Imagethief

In a country where piracy is a way of life and the circumscription of art by government muddies its social value, the Chinese Ministry of Culture has demonstrated crackerjack legislative priorities by, wait for it, banning lip synching. This follows the well known lip-synch scandal at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and various other complaints about lip-synched performances. The Register reports:

China's ministry of culture has announced a clampdown on miming professional musos, marking an end to lip-synching and fake guitar strumming, the Guardian reports.

The ministry's Sun Qiuxia said it would first "consult with the public over the next few weeks, before agreeing final details of new rules on commercial performances". Said rules are a "two strikes and you're out" attack - those who "pretend to play their instruments twice or more in a two-year period" face a possible revocation of their business licences.

Note that "amateur performances", which includes such things as the Olympic performance, are exempt. So it's hard luck for club-crawling third raters fighting a case of the nodes, but just fine for the government to arrange full lip-synched state extravaganzas.

In fact, Imagethief, who spent many years playing in bands himself, is opposed to the lip-synch ban because, let's face it, there are some people that look great on stage and sound good after a thousand hours of studio massaging, but absolutely, positively should not be entrusted with a live microphone in any kind of public situation. To disregard this basic truth is to dangerously undermine the very foundation of Chinese pop music. And, in fact, much pop music in general, as pop music has often been much more about jiggle than actual musical talent.

The problem here is not one of whether lip-synching is right or wrong. This vast, philosophical grey area that would take years of scholarly debate to unpick. Superbowl halftime shows would be doomed if lip-synching was banned in the US, possibly leading to the collapse of American civilization as we know it (although that may be underway nevertheless, rendering the consequences moot). Much like, say, the credit default swap market, the problem is really one of transparency. That's why Imagethief feels that lip-synching should be allowed, but that any performer who is lip-synching should wear a big, scarlet "L". Or in China a big scarlet "唇". Preferably on the forehead where it will be visible in the glow of the Varilights.

There. Now the show can go on, and no one need feel cheated. Market forces, which thrive in transparent conditions, will handle the rest.

Look at the expression on the pearl ox and then ask yourself, where is the girl's right hand?

Because an ox figurine made with 130,000 pearls that conspicuously invokes the Wall Street "bull" statue doesn't seem, you know, vulgar or anything on the eve of a walloping recession. (By the way, the recession will be a real test of China's recently promulgated employment law.) In case you're wondering, the Wall Street bull statue is not gelded, although judging from the photo above the pearl one might not be so lucky.

The bug-eyes actually seem like something of an afterthought. Some poor jewelry craftsman laboriously applied 130,000 pearls to an ox maquette for a year in a plywood shed full of lead fumes and then took it to his boss, who said, "FanTAStic. But can we make the eyes look a little bit more like Cookie Monster from Sesame Street if he had terminal liver failure?" Next year is the ox/cow/general bovine year on the Chinese calendar, so I guess there will be more golden calves etc. in the coming months. Insert the symbolic, apocalyptic interpretation of your choice here.

That was the most interesting thing I found on Xinhua today, which may say as much about my newsreading habits as it does about Xinhua. In other rural news, the second most interesting thing was this:

Hu Jintao visits county to promote ideological campaign

BEIJING, Nov. 17 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Hu Jintao recently made a site tour in Ansai County, Shaanxi Province, to publicize a campaign for the Scientific Concept of Development.

It's an ideology with the same principles of the previous Party leaders' theories known as Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory and the Important Thought of "Three Represents". The theories all say the CPC has always represented the most advanced productivity and culture in China, as well as the most fundamental interests of the majority of the Chinese people.

No word on when that visit actually took place. The President is in Costa Rica today, so that story may have been in the can a while. But no matter. I've always enjoyed the rigid protocol attached to the ordering of the major political philosophies in state news coverage (really). No matter how chaotic the rest of my life gets in these straitened times, I know it's always Mao Zedong Thought first, the Scientific Concept of Development last, and Deng and Jiang in the middle. Comforting, in its own modest way.

Thanks for the land reform, Mr. President. But what I really want is a pearl ox!

This is one of those unusual occasions on which I feel genuine sympathy for Microsoft, which has a hard time catching a break in China. It's true there was, during the Tim Chen era, a brief flowering during which Microsoft's government relations improved and the company appeared to make real progress licensing Windows to Chinese OEMs. Remember when Hu Jintao visited Bill Gates? But Tim is in NBA land now (much more glamorous, and with cheerleaders!) and another Moto veteran, Simon Leung, is new in the Microsoft China job. He took over from China R&D head and caretaker chief Zhang Ya-Qin as of last Thursday.

Which was just in time to inherit the latest bit of PR trouble, in the form of an ongoing outcry over Microsoft's anti-piracy measures in China. Welcome to Microsoft, Simon. Kathrin Hille and Mure Dickie report in the Financial Times (subscription): 

When Microsoft rolled out its latest anti-piracy initiative this year, it was not aimed at any particular country. Windows Genuine Advantage, a tool that identifies users of counterfeit software and pushes them to buy the real thing, was launched worldwide in several geographical blocs.

But Microsoft ran into trouble when the roll-out hit China last month. While users in other markets kept silent when hit by one of WGA's more extreme features, a mechanism that blackens the desktop background on computers found to be using counterfeit Windows, their Chinese peers broke into a storm of anger, forcing Microsoft officials in the country into damage control mode.

***

Last month, Dong Zhengwei, a Beijing-based lawyer, called on the police to pursue Microsoft for what he called a "hacker-style attack" on consumers.

Local bloggers have also taken up the issue in fervent postings. "If we ignore them for six months, they will come back begging us to take it for free," one blogger called 'liangyouliang' wrote at the weekend. "If they don't seek good relations with us and not give us a little something for our [exported] clothes, then the people of their country will go naked."

