Media/Tech

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

The secret campaign to save a chained woman

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Source: NYT (3/25)
The Secret Campaign in China to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck
By Vivian WangGraphics and illustration by Pablo Robles

Screenshot from a video showing a woman chained by the neck.

The video blogger had visited Dongji Village, in eastern China, to find a man known for raising eight children despite deep poverty. The man had become a favorite interview subject for influencers looking to attract donations and clicks.

But that day, one of the children led the blogger to someone not featured in many other videos: the child’s mother.

She stood in a doorless shack in the family’s courtyard, on a strip of dirt floor between a bed and a brick wall. She wore a thin sweater despite the January cold. When the blogger asked if she could understand him, she shook her head. A chain around her neck shackled her to the wall.

The video quickly spread online, and immediately, Chinese commenters wondered whether the woman had been sold to the man in Dongji and forced to have his children — a kind of trafficking that is a longstanding problem in China’s countryside. They demanded the government intervene.

Instead, local officials issued a short statement brushing off the concerns: The woman was legally married to the man and had not been trafficked. She was chained up because she was mentally ill and sometimes hit people.

Public outrage only grew. People wrote blog posts demanding to know why women could be treated like animals. Others printed fliers or visited the village to investigate for themselves. This was about more than trafficking, people said. It was another reason many young women were reluctant to get married or have children, because the government treated marriage as a license to abuse.

The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it.

And yet, it did. Continue reading The secret campaign to save a chained woman →

Get married or get out

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Source: NYT (3/4/25)
Chinese Company to Single Workers: Get Married or Get Out
As China’s government worries about the falling birthrate, some private employers have ordered workers to do their part, or else.
By Vivian Wang, Reporting from Beijing

A bride and groom hold hands in front of a church as photographers take their picture from about 30 feet away.

Taking wedding photos in Shanghai in 2023. Last year, only 6.1 million Chinese couples got married — a 20 percent decline from a year earlier.Credit…Qilai Shen for The New York Times

The ideal worker at the Chinese chemical manufacturer, according to the internal memo, is hardworking, virtuous and loyal. And — perhaps most important — willing to have children for the good of the country.

That was the message that the company, Shandong Shuntian Chemical Group, sent to unmarried employees recently, in a notice that spread widely on social media. It instructed them to start families by Sept. 30, or else.

“If you cannot get married and start a family within three quarters, the company will terminate your labor contract,” the memo said.

Shandong Shuntian was not the first company to try to dictate its employees’ personal lives amid rising concern about China’s plummeting marriage and birth rates. Weeks earlier, a popular supermarket chain had told its staff not to ask for betrothal gifts, to lower the cost of weddings. Continue reading Get married or get out →

DeepSeeking Truth

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Source: China Media Project (2/10/25)
DeepSeeking Truth
When it comes to assessing the risks of DeepSeek, are we asking the wrong questions? Governments, journalists, and coders need to know that it’s a much more sophisticated propaganda tool than we all thought.
By Alex Colville

Can you tell me about the Tiananmen Massacre? When did China invade Tibet? Is Taiwan an independent country? When pointing out DeepSeek’s propaganda problems, journalists and China watchers have tended to prompt the LLM with questions like these about the “Three T’s” (Tiananmen, Taiwan, and Tibet) — obvious political red lines that are bound to meet a stony wall of hedging and silence. “Let’s talk about something else,” DeepSeek tends to respond. Alternatively, questions of safety regarding DeepSeek tend to focus on whether data will be sent to China.

Experts say this is all easily fixable. Kevin Xu has pointed out that the earlier V3 version, released in December, will discuss topics such as Tiananmen and Xi Jinping when it is hosted on local computers — beyond the grasp of DeepSeek’s cloud software and servers. The Indian government has announced it will import DeepSeek’s model into India, running it locally on national cloud servers while ensuring it complies with local laws and regulations. Coders on Hugging Face, an open-source collaboration platform for AI, have released modified versions of DeepSeek’s products that claim to have “uncensored” the software. In short, the consensus, as one Silicon Valley CEO told the Wall Street Journal, is that DeepSeek is harmless beyond some “half-baked PRC censorship.” 

