Imagethief

Author: Will Moss

  • We’re back, plus the great Christmas pox of ’09

    On Sunday Imagethief arrived in Beijing from two well-earned holiday weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area. Flying with Zachary), now 22 months, is always an adventure. He’s a well traveled kid, but a well-traveled two year old is like a well-traveled troglodyte. Even at their best, social habits are wanting. I’m not especially superstitious, but I knew we were headed for trouble on the return flight when, at about the International Date Line, the woman seated across the aisle from me said, “He seems very well behaved.” Thus jinxed, the last three hours consisted of full-on, bawling meltdown as we became one of those families that other people on airplanes dream of pushing out an open door 35,000 feet above the trackless, ice-clad wastes of Siberia. During one particularly tantrumy spell I even dreamed of pushing myself out.

    The definition of “hell on earth” is touching down in Beijing during the blizzard of the century after a twelve-hour flight in steerage with a sleepless toddler who is entering the hallucinatory/psychotic stage of fatigue. Beijing’s taxi drivers had collectively decided to wait the whole deep-freeze out, so the taxi queues looked like round-the-block Depression-era breadlines with luggage carts. This is when something unprecedented happened: We were invited to the front of a queue by Chinese people. Say what you will about Beijing, but it’s a great town to have a kid in, even if that kid is in twelve-gauge, double-barrel meltdown.

    The drive home took another hour as we slo-mo fishtailed our way along the No. 2 airport express way, which resembled a snowed-in version of Iraq’s famous “highway of death” from the first Gulf War. Nevertheless, we made it home just as the last of the twilight slid away. Three boiled dumplings later, the kid went to bed. As I lowered him into his crib, he flashed me a huge and utterly sincere grin (as opposed to his normal, cheesy and exaggerated one), as if to say, “Father, from the bottom of my heart bless you for putting my tired ass to bed.” The last time I was that happy to go to bed myself I had just watched the sun rise after a poor-man’s bender of Red Horse ’40s and Taco Bell while still in college. This I do not recommend for anyone over the age of 22.

    I’d been counting down to this Christmas holiday since roughly August, when I went on blog hiatus and commenced five months of particularly grueling work. In my head, I constructed all these fantasies of two weeks of complete indolence and gluttony. These plans were duly torpedoed by my son, who had diarrhea on the plane. This turned out to be caused by a stomach flu that infected me, both my parents and my sister-in-law. After spending our third day in Palo Alto sponging up toddler-vomit (from the rug, the hallway, the dog) and with me paralyzed with fever on the couch, we took Patient Zero (formerly Zachary) to a local clinic in Palo Alto. There the doctor said there was nothing much to do but wait it out, and asked us if we’d had direct contact with his vomit or feces. I had a flashback to changing runny, poop-sodden diapers in the matchbox-bathroom of United steerage three days before. In such a confined space perhaps Iron Man or a trained doctor in one of those plague movie bunny suits could have avoided direct contact with fecal matter. I, however, could not. (Also, thanks to the American health system, I still have no idea how much I’m being charged for this consult.)

    The upshot was that I spent the whole first week of the holiday with no appetite whatsoever, which means I probably gained a little less holiday weight than usual. But I also had to apologize to everyone else who was laid up, including my mother, who spent an un-festive Christmas day in bed with a fever (on top of wrestling with an automotive soap opera too complicated and depressing to recount here). My sister-in-law paid us back, however, as she and my brother traded their infant daughter’s cold for our stomach flu. Zachary had the pleasure of being sick in both directions, but with completely different secretions. You gotta love parenthood.

    Nevertheless, Imagethief made the best of his vacation under the circumstances. With an heroic effort in week two, I’m pretty sure that I compensated for most of the first week’s caloric deficit. You can accomplish splendid things with egg nog if you put your mind to it. Plus, Elliott Ng of CNReviews, whom I also saw recently in Beijing, was kind enough to treat me to a burrito the size of a Pres-To-Log over an extensive conversation about China blogging. That alone probably put a pound back on.

    This brings me to two announcements. First: The great Imagethief blog hiatus is officially over. I’m not sure what kind of pace I’ll maintain, but I intend to get back to regular blogging and it won’t be hard to top the average of two posts a month since last August. Thanks to any remaining readers who have stuck around for five months of relative inactivity. Your Imagethief decoder rings are in the mail.

    Second: One reason why I have the time to blog again is that I have started a six-month sabbatical from work in order to return to my languishing Chinese studies. In fact, it’s only a partial sabbatical as I will still be working a couple of days a week so I don’t have to dip into my savings and can keep my family’s visas and health insurance in good order (the insurance thing is looking pretty key after Christmas). But three days a week will be spent with my tutor and my nose in the textbooks and Chinese newspapers. A hat tip to my employers, who have been spectacularly cooperative about the whole thing. This is pretty experimental, and we’ll see how it all goes, but I’m excited.

    Finally, I’d like to wish all readers a belated by sincere happy new year. Here’s hoping 2010 is better than 2009, and that the teens are an improvement on the naughties.

    On Sunday Imagethief arrived in Beijing from two well-earned holiday weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area. Flying with Zachary), now 22 months, is always an adventure. He’s a well traveled kid, but a well-traveled two year old is like a well-traveled troglodyte. Even at their best, social habits are wanting. I’m not especially superstitious, but I knew we were headed for trouble on the return flight when, at about the International Date Line, the woman seated across the aisle from me said, “He seems very well behaved.” Thus jinxed, the last three hours consisted of full-on, bawling meltdown as we became one of those families that other people on airplanes dream of pushing out an open door 35,000 feet above the trackless, ice-clad wastes of Siberia. During one particularly tantrumy spell I even dreamed of pushing myself out.

    The definition of “hell on earth” is touching down in Beijing during the blizzard of the century after a twelve-hour flight in steerage with a sleepless toddler who is entering the hallucinatory/psychotic stage of fatigue. Beijing’s taxi drivers had collectively decided to wait the whole deep-freeze out, so the taxi queues looked like round-the-block Depression-era breadlines with luggage carts. This is when something unprecedented happened: We were invited to the front of a queue by Chinese people. Say what you will about Beijing, but it’s a great town to have a kid in, even if that kid is in twelve-gauge, double-barrel meltdown.

    The drive home took another hour as we slo-mo fishtailed our way along the No. 2 airport express way, which resembled a snowed-in version of Iraq’s famous “highway of death” from the first Gulf War. Nevertheless, we made it home just as the last of the twilight slid away. Three boiled dumplings later, the kid went to bed. As I lowered him into his crib, he flashed me a huge and utterly sincere grin (as opposed to his normal, cheesy and exaggerated one), as if to say, “Father, from the bottom of my heart bless you for putting my tired ass to bed.” The last time I was that happy to go to bed myself I had just watched the sun rise after a poor-man’s bender of Red Horse ’40s and Taco Bell while still in college. This I do not recommend for anyone over the age of 22.