So let me get this straight. People steal Microsoft's software and then threaten the company for inflicting what can only be described as a cosmetic inconvenience on the thieves? That, my friends, takes balls of burnished brass. Only in China.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, they do skate on some dangerously thin ice here, given that no less a figure than Bill Gates himself has explained how, in a certain light, piracy can be viewed as a competitive tool for Microsoft in China. And as zillions of disappointed Internet entrepreneurs know, once you set the expectation that something can be had for free, it's damned hard to persuade people to pay for it again. Unless you're willing to start breaking fingers, which might be an effective collection technique, but is widely frowned upon in traditional brand marketing circles.

In fact, Imagethief thinks that Microsoft is right to enforce its intellectual property rights more vigorously in China. Imagethief also thinks that Chinese computer users really need to get over the idea that they can knock off Windows (and just about every other bit of software) for free forever. Forget the relatively modest implications for Microsoft. The practice is lethal to Chinese software companies, some of which deserve a better shake, and undermines the premise of domestic innovation, which is one of the pillars of the current 11th Five Year Plan. If Chinese computer users want free software they should check out Ubuntu. Although that seems unlikely as long as the games are all running on Windows.

But Microsoft eats some blame for their current difficulties as well. First, they should have consulted the government before throwing the switch and either got support for their plan or worked with the government to come up with an acceptable plan. One wonders if this plan was imposed from Seattle without enough consideration of the ramifications in China.

Yes, all things being equal, having to seek government support to enforce perfectly clear intellectual property rights seems goofy. But this is China, where business and politics are inseparable and all things are definitely not equal. Also, while Microsoft is perfectly justified in asserting its IPR, doing so through a technique that amounts to a public shaming in China, where public shame is a big deal, seems like an invitation to public outrage (especially, it must be admitted, with the benefit of hindsight). Rather than changing the desktop, perhaps Microsoft should have made a few behind-the-scenes adjustments to infringing PCs, such as dialing down the CPU performance or switching off network connectivity.

On the other hand, can you imagine an Internet cafe full of caffeinated young men suddenly losing net access? I got yer social unrest right here, buddy...

Perhaps Microsoft should construct an entirely new business model for licensing in China. They could take a page from the suffering music business with compulsory licensing on devices. But I imagine the OEMs might have a thing or two to say about that...

See also:

Silicon Hutong's David Wolf on constructive approaches to IPR issues in China.

Note:

Imagethief recently heard that Mure Dickie will be relocating to Japan, and that Ms. Hille is assuming his portfolio here in China. I've spoken to Mure on many occasions and he has always been courteous and engaging, something no flack takes for granted. Imagethief wishes Mure all the best in Tokyo.

Singapore's PAP has discovered its value as a political marketing tool:

Said PM Lee [Hsien Loong]: “(This) is how this generation communicates — through YouTube, through images, through sounds — and we have to get our message across in a serious way, but in a way which people can accept, and we’ll resonate with them on our website and on many other places in cyberspace.” 

Uh oh. Dontcha hate it when you're parents try to be cool? For an example of the Singapore government getting its message out in a serious way that people can accept, have another look at this, from almost exactly a year ago.

Well, there's always Vidoosh, the Iranian video sharing site. Say what you will about Ahmadinejad, I reckon he's better value for money online. Remember his blog?

Imagethief was not in the least surprised to hear that Chinese netizens were outraged that movie actress Gong Li has taken Singapore citizenship. But then, Imagethief is not in the least surprised by anything that outrages Chinese netizens. Chinese netizens were outraged when Gong Li played a Japanese woman in "Memoirs of Geisha", alongside fellow crypto-Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi. (In fact, all the leading roles in Memoirs of a Geisha were played by ethnic Chinese women, so if anyone should be outraged it's the Japanese.) Chinese netizens often seem outraged by things that appear trivial to the rest of the world, such as the appearance of circles in provocative locations, kind-hearted attempts at mediation, and being French. Chinese netizens, in fact, often seem outraged by anything that transgresses against a hard-boiled nationalist line.

Which suggests that we are actually talking about a certain segment of Chinese netizens, rather than Chinese netizens as a whole or Chinese people in general. Unfortunately this distinction didn't survive Jane Macartney's recent Times story on Ms. Gong. To be fair, Ms. Macartney's story is clearly focused on nationalist online sentiment. Here's the lede:

A decision by one of China’s most famous film stars to take Singaporean nationality has set off an online furore with many ardent nationalists branding her a traitor and a shame to her native country. 

Following from there, rest of the story is actually reasonable and balanced. Unfortunately the headline, which is what most readers will see and which was probably written by a sub-editor in London, is general in a way designed to reinforce foreign perceptions of the Chinese as a bunch of xenophobic goons in Mao suits. Reasonable work by good China journalists often runs into problems like this, which may be why several of my foreign correspondent friends (you'll understand if I don't name names) think the editors at their organizations' foreign desks are tools.

Unfortunately the Internet-comment-as-vox-pop is a common technique in China reporting, and the colorful comments that often drive the stories usually can be traced back to that same rich vein of nationalism that surges through the Chinese Internet. While Imagethief, who has seen first-hand the PR damage that can be done when a stick is poked into the nationalist ant-nest, would never dismiss the importance of nationalism in China, there are some problems with this approach.

First, as anyone who has spent any time on the Internet knows, you can find any opinion you want on it, no matter how outlandish. Second, it's very easy to select from a skewed sample on the Internet (which in China represents an already skewed sample). It's fine to discuss the opinions of a narrow sample as long as that's how you represent it. But when it's presented in a way that invites the drawing of broader conclusions, you step into dangerous territory. If the rest of the world based their opinion of America on the comments in American political blogs, they'd sterilize the country with neutron bombs. Some of them probably want to do it that anyway, but the point stands.

