Media/Tech

posts related to Chinese media (tv, internet, social media, etc.) and technnology

How Black Myth: Wukong navigates China’s political and cultural trends

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Source: Think China (9/10/24)
How Black Myth: Wukong navigates China’s political and cultural trends
By Ying Zhu

Black Myth: Wukong has revived interest in everything Monkey King, but the Chinese video game has also been criticised for not fully capturing the original myth. Even so, the game has given the Chinese gaming industry a boost, even though government endorsement may shift the focus from design to politics. Academic Ying Zhu explores the magic of Monkey King.

People wait in line to play Black Myth: Wukong at Gamescom 2023, in Cologne, Germany, on 23 August 2023. (Jana Rodenbusch/Reuters)

People wait in line to play Black Myth: Wukong at Gamescom 2023, in Cologne, Germany, on 23 August 2023. (Jana Rodenbusch/ Reuters)

In summer 2015, a Chinese animation film, Monkey King: Hero Is Back, made headline news for breaking the Chinese animation box-office record previously held by DreamWorks’ Kungfu Panda 2 (2011). The film features the Monkey King, a legendary trickster known for his mischief and magical powers, drawn from the beloved 16th-century Chinese literary classic Journey to the West.

Journey to the West narrates the 7th-century pilgrimage of Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who travels from Xi’an (the Tang Dynasty capital) to India in search of Buddhist scriptures. This whimsical and fantastical tale chronicles Xuanzang’s challenging journey, accompanied by three troublesome apprentices who have been assigned to him as protectors to atone for their sins.

Among the three, the monkey named Sun Wukong stood out for both his magical power in fighting evil and his troublemaking penchant. His captivating character has enchanted generations of readers, making him a legendary hero in Chinese mythology.

Monkey King fever a decade ago

The Monkey King story has been updated through stage performances, TV series, film and video games in China and beyond. Research shows that from 1906-2021, roughly 170 theatre, film and TV adaptations were said to have been produced in the Chinese-speaking world alone. Among them, Monkey King: Hero Is Back stood out for its success in vanquishing Hollywood in the Chinese domestic market. Continue reading How Black Myth: Wukong navigates China’s political and cultural trends →

Enduring ‘public secrecy’ around 1989

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Source: China Digital Times (9/9/24)
Accused Tiananmen Informant’s Silence Reveals Enduring “Public Secrecy” Around 1989
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The violent repression of the 1989 student protests scarred Chinese society. The campaign to purge “two-faced” protest sympathizers that followed was similarly painful. Yet some of the greatest unresolved anguish from that tumultuous year stems from the realization among those who served prison sentences that dear friends and trusted colleagues informed on them—or even framed them.

Just such a case has re-entered the public eye 35 years after the fact due to the reporting of the investigative journalist Chai Jing, creator of the 2015 air pollution documentary “Under the Dome.” In 1989, the poet Zheng Shiping, better known by his pen name Ye Fu, was charged with revealing state secrets and sentenced to six years in prison. After his release, Ye Fu alleged that the Mao Dun-prize winning novelist Xiong Zhaozheng, his former classmate and friend, had set him up. Ye Fu’s allegation is decades old. Xiong has never publicly admitted to acting as an informant, although according to Ye Fu he has previously apologized in private. As part of a recent interview series for her YouTube channel, Chai Jing interviewed both Ye Fu and Xiong. Her brief interview with Xiong was dominated by silence. Far more than a rehashing of bitter recriminations about 1989, the call, which Chai Jing posted in full and whose transcript is translated below, proves an illuminating example of the “public secrecy” that surrounds the Tiananmen movement.

While the 1989 student movement is among the most sensitive and censored topics in China, the silence surrounding it is not solely a matter of government enforcement. “Public secrecy” is Margaret Hillenbrand’s term for the cult of self-interested silence that surrounds the most traumatic instances in modern Chinese history. Hillenbrand explained the term in an interview on her book “Negative Exposures” published by CDT earlier this year: Continue reading Enduring ‘public secrecy’ around 1989 →

HK editors convicted of sedition

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Source: NYT (8/28/24)
Hong Kong Editors Convicted of Sedition in Blow to Press Freedom
The editors said they published stories in the public interest. A judge ruled they were guilty of a crime against national security.
By Tiffany May, Reporting from Hong Kong

Two men stand outside a building as a group of journalists photograph them.

