NOTE: For those readers who’ve been offline for the past 3 days, this is a post about Google Buzz, the new Google service that has invaded the World’s mailboxes this week.

But take it easy, hold on a sec, don’t rush to your GFW test tools, this has not happened yet. I just want to be the first to announce it and get all the credit, since I am 90% certain that Google Buzz will be blocked within a week. The remaining 10% I am hedging in case the GFW censors get too high on Baiju over the New Years and their reactions are a bit slower than expected.

Look, I hate playing blogger of doom, but this is just how China works today. I’ve heard a few opposed opinions from bloggers I respect, and I am ascribing that to wishful thinking. There is no way Google Buzz is going to continue open, here is why:

• Gbuzz is attracting very fast a larger number of users than Twitter or Facebook in China, due to its use of Gmail, a relatively popular email service here.

• The viral transmission potential of Google Buzz is extraordinary, and very appealing for the Chinese way of using the internet. In the first 24 hours of GBuzz in China the popular Chinese bloggers where getting far more comments than pioneers like Robert Scoble.

• After their recent controversy with the Chinese authorities, Google put Gmail (and now GBuzz) on HTTPS, which means that the GFW cannot  see the content flowing inside China. They cannot block particular users or keywords, and neither can they force a self-censorship of Google as they did with the Google.cn, for reasons both technical and political for the Google company.

So what we have here is a means of massive viral communication, completely out of control and with a potential to piss off the Chinese authorities that may be second only to the Epoch Times.

A Real-time Simulation

For those who still don’t agree with me, I have used my old engineering supercomputer to do a real-time simulation of the upcoming events, starting from yesterday, when most Chinese Gmail users got access to GBuzz. The first 4 steps have already happened as of February 12:

Step1: GBuzz is rolled out in China and within hours the popular bloggers are getting streams of comments in the few hundreds. One of the first subjects of discussion is whether the Buzz will be blocked or not.

Step2: Some Chinese users start timidly testing the system with unmodified swearwords and taboos, such as Caonima and Malagebi. Euphoria: no comments are deleted or blocked!

Step3: - After 12h some Chinese users are already sending pictures of beautiful ladies with a peculiar tendency to wear less and less clothes even as the winter is hitting back hard on the mainland.

Step 4: Bloggers like Han Han or AiWeiwei discover GBuzz and start broadcasting there. Not only their posts, but worst still, the flow of comments is out of reach of the Chinese authorities. Comment threads are by now in the tens of thousands.

Step 5: The next big viral event hits the Chinese internet, and seeing that all comments get erased on the other blogs and microblogs, even more people starts flocking to GBuzz.

Step 6: By now most netizens have understood that GBuzz is their GFW free day out. Uncensored photos of Edison Chen or drunken party cadres recirculate widely, people even write appraisals of the performances. More than 50% of the words on GBuzz worldwide are in mandarin characters, and about 10% of them are some form of 妈/逼 word construction (mother /cunt).

Step 7: The early days of FOS were rather hectic, but the people finally realizes the advantages of communicating freely. The divide between the Chinese internet and the rest of the world is disappearing quickly, and Google Buzz has written a page in World history.

… in the meantime, somewhere in the middle kingdom…

… the evil 5Mao teams of netizens sold to the the party have caught up with GBuzz and are calling their bosses in the propaganda department to wake up from their baijiu dreams and show up at the GFW headquarters with red tape and pruning shears…

Conclusion

OK, I think you get the gist by now. And the conclusion is this: there is no way GBuzz is going to remain open in China. The only question remaining to answer is what will happen to the rest of the Google services, in particular Gmail and Google.com (G.cn is already doomed in my books).

I see here 2 possibilities:

1- Google Buzz could technically be blocked without blocking GMail, in spite of their integration. The GFW could achieve this by using intelligent URL blocks on the #buzz string that appears on all the buzz URLs. Easier still, since they are in negotiation with Google, they could ask G to facilitate the blocking of GBuzz in exchange for GMail remaining open.

2- GBuzz might go down and take down with it all the Google services in China once and for all. Especially this can be true if the negotiations between Google and the Chinese government are not as smooth as I supposed lately. This has happened already in Iran, and I am certain most leaders in the CCP wouldn’t even  blink. Or does anyone think they care about the outside opinion on China’s freedom of speech?

So this is only a 2-way dilemma, I don’t see any other solution. The final outcome of the Google vs. China affair is coming very soon, precipitated by the unexpected birth of GBuzz. Neither Google nor the CCP can afford to wait much longer, as the pressure is mounting on both sides. The end is near, fasten your belts and turn on your VPNs.

And Happy New Year of the Tiger

And now I am going to close the computer, leave the office and take a flight to a certain tropical destination in South East Asia where I intend to spend my New Year’s Holidays. When I am back to Shanghai on the 22nd, Google Buzz will be over in China, and I will be just in time to pick up the pieces. I look forward to a whole new series of posts on the year of the Tiger.

Happy New Year to all, 恭喜发财！

As usual we will start with the popularity of China in the news. This year it is more interesting than ever, because 2010 is a round number, and the early-birds of the China Experts are already chanting the Chinese decade.

As we predicted last time, 2008 was a peak for China related news in the World, and it was going to be difficult to beat that in the short term. Within the general rising trend, 2009 has gone back to reasonable levels of media attention, partly because Xinjiang and the Tiananmen anniversary were no match for Tibet, Sichuan and the Olympics; partly because the US Obamania has stolen the show from the Middle kingdom.