This is particularly fraught in China, where Internet users are still only 19% of the population, and are demographically concentrated among male, urban youth (more here). So using Internet comments as a proxy for overall Chinese sentiment without some serious qualification, or even statistics, is dangerous.

All of which is scholarly good fun, but ignores the biggest point: Who besides undersexed dorm-crawlers gives a damn what Gong Li does? Imagethief is willing to bet that if you stopped Chinese people at random on the street in Beijing and asked them how they felt about Gong Li taking Singaporean citizenship, the most often expressed sentiments would be, "Huh?", "How can I do that?" and "Who are you and why are you talking to me?" Not necessarily in that order.

I suspect most of this anger comes because some of these same netizens voted Gong Li "China's Most Beautiful Person" in 2005. That's gotta hurt. You say, "You're China's most beautiful!" She says, "Yeah, about that Chinese thing..." And for Singapore? For most people, this looks like pragmatism. But from a Chinese Internet nationalist point of view this has gotta be like stepping out of prom night for a smoke and finding your girlfriend making out with the football team's waterboy in your Vega.*

Well, maybe not that bad, but pretty bad anyway.

Frankly, given the recent state of Gong Li's oeuvre, Singapore is probably one of the few countries that would be particularly excited to land her. I'm sure it's seen as a coup for the local artistic community and as validation of Singapore's ambitions to be a "media hub" (whatever that means). But the state of the Singaporean movie industry can be summed up in three words: Liang Po Po.  If you don't know what that is, count yourself lucky. In fact, thinking about it, it's a miracle that China didn't revoke Gong Li's citizenship for the crime of appearing in "Miami Vice". I watched "Miami Vice" for free and still felt violated. And Gong Li didn't even serve in my country's government. (Nor, thankfully, does Colin Farrel, although I'm open minded if Obama wants to offer Jamie Foxx a portfolio.)

In fact, looking back over Gong Li's last decade or so of work, it's all a bit worrying. "Memoirs" was watchable if you squinted and jammed your fingers into your eyes until you got those little sparkly bursts of color. "2046", I suppose, if you're into that otherworldly Wong Kar Wai thing (Imagethief has no patience for it, but I'm an admitted philistine). Otherwise, set the wayback machine for 1992 and "The Story of Qiu Jiu". It's been downhill for the Gong Li-Zhang Yimou team since then. I mean, seriously, "Curse of the Golden Flower"? Curse of the costume department more likely.

When Zhang Ziyi (who made her film debut in a Zhang Yimou movie herself) someday abandons Chinese citizenship the nationalist youth can crash on my couch and spend the night talking things out. Until then, get over it. There's lots more important things to get worked up about, like the collapsing economy, the evaporation of the Himalayan glaciers that supply China's water, or whether foreign bloggers are besmirching the country's honor with snarky rants about formerly Chinese movie stars.

China's Singapore's most beautiful

*This never happened to me. I couldn't get a date for prom night.

So report immediately to the Beijing Military General Hospital, net fiends. Or check yourself against this Xinhua article, with details of China's official diagnostic definition of that scourge of spotty teenagers (and, ahem, adult nerds), Internet addiction:

BEIJING, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese doctors released the country's first diagnostic definition of Internet addiction over the weekend, amid efforts to address an increasing number of psychological problems that reportedly result from Internet overuse.

Tao Ran, a medical expert at Beijing's Military General Hospital, where the definition was developed, said it was also the first time for China to officially designate hospital psychiatric units to treat such cases.

Symptoms of addiction included yearning to get back online, mental or physical distress, irritation and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.

Well, I dunno. Remove the "yearning to get back online" part and it sounds like a diagnostic definition of adolescence to me. While I do recall that as a painful and afflicted period, I'm not sure there's a therapy for it per se. Other than maybe getting laid, which I'm pretty sure will not be among the therapies authorized at the Military General Hospital.

The definition, based on a study of more than 1,300 problematic computer users, classifies as addicts those who spend at least six hours online a day and have shown at least one symptom in the past three months.

"Eighty percent of addicts can be cured with treatment, which usually lasts about three months," said Tao. He did not describe the treatment, however.

Seems like a glaring omission, considering that prior reports have suggested such radical measures as electric shock therapy (apparently at the same Military General Hospital) as treatment. Parents, you may want to look into that before consigning your little digital emperor to pretty girls in white for a spell of deprogramming (pun intended). He may come back cured of Internet addiction but with a hysterical fear of Beethoven symphonies.

According to the China Youth Association for Network Development, Internet-addicted youths are more likely suffer frustration in interpersonal relations than their peers.

See? I was totally ahead of my time. I had frustration in interpersonal relations way back in the early eighties, when there was no public Internet and the computing state-of-the-art was the Tandy TRS-80, which was difficult to be addicted to when compared to siren calls of television, touch football or reading the text off of cereal boxes. Or maybe Atari 2600 consoles had the same effect. That would explain some of my own persistent symptoms.

Those aged 18 to 30 account for nearly half of the online population in China, which has been estimated at 210 million as of 2007 by the China Internet Network Information Center.

Time to update those stats. If Internet addiction is a constant proportion of the overall user population then there may be fifty percent more of them out there lurking their bedrooms than medical authorities currently predict. On the other hand, given that youth are likely early adopters, it may be that there is an unnoticed swell of internet addicted grannies and peasants out there, slipping beneath the medical radar. Or perhaps they're less susceptible than teenaged males to the blandishments of the fluorescent screen. Ask your granny if she's on QQ. If so, worry.

About 10 percent of young users suffer Internet addiction, an earlier survey revealed, and about 70 percent are male.

This is a little unclear, but if the meaning is that about 70% of Internet addicts are male, then Imagethief sees this as a clear wakeup call for Chinese Internet providers to improve the content they offer to Chinese women. I mean, where are you people? Women hold up half the sky, so start addicting them to the Internet. Your advertisers will thank you.