    I’d been counting down to this Christmas holiday since roughly August, when I went on blog hiatus and commenced five months of particularly grueling work. In my head, I constructed all these fantasies of two weeks of complete indolence and gluttony. These plans were duly torpedoed by my son, who had diarrhea on the plane. This turned out to be caused by a stomach flu that infected me, both my parents and my sister-in-law. After spending our third day in Palo Alto sponging up toddler-vomit (from the rug, the hallway, the dog) and with me paralyzed with fever on the couch, we took Patient Zero (formerly Zachary) to a local clinic in Palo Alto. There the doctor said there was nothing much to do but wait it out, and asked us if we’d had direct contact with his vomit or feces. I had a flashback to changing runny, poop-sodden diapers in the matchbox-bathroom of United steerage three days before. In such a confined space perhaps Iron Man or a trained doctor in one of those plague movie bunny suits could have avoided direct contact with fecal matter. I, however, could not. (Also, thanks to the American health system, I still have no idea how much I’m being charged for this consult.)

    The upshot was that I spent the whole first week of the holiday with no appetite whatsoever, which means I probably gained a little less holiday weight than usual. But I also had to apologize to everyone else who was laid up, including my mother, who spent an un-festive Christmas day in bed with a fever (on top of wrestling with an automotive soap opera too complicated and depressing to recount here). My sister-in-law paid us back, however, as she and my brother traded their infant daughter’s cold for our stomach flu. Zachary had the pleasure of being sick in both directions, but with completely different secretions. You gotta love parenthood.

    Nevertheless, Imagethief made the best of his vacation under the circumstances. With an heroic effort in week two, I’m pretty sure that I compensated for most of the first week’s caloric deficit. You can accomplish splendid things with egg nog if you put your mind to it. Plus, Elliott Ng of CNReviews, whom I also saw recently in Beijing, was kind enough to treat me to a burrito the size of a Pres-To-Log over an extensive conversation about China blogging. That alone probably put a pound back on.

    This brings me to two announcements. First: The great Imagethief blog hiatus is officially over. I’m not sure what kind of pace I’ll maintain, but I intend to get back to regular blogging and it won’t be hard to top the average of two posts a month since last August. Thanks to any remaining readers who have stuck around for five months of relative inactivity. Your Imagethief decoder rings are in the mail.

    Second: One reason why I have the time to blog again is that I have started a six-month sabbatical from work in order to return to my languishing Chinese studies. In fact, it’s only a partial sabbatical as I will still be working a couple of days a week so I don’t have to dip into my savings and can keep my family’s visas and health insurance in good order (the insurance thing is looking pretty key after Christmas). But three days a week will be spent with my tutor and my nose in the textbooks and Chinese newspapers. A hat tip to my employers, who have been spectacularly cooperative about the whole thing. This is pretty experimental, and we’ll see how it all goes, but I’m excited.

    Finally, I’d like to wish all readers a belated by sincere happy new year. Here’s hoping 2010 is better than 2009, and that the teens are an improvement on the naughties.

    Mophead

    Happy new year from patient zero!

  • Diving with the whale shark at Dalian’s Tiger Beach

    Dive nerds: This weekend I went with Steven Schwankert of Sinoscuba to dive in the whaleshark tank at Dalian’s Tiger Beach Marine Park. Here’s a little video of the weekend’s fun. It was shot on an iPhone (I didn’t really plan on making a video), so please excuse any crappyness.

    Updates:

  • Don’t scoop the reporter who interviews you, and other PR basics

    Last Wednesday, the 21st, the IT news channel of giant Chinese portal Sohu published the transcript of an interview of Sohu CEO Charles Zhang by Hong Kong-based BusinessWeekjournalist Bruce Einhorn. All well and good, you might think. Chinese portals regularly translate and run foreign media articles, and it makes sense that a portal might want to run a high-profile interview with its boss. But there were two problems. First, the interview was on the rather sensitive topic of the dueling IPR lawsuits between Sohu and Youku. Second, BusinessWeek hadn’t run the story yet.

    Alerted by YouKu, BusinessWeek presumably put pressure on Sohu because the Chinese interview transcript vanished by the next day, along with many of the reprints on other Chinese websites. If you’re curious, and read Chinese, a few instances remain online. TheBusinessWeek story by Mr. Einhorn is also now available online. It is interesting to compare the two, although Imagethief suggests reading the transcript with some caution for reasons that shall be explained below.

    Imagethief has no idea what transpired between Mr. Einhorn and Sohu in arranging and conducting the interview, but I’d bet actual money that an agreement for Sohu to publish their own transcript of the interview was not part of the deal. Another Western business journalist told me today that such a move was pretty likely to piss off a publication on any number of levels. Really, I didn’t have much trouble guessing that on my own. In general, Chinese companies have a lot to learn about working with Western media, but I can’t imagine the Economic Observer, 21st Century Business Herald or Caijing (even with its current woes) sitting still for such a move either. The fast removal of the transcript from Sohu suggests that publication took BusinessWeek by surprise.

    There were a couple of problems with what Sohu did. First, and most basically, they used a journalist’s interview to create and publish material that pre-empted that journalist’s story. That’s just plain rude, and probably won’t be soon forgotten. As a media organization itself, Sohu, of all companies, should know better. But it goes beyond that. Mr. Einhorn is an experienced journalist writing for a publication with a reputation to protect. As you would expect, his story on the lawsuits between the two companies is balanced and includes quotes from both Sohu and Youku.

    The transcript published on Sohu, however, included only brief questions and Mr. Zhang’s responses. Sohu’s introduction presents the transcript as “an interview with BusinessWeekjournalist Bruce Einhorn”, which is literally correct, but appropriates BusinessWeek’scredibility for a one-sided view on a contentious issue. That same introduction characterizes Sohu rival Youku extremely negatively, saying that the discussion would, “reveal the details of Youku’s piracy and rights infringement.” Not much balance there.BusinessWeek might run executive Q&As, but it’s safe to say they wouldn’t stake out such a negative position in an article that didn’t give Youku space to respond, and that wasn’t backed up by copious facts and extensive reporting. Interviews are raw material. A transcript of a single interview is not a story, and putting BusinessWeek’s name on the interview is a misrepresentation.