In the first months of the year the crisis did bring some attention to China, but as soon as it became clear that the stimulus package was working and damage was under control, the journalists’ interest waned. Here are the results of my Chinanews-meter, the high precision tracking device I purchased from the Uni of East Anglia:

Occurrences of "China" in LaVanguardia 1881-2009

This year I want to go a bit further, so I add below the statistics from Google Trends for the News references of the term “China”. Note that Google Trends is not more precise than my own original method, because the number of news sources that Google references always grows. To recalibrate the scale we must try neutral words like “when” or “he” and take them as visual zero axis, leaning the whole curve to the right. The result confirms clearly the peak of 08.

Google Trend News for "China" (axis not corrected)

Still, this system is not very accurate, and I would like to find a more reliable way to estimate the impact of China.  I guess the old Chinanews-meter above is as good as I can get for now. As a random mainstream newspaper in Barcelona without any special connection with China, there is no reason why La Vanguardia  shouldn’t replicate roughly the general trend in the West.

Another possible solution (albeit without numbers) is to use the tool “Google Timeline” to compare some occurrences of “China” within particular newspapers. Interestingly, I have seen that the “highbrow” newspapers, such as the NYT or WAPO, tend to have a more stable coverage of China, as they usually have staff dedicated fulltime to this subject:

New York Times occurrences of "China"

Whereas more “lowbrow” papers like USAToday tend to show more the peaks and the valleys, as they follow more closely the trends of popular interest (see the massive peak in 2008 Tibet+Sichuan+Olympics):

USAToday occurrences of "China"

As a temporary conclusion I would say the results from USAToday and similar papers are more significant, because by far that kind of media have the largest number of readers in the World. This confirms again the trend seen in my old Chinanews-meter, and it also confirms the impression of most China bloggers I have spoken to: 2009 was not as hot as 2008.

Your call

I am still not entirely satisfied with these measurements and I am looking to find a better way to estimate “China” and follow it over time. If you have any idea please let me know in comments. Any suggestion welcome.

In the meantime, the bets are open for 2010 predictions, closest guess gets a beer.  Remember there is the Shanghai Expo and the end of the stimulus package, plus the novelty of Obama will be worn out. I go for a safe 4,000 this time (we have to use the Chinanews-meter again as it is the only chart with numbers in it).

In the next part we will see the results of this blog in 09, and I will inflict you with the best of the 2009 collection. While I get that ready, to follow the year end tradition, here’s the green pastures of the Biscay coast:

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UPDATE: This morning I did a “callibrated” Google trend, taking the word “when” as horizontal reference. “The lower curve is the one representing “China”. The results are far from precise, but they do confirm a strong peak in 08 and return to normal in 09:

Occurrences of "when" (up) and "China"(down) in Google Trends News

UPDATE2: I have found out these days one reason why the Chinanews-meter shows such a sharp fall in 2009: in the beginning of the year the popular correspondent of La Vanguardia, Rafael Poch, was demobilised from Beijing. It is very possible that a few hundred of the articles missing in 09  can be explained by his absence.  Of the charts above, probably the general reality of Western media is somewhere between the USAToday and the NYT charts. I am still looking for a way to put numbers to that, any idea would be welcome.

Whatever we make of the phrase, the fact is that it comes up every time, whether we are speaking of language, media or politics,  all seems to point in that direction.  The pictures below are my attempt to draw a World Map of the Internet to illustrate this insularity, using the data from the site Internet World Stats.

Here is the first idea I had: I got the statistics of all countries with more than 10 Million internet users, that makes 32 in total, from China to Morocco. Then I did an Excel chart where each bubble has an area proportional to the internet users of the country, and crucially, I filled the bubbles with code from the Matrix. Result: the World Map of the Matrix:

The World Map of the Internet Matrix

One interesting thing in the map above is that Asia is already the largest internet area in the World. Amazing—but not really, after all, it has by far the largest population. And this is nothing compared to what is coming: with the growth of India and China the internet is going to be an Asian joint in the next few years. No hit will be really global on the net without them. Up to now, most people on the net were from developed countries, from now on the majority will be from developing ones. The close contact between our societies will have important consequences online and off. That is, supposing we really manage to connect.

But when we speak of the internet, it doesn’t make much sense to look at political boundaries. There is no such a thing as border controls online, what really unites or divides the peoples is culture. An in particular, the most important parameter is language: regardless of your national origin, what defines you as an user is the language you surf in. That is the reason why my browsing habits look more like this blogger’s than like anyone in my country: ESWN and I have completely different backgrounds, but we have in common our surfing languages.

So I looked up the statistics of the 10 most used languages on the internet, from English to Korean. This time I coloured the bubbles with flags, and I placed them roughly on the center of gravity of their community of speakers. The result is the map of Surfing Languages:

The World Map of the Surfing Languages

Still, the map is not great. Many of the speakers in the massive English bubble are actually Indians, Spanish should be both in America and in Europe, and Australia is completely out of the picture. Physical distance has no meaning on the net, even less than political boundaries. It becomes clear that geography is of little use for my purpose, so we might as well dump  Gmaps and stick to the bubbles.

My new diagram looks like this, where all the major internet communities are represented together in a Cloud. We are all interconnected, and the only solid differentiator is language. Two people might share a hobby, like soccer , but they don’t go to the same websites if they surf in different languages. Most of the media and resources on the internet are not translated into other languages, but rather re-written and re-interpreted by native bloggers/journalists, who function as border control among the communities.

Improved World Map of the Internet: the Cloud

One of the things we see on the Cloud is that all the communities are touching each other. But I’m afraid this is not a very precise picture. Normally Russians don’t translate Japanese content, neither do Portuguese translate Arabic. The English language has a crucial role on the internet today, because in most cases it is through English that the rest of the languages communicate: Most content is translated first to English and from there to the other communities. The English bubble, including users from all over the World, is the Center of the Internet.