Patrick Lam, left, and Chung Pui-kuen of Stand News leaving court in Hong Kong last year. Credit…Louise Delmotte/Associated Press

The two veterans of Hong Kong’s long boisterous news media scene didn’t shy away from publishing pro-democracy voices on their Stand News site, even as China cranked up its national security clampdown to silence critics in the city.

Then the police came knocking and, more than two and a half years later, a judge Thursday convicted the two journalists — the former editor in chief of Stand News, Chung Pui-kuen, and his successor, Patrick Lam — of conspiring to publish seditious materials on the now-defunct liberal news outlet. Both face potential prison sentences.

The landmark ruling highlighted how far press freedom has shrunk in the city, where local news outlets already self censor to survive and some foreign news organizations have left or moved out staff amid increasing scrutiny from the authorities.

During the trial, prosecutors characterized news articles and opinion pieces published by the two as biased against the government and a threat to national security. The articles were similar to those Stand News had been publishing for years. But after the authorities crushed protests that rocked the city in 2019, China imposed a national security law, and tolerance for dissent in the city’s freewheeling media began to evaporate. Continue reading HK editors convicted of sedition →

‘Road Trip Auntie’ files for divorce

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Source: NYT (8/21/24)
China’s ‘Road Trip Auntie’ Is Ready for a New Milestone: Divorce
Su Min became an internet sensation for leaving behind an abusive husband to drive across China alone. Now she’s ending the marriage, but there will be a price.
By Vivian Wang and Joy Dong, Vivian Wang reported from Beijing and Joy Dong from Hong Kong.

A woman in a bright jacket stands high in the mountains, with a few other people standing behind her. The hills behind her are barren.

A screenshot from one of Su Min’s videos, showing her near the foot of Mount Everest. Credit…Su Min

In the four years since she began driving solo across China, leaving behind an abusive marriage and longstanding expectations about women’s duties at home, Su Min, 60, has become an internet sensation known as the “road-trip auntie.”

She has driven to the foot of Mount Everest and camped on the beach in the tropical province of Hainan. She has been featured in an ad campaign about female empowerment and inspired a forthcoming movie starring a famous Chinese actress.

But one key step in Ms. Su’s emancipation eluded her: She wavered on whether to file for divorce, worried about how it would affect her family.

Until now. Last month, Ms. Su officially began divorce proceedings.

Her decision, she said, is a testament to how much she has learned to commit to her own happiness, and to the self confidence she has gained on the road.

But her experience in trying to end the marriage also shows the many barriers to independence that Chinese women still face. Ms. Su’s husband at first refused to divorce, and a legal fight loomed. Judges in contested divorce cases often deny petitions or force couples into mediation that disadvantages the woman, studies show, and they frequently ignore claims of domestic violence. Continue reading ‘Road Trip Auntie’ files for divorce →

‘When we die, our bodies are plundered for parts’

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Source: China Digital Times (8/16/24)
Quote of the Day: “When We Die, Our Bodies Are Plundered for Parts”
By  |

A recent scandal involving the organized theft and trafficking of thousands of corpses that were later processed into bone-graft material for dental procedures has prompted horror among the Chinese public, and tremendous censorship on Chinese social media platforms. CDT editors have identified 21 censored Weibo hashtags, about a dozen deleted posts and investigative reports, and many deleted comments and filtered comment sections on social media platforms.

Despite attempts to suppress discussion of the corpse-trafficking scandal, public interest in the case—currently being investigated by authorities in Taiyuan, Shanxi province—remains unabated. CDT editors have put together a selection of online comments, quips, poetry, and blog excerpts related to the case. Some of the writers described the corpse-trafficking scheme as just another example of how ordinary citizens are subjected to various indignities—treated as “chives” or “huminerals” to be harvested and exploited, both in life and in death. Others drew connections between this and previous scandals about melamine-tainted powdered milk and baby formula, recycled “gutter oil,” and tanker trucks used to transport both fuel and cooking oil without being sanitized between loads.

The following are some online reactions to news of the corpse-trafficking scandal and censorship of related hashtags: Continue reading ‘When we die, our bodies are plundered for parts’ →

Video game seeks to curb ‘negative discourse’

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Source: NYT (8/20/24)
Hit Chinese Video Game Seeks to Curb ‘Negative Discourse’
Black Myth: Wukong tried to forbid influential overseas streamers from discussing “feminist propaganda,” Covid-19 and China’s video game industry policies.
By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu

Two people walking by a promotional image for a character in a video game.