    Readers also have no way of knowing if the transcript is accurate or how it may have been edited. Any Q&A interview is likely to be edited, but a publication editing a Q&A for tightness or focus is not the same thing as a company editing a transcript to better present its point of view. Imagethief knows from experience that editing of interview transcripts by PR teams is common practice in China (many journalists expect a transcript by e-mail following an interview), and a reading with a critical eye is well advised. However, the imprimatur of BusinessWeek on the transcript implies that BusinessWeek itself had the final cut, not Sohu. That looks like another misrepresentation.

    It’s sensible policy for companies and PR teams to record their own versions of interviews with journalists. A recording enables you to check the accuracy of final quotes, provides leverage if you need a correction or clarification, and can help out if the journalist has a problem with their own recording (it has been known to happen). Recorded interviews with experienced spokespeople can also often be good source material for messages, sound-bites and other content. However, publishing or leaking recordings or transcripts in their entirety is a bad idea if you want to preserve your media relationships.

    There is only one situation in which I would suggest to a client publishing verbatim portions of an interview transcript. If a story has already run with an inaccurate or wildly out-of-context quote that I feel misrepresents a spokesperson or client company, and if I can’t get the publication to correct the quote or issue a clarification, I might suggest that the client publish an appropriate excerpt of the transcript on a PR page or company blog. I would only recommend an excerpt, and I would include an explanatory note of why the excerpt is being published and a link to the original article. I would also notify the publication that I was going to do this.

    Running the transcript also hints at a deeper issue. It would have been simplicity itself to have a Sohu journalist interview Mr. Zhang for the exact same responses (or to put the same material on Mr. Zhang’s blog, which appears to have been fallow since July). An admittedly cursory search of Sohu today didn’t turn up any such articles since the founding of the Alliance last month. Why not?

    News organizations are generally disinterested (as opposed to uninterested) in the news they are reporting. When reporting on issues in which they have an interest, such as the fortunes of their parent companies, good news organizations take pains to be balanced in order to preserve their reputations. There are op-ed pages and blogs for points-of-view (not to mention the occasional leaked letter to ownership). Sohu is hardly a disinterested party in the lawsuit with Youku or in the fortunes of the Online Video Anti Piracy Alliance, which it founded and largely speaks for. Running the transcript of the BusinessWeekinterview might just have been a mistake. Or it might have seemed like a way for Sohu to have the best of both worlds: A splendidly one-sided interview that carried that authority of a respected, international business magazine and that didn’t seem to compromise their own newsroom.

    But in the long run you can’t have it both ways. And for a company listed on America’s NASDAQ, annoying Western business media in attempt to have it both ways is probably not a great PR strategy.

    Disclosures: I found out about this episode from a friend who works for Youku. In my job I also regularly work with journalists from Sohu’s news organization, all of whom are completely professional. I have no opinion on the merits of the various lawsuits flying back and forth between Youku and Sohu.

  • Communication is the real lesson from the Green Dam Youth Escort fiasco

    So Green Dam + Youth Escort blocks images based on skin tone. But what if I like Afro-porn? These, and other important questions are arising now that serious analysts (which is to say, people other than me), have had some time to dig into the capabilities of Jinhui’s now infamous software package. The verdict is pretty much as you might have guessed: Green Dam + Youth Escort is a poorly designed rip-off of a foreign nanny-ware product, is unstable, and is riddled with security holes. It is, in short, crapware. I won’t go into the gruesome details, but if you’re interested I highly recommend an analysis by the Computer Science and Engineering division of the University of Michigan. For those in a hurry, the summary gives you a taste of their conclusions:

    We examined the Green Dam software and found that it contains serious security vulnerabilities due to programming errors. Once Green Dam is installed, any web site the user visits can exploit these problems to take control of the computer. This could allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet. In addition, we found vulnerabilities in the way Green Dam processes blacklist updates that could allow the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process.

    We found these problems with less than 12 hours of testing, and we believe they may be only the tip of the iceberg. Green Dam makes frequent use of unsafe and outdated programming practices that likely introduce numerous other vulnerabilities. Correcting these problems will require extensive changes to the software and careful retesting. In the meantime, we recommend that users protect themselves by uninstalling Green Dam immediately.

    Judging from the livid reaction in China, no-one will have to work too hard to convince Chinese computer users to take that advice. So this will go down as yet another shining moment in the annals of government procurement.

    But despite what you may think, the government’s real problem wasn’t in the procurement process or obviously less-than-rigorous technical evaluation. It was in the public communication, which was nonexistent. This is a bit of surprise because on average, Chinese government bodies have become significantly better at public communication in the past few years, developing a level of responsiveness to public opinion that would have been unthinkable a couple of decades ago. But the radar was definitely switched off in this situation.

    In Imagethief’s personal experience, most Chinese people are relatively sanguine about the Great Firewall (or Net Nanny or Golden Shield or what have you). It doesn’t interfere with most of the things your average Chinese net user wants to do (watching a complete and conveniently subtitled version of the new Star Trek movie on Youku, for instance), and is treated as a kind of necessary but slightly obnoxious inconvenience, like a younger brother who wants to join your pickup soccer game. You can always make him play fullback, where he’ll probably stay out of trouble.

    But there is something important about how the mechanism of the Great Firewall relates to this forgiving attitude. The Great Firewall is implemented at a distance from the end user, in the ISPs, routers and gateways that form the infrastructure of the Internet. It’s enforced out in the cloud, and is thus abstract to some degree, even if its effects are apparent in the information you can or cannot access at any given time.

    But what the regulator does in the cloud is one thing. What it does when it reaches out and plants its mitts squarely in your computer — your personal computer, in all senses of the word– is entirely different. It is the difference between posting speed limits and deploying the highway patrol on dangerous stretches of road, and putting a governor in your car so it won’t go over 55 mph no matter what you do. The former is completely reasonable for the public good. The latter is an insult to your manhood (unless you’re a woman, in which case it’s presumably an insult to something else).

    Now, imagine that the authorities are not only putting a governor in your car, but that it’s a crappy governor that sometimes kicks in when you’re only going 35, stalls the car completely when you break 55 rather than simply limiting your acceleration, and spontaneously unlocks all the doors and starts the engine when car thieves walk by. That’s about where we stand with Green Dam + Youth Escort according to the analyses.