Another problem with the Cloud is that it shows all the communities equally interconnected, which is not very realistic. Users who speak European languages are much more likely to read English. The Spanish community, for example, includes many Americans who surf English sites as much as their own language. Actually, most of the language bubbles share a significant part of their pixels with the English bubble, so we can represent the Map as a sort of Venn diagram:

Second Iteration: the Venn Diagram Map

We see the new Map is very different from the previous one. Now there is a cluster of Western languages that share a lot of content with English, two more languages that share a bit, Russian and Arabic, and then the three languages that form the core of the Asian internet today: Chinese, Korean and Japanese. And you may have noticed that I have drawn Chinese at a distance from the rest.

For various reasons that we will see, Chinese don’t use Facebook, or Twitter, or Youtube, or MySpace, or eBay. They don’t read Boing Boing or the Huffington post, and they chat in their own QQ chatrooms. They rarely receive the viral emails that we receive, and instead they get others like this one. They have all the things that we have and some more, but they built them in parallel in their separate parcel of the internet.

Whereas the sizes of the bubbles above are based on quantitative data collected by a respected source, the positions are only decided by semi-informed feeling. Any reader could argue that China should not be so far right. There is Hong Kong,  Chinese-Americans, even mainland Chinese who do surf in English. And I will be forced to admit that the Venn Map is flawed, because it fails to show this.

But in such a fast changing World like the Internet, position really means nothing. What holds today may be different tomorrow. What is really significant is the dynamics: which direction is China going, and how will the internet look in 10 years? Everybody agrees that China’s internet community is growing very fast, and that is natural. The worrying part is that it might also be moving away from the rest.

Third iteration: The Dynamic Map

Because in Western countries internet penetration is already very high and India is still lagging behind, in the next 10 years the Chinese internet will become almost as big as all the rest together. If it continues to diverge, it may grow into a parallel network, like a dark side of the moon, a vast, self-sufficient island that the government can cut out at any moment and most people inside it don’t even notice the difference. This defeats the whole idea of the www.

Whatever the real magnitude of the problem, it is clear to most observers that there is a disconnect between China and the rest of the Internet, and there are powerful forces pulling them further apart. Fortunately, there are also forces working to balance this, and the results in the coming years will very much depend on how those factors play against each other. Here is how my new map looks now:

The Forces of the Internet

As we saw before in this blog,  some of the main factors that keep China separate from the World are the following, shown in red in the chart:

• Linguistic, as we saw in this post, where we proved that Chinese language is beautiful and unique in many ways, but it makes it very difficult for Chinese and foreigners to connect.
• Cultural, in the broad sense of the word, meaning that the communities have so different views and values that they cannot understand each other. This includes the problems with the Media.
• Political, the deliberate actions of the CCP in  multiple forms, including Nannies, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) and directly arresting people, as we saw here.

And in green the main factors that go in the opposite direction. Here they are in detail, for the optimists to rejoice:

• The growing number of bridge bloggers and other internet uses that work to connect the two communities. These include not only the English language Chinablogs, but mainly Chinese people who translate foreign media and other content on the Chinese internet. From this humble blog I also did my bit against the GFW.
• The post 90s and 80s generations that already dominate the Chinese internet. Their personal tastes in arts, music or cinema will probably be more international, and push them to connect with the World. This point is object of debate though, and some Westerners are very skeptical of the post 80s.
• Business is one of most important factors that link China to the World. Since the construction of the EU, it is no secret that commerce can achieve the most ambitious goals in World Peace, so whatever your take is on those business minded Chinese, they are probably the main force that is still keeping the Chinese Island connected and holding the World Wide Web together.

What do you think? 你有什么想法？

Do you think I am exaggerating? Or is the problem even worse than this? Any factor I missed in the Internet Maps? Internet friends: you are the pixels inside the coloured bubbles, you know all about this World because it is your home: comment and help me improve my Map!

你觉得这很夸张吗？还是认为问题写得还不够严重？你知道我在互联网地图里忽略了哪些元素吗？网友们：你们是小圈里面的像素，那里就是你们家，帮助我改进我的地图！  U5KMU63NGPP2

The most important news, surprisingly gone unnoticed by all observers, is that Obama wants to become Euro-bama in Chinese. That is how I read the new spelling of his name in characters, as proposed by the website of the white house :

欧巴马 (oubama) will replace 奥巴马, where 欧 is the Chinese character for Europe, making the name sound in Chinese like Euro-Bama.

Some might say that the new spelling is chosen for greater phonetic similarity, or because it is standard in Taiwan, but when have politicians listened to the linguists? There is a clear political motivation in the naming of Euro-Obama, and I see a bright future in the project.

I think I speak for a large number of Europeans when I say we are very happy to see this plan finally in execution. Mr. Obama, please sweep away all our bunch of incompetent presidents and prime ministers, and become King of the European Union. Then, perhaps, in the next meeting with China you can represent our united interests, instead of having each European tribe sending its little pathetic chief for the CCP to cleverly divide and manipulate a la Sun Tzu.

One of the things I like of being European is that you can be thoroughly unpatriotic against the UE, and nobody cares. Dear commentators of the Washington Post, please do not worry anymore. America is not in decline yet, and it will not be for a long time. Among other reasons because it is needed by European countries that are too incompetent to unite in international politics. And indeed, when the Chinese people see Obama, they see a leader of the West as much as they see a leader of America. Because seen from here, the concepts of West, Europe, America, or Euramerica (欧美）have never been all that distinct.