A promotional image of a character from the video game Black Myth: Wukong. It is considered China’s first “AAA,” big-budget game. Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Black Myth: Wukong is one of the most highly anticipated Chinese video games ever, a premium title with a blockbuster-worthy budget that underscores the country’s push to become a global cultural power.

But ahead of its debut on Tuesday, a company affiliated with the game’s China-based developer rankled some influential overseas players with a list of topics to avoid discussing while livestreaming the game.

The list of forbidden subjects laid out in a document under “Don’ts” — politics, “feminist propaganda,” Covid-19, China’s video game industry policies and other content that “instigates negative discourse” — offered a glimpse of the restrictions that content creators face in China as well as the topics deemed sensitive to Beijing.

“I have never seen anything that shameful in my 15 years doing this job. This is very clearly a document which explains that we must censor ourselves,” said Benoit Reinier, a prominent video game streamer on YouTube and a French journalist, in a YouTube video. Continue reading Video game seeks to curb ‘negative discourse’ →

Xi’s ten-year bid to remake China’s media

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Source: China Media Project (7/24/24)
Xi’s Ten-Year Bid to Remake China’s Media
Outside China, the idea of “media convergence,” the joining together of communication technologies on handheld devices, is now so much a way of life that few even talk about it. But for China’s leadership it is a concept with era-defining significance — having far-reaching consequences for the current and future exercise of power.
By David Bandurski

Xi Jinping opens the Chengdu Universiade in 2023. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In recent years, the buzzword “media convergence,” or meiti ronghe (媒体融合), has abounded in official documents about public opinion and ideology in China. What does this term mean? And why is it important in a Chinese political context? The quick answer — it is about remaking information controls for the 21st century, and building a media system that is innovative, influential and serves the needs of the ruling party.

The idea of “media convergence” took off in official circles in China almost exactly 10 years ago as Xi Jinping sought to recast “mainstream media” (主流媒体) — referring narrowly in China’s political context to large CCP-controlled media groups, such as central and provincial daily newspapers and broadcasters — into modern communication behemoths for rapidly changing global media landscape. More insistently even than his predecessors, Xi believed it was crucial for the Party to maintain social and political control by seizing and shaping public opinion. To accomplish this in the face of 21st century communication technologies, built on 4G and eventually 5G mobile networks, the Party’s trusted “mainstream” media had to reinvent themselves while remaining loyal servants of the CCP agenda. Continue reading Xi’s ten-year bid to remake China’s media →

Why Chinese propaganda loves foreign travel bloggers (1)

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Good observations in this article. But somebody should write about the obvious, glaring parallels with Nazi tourism.

Just like China, the Nazis also organized foreigners to come and “see with their own eyes” to counter the accusations that the Nazis were doing anything wrong.

And huge numbers of foreign tourists did go to Goebbels Germany, which was similarly full of sightseeing spots, rich in cultural history, and helpful Nazis.

I wasn’t aware of just how striking these parallels are, but there are some outstanding books on this, such as Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich, by Kristin Semmens (2005), and Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism 1919-1945, by Julia Boyd (2018) which lay out in great detail how the Nazis purposefully organized the tourism, to cover up their crimes by luring in foreigners to play the fool, just like in China now — where we now see lots of Americans marveling about how great is the food, and the bridges and the Autobahns, etcetera.

On X/Twitter, all the usual Chinese “diplomats” as well as the armies of propaganda officers under cover have all be directed to talk about tourists and vloggers almost more than they mention the Olympics.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Why Chinese propaganda loves foreign travel bloggers

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Source: NYT (7/31/24)
Why Chinese Propaganda Loves Foreign Travel Bloggers
Videos by influencers documenting their trips have been widely promoted on Chinese media — if they tell a certain story.
By Vivian Wang, Reporting from Beijing

Spend some time browsing YouTube or Instagram and you might come across a growing new genre: China travel vlogs.

There’s the American who made a four-hour “vlogumentary” about eating dumplings in Shanghai. There’s the German traveler marveling at how quickly China’s bullet trains accelerate. There’s a British couple admiring colorful traditional clothing in the far western region of Xinjiang. All have hundreds of thousands of views.

The videos are even more popular on Chinese social media. YouTube and Instagram are banned in China, but Chinese users have found ways to reshare them to Chinese sites, to avid followings. The bloggers have been interviewed by Chinese state media and their experiences promoted with trending hashtags such as “Foreign tourists have become our internet spokespeople.”

The emergence of these videos reflects the return of foreign travelers to China after the country isolated itself for three years during the Covid pandemic. The government has introduced a slew of visa-free policies to attract more tourists. Travel bloggers have leaped at the chance to see a country to which they previously had limited access.