    It’s conceivable that the authorities could have pulled this off if they had taken a few basic steps. First, it would have been good to have a period of public consultation. At least that would have provided a chance to assess public reaction and respond appropriately prior to making a commitment. They also could have used that period to defuse some of the negative reaction from the PC manufacturers, all of which are publicly walking a fine diplomatic line, and privately lobbying like Jack Abramoff on poppers and Red Bull. At the risk of letting you see how a PR person thinks (a dark and terrible thing), if I was selling this idea I’d do as much work as I could with grass-roots and community groups and academics to build up the problem of undesirable information with supporting comment from a variety of different directions. I’d run a parallel media compaign also building up the problem and making sure that regulatory interest in a solution was presented in an appropriately benevolent light. Then I’d position the free inclusion of parental control software (and that’s how I’d describe it) with all computers sold in the country as a gift, not as a mandate. Importantly, I’d suggest making it clear that the software is only included with the computer as a disk, and not preinstalled. I’d combine that with community distribution to get the software out to households that already have computers. This puts the software potentially on the desktops of children and students for whom it matters (if you believe in such things) while not wasting time on the committed geeks and randy young men who will immediately scrub the software off of any computer they buy. I’m not saying I like doing this, I’m just saying that’s how I would do it if I had to.

    Oh, it would help immeasurably if the software itself wasn’t complete crap. Because I’d also encourage public review of the software itself prior to finalizing the plan. And, after all, you’ll have a much easier time selling this idea to the PC industry and enlisting their support if the PC industry doesn’t think it’s going to break their products.

    Instead, the authorities mandated bad software by fiat without warning anyone. In the face of the entirely predictable backlask, they are reduced to their usual double-pronged approach to managing public opinion, telling the mainstream commercial media to tone down the criticism and running a happy-banner up the trusty Xinhua flagpole. Good luck with that. Imagethief stands by his original judgment: In six months, this will all be conveniently flushed down the memory hole. You might want to order a new PC soon just for the souvenir value.

    See also:

    Hey, does Green Dam Youth Escort block bunny porn?
    Hey, does Green Dam Youth Escort block bunny porn?

  • Why I’m not in a tizzy over China’s new Internet filtering software

    Another day, another censorship-related thing to get bent out of shape about here in China.This week it’s the dreaded “Green Dam Youth Escort” internet filtering software, which goes right to the head of the nominee list for the annual Imagethief “branding that translates badly” award. They can collect the statuette, a little plastic model of a Chevy Nova*, at the ceremony, which will be hosted by the auntie who empties the garbage can in my apartment hallway. Watch your mailbox for an invitation. Black tie, please.

    Originally reported by the Wall Street Journal and then relayed by the New York Times in somewhat darker terms, the story is that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the IT regulator, will require all computers shipped in China after July 1st to include Green Dam Youth Escort, a client-side Internet filtering program (actually two related programs it turns out, “Green Dam” and “Youth Escort”) . The Journal also published a day-after follow-up with some further industry response and third-party comment. The industry response might best be characterized as weary sighs punctuated with occasional slaps to the forehead when they think no one is looking.

    Personally, Imagethief isn’t getting his shorts in too much of a twist over this. Don’t misread me: There is nothing to celebrate in yet another measure of government intrusiveness in people’s surfing habits, or the mandating of the use of what is almost certainly a perfectly crappy bit of software. But I’d say that the net effect of Green Dam Youth Escort on Chinese surfing habits will be close to zero.

    First of all, it is unclear whether PCs will ship with the software installed. The Wall Street Journal says that the software need only be packaged with PCs sold in China, and not necessarily installed. Rebecca MacKinnon, on the other hand, has received a copy of what is claimed to be the original MIIT notice calling for the use of the software. Her reading is that the document requires that the software be pre-installed on computers. (See also Rebecca’s initial post on the software.)

    Even if Green Dam Youth Escort comes pre-installed, however, it seems like the leakiest of dams. After all, what’s to stop anyone acquiring a new computer from simply doing a fresh reinstall of Windows? Certainly no IT administrator at a major corporation –especially a foreign one– will allow this software on company systems, given its apparent propensity to phone home for poorly documented reasons.

    And even a post-purchase reinstall won’t be necessary in many situations as I’m sure any DIY vendor at the highly competitive IT malls will sell you a nicely scrubbed box at your convenience. They’re already willing to sell you pirate software and technically illegal mobile phones, so it’s hard to imagine they’ll let a little thing like Green Dam Youth Escort stand between them and a sale.

    Also, this is Windows-only software as near as I can tell (the website is not accessible right now, so I can’t confirm). Will Macs and Linux systems be in technical violation? Or will they be conveniently ignored? What about the increasing number of Internet capable mobile handsets that are on the market? Plenty of palm-friendly (I don’t mean it that way, you filthmonger) yellow content out there for on-the-go types.

    The claim is that Green Dam Youth Escort is meant primarily to filter pornographic and otherwise socially objectionable content rather than politically objectionable content. It’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t be used for both, redundant as that seems given existing censorship mechanisms. But the Chinese government has a well established obsession with limiting access to pornography and similarly nasty content. Hence the periodic Internet-purification campaigns and the regular drip-feed of ghastly stories about Internet addiction, young lives ruined, etc.

    But if this is really about limiting access to porn, then the effort is even more doomed than I thought. Demand for dissident content is pretty selective despite what people overseas may believe (Imagethief’s Chinese colleagues were annoyed by the recent blocking of Twitter, but mostly for mundane reasons). However, it’s a safe bet on demographic grounds alone that demand for porn is as sky-high among Chinese Internet users as it is anywhere else. Commercial forces alone will doom Green Dam Youth Escort (unless it’s actually linked to an escort service, which seems unlikely). After all, look how miserably government attempts to limit online game playing worked. It took a commercial issue to deny Chinese gamers access to World of Warcraft for any significant amount of time.

    Imagethief detects the whiff of a sweetheart deal. Certainly the company that produced the software, Jinhui Computer System Engineering Company, will cash a nice check from the government, which will apparently underwrite the inclusion of the program. But client-side filtering software, even if updated from a central database, is principally useful at an organizational level, such as by a company or household, where policies need to be set locally. If the government wants to set policy for the entire country, then China’s existing DNS, ISP and gateway-based filtering mechanisms are much more efficient and, for all their porousness, harder to circumvent. If Chinese ISPs start denying connectivity to clients not running Green Dam Youth Escort, then I’ll panic. But I don’t see how that’s feasible (and if it gets tried, stand-by for the slap-fight of the century between MIIT and MOFCOM).

    Frankly, despite the inevitable hand-wringing and bluster, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the whole initiative vanish quietly after a few face-saving months.

    *NB: The Chevy Nova story is actually bullshit, but it lives in legend.