After this important geostrategic consideration, you can continue to read what else is to read about the visit. Essentially nothing, because no real news have emerged yet, and most journalists and bloggers alike do their best to fill in their columns with China generalities. Apart from the links above, interesting questions are:

• Will Obama comment on the Human Rights Watch report about black jails and other human rights issues? Of course this will not happen, no more than Hu will elaborate on the new theories of the Liberation of Tibet. But it is interesting for the sake of debating.

• Perhaps more likely is that he mentions the environment, as this blog suggests. I am pretty sure the two leaders will mention it, actually, a different thing is how much of a commitment will come from the meeting. From the voiceless rest of the World we will be watching to see if the 2 giants finally decide to make a move and quit sending their fumes to our back yard.

• Finally, a lot of articles out there speak of Obama-mania and make a big deal of the Obamao icon, which has been circulating in China since before the election. My view is that young modern Chinese tend to like Obama, and he is marginally more popular than Bush was. But there is no such thing as the Obamania we saw in Europe, and most people here adopt a cold stance of “wait and see”. The minute 欧 mentions some delicate issue or  meets some old lama, it will take no more than a minute of well phrased CCTV news to wipe the Obamania into thin air.

So already, quit the Obamaos and give me some Eurobamas, we are growing tired of politics over at the other side of this continent.

Before I disappear for a week into my studying den, let me explain you again this business of the HSK. It is short for 汉语水平考试，or Chinese Level Exam, and it is the official standard to measure your level of mandarin, accepted by all universities in the mainland. It is also a very crazy exam, designed to squeeze out of the examinee’s brains as much linguistic information as possible in 3 hours, and then put it down in measurable statistical terms.

As it happens, the HSK is an exam that does not mainly measure your level of Chinese. It measures your determination, endurance and sangfroid, and your faith in a better life after the bell. The good side of it, apart from hardening your soul, is that it gives you a good taste of the ultracompetitive Chinese education system and their university entrance exam. It is even reminiscent of the 科举考试, the old imperial examination to select the bureaucracy, which famously caused some of the candidates to lose their wits and become heavenly kings. For a foreigner who is serious (deranged) enough to try to understand China, this experience is essential.

But back to the facts: This Saturday 17th is the HSK advanced, and I am going to fight for a level 9, out of 11 possible levels. I need to get this degree desperately, for the sole honourable objective of beating my own record. This is the Olympic spirit.

My practice essays with thoughts on the Four Books

Here are some details of the exam: the reading section contains text with a total of over 4,000+ characters, the equivalent of some 10 pages in a standard format novel, and on that text you have to answer 15 questions (not choose a,b,c,d, but actually answer with a sentence). There is a total of… 15 minutes for this part. I tested with a native Chinese friend and that is the time she took just to read the text at normal speed.

The essay writing is another scary part, because you get so used to typing with the computer that when it comes to handwriting characters you don’t even know where to start. At least here you do get 30 minutes for an essay of 400-600 characters, so you actually have the time to read what you are writing, and to consider if you really want to express your own point of view in an exam which contains exercises like:

“The concept of scientific development leads our people towards a more ——– society”  ( a-harmonious, b-harmonic, c-harmonium d-hormonal)

This example is not exactly literal, I am quoting from memory. The point is the HSK has a strong Beijing flavour, and some of the phrases are taken directly from CPC handbooks and the helmsmen’s theories. In a way, it feels like the Four Books of the imperial examinations all over again: the Thought of Mao Zedong, the Theory of the 3 Represents, the Concept of Scientific Development… As the old saying goes: All things they’ve changed, and nothing has changed.

I am not usually supportive of external efforts to force political change in China. Democracy is like love, I say, it has to come from the inside if it is going to be true. But when it comes to breaking the GFW any help is welcome. GFW censorship is a shameful activity and it amounts to lying to the people, China deserves better than that.

Now, the only problem I see here is that the program is not looking great. I will not criticize the technical part of it, I am sure Mr. Berman has hired the best brains in Silicon Valley to ensure the solution is sound. But like in all internet applications, it is the final user’s point of view that has the last word, and from this perspective I have strong objections. Here is why I think it is dumb:

The real challenge of the GFW is not for final users to be able to access information on the web, this is already done in many easy ways, not to mention that RSS feeds are not censored and any blocked website can be read simply by opening its feed on Google Reader.

No, the real challenge is for content providers, including dissident bloggers, Chinese NGOs, discussion forums, etc. to be able to serve their content in a way that is immediately accessible to all. Because the objective of those sites is NOT to be read by their fans, but rather to spread the word into the general population. And the general population has been proven once and again too lazy to use the GFW bypasses linked above, unless it has a definite purpose to use them (usually porn).

In a nutshell: “Voice of America” is offering a service for fans of VOA to subscribe and access content that they can already access anyway. What those guys need is not to access content, but to SERVE it.

So it looks already like GFW 1 – USA 0.  I wish I could say good try, but really they are not even trying. What is this, a VOA publicity stunt? Whatever, all agencies have a budget to spend, I guess.

Prevention – Try to stay out of trouble

From the beginning when you set up your website, there are a series of measures you can take to reduce the probabilities of getting blocked and/or making your life easier if this happens. If you follow these points hopefully you will never need get to the next Section.

• Be careful with what you publish. >>>
• Try to avoid writing GFW keywords. >>>
• Choose where you want to be hosted. >>>
• Choose a good, flexible hosting service. >>>
• Host your blog/site on a subdomain. >>>

Action – When trouble is at your door

Then one day you realize that your Chinese readership has fallen to zero, and you wonder why you can’t open your website from China. If this happens to you, these are the simple steps to follow:

• Make sure it is really the GFW. >>>
• Check if there is an IP block. >>>
• Find out if the target is really you. >>>
• Check if there is an URL block. >>>
• Move to a new IP address. >>>
• Change your URL and Redirect. >>>
• Check that you don’t have links. >>>
• Try to eliminate the keywords. >>>
• Take it easy, and send feedback. >>>

Notes and Disclaimers

• Don’t forget to read the party of the first part >>>

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PREVENTION

From the beginning when you set up your website, there are a series of measures you can take to reduce the probabilities of getting blocked and/or making your life easier if this happens. If you follow these points hopefully you will never need get to the next Section.