Had enough Youku, have you?

I've been fascinated by the rise of the online video sharing websites in China. Unlike the US, where video sharing sites have jammed a stick into the side of traditional broadcast media, in China they have jammed sticks into the sides of both traditional broadcast media and the government. This is not surprising since broadcast media and the government are closely entwined in China, and anything that upsets the equilibrium of the government's carefully managed media environment is destined to make for interesting times.

I therefore highly recommend that anyone else with a similar interest read David Wolf's recent post on the collision courses of digital video and broadcast, written following a panel discussion at this year's CASBAA conference in Hong Hong. It's a few days old now, but still worth your time. Looking into the future and considering the current (deteriorating) business environment, David writes:

Here is my scenario: either this year, next year, or in 2010 the results of the CCTV advertising auction are bad - so bad that they cannot be hidden. We're talking like a 10-15% decline, or maybe worse. Meantime, Youku, Tudou, et al are starting to rake it in. They've concluded content licensing deals, they've fixed (or kind of fixed) the measurement issues, and there are upwards of 300 million users online.

At that point, it is not going to take long for CCTV and its fellow broadcasters throughout China to add things up. They will turn to the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television and to the Publicity (propaganda) Committee of the Party, making the case that these private online companies are not only hurting their business, but, worse, doing damage to the ability of broadcasters to serve their propaganda/social administration function for the state.

At that point, the government's options become fairly clear: restrict the online video sites, let the broadcasters run whatever content they want, or force some kind of accommodation between the two sides (i.e., compel each of the sites to take on a state broadcaster as a part or majority shareholder.)

David's advice is for the online video sites to start preparing for such an eventuality now.

One of the reasons why the video sharing sites are so popular in China is that, although tightly regulated in comparison to their American cousins, they offer a low (though improving) resolution but much livelier product than the thoroughly ossified State and provincial broadcasters. But tight regulation, which is largely subtractive ("do not show this") is not the same thing as active programming guidance ("emphasize this"), which makes the complaint about undermining the propaganda function seem like a very likely angle of attack. Thinking about David's two resulting scenarios, Imagethief reckons he will have substantially more gray hairs by the time the Chinese government gets around to allowing broadcasters freedom to program on a relatively unregulated commercial basis. Driving video sharing sites into the arms of traditional broadcasters seems much more likely. Something similar was hinted at in the new online video regulations published by SARFT earlier this year, which officially mandated state ownership or investment for video sharing sites. But that regulation seems to be only loosely or cosmetically applied to the industry leaders.

That is probably for the best, because if there is one thing governments have no idea how to do, it is to create or program commercially competitive content. (For one take on this, read this post from The Nut Graph.) Asia's dismal, continent-wide history of state owned or state managed media stands as testament to that truth, as does any flip through the TV channels in China, most of which are as firmly trapped in the slide whistle and bicycle horn approach to entertainment as a fly is in amber. Hollywood types and New York big-media barons may be a mix of ruthless tycoons and venal, coke-snorting jackals who want to defile your daughter, but Imagethief prefers handing the production budget to them any day because they want to make money. That means that for any given product they are about twenty times more likely to come up with a product people actually want to watch or read (although not necessarily something I'd want my son to watch or read, which suggests that at least some role for government is sensible). And that's allowing for the fact that 99% of Hollywood output is some variation on one of the two following formulas: A) A group of [teenagers/astronauts/cops/cartoon animals/scientists/sorority girls] are pursued through a [haunted house/spaceship/office tower/underwater research laboratory/locker room/jungle] by an [alien/masked murderer/group of terrorists/giant shrimp/amorphous pile of man-eating jelly] or B) Two cops in Los Angeles who at first hate each other for shallow [cultural/racial/age/you weren't in 'Nam/you screwed by best girl/you let my brother die in that hellhole] reasons before progressing through grudging respect and then firm buddyhood under a hail of gunfire from a bunch of guys with generically foreign accents. Mix and match and create your own treatment and shop it to Hollywood. You can send your check for ten percent of the option fee to me care of this website.

But Bollywood and Hong Kong are just as bad when it comes to formula, and they also manage some consistent entertainment (although Hong Kong has never recaptured the golden age it had before Hollywood turned it over and shook all the talent and ideas out). As for government guidance, if I have to watch one more mainland film where guys in ponytails stand around brooding at each other in between awesome-yet-tedious battle scenes and tepid, sexless interludes with winsome looking girls I might have to commit suicide by stir-frying my own head in peanut oil.

So it goes. My standards for entertainment are nevertheless rock bottom. Some people get misty at sweeping cinematography or outstanding screenwriting. Imagethief got all choked up during the scene in Iron Man where Tony Stark tests the control surfaces on the suit. To thine own geeky self be true.

Bonus pop culture quiz (for the first time in perhaps two years): In what movie was former MTV VJ Nia Peeples pursued and (thankfully) eaten by a giant shrimp? No Google. God bless Hollywood.

Previously:

Asian media vows to make western media cry (April 2007)

Why patriotism won't save the Chinese film industry (September 2007)

Notorious MDA: The Singapore government raps (November 2007)

The slightly alarming note waiting for me on the desk of my Shanghai hotel room two days ago:

Dear Guest:

There will be an underground blasting operation undertaking between 23:00pm-23:30pm on 3rd November. 2008, 23:00pm-23:30pm on 5th Nov. 2008, 30M away from here. There will be a chain of "firecracker like" noises and you may feel a little vibration. Please do not park your [sic] or walk in the temporary banned area indicated then. And, close your windows.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

I was there on the night of the 4th, an explosion-free night, I'm almost disappointed to report. I've had hotel nights disturbed by many things over the years: Rats (Vietnam), a hail of insects (Qiqiha'er), inescapable neon (Macau), drunk Russians (also Shanghai), crappy bands from the Philippines (numerous countries in Southeast Asia). Never explosions, I'm pleased to say.