But do coders and Silicon Valley denizens know what they should be looking for? As we have written at CMP, Chinese state propaganda is not about censorship per se, but about what the Party terms “guiding public opinion” (舆论导向). “Guidance,” which emerged in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, is a more comprehensive approach to narrative control that goes beyond simple censorship. While outright removal of unwanted information is one tactic, “guidance” involves a wide spectrum of methods to shape public discourse in the Party’s favor. These can include restricting journalists’ access to events, ordering media to emphasize certain facts and interpretations, deploying directed narrative campaigns, and drowning out unfavorable information with preferred content.

Those testing DeepSeek for propaganda shouldn’t simply be prompting the LLM to cross simple red lines or say things regarded as “sensitive.” They should be mindful of the full range of possible tactics to achieve “guidance.” Continue reading DeepSeeking Truth →

The Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet

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Source: NYT (1/20/25)
TikTok, RedNote and the Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet
Leer en español | 阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
China’s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing.
By Li Yuan

Dongyan Xu.

The Chinese social media app RedNote is full of cute, heartwarming moments after about 500,000 American users fled to it last week to protest the looming U.S. government ban on TikTok.

Calling themselves “TikTok refugees,” these users paid the “cat tax” to join RedNote by posting cat photos and videos. They answered so many questions from their new Chinese friends: Is it true that in rural America every family has a large farm, a huge house, at least three children and several big dogs? That Americans have to work two jobs to support themselves? That Americans are terrible at geography and many believe that Africa is a country? That most Americans have two days off every week?

Americans also posed questions to their new friends. “I heard that every Chinese has a giant panda,” an American RedNote user wrote. “Can you tell me how can I get it?” An answer came from someone in the eastern province of Jiangsu: “Believe me, it’s true,” the person deadpanned, posting a photo of a panda doing the laundry.

I spent hours scrolling those so-called cat tax photos and chuckled at the cute and earnest responses. This is what the internet is supposed to do: connect people. More important, RedNote demonstrated how competitive a random Chinese social media app can be from a purely product point of view. Continue reading The Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet →

Peace and Love poetry reading (1)

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On December 31, I participated in a New Year’s  Eve and New Year’s Day poetry marathon on the internet in Chinese and other languages, hosted by the poet 桉予 An Yu. Altogether 300 poets reading over 24 hours. One section  was devoted to poets from Ukraine. An Yu has now been circulating video recordings of readings from this section on WeChat, under the title Real Tiktok Refugees. I have seen reports from Ukraine and even online anthologies of poetry from Ukraine censored on WeChat, but for now, these voices are there to be heard and seen. It is a diverse selection, maybe as diverse as possible in this situation.

Real TikTok refugees – Ukrainian section of New Year poetry readings on the Chinese internet: Introduction and nine poets reading their works, along with translations.
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ifq5ZTOPY7c0d4eemiJr7g

Real TikTok refugees, part 2: Ten more poets reading their works, along with translations
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jG7IN-2rH-nkApXSW4FGeg

Martin Winter 维马丁

American refugees

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Source: China Media Project (1/16/25)
American Refugees
As TikTok users seek asylum on China’s RedNote, and glee ensues from commentators in the world’s most restricted internet environment, the lines of repression in the promised land are quickly revealing themselves.
By David Bandurski

As a January 19 deadline looms to ban or sell TikTok, and as a key decision awaits from the US Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the related July 2024 act on “foreign adversary controlled applications,” many users of the popular video-sharing platform are already rendering judgment with their feet, seeking refuge in the most unlikely of places — the international version of a popular Chinese app that has a long track record of censorship and surveillance.

This week, more than 700,000 self-styled “TikTok refugees” have flocked to China’s RedNote platform, known at home as Xiaohongshu (小红书) — literally “little red book” — an Instagram-like platform that has long been a go-to space for posts on shopping, makeup, fashion and travel. The app currently has 300 million monthly active users, nearly 80 percent women.

The mass migration, announced with the hashtag #TikTokrefugees, has made the Chinese lifestyle-sharing app an odd escape route for American users of TikTok, some of whom have posted videos criticizing the actions of US lawmakers, and declaring provocatively that they are prepared to volunteer their personal data to the Chinese government. As of yesterday the hashtag had received more than 250 million views and was closing in on six million comments. Continue reading American refugees →

Cutting micro-dramas down to size

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Source: China Media Project (1/9/25)
Cutting Micro-Dramas Down to Size
China’s government has signaled stricter rules this year for micro-dramas, a bite-size entertainment format with mega market potential.
By Alex Colville

Micro-dramas — TV series cut into short snippets of one to 15 minutes — are becoming a huge business worldwide. The global market for this new, bite-size format is said to be worth two billion dollars a year, with forecasts that this could double by the end of 2025. And that’s excluding China, which has emerged as a global leader in the production and consumption of weiduanju (微短剧).