1. Be careful with what you publish. Sites in English have more leeway than Chinese to publish political content, but the more popular your posts get the tighter the line will be. Any kind of political activism can get you blocked, in particular subjects that are seen as potential menace to the one-party system. You can easily be misunderstood if you mention those subjects, even if your intention was different. Apart from politics, the other big subject that can get you blocked is porn.

2.Try to avoid writing GFW keywords. OK, if you need to write about these subjects, then try to avoid writing GFW keywords. To test which words are GFW keywords, run a search on Wikipedia in China, and see if it resets the connection. There are many ways to avoid keywords, such as periphrasis, or use of similar characters (omicron “ο” for “o”, etc.).

The problem is nobody will find your words on Google if you use this, so up to you to see how much you want to trade safety for search engine hits. Bear in mind that keywords won’t get you blocked automatically, and if your site is small enough you can relax and write as many as you want. The risk is some day a big website may link to you, then your keywords will attract the attention of GFW and your trouble starts.

3- Choose a good location for your host. If you are legit business with a business license you can apply for a permit and host your website in China. The permit is easy to get, as long as you don’t do politics or journalism. This solution will make your site faster for users in the mainland, and it will avoid all sorts of trouble with the Great Firewall.

If you are planning to write some controversial content, or if a large part of your readers will be outside the mainland, then it is better to host out of China, otherwise you risk to get your whole site closed down and your data lost. A good location in the middle is Hong Kong. It is well connected internationally and close to one of the nodes entering the mainland. Therefore it should be quick on both sides, plus many Hong Kong hosts are reportedly understanding with the GFW problems and they will help you to get rid of an IP block.

4- Choose a good, flexible host. Regardless of where you are hosted, the most important is that you choose a hosting company that will give you flexibility and will try to help you if anything happens. In particular you should check if there is an affordable option to change your IP. In my case it was 30$/year, I heard from other webmasters they paid double. The essential is to check that your host will give you this options, because not all hosts offer it.

5- Host your website/blog on a subdomain. I learnt this trick in my recent experience. When you get an URL string block, it will not necessarily affect the whole domain, but only the particular subdomain where your site lives.

If you host your site on a subdirectory, such as www.domain.com/blog/, this will allow you to deal with a URL string block very easily, just by moving to, for example, www.domain.com/myblog/. This way you can save the money and the trouble to register a new domain, and you can continue to use that domain that your users already identify with you.

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ACTION
Then one day you realize that your Chinese readership has fallen to zero, and you wonder why you can’t open your website from China. If this happens to you, these are the simple steps to follow:

1. Make sure you are actually blocked by the GFW. The first obvious step is to check that you are really blocked by the GFW, and not by some other problem. You should get in contact with some friend who is outside the mainland and a friend inside the mainland. If it is a GFW block, the outside friend should see no difference at all, whereas the inside one should get a Reset Connection error or sometimes a Server Time Out error when he tries to open your site. There are also online tools available to do the test, but  I haven’t tried their accuracy.

2- Check if there is an IP block. The first thing to do in this case is to check if you have an IP block. It is very simple, from China type your site’s IP in the address bar of your browser after the “http://” and if it doesn’t work  then it is an IP block. IP blocks are the most common GFWs blocks so this test should normally confirm step 1. NOTE: If you don’t know what is your site’s IP there are many Firefox free add-ons, and other web based services that will give you this information.

3- Find out if the target is you, or some site living on your server. Very often when you are down to point 3 what is actually happening is that you are collateral damage of the GFW. They are not targeting you, but just somebody else’s site which lives in the same IP or the same subnet (group of IPs). It is not easy to check this, but there are 2 simple techniques that can give you a clue. One is to use a reverse IP service, such as this one, where you can see more or less how many sites are sharing IP with you, and you can get a list of these sites. If you are hosted in the same address as FLG.com (ie. an anti-CCP organization) then you know it was not you.

4- Check if there is an URL block. In China, go to Wikipedia search box (or some other search bar on a site hosted out of China ) and type the strings you want to test. First try www.domain.com, and then www.domain.com/blog. If you are lucky only the second one will reset your connection, which means that your domain root URL is still unblocked and you can easily switch to a new subdirectory as explained above.   NOTE: URL blocks typically give RCs. When you do RC tests you must wait for at least a minute after getting a Reset Connection, otherwise you will RC again no matter what you type in (the connection is still not re-established)

5- Change your IP address. OK, so you have done all the checks. It is time for action. Supposing you followed the prevention steps in the first place, you have a cool, understanding host that is not pissed off each time you get his whole subnets blocked in China, and who is willing to swap IPs for a moderate price. Get in contact with him or select a new IP directly from your admin panels functions (if available) from the site.

6- Change your URL and Redirect. This part can be very easy or very difficult, depending largely on how well organized is your website. In any case, the process is not without pain, and you will lose many incoming links. Why? Because even if you have a Redirect on your old URL, anybody in China clicking external links to your old site will get an error, as the connection resets before your server has the time to redirect to the new URL.