    Update:

    From Malcom Moore’s story on this in the Telegraph, this outstanding quote from the Jinhui spokeswoman:

    “This is very good news for users, so they should not uninstall it. It will automatically filter pornographic images and antirevolutionary content. It will not take up much space on the hard drive. It is very stable and we have conducted many tests already,” [the spokeswoman] added.

    As if. Also, screenshots here (in Chinese) courtesy of @davesgonechina.

    Update 2:

    Speaking of handwringing, this quote from the AP’s coverage:

    John Palfrey, an Internet censorship expert at Harvard University, described the latest requirements as “a potential game changer in the story of Internet control,” by moving China’s “Great Firewall” closer to the user, where censorship can be more effective.

    Game changing indeed. As long as the game is strip-Parcheesi played by monkeys in diapers. I disagree that censorship is more effective when it’s closer to the user. I think it’s more effective when it’s centralized for the reasons described above. Ask the DVD consortium how they feel about device-level security restrictions in China (although it’s an imperfect comparison as the government doesn’t give a crap about DVD piracy). Still, unless something completely unexpected is sprung in the implementation of this software, getting it off of your computer will be about as easy as hitting a dead sturgeon with a fork.

    Update 3 (June 10):

    The government and Jinhui both insist it’s not spyware. So that’s OK then, but I notice nobody insists its not crappy software, as alleged elsewhere. Bonus: The Foreign Ministry spokesman claims that China’s internet has always been “open”. Which is true, if by “open” you mean “restricted”.

    Also, Bruce Einhorn of BusinessWeek writes about the lack of consultation with the industry over this move, and what that says about the Chinese approach to regulation.

    Also on Imagethief:

    I can't see any sea cucumbers, but look what Edison Chen's doing with this girl!
    I can’t see any sea cucumbers, but look what Edison Chen’s doing with this girl!

  • Consultants say hardened Chinese death-nerds are coming for your daughters

    Yes, it’s true. Those Chinese death-nerds are everywhere. They’re in your bank account. They’re in the Pentagon. They’re sending naked pictures of themselves to your daughter. And they’re completely invulnerable to all known countermeasures!

    Or at least that’s the terrifying conclusion one might draw if one was to read a long article from the Washington Times with the chilling headline, “China blocks US from cyber warfare.” Now, the Washington Times and this journalist in particular have–how shall I put it?–a distinct point of view on China, and it’s perhaps just a tad darker than my own. But I find this story interesting less on its own (thin) merits and more because it represents the latest installment in what seems to be something of a fad in hair-raising stories on the Chinese cyber-security threat. My heavens, are we having a meme?

    You may recall that this idea began rolling in its most recent incarnation with a report about Ghost Net, in which the link to the Chinese government was unclear but widely assumed. It gathered steam with a rather vague Wall Street Journal article about Chinese “spies” hacking into the US electricity grid. With this Washington Times article, which has been picked up by AFP and thus relayed to Yahoo and other portals, it’s reached something of a loony crescendo. You’d think bureaucracies in Washington were competing over turf and budgets and thus doing their best to dial up the general anxiety level in order to exert political leverage. Because, you know, what with the economy, two wars, the Taliban destabilizing Pakistan and Swine A/H1N1 flu we so desperately need one more thing to be afraid of.

    The Washington Times article really is in a class all by itself, though. It focuses on the devastating implications of a “hardened” Chinese operating system that, to read this article, makes Chinese government computers essentially hack-proof. It is based largely on the testimony (PDF) of Mr. Kevin Coleman, one of nine witnesses speaking before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission on April 30th. (The USCC makes periodic recommendations to congress on the national security implications of trade with China.)  There is no one part of the article can single out for an excerpt, so I’ll instead give you a rundown of the highlights. The article features:

    • An IT security consultant (Mr. Coleman) who “advises the government on cybersecurity” telling us that the Chinese are outplaying us badly. Because what do you expect him to say? “It’s all good. I’m done here.”
    • Terrifying absolutes, such as this quote on the effect of China “hardening” it’s servers with this new operating system:

    “This action also made our offensive cybercapabilities ineffective against them, given the cyberweapons were designed to be used against Linux, UNIX and Windows,” he said.

    • The suggestion that the revelation of this operating system is somehow an intelligence coup, on par with the cracking of Enigma:

    The secure operating system was disclosed as computer hackers in China – some of them sponsored by the communist government and military – are engaged in aggressive attacks against the United States, said officials and experts who disclosed new details of what was described as a growing war in cyberspace.

    • Further vague but terrifying details designed to emphasize our inferiority:

    Additionally, Mr. Coleman said, the Chinese have developed a secure microprocessor that, unlike U.S.-made chips, is known to be hardened against external access by a hacker or automated malicious software. “If you add a hardened microchip and a hardened operating system, that makes a really good solid platform for defending infrastructure [from external attack],” Mr. Coleman said.

    • Hopeless over-generalizations of dubious technical soundness:

    U.S. operating system software, including Microsoft, used open-source and offshore code that makes it less secure and vulnerable to software “trap doors” that could allow access in wartime, he explained.

    • Quotable quotes:

    “What’s so interesting from a strategic standpoint is that in the cyberarena, China is playing chess while we’re playing checkers,” he said.

    • The devastating revelation that the Chinese government is hiring hackers!

    A third computer specialist, Alan Paller, told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on April 29 that China’s military in 2005 recruited Tan Dailin, a graduate student at Sichuan University, after he showed off his hacker skills at an annual contest.

    Mr. Paller, a computer security specialist with the SANS Institute, said the Chinese military put the hacker through a 30-day, 16-hour-a-day workshop “where he learned to develop really high-end attacks and honed his skills.”

    • Meaningless statistics:

    Mr. Coleman said one indication of the problem was identified by Solutionary, a computer security company that in March detected 128 “acts of cyberagression” per minute tied to Internet addresses in China.

    “These acts should serve as a warning that clearly indicates just how far along China’s cyberintelligence collection capabilities are,” Mr. Coleman said.

    •  Just plain goofyness:

    Mr. [Joel] Brenner [national counterintelligence executive] said there are minimal concerns about a Chinese cyberattack to shut down U.S. banking networks because “they have too much money invested here.”

    Well, thank god for that!

    It’s hard to know where to start with this article, but perhaps I should begin by saying, of course the Chinese government is conducting cyber-espionage against the US. They’d be stupid not to. And of course they are concerned with securing their own critical systems against the United States’ equally inevitable cyber-espionage. Again, they’d be stupid not to. And certainly the US government needs to take information security seriously. And so do businesses. And so does your grandmother. Especially if she’s using Windows. All granted.