But for China, the videos do more than help stimulate its economy. They are a chance for Beijing to hit back at what it calls an anti-China narrative in the West. China in recent years has encouraged locals to treat foreigners as potential spies; expanded its surveillance state; and expelled or arrested journalists at Chinese and foreign media outlets. But it points to the carefree travel videos as proof — from Westerners — that criticisms about those issues are manufactured. Continue reading Why Chinese propaganda loves foreign travel bloggers →

When Worlds Collide

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Soure: China Media Project (7/22/24)
When Worlds Collide
State media have released a short, AI-generated series on Douyin. It’s the meeting point of several tools the Party has been using to modernize media and propaganda.
By Alex Colville

Government and private tech have teamed up to create the first AI-generated sci-fi short-video series in China. “Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse,” released on July 8, imagines a world far in the future where characters travel back to the Bronze Age Sanxingdui (三星堆) civilization of southern China. The series consists of 12 three-minute clips — generated with human guidance, edited through Douyin’s “Jimeng AI” (即梦AI) algorithm, and then released on their short video platform. The company has already reported views of over 20 million.

The series combines the slickness of Douyin tech with the media know-how of the State Council’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) and the Bona Film Group, one of China’s biggest production companies and a subsidiary of the state-owned mega-conglomerate Poly Group. At a press briefing, Bona executives explained how the Jimeng algorithm had generated video through the input of original images, responding to prompts on camera angles and movement speeds.

This production process is a convergence of trends that the Chinese Communist Party has been pushing forward for years to modernize the media. To look at the show is to look at some of the first sprouts of the Party’s long-term goals for communication. Continue reading When Worlds Collide →

Crackdown on extreme nationalism

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Source: China Digital Times (7/3/24)
Chinese Social Media Platforms Launch Crackdown on Extreme Nationalism and Xenophobic Hate-Speech after Fatal Suzhou Stabbing
By

Chinese social media platforms have announced a belated crackdown on “extreme nationalism” and xenophobic hate-speech online, following last week’s fatal stabbing at a school bus stop in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, in which a Japanese mother and child were injured by a knife-wielding man, and Chinese school bus attendant Hu Youping was killed after trying to intervene. Just two weeks earlier, four visiting American teachers were stabbed and injured by another man at a public park in Jilin, in northeastern China. Both stabbings are believed to have been motivated by xenophobic sentiment, and many online commenters have witheringly described the attackers as “modern-day Boxers,” referring to the anti-foreign rebels who launched the Boxer Rebellion approximately 125 years ago.

In the last few weeks, CDT editors have compiled numerous essays, articles, and netizen comments pointing out apparent links between the recent spate of attacks and the vitriolic anti-Japanese and other xenophobic content that is tolerated on Chinese television, social media, and even in school textbooks. It is worth nothing that several of these essays were censored and taken offline in the days following the Suzhou attack. The hate-speech crackdown announced by social media platforms this week seems to reflect a belated realization that xenophobic online content may be fueling hatred and even radicalizing some individuals to carry out offline attacks. Continue reading Crackdown on extreme nationalism →

Netizens reflect on anti-Japanese propaganda

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Source: China Digital Times (6/26/24)
Netizens Reflect on Anti-Japanese Propaganda after Stabbing at School Bus Stop
By Alexander Boyd

A stabbing at a school bus stop in Eastern China that left two Japanese nationals and a Chinese national injured is the latest instance of anti-foreigner violence to rock China in the last month. Two weeks ago, four instructors from Iowa’s Cornell College were stabbed in a park in northern China. Details of this latest attack are sparse: a Japanese mother and her child were stabbed while waiting for a school bus to Suzhou’s Japanese School, a school for Japanese children that follows a Japanese curriculum. Both sustained minor injuries. A Chinese bystander who attempted to prevent the attacker from boarding the school bus was grievously injured and remains in the hospital as of publication. On Weibo, reactions to the news ranged from despair over xenophobic propaganda to admiration of the Chinese bystander’s bravery. Particular ire focused on a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson’s insistence that this attack—like the one in Jilin—was “random”:

Cor-Universe：When certain emotions get stirred up, they can lead to murder.

吃瓜的专业群众SH：If we don’t reform our education and propaganda systems, there’ll only be more of these “Boxers” going forward.