After over a month of essentially constant panic (including working straight through the October holidays), Imagethief is off on a richly deserved vacation to Australia with his wife and son tomorrow. I probably won't be posting while I'm gone, but given my complete lack of time for writing recently I doubt anyone will notice the difference.

With any luck, usual posting will resume in November.

-Will

Complaining about today's woefully un-autumnal air quality in Beijing, I had a quick check of the SEPA website, where I saw this:

What the hell is going on in Harbin? Oil-well fires in Daqing? Or is their air testing gear just out of calibration? AQI is 273. Qiqiha'er, which is the next city to the right on the table and is a couple of hours from Harbin by train, could be on a different planet.

And I thought we were having a bad day...

Note: Qiqiha'er, an arms manufacturing town, has the coolest train station I've seen in China. Art Deco brick-work, with an immense "Long Live Mao Zedong Thought" sign on the roof. Unfortunately, that's the "old" train station, and it's now grafted onto the glass-and-steel '80s future-box monstrosity that is the "new" train station. Such is progress. But at least the air is good.

If you're a regular reader of China blogs you will have caught some mention of IBM's new virtual Forbidden City. If not, a good place to start is Ogilvy China's Digital Watch, where, in a post titled "Forbidden City without the damn crowds!" Kaiser comments:

Over the weekend I played around a bit with “Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time,” the virtual recreation of that massive, stately palace complex at the heart of Beijing that was home to 24 emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties. This was a joint project between IBM and Beijing’s Palace Museum. Predictably, given IBM’s extensive involvement with Linden Labs’ Second Life, it borrows liberally from SL. Your avatar — you can be deck yourself out in various Qing-era garb, to be a eunuch or a civil servant — can interact with others in a limited way, chatting and the like. There are also tour guides you can follow around and explain what you’re looking at. Gorgeous and chock-full of information, it’s available in English and both simplified and traditional Chinese. Hopefully they’ll open up more of the side apartments to the palace; currently, it’s mainly the (admittedly stunning) courtyards and pavilions of the main central axis, but that’s plenty for now.

Good summary. Imagethief also downloaded the app (it's a slightly hefty 250 or so MB in the Mac version) and had a wander around. It was good fun. But even though this is an connected app in which you can encounter other people, I was unsatisfied. Personally, Imagethief feels the best thing about the Forbidden City is the damn crowds. As a structure it's awesome. As a museum it's mediocre at best. As a people-watching location, it's simply world class. Between the foreign tourists and the vast busloads of Chinese tourists from the provinces the Forbidden City in high season is spectacular place to appreciate the great wash of humanity in all its eccentricity. Really, short of bringing back the 20,000 eunuchs (or however many there were), you can't do much better.

Unfortunately the online one is still a bit of a ghost town, even with a thousand people online. Nevertheless, short of getting on a plane and flying to Beijing (ever trickier in these straitened times), it's a good way to get a sense of the place.

Oh, and no virtual Starbucks either. I'm disappointed. That would have really put a bug up people's noses.

Hello? Anyone?

Don't miss James Fallows' superb story in Atlantic Monthly on China's national communication woes. Fallows gets into all the things that China does to undermine its own attempts to improve its international image. It's a fascinating read for anyone interested China and communication:

Such self-inflicted damage occurs routinely, without the pressure of the Olympics. Whenever a Chinese official or the state-run Xinhua News Agency puts out a release in English calling the Dalai Lama “a jackal clad in Buddhist monk’s robes” or a man “with a human face and the heart of a beast,” it only builds international sympathy for him and members of his “splittist clique.” A special exhibit about Tibet in Beijing’s Cultural Palace of Minorities this year illustrated the blessings of China’s supervision by showing photos of grinning Tibetans opening refrigerators full of beer, and of new factories including a cement plant in Lhasa. Such basic material improvements are huge parts of the success story modern China has to tell. But the exhibit revealed total naïveté in dealing with the complaints about religious freedom made by the “Dalai clique.” It was as if the government had hired The Onion as its image consultant.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that reporters are viewed with suspicion or loathing by the political or business leaders they cover. That doesn’t keep governments in many countries from understanding the crass value of cultivating the press. Anyone with experience in neighboring South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan knows how skillful their business-governmental establishments are at mounting “charm offensives” to make influential foreigners feel cosseted and part of the team. Official China sometimes launches a successful charm offensive on visiting dignitaries. When it comes to dealing with foreign reporters—who after all will do much to shape the outside world’s view of their country—Chinese spokesmen and spinners barely seem to try. Maybe I’m biased; my application for a journalist visa to China was turned down because of “uncertainty” about what I might be looking for in the country (I have been here on other kinds of visas). But China’s press policy seems similar to, say, Dick Cheney’s (if without the purposeful stiff-arming) and reflects the same view—that scrutiny from the Western press is not really necessary. I’m convinced that usually these are blunders rather than calculated manipulation.

Fallows' point --and I agree with it-- is that the great tragedy of this is that there is much positive happening in China and many good stories to tell, but that they often get lost among the time-warp rhetoric, self-destructive mistakes and ham-fisted attempts at total control. That's a shame, because the essence of good PR is to find the good stories and tell them well. Fallows also points out that the government's domestic communication abilities far outstrip it's international ones. As someone who lives in China and likes it, I sympathize with the need for better external communication. As a PR man, however, I often cringe at the attempts.

Imagethief would like to take this spare few minutes to apologize to readers for the radio silence of the last week or two. I've been a little busy.