    And it’s nice that various American government bureaucracies are having a pissing match about who should oversee American cyber-security at a government level (the end of the article hints at that a bit). I hope somebody wins someday. But, really, do we need to frame all of this in such Michael Bay terms? Let’s take a closer look at this super-secure operating system, “Kylin”. It’s hardly a secret, having been in the press since at least 2004. You can even download the ISO files, which suggests security somewhat shy of, say, the Manhattan Project. I’m thinking Langley may have a copy. A fairly sketchy DIY site promisingly called “Cheapest-computer-hardware-software.com” has the skinny (all Chinglish is sic):

    The Kylin operating system focuses on high performance, reliability and security. The development program was first funded by the Chinese government sponsored R&D program during 2002. The operating system developed in a hierarchical model, in which, the kernel layer is based on Mach, the system service layer is based on FreeBSD and the desktop environment is similar to that of Windows. The operating system standards are similar to UNIX standards, and are highly compatible with Linux binaries.

    ***

    The operating system was on development at the National University of Defense Technology. The operating system was designated as the document processing operating system. It can now turn China into super power in IT product development. The powerfulness, stronger security of the operating system may make Chinese people to replace the foreign operating systems. In China, Kylin was listed among the best 10 scientific and Technological Progresses News of Higher Learning Institutes during 2005.

    ***

    The dominance of IT product by the foreigners in China will get reduced, once this operating system made popular among Chinese population. The security of data will be stronger, because, it is being developed by the Chinese government and people themselves.

    So, the indestructible Chinese operating system is FreeBSD + Mach. Yes, that’s right, the operating system that frees them from foreign innovation and with which China will conquer the world is a less slick version of Mac OS X. Well, I hate to break that to the scare-mongers Washington, but we have that technology also. As for the secure microprocessor, I hope he’s not talking about Godson, the domestic chip project that languishes in the same commercial phantom zone as the domestic video disk project (EVD) and the domestic WiFi standard project (WAPI).

    Why would I trust some half-assed and likely Chinese no-name site over the best and brightest of Washington DC?  Well, for one reason, the language in the extract above rings absolutely true. Second, let’s just say I’m getting agenda sensitivity on this issue. Sure, it’s possible this is all part of some huge Chinese disinformation campaign and I’m just another useful idiot, talking down the crowbar that the Chinese state will someday use to pry open the secret folder where I keep the naughty photos of Mrs. Imagethief. Maybe there are two Kylins, and I’ve got the wrong one. Maybe Kylin + Godson is the shit, and I should trade in my MacBook Pro.

    Or, just conceivably, people with their noses in the Washington trough are blowing smoke up my ass. Let’s face it, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  • A few other people that China could helpfully quarantine

    Imagethief has been watching with some interest the resolution of the drama concerning the quarantining of Mexican passport holders, some of whom hadn’t even been to Mexico in recent months. Given that my own country, the United States, was only recently contemplating the building of a border wall specifically designed to keep Mexicans out even before the flu, it seems small of me to criticize China for this policy. Especially now that news has surfaced that four Americans and a bunch of Canadian students have joined the Mexicans already enjoying government-sponsored stays in luxurious, one-star accommodations.

    Fortunately, I am a small man. Charitably, the jury is still out on the epidemiological efficacy of quarantining the Mexicans. Uncharitably, it was a scattershot, poorly-thought-out bit of knee-jerk policy that did for Chinese-Mexican relations what the notorious P3 incident off of Hainan did for Chinese-US relations in 2002.

    There is something rather 19th century about the whole idea of “quarantine”, conjuring as it does visions of smallpox and death ships. Not that there aren’t situations in which quarantine is a perfectly reasonably option. Infectious diseases are simply the most obvious application. But if the Chinese authorities are going to get all quaranteeny, Imagethief is happy to suggest a few other groups of people that the government should consider holding in isolation, for the benefit of society at large:

    • Taxi drivers who piss and moan under their breath about the traffic. It’s Beijing. You’re a taxi driver. What were you expecting?
    • Sanlitun bar touts.
    • Those girls with blue-frosted eyelids at Oriental plaza who try to waylay me for the tea-house scam when all I want is a coffee from Starbucks.
    • People who walk slower than me and follow an unpredictable path that makes it hard for me to get around them, or who stand two abreast on escalators.
    • People who cram huge trolley bags onto the subway at rush hour.
    • Drivers at the back of a line of thirty cars who honk the instant the light turns green. In fact, all drivers.
    • People who tell me my son needs to wear more clothes. Or less clothes. Or offer any kind of unsolicited parental advice based on folk wisdom.
    • People who put smiley-face emoticons in otherwise unpleasant e-mails: “You’re being audited. :) ”
    • Anyone who sends me an SMS that begins, “本公司…”
    • The Bank of China.
    • Snarky foreign bloggers.

    All of them would benefit from a spell in isolation, if only as a precautionary measure.

    Addenda:

    • People who smoke in elevators or office-tower bathrooms
    • People who instant-message you from ten feet away.

  • Chinese cyberspies? Sheer lies and heinous fabrications!

    Alright, I confess I made up the “heinous fabrications” bit. But the “sheer lies” sound bite comes straight from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which has clearly worked hard to make sure that its representatives around the world are working from the same talking points.

    China has found itself accused of a lot of hacking recently. A March 28 New York Timesarticle covered the dreaded “GhostNet”; innocent computers ruthlessly compelled to do the bidding of alleged shadowy overlords in Beijing (which bidding was, apparently, to screw with Tibetan exile organizations). More recently, a story in the Wall Street Journalreported on attempts to hack into the systems controlling America’s power grid, some of which apparently originated from China and Russia.

    The Chinese government had chances to rebut both stories. Here is a Beijing-based Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman responding to a “GhostNet” question in a regular media Q&A the day after John Markoff’s story broke in the Times:

    “I have noted before that the Chinese Government has always taken cyber-safety very seriously. We resolutely oppose any crime including hacking that destroys the internet or computer network, which is stipulated in relevant Chinese laws and regulations. The current problem is, some people overseas are indulged in fabricating the sheer lies of the so-called cyber-spies in China. What I have seen is a ghost of “Cold War” and a virus of “the China Threat” mentality. The China Threat virus on those haunted by the Cold War ghost strikes from time to time. Their attempt to defame China will get nowhere.”

    And here is Chinese Embassy spokesman in Washington DC responding to the electric grid issue in the Journal (responding in writing, I would guess):

    [The Chinese government] “resolutely oppose[s] any crime, including hacking, that destroys the Internet or computer network” and has laws barring the practice. China was ready to cooperate with other countries to counter such attacks, he said, and added that “some people overseas with Cold War mentality are indulged in fabricating the sheer lies of the so-called cyberspies in China.”

