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

Posted on June 14, 2009 by Will Moss

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 Green Dam makes frequent use of unsafe and outdated programming practices that likely introduce numerous other vulnerabilities.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?

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

Posted on June 9, 2009 by Will Moss

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!

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

Posted on May 13, 2009 by Will Moss

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.

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A few other people that China could helpfully quarantine

Posted on May 6, 2009 by Will Moss

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.
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Chinese cyberspies? Sheer lies and heinous fabrications!

Posted on April 9, 2009 by Will Moss

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.

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Coke, Huiyuan and the audiences that matter

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Will Moss

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.”

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

Posted on March 13, 2009 by Will Moss

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:

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Adventures in pyromania

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Will Moss

So CCTV burned down their own hotel. That has got to look bad in the yearly evaluation. However, here is what I am pretty sure didn’t happen: I am pretty sure that they didn’t torch their own building for the insurance money using the year’s second-biggest night of fireworks as convenient cover. This conclusion rests on no special powers of insight or criminological ability, only on my conviction poor planning and an abundance of colossal fireworks in a dense, urban area is explanation enough. I might concede sloppy construction-site management, bad safeguards and poor materials choice as a contributing factors, but that’s about it.

I am, however,  sad. I have no particular attachment to the Mandarin Oriental tower (or much of the other graceless architectural wank that has sprung up in this town in the past five years), but I expect the fire will lead to new controls on fireworks in Beijing. As wise as that might be from a civil defense point of view, it would dilute one of the Beijing’s great spectacles: the Chinese New Year fireworks inferno.

Fireworks reach a special part of me.That part is the twelve-year-old boy that still lives inside of me somewhere. He’s not gone, he’s just been gradually wrapped under three more decades of of maturity added over the years one thin coating at a time, like a pearl. But he’s still in there. And he still thinks fireworks are a hoot.

Like many small boys, Imagethief went through an extended phase where fire was just about the coolest thing ever, with slot racers and jet airplanes close behind. A scientifically-inclined lad, I pursued a rigorous program of experimentation in which I tested the combustibility and incendiary characteristics of various household objects and substances. Those were good times.

But not for my father. In those days I was living with him in a four-story Victorian in San Francisco’s Castro district that he’d bought in ’74 (for what would now seem like a preposterously small amount of money). 1890s redwood Victorians are notorious tinderboxes. Living in one is about the closest you can get to living in a house built from oil-soaked rags. When the 1906 earthquake struck, most of the damage was caused by the resulting fire ripping through hundreds of wood-frame Victorian houses. And that was when they were relatively new.

So what I thought was good clean, educational fun, my father thought was borderline psychopathy. He may have had a point. Over the years I set my hands on fire with alcohol, singed my eyebrows with gasoline, melted one kitchen trash can, accumulated a ghoulish collection of blisters and retained my eyesight only through, pardon the expression, blind luck.

In fairness, I had a local role model. Not neighborhood toughs lighting trash-can fires, but Walter, a friendly engineer who lived on our block and worked at Sutro Tower, the enormous, three-legged broadcasting antenna that dominates San Francisco from atop Twin Peaks. For many years in my family Sutro Tower was known as “Walt’s Tower”. In fact, I may have thought for some years that that was the official name.

One year for the Fourth of July, which is when one lights fireworks in the United States, Walt put on a show for the neighborhood. He built a large aircraft carrier model out of cardboard, filled it full of small explosives and smoke charges wired to an electrical switch panel, and proceeded to recreate the Battle of Midway. The climactic explosion disintegrated the model and deafened the entire neighborhood. I can picture it with near perfect clarity to this day.

I was also a budding film-maker with a super-8 camera. Suitably inspired, I soon launched an ambitious project to recreate every pyrotechnic effects shot from Star Wars, but at a level of spectacle that I felt George Lucas had lacked the balls and vision to achieve. My Millenium Falcon adventure playset? Blown up. My X-Wing fighter? Incinerated. My painstakingly built The Empire Strikes Back snowspeeder model? Scorched with flaming WD-40. And so on. What would be valuable collectables today became molten puddles and detonated fragments. I have no regrets.