Chinese micro-dramas: heavy on history and romance, light on Xi.

With the PRC’s micro-drama market growing at a blistering 250 percent annually, bringing in some RMB 37.4 billion (5.2 billion dollars) in 2023 according to state media reports, the authorities are also acting quickly to figure out how they can control this new entertainment format and ensure it serves their interests. On January 4, the National Radio and TV Administration (国家广播电视总局), or NRTA, publicized its plan to create hundreds of short videos on Xi Jinping’s political thought — for example, by promoting his vision of uniting classical Chinese culture with the latest technology and teaching netizens about the benefits of Xi’s version of the rule of law. Continue reading Cutting micro-dramas down to size →

‘Aim the rifle an inch higher’

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Source: China Digital Times (12/12/24)
Words of the Week: “Aim the Rifle an Inch Higher” (枪口抬高一厘米, qiāngkǒu táigāo yī límǐ)
By 

What to do when the law and basic humanity are in opposition? The Chinese internet has an answer: “Aim the rifle an inch higher” (枪口抬高一厘米, qiāngkǒu táigāo yī límǐ). The phrase is shorthand for subverting orders that violate one’s conscience.

“Aim the rifle an inch higher” has its origin in historical fact. In 1992, two former East German border guards were convicted of fatally shooting Chris Gueffroy as he fled across the no man’s land that divided East and West Berlin. While rendering the guilty verdict, the presiding judge of the trial stated: “At the end of the 20th century, no one has the right to ignore his conscience when it comes to killing people on behalf of the power structure.” After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an apocryphal version of the German judge’s closing statement began to circulate on the Chinese internet: “You had the power to aim your rifle one inch higher.” The phrase’s true origin stretches back even further, to the 1954 film “Reconnaissance Across the Yangtze.” In that film, a veteran Nationalist soldier advises a new recruit not to shoot to kill at advancing Communist troops so as to accrue potential amnesty in case they are defeated and taken prisoner: “When we’re in battle, aim your rifle an inch higher; that’s how you accumulate hidden merit.”

The phrase is now ubiquitous. As rapt Chinese netizens watched South Korean civilians block the military from occupying the National Assembly in Seoul last week—scenes that brought to mind the “Tank Man” of 1989—some commentators mocked the military’s restraint. In a now-censored essay, one author hailed the South Korean military’s decision not to use force, noting it as a real-life example of “aiming the rifle an inch higher.” Some have also used the phrase metaphorically to encourage China’s domestic security forces or online censors to shirk their duties so as to allow citizens greater freedom of expression. In a note addressed to China’s internet police after authorities shut down a 2016 in-person symposium of former Tsinghua University Red Guards, organizer Sun Nutao wrote: Continue reading ‘Aim the rifle an inch higher’ →

Telling Zhejiang’s story

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Source: China Media Project (12/4/24)
Telling Zhejiang’s Story
As international communication centers, or ICCs, open across China to beef up its global impact, one province has become home to a disproportionate number. What’s behind the ICC boom in Zhejiang?
By Alex Colville

International communications centers, or ICCs, are sprouting up all over China. These centers, a crucial piece in the leadership’s bid to remake its external propaganda matrix, have opened in nearly every province and dozens of cities nationwide. Their spread has been expansive — but far from even. One province, coastal Zhejiang, now hosts 16 “local international communication centers” (地方国际传播中心) at the municipal level or lower — five times the national average.