    Well, that’s message discipline for you. And it would be admirable discipline indeed, were the talking points not the usual throwback language that always sounds better coming off of a red-ink woodcut with a picture of Mao in a sunburst than off of the pages of, say, theWall Street Journal. The only thing reminiscent of the Cold War here are those quotes.

    Of course the Chinese government, like all governments with access to electricity, is probably involved in computer-espionage and computer-warfare programs. But it obviously has to deny any involvement in polite company. That’s a given, and no-one can blame them. There are even some good bits and pieces in both responses above: “Always taken cyber-safety very seriously”, “oppose [activities] that destroy the Internet”, and “ready to cooperate with other countries”. Unfortunately, the usual, overly scandalized language wrapped around those bits and pieces does nothing to help. It makes the spokespeople sound, to abuse Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude, like they are protesting too much. The good stuff gets lost.

    If I was rewriting their talking points, I would take a classic broadening approach where you turn the accusation everyone’s problem. You can see the beginnings of this in the embassy spokesman’s quote. I might suggest something like this, which takes the good bits from both responses and loses the righteous anger:

    “The Chinese government takes Internet security very seriously, and is opposed to any activities, including hacking, that make the Internet less secure or less useful. Internet security is a concern for everyone who uses a computer. As you know, internet use has been growing rapidly in China. This year we passed 300 million users, and now have more people online than any other country. The Internet has been a great contributor to growth and innovation in China, so no one takes these issues more seriously than we do.”

    If you wanted to be extra-saucy, you could build a bit on the embassy spokesman’s cooperation statement and say,

    “We stand ready to cooperate with the governments of other Internet using nations to find ways to improve global Internet security for all users.”

    Less quotable, perhaps (short of a threat to kill the questioner’s pets, what wouldn’t be?), but also much less of that how dare you? tone that comes off so defensively. As we say in PR, you can’t control the questions you get asked, but you can always control the answer you give. Why not take the opportunity to say something positive instead of just reeling off an angry denunciation of the charges?

    And if you read the responses above carefully, denunciations is what they are. There is no outright denial in either of them. I doubt that’s a legal maneuver (after all, what are you going to do, sue them?) so much as a chosen rhetorical technique: Attack the credibility of the charge rather than denying it. If so, it’s shrewd on a certain level. Denials always look terrible in print. “I never stole those panties!” has “cover pull quote” written all over it. That’s why we always tell spokespeople not to “repeat the negative” in a question. But there are many things that could better replace an outright denial than straw men fabricating sheer lies.

    See also:

    James Fallows: What should we make of this Chinese cyber-spy story?

    Schneier on Security: US power grid hacked, everyone panic! Welcome perspective:

    Honestly, I am much more worried about random errors and undirected worms in the computers running our infrastructure than I am about the Chinese military. I am much more worried about criminal hackers than I am about government hackers.

    Nart Villeneuve of the Internet Censorship Explorer on the hype-factor in the article.

  • Coke, Huiyuan and the audiences that matter

    Nothing as timely as the blogs, I tell you. As everyone on the planet now knows, the Coke-Huiyuan deal has fallen through. It retrospect, it wasn’t particularly surprising. It broke new ground in size, and public sentiment was never behind the deal. David Wolf and Dan Harris have both written good posts about this, and I recommend taking the time to check out both.

    I have been trying to find finely-parsed and academic way of stating a basic truth, and it hasn’t worked out. So here it is in plain language: If you’re a large foreign firm taking over a Chinese firm, prepare to be flogged in public. And prepare for it before you announce your acquisition.

    Here is a basic PR lesson to go along with that: Part of selling any acquisition is convincing stakeholders of the value that the acquisition will bring in terms that make sense to them. That last part is the detail that often gets lost. In a perfect capitalist world (if you don’t see that as oxymoronic) it would be easy to explain the value of an acquisition to the key stakeholders on all sides of the deal. “Dollars” and a business case would do the trick.

    However the real world is messy, not every stakeholder is interested in the share price premium, and I think we can all agree that China is a long way from being a perfect capitalist world. Some of its complexities are nicely captured in a summary of the unwritten rules guiding foreign acquisitions assembled by Dan and Steve at China Law Blog and included in the post linked above:

    Foreigners are permitted to purchase large, state-owned enterprises that suffer from financial difficulty, provided the foreign investor agrees to restructure the purchased company.

    Foreigners are permitted to purchase non-majority interests in strong, successful Chinese companies, but only if there is some added benefit, such as transfer of technology, advanced management or access to foreign markets.

    Foreigners are not permitted to purchase a majority interest in a large and financially successful Chinese company. Even smaller companies are off the table if they are financially sound and work in a core technology field or have created a strong or historically important brand.

    I’m a PR man, so I am compelled by some mystical force to reduce these rules to something I can work with: Perception. When you understand how you are perceived by different audiences, you can begin to figure how to communicate and act in way that will reinforce those perceptions if they are good, or change them if they are bad. So here is what China Law Blog’s rules say to me about how foreign companies and foreign acquisitions are perceived in China:

    • The government and a loud and influential slice of the grass roots automatically perceives the motives of foreign companies as suspect
    • The state perceives foreign acquisitions of Chinese companies as value-destroying by default, even if they’re good for shareholders, therefore it perceives value differently than shareholders do
    • A foreign acquisition can be perceived to add value if there is explicit upside with regard to national priorities

    This lays out the difficult communication challenge for any company in Coke’s position. Note the really small role of “what’s good for shareholders” in the above. Therefore, in communicating about a major planned acquisition in China, and knowing that both government and popular backlash are likely, leading with shareholder value might not be the ideal approach. But here is Coke’s statement of September 3rd (it’s the same inChinese):

    “This acquisition will deliver value to our shareholders and provide a unique opportunity to strengthen our business in China, especially since the juice segment is so dynamic and fast growing in China. It is also further evidence of our deep commitment to China and to providing Chinese consumers with the beverage choices that meet their needs,” Mr Kent said.

    If successful with the offers, the Company will use its expertise as a global beverage company to further develop the Huiyuan brand to address the evolving needs of consumers. There are anticipated synergies that will drive operational efficiencies, particularly in the Huiyuan business’ production footprint and in Coca-Cola’s distribution and raw material purchasing capabilities.

    When I read that, here is the order of priorities I see in the messaging:

    1. Coke shareholders
    2. Coke’s business in China
    3. Chinese consumers
    4. Huiyuan’s success

    That’s a perfectly good set of messages for Coke’s investors and stakeholders back home. But I might reverse that list if I was writing this for Chinese audiences. I also see a message on how Coke’s global experience will benefit Huiyuan. Viewed one way, that seems wonderful and constructive. Viewed through a nationalist looking-glass, which is how many foreign acquisitions are seen, it could seem paternalistic.