Fireworks (presumably including homebrew exploding aircraft carriers) were illegal to purchase in San Francisco, but could be bought legally a ten minute drive up Interstate 280 in Daly City. The stalls were almost always on the lots of car dealerships, as I recall. Perhaps because these were convenient spaces, or perhaps because you might feel the need to celebrate the purchase of a Dodge Dart with a little something extra. The stalls were plywood shacks that sold a changeless assortment of cheap-and-cheerful pyrotechnics including sparklers, ground flowers and fountain cones.

You could buy the fireworks a la carte, but typically you picked up the biggest boxed assortment you could wheedle your parents into and prayed it didn’t burst into flames in the car. The only drawback was that the boxed sets also included some b-list stuff like Piccolo Petes (all sound, no flame) and those risible charcoal “snakes” that expanded magically from black pellets into, um, a pile of ash. We conducted some experiments trying to launch Piccolo Petes like rockets, but after one blew up on the pad we suspended the program.

There were limits to what you could buy, however. For one thing, no bottle rockets. In fact, anything with a projectile component appeared verboten. I recall Roman Candles as being very hard to get. This seems pointless in retrospect since I have clear memories of engaging in totally legal model rocketry at about the same time, using much larger and potentially more destructive projectiles. This lesson that was etched in my mind for all time when (Star Wars again — this was the late ’70s after all) my classmate Andy Filler’s Estes X-Wing encountered guidance problems off the pad and nearly gave the entire Marin Country Day School class of 1981 a haircut. That was just one of several grand failures on our school model rocketry day.

In practice, the projectile ban simply tempted inventive lads to test the strength of their throwing arms with pyrotechnics never meant to go airborne. It may be called a “ground flower”, but it makes a hell of an impressive sight when it ignites in mid-air. It also, like Andy Filler’s X-Wing, has erratic and unpredictable ballistic characteristics. One fourth of July I accidentally lofted one right into the middle of a bunch of beer-drinking adults. It was like dropping a rattlesnake into the hot tub. Liberty Street’s own Nolan Ryan and his flaming fastball were promptly benched.

Firecrackers were also illegal to purchase, along with their larger cousins, cherry bombs and the dreaded M-80, a hand-vaporising bastard with military antecedents and sixty times the punch of a garden-variety firecracker. Thus, in an early brush with Chinese globalization, my experiments were heavily dependent upon the availability of black-market Chinese fireworks in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Even for a small boy it was easy to go down to China Town and buy bricks of 1280 firecrackers and packs of bottle rockets sold out of the backs of Datsun 280-Zs by skinny, dangerous looking Hongkie kids for not too much money.

Those black market firecrackers were grist for many of my experiments. They also went off many times in my hand (which leaves you with a characterestic numbed burning sensation in your fingertips and a sheepish expression) and once right in my face (stunned amazement), so it’s probably a good thing we didn’t have access to anything bigger.

If only I had known what real Chinese firepower was. Imagine the fiendish child that I was with access to real Chinese fireworks…

To understand the gravity of that bit of conjecture, you need to understand the nature of fireworks that can be had at retail in China during the Spring Festival. As in Daly City the booths spring up seasonally, gaudy and colorful, their wares piled high alongside. And what wares! In China any drunk fool with a few hundred RMB can buy a colorful box the size of a beer keg that includes twelve or eighteen thudding mortar tubes that launch starbursts that would look good at the Pro Bowl. Imagine legalized, recreational white phosphorus. The first time some friends of mine set one of these off in China I thought the cops would come for us.

And there is a kaleidoscope of options on down from there. When you read about a Chinese fireworks factory exploding (as they do), it’s not the fwisssh….phut! stuff that gets sent to America that does the damage. It’s the high-grade domestic product that levels the village and kills the livestock. I admit one must have different expectations for China. Nevertheless, having grown up in San Francisco, where fireworks are controlled, and then lived a decade in Singapore, where private fireworks are banned, it staggers me to this day what you can buy legally in China. I don’t even want to imagine what’s available on the local black market. Stand back and don your radiation goggles.

So we get treated to quite a show during the fifteen days of lunar new year. Everybody and their maid buys piles of fireworks. On key days–new year’s eve, the lantern festival–there are queues at the stands. This being China, it’s imperative that your Golden Lotus Atomic Flower Detonator be bigger and more impressive than your neighbor’s Mighty Dragon Lucky Supernova. Or, if you can’t beat him on size, counter with volume and pepper him with a vast battery of the smaller stuff.