Zhejiang is one of China’s wealthiest provinces, but this alone cannot account for its surge in new ICCs. Even wealthier provinces, like neighboring Jiangsu and Fujian, have not experienced similar growth. So why has Zhejiang become home to so many ICCs? Continue reading Telling Zhejiang’s story →

Golden Horse Film Fest

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Source: China Digital Times (11/28/24)
Online Censorship About Lou Ye, Geng Jun Films Winning Awards at 61st Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival
By 

A banner year for Chinese films and filmmakers at the 61st Taipei Golden Horse Awards has attracted much attention on Chinese social media, despite strict ongoing censorship of any topic connected to the awards. This year’s Golden Horse Award winners, announced on November 23, include Best Narrative Feature and Best Director for Lou Ye’s “An Unfinished Film,” a work of docu-fiction about a film crew caught up in the COVID pandemic lockdown of Wuhan; Best Leading Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and the Audience Choice Award for “Bel Ami,” Geng Jun’s LGBTQ+-themed black comedy; and Best Adapted Screenplay for Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Above the Dust,” a coming-of-age film that casts a critical eye on events in PRC history (including 1950s land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the massive famine that ensued).

Chinese actors and films have technically been banned from participating in the Golden Horse Awards since 2019, after a 2018 award-ceremony speech in which Taiwanese director Fu Yue expressed her wish for Taiwan to be treated as “an independent entity.” Despite this restriction, films from China (including some co-produced films) made up over 200 of this year’s record-high 718 Golden Horse Film Festival submissions from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia.

A recent CDT Chinese post notes that the film review site Douban has scrubbed any mention of the Golden Horse Awards or award winners from the site, and Weibo search results for “Golden Horse Awards” (金马奖, Jīn Mǎ Jiǎng) are restricted to content posted by certified “blue V” accounts. Despite this, some articles about the awards that omitted or altered director names and film titles are still circulating online. For example, an article from WeChat account “Super-Sauce Movie Paradise” (超酱的电影天堂, Chāo Jiàng de Diànyǐng Tiāntáng) managed to escape censorship by employing some extensive linguistic sleight-of-hand: Continue reading Golden Horse Film Fest →

Labor activist Han Dongfang refuses to back down

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Source: NYT (11/10/24)
Once China’s ‘Worst Nightmare,’ Labor Activist Refuses to Back Down
Neither jail nor exile to Hong Kong have stopped Han Dongfang, a former Tiananmen Square protest leader, from championing workers’ rights. “If you’re born stubborn, you go everywhere stubborn.”
By Alexandra Stevenson, Reporting from Hong Kong

Han Dongfang, wearing a short-sleeved shirt, jeans and glasses, sits by a window with a potted plant behind him. His dark hair is almost to his shoulders.

Han Dongfang is one of China’s last remaining labor rights activists not in hiding. Credit…Anthony Kwan for The New York Times

Han Dongfang was just another dot in a sea of agitated university students during the mass protests in Tiananmen Square 35 years ago when he suddenly jumped onto a monument to speak.

“Democracy is about who decides our salaries,” Mr. Han, now 61, recalled shouting out to the crowd from the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Beijing. “Workers should be able to take part in the decision.”

It was one of the first times during the protests that anyone had mentioned workers. And it marked the beginning of Mr. Han’s three-decade fight for their rights in China, a struggle that was almost brought to an immediate halt.

On June 4, 1989, just weeks after Mr. Han began his speeches, the People’s Liberation Army fired on pro-democracy protesters in the square, putting a bloody end to the democracy movement and free speech in China.

The crushing response also disbanded the labor union he had helped to create during the protests — the first and only independent union since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. After Mr. Han was placed on a “most wanted” list, he turned himself in to face prison, where he served 22 months. Continue reading Labor activist Han Dongfang refuses to back down →

Copycats are no joke

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Source: China Media Project (10/21/24)
For State Media, Copycats are No Joke
The recent case of a counterfeit article erroneously sourced to the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party has the authorities crying foul. But the real culprit is their claim to a monopoly on the truth.
By Alex Colville

Earlier this month, the People’s Daily astonished millions of online readers in China by weighing in on a petty dispute between two celebrities. The article, which accused an actress of grabbing publicity by slandering her ex-boyfriend, was an odd change of character for the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece. Speculation raged about what this aberration could mean.

There was just one problem — the article was a complete fake. And within hours, a new question loomed: How did this happen?

In fact, convincing as it was — with an apparently genuine People’s Daily Online URL, look and layout — the piece wasn’t written by People’s Daily at all. The next day, the media group weighed in to disavow the article, saying it was a “copycat” (套牌) that had cloned its news pages. It went on to say this was not an isolated incident, and voiced concern that the impersonation of official news outlets, apparently a rather widespread phenomenon, could “trigger a crisis of trust” in the country’s Party-run news outlets.

