held. It says it funds its expansion through an annual increase in its capital base and well-supported employee share purchase program. It also has the benefit of a generous $30 billion credit line from a state-owned bank to help customers buy its gear.

Huawei has made the denial about its military connections often enough for it to be quite credible. But in the form put by Zhou, it doesn't rule out the RAND Corporation assertion that Huawei

“maintains deep ties with the Chinese military, which serves a multifaceted role as an important customer, as well as Huawei’s political patron and research development partner.”

Like China itself, Huawei's success, and its secrecy, make it controversial.

"Blank Screen Weekend" in Beijing

Volunteer teams roamed Beijing neighbourhoods this weekend, warning people to switch off their PCs or pay a "fine" as part of the NC63 (no computers for 63 hours). Some 20 websites reportedly supported the campaign, although the original front page Beijing Morning Post story didn't name any of them.

A coincidence, surely, that it's a print daily leading the charge against the web.

Sex and a city

Another China porn crackdown, this time the scourge of “yellow” on mobile phones. It was lead item on Xinhua on Thursday afternoon, with a suitably clunky cartoon of a chopper cleaving the "mobile porn profit chain."

A well-reported story on scmp.com($$) about the anti-vice sweep in Dongguan puts these campaigns into perspective.

Dongguan, in China's factory belt just north of Shenzhen, is to the sex trade what Las Vegas is to gambling. Although the threat of being ranked as one of the country's most crime-ridden cities is a motivating factor for the local party honcho, we don't know why Public Security has chosen to declare war on prostitution at this time.

Yet the inevitably feeble results remind us that being seen to crack down is far more important than the actual crackdown itself.

The chain of interests between the sex industry, police, party officials and the local economy are too important to break. Some 300,000 sex workers, and another 500,000 or so indirectly employed in an industry that accounts for 20%-30% of the Dongguan service industry.

According to a brothel operator who has lived in Dongguan for 30 years, the sex industry is highly developed and run in the same way as legitimate private businesses. Recruiting is standardised, training is provided, and marketing strategies are conceived and executed.

The logical response would be to at least decriminalise the sector and establish safe working conditions, routine medical checks and all the rest.

But that would run counter to the “harmonious society” narrative and acknowledge that the party can't find employment for rural women beyond low-paid factory work.

Just as important, the security apparatus needs an illicit sex trade as a pretext for far-ranging sweeps against "unhealthy elements". If actual commercial sex were legalised, how much harder would it be to launch endless Airstrip One-style campaigns against vaguely-defined internet porn, gambling and violent games?

And without that cover, the just-as-frequent crackdowns on human rights and democracy activists will be naked.

Opera joins the China censorware party

Opera's new Chinese mobile browser keeps users firmly inside the Great Firewall, BBC reports.

How Bing skews its Chinese search results

Microsoft copped a huge spray from NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff a few days ago for their selective treatment censorship of Bing search results.

Kristoff said:

If Microsoft felt it had to bow to Chinese censorship within China’s borders, based on the IP address, that might be defensible. But when Microsoft skews its worldwide searches to make Hu Jintao feel better, that’s a disgrace. It becomes simply a unit of the Central Committee Propaganda Department.

What has prompted Kristof’s ire is that Microsoft is providing different (read: pro-Beijing) results for searches in simplified Chinese characters compard with traditional Chinese or English.

My own brief test mostly bore this out.

Results for searches on “Tiananmen 6/4” and “Taiwan independence” are certainly bowdlerized; the simplified search results go straight to mainland sites. Non-communist views on both topics disappeared completely.

Admittedly a search on “Dalai Lama” yielded similar results in both complex and simplified versions, but I've seen enough. As Kristoff says, it's absurd for Microsoft to claim that its simplified Chinese searches “produce pro-Communist results because of the algorithms used.”

Another reason to not use Bing.

Twitter to Murdoch: go radical free, man

Biz Stone has some advice for Rupert Murdoch: the future's in free content.
That would be the Biz Stone, the Twitter co-founder, who is yet to make a dollar out of his 50 million-odd users.

Stone said:

"[News Corp] should be looking at this as an opportunity to try something radically different and find out a way to make a ton of money from being radically open rather than some money from being ridiculously closed."

So although we've been reading news for free online for the past 13 years, that's merely giving it away for free; the blats should take that to a higher level.

Another way to look it is that Murdoch has built a global media empire out of pretty much nothing. Cynical old schemer he may be, but if he can't turn a dollar out of free news, who can?

MS gets some love

When was the last time Microsoft had a hit? The first Xbox?

Microsoft has just released the new Zune to surprisingly warm reviews (and here). This is after all the company that came up with Windows ME, Vista, Bob, and the Seinfeld ads.

The blogosphere loves the new thin Bluetooth keyboard, too. Well, done Microserfs, but is there really a need for an expensive ($90) keyboard, in particular one aimed at owners of netbooks? Will anyone want to pack an extra qwerty keyboard?