If your blog is powered by a good system like Wordpress, and if you have been consistent with the use of permalinks over the years, it should be very easy for you to move to the new directory in your same domain. Just follow the steps given in your blog engine and you will be done on a few minutes. If you need to move to a new domain because the whole domain URL is blocked, then it will take a bit longer, but it shouldn’t be a big deal.

7- Check you don’t have remaining requests to your old URL. Many of the blog’s elements, such as pictures, are probably still linked to a URL in your old subdirectory, and therefore when the page loads they instruct the users computer to connect to that subdirectory in order to display the picture. If you have been paying attention you know what will happen in this case: the fretful RC. Don’t panic, run a search in the whole blog (not the search for users on the website, the admin tool in your blog admin panel, you might need to install it as a plug-in. In wordpress it is called Regex Search) and replace all instances of the blocked URL with the new URL.

At this point, you might still see that the blog continues to trip RC. In this case it might be some JavaScript or other active content in your site that is sending requests to the old URL. Use a traffic viewing tool like the free Firefox add-on Tamper Data which will easily show you all the requests sent while loading your site. Type the blocked string in the search bar and you should see the old URL coming up at some point, and the software will tell you which application is the culprit.

8- Try to eliminate all keywords. If you have followed the instructions up to now your site should be open again in China. What I recommend you to do is to run a search for keywords in your blog and try to eliminate/disguise some of them. Especially look at the posts that were linked by big websites and they received a lot of hits in China. NOTE: you don’t need to eliminate outgoing links, a link to a forbidden site does not usually get you blocked, otherwise every major website in China would be down.

9- Take it easy, and tell me about it. Go back to step 1 “prevention” above and try to get smarter so next time you don’t have to go again through the whole process. Or else remain blocked and take it as a honour, make yourself a T-shirt saying “I was blocked by da GFW”, after all not every site is worth the effort of blocking. You must have had at least some relevance in the eyes of the GFW for it to censor you. In any case, if you get GFW’ed and follow these steps, give me your feedback in comments below so we can improve the method.

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NOTES AND DISCLAIMERS

• There is no such a thing as censorship in China, the GFW is due to a bug in the Chinese internet that defies all scientific explanation.
• These instructions are empirical knowledge, I have no internal information on the GFW, and the basis for these instructions is my own experience and that of a few other bloggers shared with me by email. I am not giving credit to anyone here to avoid getting them in trouble again, but guys let me know if you want to be linked.
• It cannot be excluded that the GFW reads these instructions and changes its blocking devices. Also the GFW has a random nature and not all the steps above will work in al the situations.
• These instructions can only be used by websites of a small to moderate size who are blocked more or less automatically by the GFW. I you are big, especially if you write in Chinese, forget about the IP/URL swap. The GFW can find your new address in 5 minutes. Well, let’s say 5 hours, with the help of the Secret Service.
• If you are hosted within mainland China, GFW instructions do not not apply to you, instead you get what is usually known as the Net Nanny. See this post if you want to understand the difference.
• As far as I know there is nothing illegal in writing instructions for webmasters to deal with an internet bug. However, if this text is somehow illegal or unharmonious, I would be grateful to the concerned department if they can inform me so I can correct it before they take more drastic measures.

Chinese ultra-blogger Han Han is starting a magazine. He announced it previously on his blog, and his last post is already giving the details to send in article drafts and job applications. I learned this last night from my friend 2Ting, who was eagerly preparing her CV and intro letter. The literati of the post-80s are very excited, it appears.

Han’s magazine, which still doesn’t have a name to avoid imitations, is presented in this blog post. A very Chinese and a very Han Han announcement, interesting for several reasons. But before I speak of it let me give some background on Han Han. I’ve been planning to write about him for ages, and never found the time until today.

The man

Han Han is 2Ting’s idol. He is also the idol of thousands of others post-80s Chinese, and he has become – in spite of himself-  a symbol of this often caricatured generation. His bio is interesting: while attending middle school he won a first prize in a famous literary contest, then he dropped out of high school and started writing  popular novels and driving race cars. By now he has become one of the best selling authors in China, and, if I got my stats right, the most read personal blogger in the World.

Han Han’ s appeal to the Chinese youth is based on his character and his life as much as on his incisive writing style. For modern day Chinese students, stifled by a cut-throat education system and the high expectations of their parents, there is no room for the big ideals. It is not Communism or Democracy that worries them, but rather the daily struggle to improve their grades. And  the fairness of a system that should allow them in the future to find a job according to their efforts.

In this world, dropping out of school has to be the ultimate rebellion. Han Han fought the system and Han Han won.  And not only he won, but he took to denouncing the gaps in the establishment, directly challenging the older generations that hold the power today. Add to this that – I am informed- Mr. Han is “hot”, and you got the bearings to start to understand the Han Han phenomenon.

The blog

Like a sort of Robin Hood of the Sinosphere, Han Han writes about injustice. He complains and makes fun of things that are wrong, by people who have power (political or other) in the older generations. Like his readers, he is not interested in the big words, you do not see “Charter” or “democracy” on his blog. You see a mayor in Chengdu who spent too much for a luxury “earthquake relief” car, or a rant against some older writer who sold his soul (some of his feuds with artists and critics are legendary).

By my own estimate, Han Han’s blog must be the most read personal blog in the World. The numbers are baffling. Each of his posts has hits in the hundreds of thousands, and comments are counted in the thousands. According to the stats on sina.com.cn, he is long past the 200 million hits. Impressive, even if we discount the part driven by returning low-value commentators. Typically, the 100 first comments on a post are whining about not being the first (the “sofa!”). Then it quickly degenerates into a series of ecstatic “chichis” and “jiayous”, which is the way Chinese express their cheering approval.