What do I mean by that? Well, if delicious idleness is a bamboo hut on a tropical beach, and my normal work busy is a four story walkup, the last three weeks have been the Empire State Building. I worked insane hours pretty much straight through the golden week and last weekend and will be in full buckle-down until late next week. At which point I will go to Australia for a well-earned vacation, assuming that global financial collapse hasn't grounded the airlines and reduced international travel to ass-in-the-breeze Kon-Tiki style rafts and the whim of ocean currents.

So October may be a bit of a light month overall. Normal service will return as soon as normality (or what passes for that at Imagethief Central) does. Meanwhile, occasional links and micro-snark can be had through twitter.com/imagethief.

-Will

Regular readers will recall that Imagethief became a father earlier this year. Having a child requires new parents to undertake many unfamiliar responsibilities. These include the obvious, such as the care and feeding of an infant, and some things that you really just don't think much about in advance. Among those are the bureaucratic hoops that the parents of new children have to go through, especially in China.

There were some things that I anticipated. In my mind I had a pretty clear idea of the set of bureaucratic steps we'd need to go through for Imagethief Jr., a.k.a. "Z". 1) Apply for passports (Z is a dual citizen so there are two passports). 2) Apply for a visa. 3) Apply for a certificate of temporary residency. Simple. Easy. Logical.

And missing  one critical step. I didn't know that I'd have to actually register Z's birth separately with the Chaoyang District police. After all, it wasn't like I'd bought a weapon or imported an exotic car. It's a baby, fer chrissake. The only things he's a threat to are diapers, teething rusks and the thoroughly detonated sleeping habits of his parents.

I discovered the police registration requirement for newborns by accident when we went to apply for Z's visa. Mrs. Imagethief and I had waited a while to do this because we hadn't applied for the passports right away. We were, as you might expect, a bit overwhelmed by the presence of a newborn and didn't have any immediate plans to travel. When we finally got Z's US passport, which was the one under which we intended to apply for his Chinese visa, he was about two-and-a-half months old.

My company helpfully pulled together a letter and assorted business registration documents for me. We had Z's Chinese birth certificate and shiny, new American RFID passport. For linguistic help I drafted my assistant from work to accompany us. Mrs. Imagethief, a Singaporean, speaks pretty competent Chinese --far better than Imagethief himself-- but for bureaucratic situations a local can be useful.

In fact we'd had some rumblings of possible trouble already. That same week a friend of ours had attempted to get a visa for her new baby, who was almost exactly the same age as Z. Informed by the Beijing Entry and Exit Authority that she had missed the critical registration step and could expect to pay a fine of several thousand RMB she had stormed out of the building in a rage. I, cocky in my  various successes wrestling with the Chinese bureaucracy, was optimistic that no such misfortune would befall us.

Pride, as is widely known, goeth before the fall. My pride had goeth-ed and my fall was not far behind.

At the Entry and Exit Authority we waited in the snaking queue for the better part of an hour before arriving at the counter. Around us swirled the usual motley collection of immigrants dealing with their visas: West African families; necktie wearing businesspeople with Chinese handlers; visa agents with fistfuls of other people's passports and so on. Other than the tax authority, which I am pleased to have avoided having to visit in China, there is no clearer glimpse into the soul of a government than the waiting room of its immigration bureaucracy. You rapidly get a picture of whose life is made easy, whose is made difficult, and the average level of desperation inflicted on the gathered applicants, supplicants and itinerants.

At the counter the uniformed young lady fiddling through our paperwork was quick to spot a problem.

"How long have you had his passport?"

"We just got it. It took a while to arrive." This was kinda true. It took a while to arrive because we took a while to apply for it. Zach's Singaporean passport had taken nearly three months from application to delivery, but the US passport had only taken a week.

"Do you have a receipt that says when you picked up the passport?"

"Uh, no." This was true. The US government does not give you a dated receipt when you pick up the passport. Just the passport itself. I pointed out that that passport had an issue date in it that was within the prior two weeks.

"No, I need a receipt. Can you get a receipt?"

I weighed the likelihood of getting the US State Department to write me a letter saying exactly when they had given me the passport in anything less than a matter of weeks, decided the yardage was too far and elected to punt.

"I don't think so."

She promptly ran my punt back for the touchdown. "We can't issue a visa now. Your baby is not properly registered with the police. You'll have to register him and pay a fine."

"How much is the fine?"

"Five thousand renminbi."

I didn't see the relationship between the passport issue date and the missing police registration, but there it was. At this point I decided to unleash my masterful china-hand negotiating skills.

"Isn't there anything else I can do?"

"No. Take him to the Chaoyang District police post on Ritan Donglu. Next!"

Damn. She knew how to negotiate. I had no choice but to make way for the extended West African family crowding up to my counter.

Early the next day we were off to the Chaoyang District police post. I had expected a massive, bustling metropolitan police station out of American television fantasy. Cops banging out reports on IBM Selectrics; perps being hustled past; a crowd of prostitutes flirting with grizzled sergeants while waiting to be booked. This was exactly wrong. It was more like something out of rural Indonesia. There was a quiet front courtyard with a couple of idle police cars. Inside there was exactly one desk with one bored looking officer sitting at it. We were the only other people in sight, although there was one officer in another room that the guy at the desk shouted occasional questions at. Sultry May air had penetrated the lobby, completing the languid, tropical feel. On the wall behind us, watched by nobody in particular, an Olympic countdown clock ticked away the months, weeks, days, minutes and seconds (no picoseconds?) until 8/8/08.

I'd rather expected a stern police haranguing, but to the officer on duty this was clearly just a trivial bit of paperwork in a long, uneventful and somewhat sweaty day. He asked me to tell him what happened, which I did with as much honesty and clarity as a PR man can muster. He took copious notes and, when I was done, explained the bottom line to me.

"As a foreigner are legally required to report the birth of your baby to the police within thirty days. Your baby is seventy-seven days old. That means he has been illegal for forty-seven days."