All of this would be chaos enough if the Chinese set off their fireworks with any sort of rational planning as to safe areas, minimum distances from nearby structures and crowd control. And in fairness some of the bigger apartments maintain pretty sound operations, with barricades, fire extinguishers at the ready and people stationed on the roofs to watch for embers (an essential precaution apparently not adopted at the Mandarin Oriental).

But in much of Beijing, and presumably in most other Chinese cities, that isn’t how it works. Many of the fireworks, possibly most of them, are detonated in the narrow warrens of old neighborhoods where sound is trapped, star-burst fragments ricochet off of windows and the general sense of bedlam is amplified far beyond the limits of common sense. Now that is good fun, and if you ever have the opportunity to wander through such a neighborhood at the height of fireworks season I heartily recommend you take it. The noise will feel like someone has painlessly run a large metal pole through your chest and is shaking it vigorously. (However it may also feel like someone has very painfully run knitting needles through your eardrums and is shaking them, too.) Heavy metal bands can only fantasize about this kind of sound and fury.

Even in the large courtyard of our apartment, where fireworks are not permitted, the sound is powerful. A rolling tide of detonations that sloshes back and forth between the slab sides of the surrounding towers, the echo creating a distinct basso triplet.WHUMPWhumpwhump! One, two, three. Often I’ll just stand in the center of the courtyard and listen to that glorious sound. I’ve often wished I could record it in a way that would do it justice.

One thing I’ve never witnessed in China is malicious use of fireworks. I’m sure it happens. People –teenagers especially– throw firecrackers at each other. They aim mortars through the superintendent’s window. They blow up small animals. That kind of behavior must be universal. Indeed, sombody scandalously blew up a popular cat at a university in Hebei recently. But I’ve never seen this kind of thing myself during the festivities in Beijing. It’s always been very family-oriented and congenial.

I have, however, seen plenty of garden-variety recklessness and stupidity, reminding me of my own past as a garden-variety reckless youth with a fire fascination. Every year fires break out and the emergency rooms stand ready for the fingerless masses. A friend of mine once videotaped a guy accidentally blowing his hand apart. Not something you’ll put on YouTube for mom to see. Alcohol, carelessness and really large fireworks mix badly. The police plaster the town with safety advisories and guidelines in the weeks leading up to new year, and the period when fireworks are allowed in the city is rigidly controlled. But it’s crazy nevertheless.

The rules for fireworks in Beijing have ebbed and flowed over the years. But I wonder if this week’s huge CCTV disaster, itself an apparent product of garden-variety recklessness at an institutional level, will mean another great ebbing. Will the city government finally decide that unfettered pyromania is inconsistent with the development of a dense metropolis of 15 million people? It wouldn’t surprise me.

And that would probably be the sensible thing to do. The twelve-year-old boy inside me, the one who still runs to the window for the fireworks and wanders the besieged streets in glee, would be sad to see that happen. But, then, he’s never had to apologize for burning down a new hotel.

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If you’re angry about Guns’n’Roses surely it must be 1991

Posted on November 26, 2008 by Will Moss

Let’s all take a moment to appreciate the Global Times, the nationalist tabloid cousin to the staid People’s Daily, which has decided to get indignant about the new Guns’n’Roses album, “Chinese Democracy”. It’s not that the Chinese people don’t have some cause to be angry. After all, the title is somewhat provocative, and the title track itself makes mention of the dreaded FLG. It also includes the following verses, which are pretty much worth getting angry about simply on artistic grounds alone, regardless of nationality:

Cause it would take a lot more time than you
Have got for masturbation
Even with your iron fist
All they got to rule the nation
When all we got is precious time
All they got to fool the nation
When all I got is precious time

Yep, you’re on the artistic edge when you’re rhyming “masturbation” with “nation” in an oblique criticism of China’s political system. Or maybe you’re just on your second bottle of Wild Turkey and your sixth line of Bolivian fairy dandruff. Who knows? Either way, as a musical critique of China, it’s ways from the sly, ironic rage of Roger Waters’ “Watching TV” (which is itself a ways from Waters’ best work). And Waters played live in Shanghai not very long ago, although I doubt he played that particular song.

But Guns’n’Roses? Guns’n’Roses?  The band singer that took so long to get this album out that the phrase “Chinese Democracy” is now, with perhaps unintentional aptness, a music industry euphemism for a project that never ends? My friends, if you’re getting worked up about this record then your yardstick for cultural relevance is perhaps in need of some recalibration. And fortunately for you, Imagethief can provide that recalibration. In terms of gross influence on society and popular consciousness, Imagethief rates Guns’n’Roses circa 2008 thusly:

pop-culture-scale

Arguably, Miley Cyrus is also past it, and should be replaced by the cast of “Twilight”.

All pop acts, and most pop-culture in general, reflect a particular moment in time. There is no such thing as “timeless rock”, only formerly timely rock that has aged well. I say that as a bona-fide classic rock fan who learned to play bass by jamming over Hendrix records, Pink Floyd, Zep, The Stranglers, and other dinosaurs. Guns’n’Roses, for all their hostility and edginess, needs to be recognized for what they actually were: The last of the LA hair-metal bands. The final, angry stand of a cornered ’80s genre. “Appetite for Destruction” came out in 1987, but languished for a year before it gained real notice. By the time “Use Your Illusion” came out, in 1991, about the time I was launching my college radio career, the band still had some juice but in fact most rock fans and and the industry itself were already up in Seattle trying to figure out exactly exactly what a “Mudhoney” was.

Some rare bands and pop musicians endure, reinventing themselves to stay relevant. That’s why, although I don’t much like her music, I have fair respect for Madonna. She has accomplished the near impossible with almost twenty-five years of pop-music success and reasonably consistent relevance. (Although, note to Hollywood, please don’t let her approach either end of a movie camera ever again.) But most bands, even if they do successfully endure and reinvent themselves, have a peak when they hit maximum alignment with the zeitgeist. Even those that stay successful thereafter are usually living on borrowed time and aging fans, like a human body that deteriorates inexorably after the late teens no matter how healthy it is kept.

So let’s take that equation and add to it not releasing an album for seventeen years. Just how long has it been since the last Guns’n’Roses studio album? When it came out, Deng Xiaoping was still a year away from making his famous “Southern Tour”, the climax of the factional battles that resulted in China’s economic opening to the world. Going after them could be considered quixotic, if Don Quixote had tilted at pinwheels.

Thus, when the Global Times published the headline (via CNN), “American band releases album venomously attacking China”, lent credibility to Chinese net gossip that the album was a Western plot to “grasp and control the world using democracy as a pawn”, and wrote that the the record “turns its spear point on China,” they were committing a classic PR sin: Drawing attention to an unworthy critic.

Let’s illustrate this principle. Let’s say you’re Enormocorp, a gigantic, publicly listed conglomerate with its fingers in a myriad of businesses that span the globe. One day a small, pimply boy with his finger jammed up his nose walks up to you and says, “You suck!” What is the correct response?

The correct response is something along the lines of turning to your friend and saying, “Did you hear something?” It is not putting out a global press release on your non-suckyness, sending your CEO to do the Sunday talk shows to refute suck allegations and publishing white papers on all the anti-suckage measures that you are undertaking. Doing this is drawing attention to an unworthy critic, someone who’s ability to genuinely affect public perception is essentially nil. We call this “PRing the problem.” Global Times has PR’d the problem.

But I suppose it’s their job to do so. The angry rhetoric will play to readers and shift newspapers, which is the real job of any newspaper. So while it makes little sense from a national PR or defending-Chinese-ears point of view, it makes plenty of sense from a business point of view. As long as you don’t mind the cynicism of accepting that a legion of people who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered will probably stampede to Baidu to run MP3 searches for “Chinese Democracy” (or the Chinese nanny-defeating linguistic spoof thereof) as a result of the article.

Personally, Imagethief thinks the Foreign Ministry, which was quoted in the same CNN article, had it dead right when they were asked about the album:

“We don’t need to comment on that.”

Note: Imagethief owns “Appetite for Destruction” and considers it one of the great workout records of all time. He has not, however, listened to “Chinese Democracy” yet. Who knows? Maybe it rocks.

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Pardon me, but who gives a damn about Gong Li anyway?

Posted on November 8, 2008 by Will Moss

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.

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

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