迷路的羊羔：Xenophobic propaganda: scares off foreign business → leading to job losses→ which inspire attacks on foreigners → scaring off more foreign businesses → causing more job losses → leading to even more xenophobic propaganda → scaring off more businesses → thus more job loss … I term this an “Okamoto cycle.” [A reference to a 2022 incident in which Chinese men, the Six Okamoto Gentlemen, opened up a Japanese convenience store franchise and then pretended to be anti-Japanese to drum up business.]

千里虽遥：Random attacks happen randomly, but xenophobic social media videos that incite hatred against everyday people and businesses should be brought under control.

你的眼我的脸：Why are these “random attacks” happening so regularly?

紫雨hz-1974：Once the Boxers rise up, it’s hard to suppress them. Continue reading Netizens reflect on anti-Japanese propaganda →

Lying down or impossible to get ahead

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Source: China Digital Times (6/10/24)
Quote of the Day: “Not So Much ‘Lying Down’ as Finding It Impossible to Get Ahead”
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Today’s quote of the day derives from netizen backlash to the Communist Youth League’s (CYL) recent video broadside against “lying down”—referring to the much-discussed phenomenon of people slacking off, quietly giving up, or dropping out of the rat race as a means of coping with a hyper-competitive society that treats workers as “huminerals” to be relentlessly exploited and ultimately discarded.

The video, widely circulated on the Chinese internet, was titled “CYL Central Committee: ‘Only a Tiny Minority Are Truly Lying Down, While the Vast Majority Are Working Tirelessly.’” This was followed by an online survey that asked viewers to choose whether they were among the “tiny majority who lie down” or “the vast majority who work tirelessly.” To the amusement of many online observers, and at odds with the propagandistic tone and intent of the video, fully 93 percent of respondents confessed to being among that “tiny majority” of slackers, while only seven percent identified themselves as card-carrying members of the “vast majority” of indefatigable workers.

Columnist, pop psychologist, and WeChat blogger Tang Yinghong (唐映红, Táng Yìnghóng) put an interesting spin on the survey, cautioning that while most of the respondents were probably jesting, the CYL was likely correct in declaring that only a tiny minority were inclined to “lie down” because slacking off is a luxury that only the privileged few can afford. The vast majority of Chinese young people, Tang wrote, are simply too busy struggling to make a living to even contemplate dropping out or slowing down: Continue reading Lying down or impossible to get ahead →

Taiwan factcheckers

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Source: The Guardian (6/4/24)
From beef noodles to bots: Taiwan’s factcheckers on fighting Chinese disinformation and ‘unstoppable’ AI
Taiwan is the target of more disinformation from abroad than any other democracy, according to University of Gothenburg study
By Elaine Chan

A person uses her mobile phone outside a restaurant in Taipei. Experts blame China for much of the disinformation aimed at Taiwan. Photograph: Ann Wang/Reuters

Charles Yeh’s battle with disinformation in Taiwan began with a bowl of beef noodles. Nine years ago, the Taiwanese engineer was at a restaurant with his family when his mother-in-law started picking the green onions out of her food. Asked what she was doing, she explained that onions can harm your liver. She knew this, she said, because she had received text messages telling her so.

Yeh was puzzled by this. His family had always happily eaten green onions. So he decided to set the record straight.

He put the truth in a blog post and circulated it among family and friends through the messaging app Line. They shared it more broadly, and soon he received requests from strangers asking to be connected to his personal Line account.

“There wasn’t much of a factchecking concept in Taiwan then, but I realised there was a demand. I could also help resolve people’s problems,” Yeh said. So he continued, and in 2015 launched the website MyGoPen, which means, “don’t be fooled again” in Taiwanese.

Within two years, MyGoPen had 50,000 subscribers. Today, it has more than 400,000. In 2023, it received 1.3m fact check requests and has debunked disinformation on everything from carcinogens in bananas to the false claim that Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te, had a child out of marriage. Continue reading Taiwan factcheckers →

‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Identity’

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Source: NYT (6/4/24)
As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory’
The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.
By Li Yuan

An illustration of a large creature with glowing red eyes. Its paws are on stacks of paper, which are also in its mouth, in between its baring fangs. Nearby, people are holding documents, two of them holding up one that says “404.”

Credit…Yifan Wu

Chinese people know their country’s internet is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation.

They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it.

Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and collective online memory — is disappearing in chunks.

A post on WeChat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.

“The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored.

“We used to believe that the internet had a memory,” He Jiayan, a blogger who writes about successful businesspeople, wrote in the post. “But we didn’t realize that this memory is like that of a goldfish.” Continue reading ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Identity’ →