Good heavens, I thought. I have an illegal baby! I never thought this was the kind of thing that would happen to me, a good Silicon Valley boy who's sole scrap with the police was being ordered off of Santa Cruz' Seabright Beach after official closing time.

The next part, explained the officer, was important:

"Did you break the law intentionally or were you ignorant of it?"

So there it was. Are you a criminal or an idiot? Even I could see which way this one would cut, so I cast my lot with idiot.

"I had no idea."

He grunted and finished the paperwork, which turned out to be my confession that I had accidentally but most definitely transgressed against the laws of the People's Republic, was contrite, and agreed to accept such punishment as the authorities had decided to mete out, which in this case was five large. This was read back to me to make sure I understood my idiocy in complete detail, which I did. Anxious to transform my illegal baby into a legal baby, I signed. It was my first confession to anyone other than my parents. I did feel a new lightness washing over me as I unburdened myself of my sins, but it may have just been the lightness caused by the extraction of RMB 5,000 from my wallet.

Or the psychological impact of imagining RMB 5,000 being removed from my wallet, since I didn't actually pay at the the police station. Instead, I was told to present myself again at the Entry and Exit Authority the next day. A representative from the police would meet us there and we could pay the fine and complete the registration of our illegal baby.

It seemed a little odd that the police would send somebody round to meet us and deal with this, but this is China and I've learned not to be surprised by bureaucratic eccentricities, such as the fact that the residency records of my neighborhood are apparently maintained on paper in a library's worth of binders arranged by estate and danwei. Or the fact that although I live in the bustling, commercial heart of Beijing's ever-extending central business district, our local paichusuo is on the other side of the Fourth Ring Road in a remote,down-at-the-heels neighborhood called Balizhuang that is being rapidly flattened to make way for god only knows what. It's these sorts of things that remind me that the area I'm now living in was farmland and industrial estates just a decade ago.

Of course the police didn't send someone to meet us. We discovered this as we waited like idiots (fittingly, since I'd already officially confessed to being one) on the foreigner floor of the Entry and Exit Administration, scrutinizing every cop who came in to see if it was one of the two we had seen at the Chaoyang District police station. Following a half hour of gathering flies, some investigation revealed that there was a police desk on the floor that apparently existed for the sole purpose of paying fines. It was doing thumping business.

We presented our confession and various chopped documents officially certifying our idiocy and tipped RMB 5,000 into the government coffers (possibly used to help pay for last week's space launch), at which point we were once again duly authorized to stand in line and submit our visa application for Z. A week later we got his passport back with visa in place. We went straight off to the  to register him for his certificate of temporary residency, and I'm pleased to say he's been fully legal ever since.

Thinking back on this episode, it's clear in retrospect that the attendants at the hospital where Z was born told me as we were checking out to register him with the police within thirty days. I had confused this fairly rigid, visa-oriented requirement with the certificate of temporary residency registration that foreigners need to complete with 24 hours when they arrive in China or move to a new address. Despite sounding very urgent, I'd always found the enforcement of temporary residency registration to be pretty squishy. I'd often been late --once in Shanghai by a staggering six months-- and never got more than a lecture for my sins, if even that. But the baby requirement is different, and in the period leading up to the Olympics nothing about the enforcement of China's immigration laws was squishy.

Honestly, it's a lot of bureaucracy for new fathers, who aren't the most competent of creatures at the best of times. Z was born in a hospital where little English is spoken, so combined with the linguistic gulf it was a recipe for trouble. Maybe they should have simply tacked the fine onto my bill at the hospital and saved everyone the trouble.

It also would have been nice if my company's HR department had thought to warn me of the baby registration requirement, but apparently not too many of our foreign staff have had babies in Beijing and it's simply not on the checklist. So if you're a foreigner living in China and expecting a baby, remember you have thirty days to do the paperwork. True, the Olympics are over and things might be getting a bit squishy again, but RMB 5,000 pays for a lot of diapers, so why tempt fate?

And though I offer a few weak excuses, in the end there is really nothing to blame but my own idiocy. I have a stamped confession to prove it.

Previously:

Illegal baby part 1: The strange case of the sluggish passport

Illegal baby part 1a: The Singapore government sends a fruit basket

Predictably for Skype, the mainstream coverage of the TOM.com keyword trapping scandal has grown, with associated reputation damage for the former naive idealists at Skype and their parent, E-Bay. (Browse examples at ZDNet, Reuters, The Register, GigaOM, Financial Times, the BBC, AFP, and god knows where else.) Among the mainstream coverage so far, the Associated Press story is interesting because it makes the pertinent point that the Chinese government may not be alone in listening in on Skype communications, and reminds people of some of the doubts that have circulated about the widely-used international version of the Skype client:

"For a couple of years, maybe more, people have had the suspicion ... that Skype pretends to be secure but actually isn't," said Bruce Schneier, the chief security technology officer of BT Group PLC, the British telecom carrier.

"The Chinese eavesdropping on Skype text messages only adds to the PR problems, the image problems, that Skype has among those who care about security," Schneier added.

Imagethief's suggestion: Assume the worst of your out-of-the-box Internet technologies. And if you really want to use the Internet for secure communication, look into e-mail+PGP.

So how is Skype's response shaping up? Via the always useful China Journal, Skype has published a statement attributed to company president Josh Silverman. Here is is in full, with some annotation by me:

You may have seen some reports in the media about a security and privacy breach in the software provided by our Chinese partner, TOM Online. I'm writing to let you know where we stand, and what we're doing to resolve the problem.

Some brief background: In China, TOM is the majority local partner in our joint venture that brings Skype functionality to Chinese citizens. [Imagethief: Majority local partner = "We don't directly manage this thing!" This buys some distance from what has happened, but is a reminder that they've surrendered control of their brand in China to an entity with little incentive to being transparent with them. This was Yahoo's error.] The software is distributed in China by TOM and TOM, just like any other communications company in China, has established procedures to meet local laws and regulations. These regulations include the requirement to monitor and block instant messages containing certain words deemed "offensive" by the Chinese authorities.