The lack of explicit political involvement is what makes many foreign readers ignore Han Han and turn to other -smaller- bloggers who write in tune with their expectations. This probably also explains why Han Han has managed to get away with so much, while being censored so little. The Censors have barely touched his blog, only once in a while blocking the occasional post.  Like the thousands of tolerated protests organised in the countryside, most of the times he is just writing  against a case of local injustice, and he rarely crosses the line of attacking Beijing.

But westerners and officials alike might be underestimating Han Han’s influence. His fans  belong to defined and very concentrated sectors of the population, including one that has been identified as potentially conflictive in times of crisis: the young graduates from university that are unable to find a job. Looking further down the line, the post 80-s will start entering their 30s next year, and gradually they will gain some power and cease to be ciphers. Han Han is in a strategic position.

It has been said that his writing lacks a message, or that he is just a student fad, perhaps because he doesn’t fit our mould of a”chinese intellectual”.  But he never was meant to be an intellectual. He is a man of action, who hops from high school to the race cars and on the way home plots his next witty line. He is the kind of man that makes change happen, rather than theorising it. The following extract of his magazine announcement can give a taste of what I mean.

The magazine

This is the bold announcement posted on the 1st May, approximatively translated and abridged by Uln:

The magazine I edit is calling for manuscripts. Any kind of documents, including novels, short stories, news, essays, commentary, etc. For this magazine, I have decided to give the highest salaries in the field. 2000RMB/ 1000 characters for original cover stories. 1000RMB for other original stories, etc. These prices are around 10 to 40 times higher than average of the industry.

The magazine will also have a section for the points of view we completely oppose. The magazine considers the author is mentally disabled. These will include articles against humanity, against common sense, against justice and freedom. We will publish these articles and remunerate them  250*RMB/1000 characters. And this is also a high standard, for 250s don’t fall from heaven, and there is also a cost for the 250s to be born.

(*NOTE:  For some reason, the number 250 in Chinese means “stupid”)

That is already a promising declaration of intentions. Fighting injustice with irony, that is very much the style of Han Han. In a country like China this kind of writing can go a long way. Until, of course, one of the 250s is powerful enough to take away their publishing licence.

The texts will only be paid 15 days after publication, to give enough time to the readers to find any plagiarism. If this is the case, a note will be published in the cover and compensation of 1000RMB/character given to the original writer, and 500RMB/character to the one who finds it. The magazine will not admit original authors that plagiarize themselves under a different name to claim both payments.

The salaries for the staff editors will be of 6500RMB/month, which will increase if we manage to keep the business afloat.

Some people advised me against this kind announcement, but  I didn’t listen to them. When I asked some guys in other publications what was their monthly budget for writers, they said it was negligible. I am fed up of the situation in this country and I want to help improve it. I am a well known writer and a champion driver and with my income I can hardly buy a flat in Shanghai. In other countries these professions are more respected and you earn enough to buy Ferraris, etc.  I want to ensure in my magazine that writers receive the proper compensation for their work.

Remarkable announcement, and, as I said, very hanhan. Also very Chinese, showing the money straight from the first paragraph. The likes of Han Han are not ashamed of  what  they are, and I can’t see a better way of getting his hordes of fans feverishly updating their CVs. I wonder how he is going to deal with the avalanche of manuscripts.

A funny paragraph is the one about plagiarism. It is a recurrent theme in Han Han’s posts, as he has been himself a major victim. The whole system of low wages for creative jobs is partly due to traditionally low awareness of intellectual property. To understand the extent of the problem, just consider that Han Han’s novels are plagiarized before they are even written: some crook commissions a writer to put together a novel with the bits of information that leak about Han’s next work, and in a week it is on the tricycle market.  In these conditions, original books in libraries rarely sell for more than 15RMB (2$). Any increase would get the tricycles flocking to your doorstep.

But finally, one might ask, what is the magazine about? In the world of Han Han, the particular theme doesn’t seem to matter so much. As we saw above, humanity, freedom, justice and common sense are the principles that will guide it. Principles without capital letters, because there are none in Chinese. Perhaps the following phrase, which sounds better in the original, can give some more hints:

We don’t have a standpoint, we just discern right and wrong. Too many people around us have standpoints, they don’t discern right and wrong.

So be it.

This article is dedicated to my friend Ting.  I really wish you can make it into the Han magazine

It all started when some Chinese blogs, including hecaitou, posted this image, which was picked by Chinageeks in a post titled “racism in China”. Hecaitou responded rather energetically to the pingback, writing a new post, and then commentators from all sides joined the party.

The discussion about whether Chinese are racist or not is a never ending one, and it has been commented to exhaustion already, for example in the FM blog.  It usually degenerates into a series of “you worse than me” counterexamples, as American/Chinese national pride quickly takes over any serious attempt of debate.  Rather  than racism, the misunderstanding comes from a different perception on the limits of the socially acceptable (ie PC). Some notes I would like to add to the debate:

1- This is one of the points where Chinese should pay attention to not mix all Westerners in the same bag. Although PC runs in all the Western countries,  the degrees are different, and UK-USA PC  is probably the single most extreme one that borders on paranoia.

2- This brings to mind the famous case of the olympic Basketball players, where a Spanish paper posted a picture of the Spanish basketball team doing “chinese eyes”. The UK and American press found it and they turned it into a major scandal, with serious accusations to Spain and reminders of Franco’s regime. I still remember a British girlfriend of mine in Shanghai,  genuinely worried, asking me: ” Uln, you are not really racist, are you?”  The whole situation was absurd, because the truth is neither Spanish nor Chinese understood this as anything more than what it was: a silly joke. The anglo-american press never succeeded in its serious efforts to turn it into a conflict.

3- On the other hand, even if I agree anglo-american PC is often exaggerated and ineffective, I cannot agree with the picture posted by hecaitou. There is a large difference between joking about some particular aspect of  a nations physique (in the Spanish coast they say suntanned British look like cooked lobsters) and  comparing Africans to apes. Because the message of that picture is clear: it is an inferior race that has still not become human.

Of course, I don’t suppose this was the real intention of  Hecaitou, he probably didn’t think of it very much when he posted the picture. But I do think there is a reasonable middle way between Anglo-PC and the Chinese laissez-faire, and Chinese need to be more careful with these things.  The fact that China was not a colonial power, or the fact that the New York Post does stupid cartoons is not an excuse to insult millions of Africans who had nothing to do with all that.

My Conclusion: It doesn’t make much sense right now to discuss whether Chinese are racist or not. The real  test of tolerance is done when different races live together, anything else is just good intentions. The day when  the major Chinese cities have a significant proportion of different races we will see how racist they are. In the meantime, observations from the Nigerian communities in Guangzhou seem to indicate that Chinese — like most other cultures — do have an inclination to discriminate racially. Which justifies even more the introduction by intelligent bloggers like Hecaitou of some basic principles of tolerance and tact.

H/t Peking Duck for providing the link.

Government slogans are some of the phrases that I find most difficult to translate from Chinese, perhaps because they don’t usually make sense.  Anyway, here is my take:  “Policemen harmoniously build peace”. And the three sub-slogans on top:  “Penetrate the bases”,  “Penetrate reality”, “Penetrate the masses”.

Yeah, said like this, it sounds like something out of 1984, but that’s only if you are not used to Chinese government slogans. This is a PR campaign that has been done many times before in China. The objective is to show the police close to the people, as explained in this old article in the Xuhui district website.

We already saw some similar campaigns in late 2008, and more are sure to come this year, as the government takes every possible measure to avert risks of instability.

On the other hand, I am not sure how necessary this is. From my own observations, policemen here don’t have the bad image they have in some places in the West. They tend to be quite humble, they rarely use violence, and they get yelled at by the citizens they are supposed to protect. More than once I’ve had them visit my house at midnight, just to shyly ask us to please turn down the music and try to not let more people in if we don’t mind.

So  I have to say that, at least in Shanghai, the government has done a good job of managing police PR. Even I find it hard to believe that it is this same 公安 (police)  who arrests activists and bloggers,  the same who kicks villagers out of their old houses marked for destruction.

I can understand these feelings. Nothing would make me prouder than to stick my picture and my name at the top of each page, because I am not ashamed of what I write and I am ready to stand for each of my statements. Nor is mine a full anonymity, as I know and I am known (with my real name) by many people in the China blogging community.

So why continue hiding behind a pseudonym? Simple:  I like writing about subjects that have the potential to excite large numbers of people. Today I represent a company in China, and this company is not mine to decide its political stance.  There is a real risk of clients associating my blog with my company if my name gets spread all over the Chinosphere – it has happened to other bloggers before-  and due to the kind of clients I deal with, I cannot allow this to happen.

So if you don’t mind, and until the next horde of fenqing decide to flesh-seach and chop up Uln, I will keep my semi-anonymity. But since we are speaking of “credentials”, I want to unveil the following points about me, just to make sure that nobody takes me for what I am not:

• I am an engineer, but I have a Master in Business and a Semi-Master in International Relations (Didn’t get the degree because I got a job and never found the time to finish the thesis, but I will be back).

• I like reading a lot, books. Sometimes even uni course books, like my famous brick: Samuelson’s economics. Because of my focus-challenged nature I have always learnt more from my own readings than from what I heard in a classroom, even when I had remarkably good teachers.

• I have been in China for 2-3 years, including Beijing in 2002 and now  Shanghai. I haven’t stopped for a day speaking about politics with all the Chinese I’ve meet. That probably explains my poor results with the “delicate” sex. On the other hand, it has taught me to be diplomatic.

• My experience and “achievements” include weird and unconnected points such as: winning a national poetry contest in France, writing and performing songs with guitar and harp, spending 1+ year living and coordinating a project in 5 different provinces of North Korea, and others even more irrelevant.

• And finally, the most exciting: my Chinese qualifications. My level is already enough to read books in Chinese, the last book I read was XiongDi by Yu Hua, and I absolutely recommend it. I am aiming at HSK 7,  signed up for  the next test session in April and then I will publish the results on this blog.

Voila,  I don’t think any of the points above provides a serious basis to support my comments on Chinese politics and economy, so I am safe from self-satisfaction. My posts will all need to stand on their own, and when they don’t please point it out. Same when I “invent” words and phrases that don’t exist in English.

And I will leave this info hidden behind the fold of a single post instead of updating my profile info. Because I only feel like telling these things to those readers that had the patience to come all this way.

BEIJING, March 8 (Xinhua) — China’s relatively fast economic growth has caught the eye of the world at a time when most of the countries are experiencing the full wrath of a raging economic slowdown.

As some Western media questions why China works, the world’s economic experts and scholars are also wondering the same thing: What tools China has to keep its economy resilient and why it is well-positioned to weather the financial crisis?

The answer lies in the nation’s unique growth mode featuring a “scientific outlook on development.”

Economists and bloggers of doom, read and learn.  For the sceptics, this editorial is based on the work of recognized specialists, such as:

• “Analysts”
• The vice president of Stellenbosch University
• The Colombian ambassador to China
• “The international community”
  
• Velia Hernandez, professor from the A.N. University of Mexico

And many other “economic experts and scholars”.

Finally,  science at the service of the community.  And the question is, what do I do now with my two months worth of canned tuna?