In fact, the issue has little or nothing to do with trust — and everything to do with power. The lesson: monopolize access to speech and information, and those eager to be heard will find a way to borrow your privilege. Continue reading Copycats are no joke →

Crackdown on online puns

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Source: The Guardian (10/23/24)
China cracks down on ‘uncivilised’ online puns used to discuss sensitive topics
Campaign targets wordplay and memes that are often used by people to get around censorship controls
By  in Taipei

A woman prepares to load the Weibo app on her smartphone.

Chinese internet regulators are cracking down on puns and wordplay that could be used to discuss sensitive topics. Photograph: Richard Levine/Alamy

China’s internet regulators have launched a campaign cracking down on puns and homophones, one of the last remaining ways for citizens to safely discuss sensitive subjects without recriminations or censorship.

The “clear and bright” campaign is targeting “irregular and uncivilised” language online, particularly jokes, memes, and wordplay, the Cyberspace Administration of China and the ministry of education announced this month.

“For some time, various internet jargons and memes have appeared frequently, leaving people more and more confused,” said an editorial by the Communist party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily.

“They also form a hidden erosion on the daily communication and ideological values ​​of minors, which can easily lead to adverse consequences.”

China’s online spaces are strictly monitored and censored. Some sensitive topics and terms are strictly banned, such as references to the Tiananmen massacre, or criticism of President Xi Jinping. Insulting individuals or China generally is also frowned upon. Continue reading Crackdown on online puns →

Wedding humiliation

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Source: China Media Project (10/18/24)
Divorcing China from Wedding Humiliation
After a recent, egregious incident of “wedding hazing” went viral in China, the controversial tradition has been pushed back into the media spotlight. Outlets nationwide are joining the charge to end this “evil custom.”
By Dalia Parete

Late last month, media across China reported on the latest incident of harassment directed at a newlywed bride — a practice known in China as “wedding hazing” (婚闹). The news story was prompted by the surfacing on September 25 of a video showing a woman in Shanxi province tied to a telephone pole, crying for help while bystanders failed to intervene. The footage quickly went viral, igniting outrage — and prompting widespread debate about the lines between custom, decency and legality in modern Chinese society.

A screenshot from the video of the latest “wedding hazing” incident in China’s Shanxi province.

Chinese Business View (华商报), a commercial newspaper from Shaanxi province, managed to reach a certain “Mr. Yang” who had taken the video in question and posted it to social media. Yang said the incident had happened around midday on September 23 in the Digou Community (底沟社区) in the prefectural-level city of Yangquan in Shanxi province. He defended the actions shown in the video. “When weddings happen making a bit of a fuss, that’s our local custom,” he said. “It’s all good friends together. It’s not as netizens say, that anyone is getting hurt.”

In a subsequent report, Yangquan Daily (阳泉日报), the local CCP-run daily newspaper in Yangquan, reported that community personnel had investigated the case and found that the scene shown in the video was part of a pre-arranged “game” (游戏) arranged for the bride and groom as part of wedding festivities. The report said that those involved in the antics were “deeply sorry for the negative impact [the video] created.” Continue reading Wedding humiliation →

Soundless saturation / quietly nourishing

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Source: China Media Project (9/18/24)
Soundless Saturation / Quietly Nourishing 润物无声
By Alex Colville

An idiom inspired by a classic Tang Dynasty poem is now a modifier commonly used in the official political speech of the CCP to refer to the need to innovate the party’s communication of its political and social agendas — ultimately making them more palatable, and more easily accepted.

As major state-run media, online influencers and propaganda pundits gathered in Shanghai in August 2024 for a conference on how to best innovate international communication, the event’s theme drew on a Chinese idiom, or chengyu (成语), with its origins in classical Chinese poetry. “Soundless Saturation” (润物无声), the four characters splashed across the conference’s promotional poster, a map of the globe faintly visible behind.

This evocative phrase, which could also be translated “quietly nourishing,” references an early spring drizzle falling gently over the world. It is a colorful phrase that now describes the drive by the Chinese Communist Party leadership for more innovative and evocative deployment of state propaganda themes both domestically and internationally. The phrase expresses a trend in CCP thinking about the need for more subtle and effective means to disseminate and inculcate the party’s thoughts and agendas. Continue reading Soundless saturation / quietly nourishing →