It is common knowledge that censorship does exist in China and that the Chinese government has been monitoring communications in and out of the country for many years. This, in fact, is true for all forms of communication such as emails, fixed and mobile phone calls, and instant messaging between people within China and between China and other countries. TOM, like every other communications service provider operating in China, has an obligation to be compliant if they are to be able to operate in China at all. [Imagethief: Very open of Skype to admit this with such frankness. The reason to do so is to make sure you, the reader, know that Chinese users should know what to expect. But it raises the question of complicity, and whether it was right for Skype to make their technology available to a partner who would have to submit to such a regime. The "compliance with local laws" angle, even wielded by extension through a local partner, has proved thin insulation for other global Internet companies with their butts in the Chinese censorship fire.]

In April 2006, Skype publicly disclosed that TOM operated a text filter that blocked certain words in chat messages, and it also said that if the message is found unsuitable for displaying, it is simply discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere. It was our understanding that it was not TOM's protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords, and we are now inquiring with TOM to find out why the protocol changed. [Imagethief: Top of the head guess as to why "the protocol changed": Because TOM changed it, either to satisfy a request from the authorities or to keep themselves covered in case the authorities came knocking. If you concede that "censorship does exist in China and that the Chinese government has been monitoring communications in and out of the country for many years", why should your Chinese partner or the Chinese version of your product be exempt? There seems to be a disconnect here between acknowledging that the Chinese government snoops and being surprised to find a Chinese partner enabling such snooping.]

We also learned yesterday about the existence of a security breach that made it possible for people to gain access to those stored messages on TOM's servers. We were very concerned to learn about both issues and after we urgently addressed this situation with TOM, they fixed the security breach. In addition, we are currently addressing the wider issue of the uploading and storage of certain messages with TOM. [Imagethief: I bet the security breach was fixed quickly. I also bet Skype isn't the only one "urgently addressing this situation" with TOM.]

It's important to remind everybody that the issues highlighted in yesterday's Information Warfare Monitor / ONI Asia report refer only to communications in which one or more parties are using TOM software to conduct instant messaging. It does not affect communications where all parties are using standard Skype software. Skype-to-Skype communications are, and always have been, completely secure and private. [Imagethief: Translation = You're safe, but Chinese users are out of luck. If you attempt to go to www.skype.com from inside China without a VPN, you're automatically redirected to the tom.skype.com site, so getting the international client takes some legwork. Thus it's insecure, censored crippleware for Chinese users. No wonder Chinese bloggers are annoyed. As for Skype-to-Skype communication being completely secure and private, the categorical statement probably makes good immediate PR sense, but seems like the kind of thing that could come back to haunt.]

I passionately believe in Skype's mission to enable the world's conversations. Allowing the world to communicate for free empowers and links people and communities everywhere. Our challenge is to bring this valuable service to people all over, including China, while being transparent to our users and staying within the boundaries of the local laws. We are committed to meet this challenge. [Imagethief: The question is whether the requirements to be transparent to users and stay within the boundaries of local laws are compatible in China, especially when working through a local partner. Transparency doesn't seem to have made the cut in the current situation.]

One word leaps into my head as I go back and reread this statement: Naivete, especially with regard to the obligations and priorities of a mainland Chinese partner. The Skype-TOM deal and associated controversy date from mid-2006, well after the US congress started looking into the behavior of US Internet firms in China (although before Yahoo got roasted over the Shi Tao affair). The alternative to naivete is calculation that the risk of an outing like this was worth taking in order to pursue opportunities in China.

I'm a big fan of Skype and I use it all the time, especially for my odd-hours conference calls with the US or Europe, when I don't want to go into the office or shell out China Telecom IDD rates (I don't even have IDD on my home phone). I use the international version. I assume it is secure in the same way I assume my WiFi is secure: Enough to deflect casual interest but not enough to deflect a truly interested party with resources, such as, say, Uncle Sam. I also assume nobody is that interested in me.

On balance I'm glad that Skype is offered to Chinese people even via TOM, just as I'm glad that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all offer their products here. The China-specific platform may owe as much to the need for different payment mecanisms and China Telecom's defense of its IDD franchise as it does to censorship and monitoring. Still, it would be nice if Chinese users had easy access to the more secure international client, which comes in a simplified Chinese version.

Silverman is probably right that the average Chinese user will assume any product they download from a Chinese company will cater to the requirements of the Chinese authorities. Skype's situation is not the same as Yahoo's, and the full extent to which the service is compromised is not clear. But it's probably safest to assume the worst, and Skype looks badly wrong-footed by a fairly predictable outcome. Still, I give Skype and Silverman credit for explaining their position, even under duress. According to the FT, TOM declined to comment on Citizen Lab's report. What a surprise.

Update:

Skype has also posted a very brief Q&A, also attributed to Silverman, on their blog. Little different from the statement avove, but includes the following clarification:

What have you learned from TOM about the uploading and storing of certain chats, and what are you doing about it?
What we have discovered in our conversations with TOM is that they in fact were required to do this by the Chinese government.

***

What Skype can and will do is to ensure that it is clear and transparent to Skype users that their chat messages into and out of China may be monitored and stored. We are looking into a number of ways to make this more clear to our users.

So TOM didn't think to mention a likely government monitoring requirement during the negotiations? Why am I not surprised? These are the kinds of things that American and European Internet companies need to think about while deals are in progress.

The transparency pledge is good, but the challenge will be getting a statement somewhere that mainland Chinese users are likely to see during the download and installation process. This will require TOM's cooperation, and possibly the authorities' agreement. I'll be interested to see how that works out.