    This statement was just the initial announcement and one slice of all the communication that took place, and by most measures it is fine (although “commitment to China” messages are such a pro-forma recitation as to have become essentially meaningless). But it’s an interesting glimpse into the formula that often guides MNC communication in these situations.

    Huiyuan didn’t post a statement of their own on the day the deal was announced, but two days later they published on their site a congratulatory note from the government of Wanrong county, where they are headquartered. This is also formulaic, but in a locally relevant way. The fact that it’s a local government statement — a third-party endorsement — is a bit of communication in itself. The first two paragraphs are congratulations and a recap of Huiyuan’s history. The last paragraph reads (in loose translation):

    The successful merger of Coca Cola, the world’s largest beverage company, with Huiyuan Group will inevitably foster a win-win situation and create more excellent social and economic benefits. We will create an excellent environment for the development of business creativity and promote the common progress of both sides.

    There’s plenty of pro-forma recitation in this statement as well, but it’s recitation that speaks directly to local priorities. Coke’s statement, on the other hand, reads like a communique primarily to Coke’s shareholders, who were probably the one stakeholder group that was on-board with the plan from the beginning.

    But other stakeholder groups were driving the outcome. Just a day or so before the deal was spiked a further glimpse into the process was afforded by a Reuters article optimistically titled, “Coke expected to get OK for China Huiyuan deal“. The lede is interesting, because it ties Coke’s prospects for success directly to a fortuitously-timed package of new China investments announced earlier this month:

    Chinese authorities are expected to grant a conditional approval soon to Coca-Cola Co (KO.N) for its $2.5 billion purchase of Huiyuan Juice after the world’s largest soft drinks maker pledged to invest another $2 billion in China over the next three years.

    But the telling stuff is further down in the article:

    Beijing’s influential Caijing magazine reported last month the MOC held a closed-door hearing on December 26 to seek advice and hear from Huiyuan’s domestic rivals and drinks industry groups.

    Some participants objected to the deal, citing protection of Huiyuan as a national brand as well as concerns about Coca-Cola’s growing monopoly power in China’s soft drink markets where small local juice makers may be hurt.

    ***

    Lawyers and bankers close to the process say the political pressures on the government over this deal have been significant.

    While Beijing wants to signal that China is open to foreign investment, it does not want to be seen as easily surrendering national interests and brands, said the sources.

    ***

    “Beijing decided to give the deal a serious and tough review after it saw growing concerns and objections from Huiyuan’s local rivals and some pro-nationalism marketwatchers,” said [an anonymous source].

    Again, it’s not the individual statements themselves that are important, but more the overall approaches and priorities they suggest. In the end, only Coke and Huiyan know exactly what steps they took to communicate about the deal to the public and to regulators and other people in the government with an interest in the outcome. Coke has been doing business globally since forever and in China since 1979, and I have no doubt they worked multiple channels very hard. But they still seemed surprised by the backlash.

    A friend of Imagethief’s who follows these things reports that Coke PR people at a recent conference had the point of view that they were acting within the law, and that China’s netizens thus had nothing to complain about (this is second-hand, so take it as such). This might be true at a strictly rational level. But rationality is relative, especially in matters of national pride. And, as any parent knows, not having anything to complain about has never stopped anyone from complaining.

    If I boil all of the above down into one rule for such situations, this is what ends up stuck to the bottom of the pot: Foreign companies making significant acquisitions in China should assume that the default starting communications position is “in trouble”, and plan appropriately. In fairness, Chinese companies making major acquisitions in the US should probably make the same assumption. In his post linked above, David Wolf writes:

    Any acquisition of a local firm by a foreign company demands a communications effort directed at both the general public and the policy making elite that makes a logical, intelligent, and sensitive case for the purchase. The bigger the buy, the better you need to be at the communications.

    So true. And this was the biggest buy of all, so far.

    See also:

    And several posts from the Wall Street Journal’s “China Journal” blog, which followed the deal closely:

    "Mother doesn't consent."
    “Mother doesn’t consent.”

  • What the “grass mud horse” means and doesn’t mean

    Warning: This post contains vulgarity in an academic context. Those with weak constitutions are advised to stop reading and visit this wholesome site instead.

    The New York Times has an interesting story about Chinese Internet users putting a stick in government efforts to “purify the Internet” with various plays on a rude pun: 草泥马. Read “cáo ní mă“, it means “grass mud horse”. It’s also, however, a few tones away from the scorching but well-worn vulgarity “操你妈”, which is read “cào nĭ mā” and means (send the children out of the room) “fuck your mother”. From the Times:

    A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

    Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the point.

    The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

    Have a read, and make sure you visit some of the linked videos. One of them will ensure you never think about alpacas the same way again. Nasty looking beasts. [Original video now deleted, but re-uploaded by Rebecca McKinnon here.]

    Imagethief, a labored speaker of Chinese at best, is no expert on Mandarin profanity or puns, although I have an academic appreciation for the latter. But as with any passenger of Beijing taxis, I am well acquainted with “cào nĭ mā“, and its common accompaniment, the hissed “shaaaaabi!” (You can look it up on the Wikipedia page linked right above.) I hastily point out that these are generally directed at other drivers and pedestrians, and rarely at Imagethief.

    Sound-alikes and double entendres are important in Chinese (think of all the words that are auspicious or inauspicious because they sound like something else), and they certainly have played role in the ongoing dance between Chinese Internet users and censors. But I rather think this story reads a bit too much significance into what is, at the end of the day, a naughty pun:

    It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

    Perhaps. But the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese language cut both ways. Have a read of ESWN’s translation of a recent Southern Metropolis Daily article on “The Seven Possible Fates of an Internet Post” which talks about how many BBS postings get filtered because of accidental character combinations that look like forbidden terms. And also have a read of James Fallows’ excellent Atlantic Monthly article on China’s Internet censorship from almost exactly one year ago, perhaps the best analysis so far in mainstream media.

    The goal of Chinese Internet censorship is not absolute control, but sufficient inconvenience and management to keep most people people on the straight-and-narrow. In that context, some naughty puns, even ones that encode an implicit criticism of censorship, can probably be thought of as a feature, if an annoying one, rather than a bug. Poke some fun. Have some laughs. Don’t cross the red lines. I’d guess that the authorities are pretty comfortable waiting for people to get bored and move on to the next allegorical pun.

    See also: