In order to test the always-fluid limits of academic freedom of expression in China, my co-authors and I submitted the Chinese version of an article about Chinese student demonstrations overseas “to protect the Olympic torch” in 2008 to the Shenzhen-based journal Open Times (开放时代), which is, indeed, one of the most open academic publications. We thought that, what with a number of foreign academics now being hired by Chinese universities and the article approaching the phenomenon from a non-conventional perspective, we might stand a chance.

The peer review came back with a rejection. When I asked the editor whether we could read reviewers’ reports, I received the reply that reports that recommend to reject a submission are not usually sent on to authors to avoid contention. But he (or she) added that “this year, debates in China are strictly controlled; ‘Tibetan separatism’ and other ethnic and religious issues are rather sensitive; we cannot but take this seriously” (今年国内对舆论的控制很严，“藏独” 等民族宗教问题比较敏感，我们不得不慎重对待).

The Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest, will open on Wednesday. This years special guest country in China, and the fair will be opened by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and China’s heir-apparent, Xi Jinping, attesting to the desire to make the event “a cultural Olympics.” According to Die Zeit, the Chinese government is spending 5 million euros on flying officials and authors to the fair. But the exiled Uyghur leader, Rebiya Kadeer, is also invited.

On 12-13 September, the organisers held a symposium entitled “China and the world: perceptions and reality.” Initially, they invited two critics of the Chinese government, both of whom have been arrested after 1989, to attend the symposium: Bei Ling (who now lives in the US) and Dai Qing, who has become a well-known environmental activist. After the Chinese government threatened to pull out, the invitations were cancelled. This raised an outcry in the German media, and the two were re-included in the programme, causing part of the official Chinese  delegation to walk out.

Qin Hui, a well-known liberal rural economist and professor at Tsinghua University, wrote a thoughtful account of the symposium, which he attended. The account has been posted on Tianya (and received surprisingly few comments, either because it was in the relatively highbrow books section or because flames have been removed). Qin describes the incident as a case of conflicting reactions within different levels of Chinese bureaucracy, and while being mildly critical of his “official” colleagues, he reserves most of the blame for the newspaper Huanqiu Shibao 环球时报, the popular offshoot of the People’s Daily.

Qin describes himself as both invited by the fair and delegated by the Chinese government, but he seems not to include himself in the official delegation. His colleague Li Qiang, a Tsinghua sociologist, was delegated by “the Chinese side.” Qin writes that the organisers had told him they would send him the invitation directly, but instead, he received it via the General Administration of Press and Publications. He reckoned the organisers had decided to express their respect for Chinese official protocol by sending the invitation to GAPP, which is the “responsible organ” for publications. But the organisers also sent Dai Qing’s invitation to GAPP, to which GAPP responded by returning it to the sender. But Dai Qing, with an invitation from the German PEN Club, went anyway. She told Qin that she had not been sure she wanted to go, but after the government’s attempt to shut her up, she had to go just to insist on her freedom of speech.

After arriving in Frankfurt on 11 September, the participants were alerted to an article in that day’s Global Times with the title “Symposium suddenly invites unwelcome guest; Chinese organisers sternly refuse; German media use fair to deliver vile attack on China” 研讨会突邀不速之客，中方组织者严词拒绝，德媒借书展恶毒攻击中国. The article praises the fair’s authorities for accepting China’s objection to the two participants, but attacks the media for pressuring the organisers. It also quotes a certain Zhao Junjie 赵俊杰 (apparently unknown to all participants but, as it turns out, an editor of Jiang Zemin’s and Li Peng’s works) as saying that the incident was a reflection of differences in values between China and Europe, but that it was “impossible to compromise on patriotism.”

Without knowing the story, the article would have seemed as just one more case of “saying no.” But the members of the Chinese delegations (which included the well-known New Left sociologist Huang Ping, who had spent a year at Berlin’s Wissenschaftskolleg) claimed that the fair organisers could have invited anyone they wanted, but by sending Dai Qing’s invitation to GAPP they put it into a position where sending it on would have been tantamount to an official endorsement of her inclusion. So GAPP “politely” sent the invitation back to the German organisers so they could handle it themselves. But instead, the German media described it as an official threat. An embassy official confirmed to Qin that they had not wanted to intervene in the Germans’ choices of invitees and that the German media was spreading misinformation. (Yet, according to several English-language news reports, China’s ambassador Wu Hongbo has described the invitations as unacceptable and an unfriendly act towards China.)

The next day, Boos apologised to the two dissidents for his “weakness” and, to applause, invited them onto the stage. At this point the official delegates left the room, according to Qin not because of the presence of the two dissidents, but because they felt offended by being upstaged. Then Boos went after them and apologised to them too, and they soon returned. (Qin remarks that, having apologised to the German media for cowing in to the Chinese government, and then to the Chinese delegates for cowing in to the German media, Boos — a former 1968 student radical — must have felt like Pigsy from Journey to the West looking into the mirror: not human either inside or out 里外不是人.)

Qin reckons that, for the higher echelons in the Chinese government, preventing Dai Qing and Bei Ling from attending a forum was not worth the price of the scandal, and points out that if they had really wanted to, they could have prevented Dai Qing from boarding the plane. (They have done so recently when Chinese blogger Michael Anti was due to travel to Germany to accept an award.) So Global Times probably acted without consulting the “appropriate organs” when they printed the story. Indeed, on 14 September, the paper printed another story (by the same authors!), in which it blamed the German media for spreading the “false news of dissidents being refused” by the symposium. But, Qin asks rhetorically, why did the German media end up as everyone’s scapegoat, when in fact, if there was misinformation, then its source was Juergen Boos himself?

Indeed, the story goes some way to explain why Western media end up at the receiving end of authorized nationalist attacks. It also nicely highlights both the lack of uniformity and the scapegoating mechanisms within China’s news industry. But in the end, the story is still unclear. Who was it who told Boos that the delegation would pull out if Dai and Bei attend? Or nobody did, but Boos decided to play it safe and then blame China? On the other hand, it might be more important for China not to allow unauthorized voices into such events than Qin thinks. And the strategy is succeeding: recently, the coordinator of an EU journalism training centre’s worldwide blog project told me that the Chinese journalist they invited to join was from the People’s Daily, as they did not want to pay the airfare for someone who in the end may not be allowed to board.

The story reminds me of 1999, when Hungary was the Frankfurt fair’s theme country. Then, Hungarian nationalist papers protested the inclusion of Imre Kertesz, a writer then little known in Hungary and critical of what he perceived as Hungarians’ lack of acceptance of responsibility for the Holocaust, in the featured programme. But, of course, Kertesz did not get “uninvited”, and later he got the Nobel Prize.

In another public-transport episode, a friend in Xiamen witnessed an old man standing in the front of a bus, near the driver’s seat, facing the passengers with a “反台独促统一” (Oppose Taiwan independence, support national unification) sign and chanting. The passengers seemed unfazed.

My friend’s interpretation was that the man must have some deeply personal relationship to Taiwan. But  I wonder if the old man was simply one of those who like (or are compelled to) rant amd rave in public places. Choosing this particular slogan, which no one can oppose, then makes sense. So he might be just like the overseas students we wrote about: as Zhang Juan suggested, patriotism is the safest and most appropriate way of any public display, not excluding those by deranged old men.

The debate on whether the Internet fosters civil society in China has been on for 15 years, since China joined the Internet. An article released by the Xinhua news agency, apparently to mark these 15 years, says that it does, and that this is good. What is striking is how closely the language of the article (praising “individuality” and “subjectivity” as well as “civil society”) resembles that of social sciences/cultural studies analysis of how the ideal, modern citizen of China is now imagined in China’s public discourse. In other words, it’s pretty explicit.

The article says that China now has 338 million Internet users, more than any other country in the world. It quotes the chairman of the board (理事长) of the China Internet Association as saying that the Internet has “aided the development of Chinese people’s individual identity and identity as citizens” (个人意识和公民意识). The article then quotes a 26-year-old female ”netizen” from Chongqing as saying that the Internet has taught her “independent reflection, looking up different opinions and forming my own judgement).

The article describes Tianya as “China’s largest people’s-life forum” (民生论坛), a term that is both positive and official-sounding, as it is part of the orthodox language of politics that goes back to Sun Yat-sen. The 25-year-old editor of Tianya’s most popular forum, 杂谈, who goes by the nickname Xiao Dang (小党 Little Party), is quoted as saying that Tianya has strengthened people’s sense of social responsibility. He added: “For us, expression is seen as a right and a duty” (表达被视为一种权利和责任). Xiao Dang opposes “irresponsible” comments on the Net, however.

A senior analyst at the China Internet Information Centre, Chen Jiangong, is quoted as saying that “the rise of a sense of subjectivity 主体意识 is favourable for the establishment of civil society,” while a former vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who signed the agreement on China’s joining the Internet praises it for helping “the individuality of Chinese people mature”.

For the first time, I witnessed how the charge of hanjian (traitor) emerges in real life. The victim was my wife, who is Chinese. We were boarding a ship in China when a Chinese man tried to elbow his way ahead in the queue. I didn’t let him, and the argument became heated. Soon afterwards another man proceeded to do the same, and my wife said, in Chinese, “This is China for you.” At this point the crowd, which until than had been neutral, turned against us (mostly her): a middle-age couple began shouting abuse at her, including calling her a hanjian. Although no one would have been likely to defend queue-jumpers (Chinese obviously dislike that kind of behaviour too), if in this situation the debate escalates further and there are no guards present, the crowd could easily have been mobilised against us. The reasons for the conflict were forgotten: what mattered was only that someone criticized China, admittedly rather summarily, in front of a foreigner.

It has been widely reported recently that the Chinese government ordered that every computer sold in China after 1 July be equipped with a preinstalled Internet filtering software called Green Dam – Youth Escort, officially intended for blocking access to pornography. The decision has been attacked for a variety of reasons: that it will serve political control, that it is technologically faulty and puts computers at risk, that it creates potential problems for operational systems, and that such a huge contract has been awarded without a tender. (A recent New York Times article is here.)

What I find interesting is the breadth and publicity of opposition to the plan even in very mainstream media in China. According to the NYT article – China Daily, which is normally as bland as it gets, “reported Monday that surveys done by four of China’s most popular Web portals showed that four in five Internet users would not use the software or would have it uninstalled.” The article also referred to accusations by a Silicon Valley company that Green Dam stole their “blacklist” of porn sites. I would have expected for such accusations to go unreported or be dismissed as preposterous, but the response of an executive from Jinhui Computer System Engineering, which helped design Green Dam, was unusually meek:

“I cannot deny that the two filters’ databases of blacklisted URL addresses might share similarities,” Mr. Zhang said in China Daily. “After all, they are all well-known international pornographic Web sites that all porn filters are meant to block. But we didn’t steal their programming code.”

None of this necessarily suggests that Chinese Internet users are becoming more interested in accessing politically subversive content, but it does seem that — for reasons that do not have to be political — they are generally annoyed and distrustful about the idea to saddle them with a government-mandated filtering software. This is not so trivial, considering that a number of surveys have indicated a high degree of support for government controls on Internet content.

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Toronto published a report in which they said that, in the course of a ten-month resaerch, they found a large hacker network operating in China, controlling 1295 computers in 103 countries and aiming to gather information from various sites. This is the latest in a long line of reports that Chinese hackers are attacking various foreign government and corporate servers.

Partly in response to this, but I think partly also in response to Charter 2008, a pro-democracy petition that has been circulating on the Chinese Internet and unexpectedly attracted thousands of signatures, some Chinese print media have published stories alleging that most of the spying was done against, not for, China, and that dissident opinion formers on the Chinese Internet were in the pay of the Americans (this bit seems like a response to Western reports on local governments in China paying online ”spin doctors”).

On 9 April, International Herald (Guoji Xianqu Daobao) published a long article entitled”Every Year, U.S. Spends Fortune Recruiting Online Spies to Counter Chinese Netizens.” A version of the same article was apparently published in the inaugural issue of the English version of Global Times, the People’s Daily’s mass-market offshot.

The article quotes Meng Xiangqing, a professor at National Defense University, as saying that Western articles on Chinese hackers is a smokescreen to hide Western online spying activities. An official at the Centre for Reporting Illegal and Malicious Internet Information (Zhongguo Hulianwang Weifa he Buliang Xinxi Jubao Zhongxin, a body under the China Internet Association set up to receive tipoffs from “the masses”) confirmed that “domestic and foreign enemy forces and anti-Chinese elements continuously carry out anti-Chinese activities and gather intelligence on the Chinese Internet.” (“The mouse is their AK-47, the CPU is their cannon,” the author of the article added.) According to the official, “on some non-mainstream forums,” where posters “reject socialist values” and which feature articles by “self-appointed so-called ‘online opinion leaders’ like He Qinglian and Guo Quan,” some participants “may have overseas backgrounds.”

For example, in March, the Chinese government revealed a “secret contract” between the U.S. Office of International Broadcasting (to which Voice of America belongs) and a Canadian company owned by the North American representative of the Tibetan government-in-exile to set up an online project with the purpose to incite, spread rumours and gather intelligence. According to an article in the pro-Peking Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao,

a North America-based Chinese  online forum has conducted an investigation that revealed those people who often post on “sensitive questions” … are employed by American, Japanese and other spy agencies especially to post articles that attack the Chinese government (and) spread misinformation; their attacks target China´s political system, values, and even social morality.

Unnamed Hong Kong media (possibly the same Ta Kung Pao article) say that U.S. intelligence agencies spend millions of dollars to recruit ”online traitors” (wangluo hanjian) from the rank of disappointed or simply unemployed people in China. In the end, the author asserts, it is unsuspecting common people who suffer. A woman named Longzhen, described as a simple woman with “insufficient vigilance to the outside world” living in Sichuan´s Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, thus fell victim to a Tibetan man abroad who asked her to gather military information, which she had access to through her work. By the time these people go on trial, their overseas minders disappear.

Of course, these stories, quite in the traditional line of unsuspecting Chinese being used by unscrupulous spies, accuse the U.S. of activities that are quite different from the hardcore online hacking that China is being  accused of. (It is true that those accusations tend to make the questionable assumption that Chinese hackers act on the government´s behalf.) This article then tries to conflate the two issues by citing a report by Symantec, an American Internet security company, which says that out China has consistently had the largest or second-largest number of computers that become “zombies” remotely controlled from another country. This makes sense, as virus protection in China is often weak; but, obviously, these zombie computers are most likely used to generate simple commercial spam.

Yesterday I participated in a very odd panel on Chinese nationalism at the Association for the Study of Nationalities convention in New York. My co-panelists were Wang Chenzhi and Li Lifan of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Li argued that nationalism was essentially a popular rather than a governmental phenomenon, and while the “ruling party” benefited from it in some ways it has not yet acted upon it. There was still “plenty of time to mold” and channel Chinese nationalism in a more militant or a more benign direction, but if Western powers did not respect China’s territorial integrity and supported ethnic separatism, then it would no doubt become more of a challenge.

I could see this as either a kind of Shanghai liberal approach to world affairs, or China’s official diplomatic line in the West — probably both. Wang’s paper, on “the subordinate role of nationalism in Sino-Russian relations,” while less coherent, was more provocative. Wang blamed “pro-Western” Russian scholars for giving false advise on China to Russia’s government and being responsible for Russian versions of the “China threat” discourse. He ignored the Far Eastern provincial governors (who have of course now been removed or tamed by Putin) and the simple nationalists, although he did talk about “fascists” who went about attacking Chinese. He talked about the incident with the Chinese cargo ship that was recently sunk by a Russian warship near Nahodka (8 sailors perished and 4 are missing) but offered no explanation why this happened. His point was that the Sino-Russian “strategic partnership” was too important to be jeopardized by such “small” incidents, which is why the Chinese government took no serious countermeasures. (In fact, this is remarkable, because this is probably the single largest loss of Chinese life abroad as a result of hostile fire since the China-Vietnam war.) Wang did not respond to a question about why the public response in China was much less subdued than in the case of the American intelligence ship in the South China Sea (where no one died and the ship was harassed by Chinese fishing boats). But the answer seems clear — China and the US have no “strategic partnership,” and the US ship was perceived as having hostile intent against the Chinese state, not merely some Chinese sailors.

Wang, who has spent some time in Kyrgyzstan, rejected a suggestion that Chinese influence in Central Asia is growing. He said he learned that the Central Asians “use Chinese money but Russian brains.”

The discussant, David Crowe, said that Chinese nationalism was an understandable expression of frustration that China was a “great country” but was not treated as such in international affairs. He, personally, did not think it was such a bad thing. Why would it be OK for Americans to go around waving flags but not Chinese?

Though foreign nations may be out there to get China, at least dolphins can tell right from wrong. Xinhua reports that

Thousands of dolphins blocked the suspected Somali pirate ships when they were trying to attack Chinese merchant ships passing the Gulf of Aden.  (…)

The suspected pirates ships stopped and then turned away. The pirates could only lament their littleness befor the vast number of dolphins.  

In absence of other information, we must assume that they have not extended similar services to ships from other nations. Still, the Chinese ships aren’t relying on dolphins only; an unspecified number of warships is accompanying them. The pirates, on the other hand, must be in Greenpeace’s good books. (Coming to think of it, Greenpeace isn’t above a bit of piracy itself, so it makes sense.)

(Thanks to Lisa Wynn for sending the link!)

Stephanie Wang writes in Asia Times (“New branches of nationalism in China,” 15 April):

On the scenic campus of Wuhan University in central China, there are over 1,000 Japanese cherry trees. Each spring, the flowering trees become a tourist attraction, but this year the beautiful scene was overshadowed by an unpleasant episode.

On March 21, when two Chinese women, a mother and daughter, were wearing Japanese kimonos and having their pictures taken beside some blossoming trees, a young man shouted at them: “Don’t wear a kimono and have pictures taken at Wuda [Wuhan University]! … Get out, you Japanese in kimono!” As more onlookers joined him to condemn the mother and daughter, they had to flee.

After being reported in the media and on the Internet, the episode quickly escalated into a nationwide debate between journalists, renowned writers and scholars and bloggers. According to a survey carried out by sohu.com, a major Chinese portal website, 51% backed the verbal abuse, while about 47% advocated a more rational expression of nationalism or patriotism.

 This percentage seems quite “balanced”. I do wonder whether these polls, which are so common on these issues, are doctored or not. My guess is that — as usual — in some instances they are (and then it serves to legitimise this or that viewpoint, or both, and to express the state’s preferences), in others not.