Oriada

SARFT clearly had their Weetabix last week.  Not content with banning fun imposing strict new broadcasting regulations on foreign cartoons on Monday, on Wednesday they announced new rules requiring all videos broadcast on the internet to get prior approval from the government.  The ruling seems to spell the end in China for peer-sharing video sites like Youtube and Toodou.

After initial incredulity, some possible explanations for this bizarre behaviour have begun to emerge.

1. A turf war.  Initial speculation centred on the theory that SARFT was making something akin to a land-grab, staking its claim as the legal arbiter of media on internet in China.  This, it seems, is something of a grey area in government policy, as several different departments have responsibilities for various aspects of internet policing, so it is not clear who actually oversees online media output.

2. Pressure from state-owned traditional media.  Younger generations are deserting in droves the (state-owned) traditional media - tv, radio and newspapers - in favour of diverse and very-much not-state-owned entertainment options on the net.  That, in itself, is not surprising, since the political interference, tiny budgets and lousy production values prevalent in most media outlets mean that most of their output is pretty poor.  But with ad revenues falling, the media moguls are starting to fret.  In yet another recent ruling (these guys really don’t mess around) SARFT did away with infomercials for fake health products, which had been a big moneyspinner for provinvicial TV stations. So the thinking goes, that SARFT reckons by clamping down on other entertainment sources it can convince people to go back to watching TV.  (We never said these were going to be good reasons)  This would be in line with another SARFT ruling earlier this year which insisted that websites like Sina.com carry only government-approved news rather than generating their own stories, thus ensuring that state-owned newspapers wouldn’t lose readers to net outlets with fresher content.

3. Displeasure from high levels at the mockery of ‘national heroes’.  One particular type of online video content has been getting under the skin of the authorities for some time, the peculiar style of satirical spoofs known in Chinese as E gao.  Party posterboy Lei Feng and hero of 1970s military propaganda flick Sparkling Red Star, Pan Dongzi, are just two of the political icons to have been pilloried in online video parodies in recent months.   But in general in Chinese culture the pantheon of Communist heroes, from dear leaders to war heroes and even, until recently, Lei Feng, are revered with po-faced seriousness at all times.  They have been long considered beyond criticism; to poke fun at them is akin to insulting the motherland itself. 

So it must be something of a shock for the authorities to see Pan Dongzi not fighting against the Japanese, as he does in Sparkling Red Star, but rather following his dream to win the Supergirls reality TV show, as he does in the wildly popular online spoof

With the booming popularity of these kinds of spoof videos (among China’s post-89 generation X in particular), it’s understandable that officials fear that this kind of iconaclism could reach a tipping point, at which stage any and all of the once-sacred cows might be up for mockery.  If such a stage were reached, a criticism free-for-all could conceivably break out and spread far beyond the relatively isolated realm of internet spoofs.

Official annoyance at the blossoming Egao culture was registered several weeks ago at a pompous  "conference of experts" in Beijing, which issued a "Down-with-this-sort-of-thing" declaration and called for more "solemn" and "earnest" net videos instead.  So this ruling may be an attempt by the authorities to nip this troublesome artform in the bud.

Regardless of the reasons for the new law, it remains to be seen whether it will actually have any effect. Danwei has a translation of a newspaper article questioning its legality and effectiveness.

Dell has taken a savage beating from Chinese netizens over the last few weeks, after it was perceived to have ignored complaints by Chinese customers.  It is a cautionary tale of the dangers of ignoring just how influential the internet is in China.

Dell’s problems began at the end of June, when a customer named Zhang Min bought a Dell laptop online, only to find that the machine Dell delivered to him had slightly different specifications to the one he had ordered.  Zhang’s laptop had a T2300e chip, but he thought he was getting one with the T2300 chip.  Apart from the letter ‘e’, the only differerence between the two chips is that the T2300 supports visualisation (i.e. running two operating systems at once), a feature usually only required by hardcore tech-heads or server computers.  Dell says there is no difference in performance. 

Nevertheless, Zhang wasn’t happy and he contacted Dell to complain.  The company (foolishly) decided to stick to its guns, apologising for the confusion but refusing to  change the chip or offer a refund.  So a very unimpressed Zhang went online to publicize his dissatisfaction with Dell and their service at a techie forum.  Before long he had rounded up several other disgruntled Dell customers who had also been given the wrong chip.  Throw in an enterprising lawyer, Ma Jianrong, and a smidgen of wounded national pride, and before you could say "We’re sorry, here’s a full refund," Dell had been served with a class action suit, and its name was being dragged through the mud on the Chinese blogosphere. 

Despite the intensely negative publicity, Dell ploughed on with their initial strategy, gamely trying to face down the net mob.  But this Friday they finally caved and offered to refund all affected customers. 

(A detailed timeline and more exellent analysis of the situation can be found on the China Word of Mouth blog.)

Although this particular story has drawn a lot of international attention to the power of Chinese netizens, this is by no means the first time they have flexed their collective muscle.   There have been countless other examples over the last year or so of the speed and fury with which Chinese net mobs fixate on and pursue their targets, from the unmasking of the Cat Killer of Hangzhou (star of an infamous kitty snuff movie, who was tracked down and named online, even though the enterprising web-sleuths initially had almost nothing to go on) to the periodic outbreaks of sometimes plain hysterical anti-japanese fervour (e.g. the thousands-strong virtual mobs that gathered to protest the use of a supposed ‘Japanese flag’ in a virtual office in the Fantasy Journey to the West online game) 

[At the Eastwestsouthnorth blog, there is a great overview of the methodology employed by the net detectives in the pursuit of their targets.  This is in relation to the hunt for alleged child pornographers in Zhengzhou city.]

This is a pattern that has been repeated again and again.  It seems that these BBS vigilante movements are filling a social void, providing an outlet for frustrations and personal opinions that rapid economic development has created, but for which the politically backward system doesn’t provide any vent. Independent monitors, for example an Independent Consumers Watchdog, don’t exist; or if they do, they do so in name only, and are likely to be under the thumb of one of the government ministries.  So with no official body to turn to, people go online and take matters into their own hands.   At which point, as ESWN points out, Chinese surfing habits influence the way these movements coalesce: "These events are mobilized on the large Chinese BBS forums with tens of thousands of comments per hour.  By contrast, Americans tend to visit personal blogs which are less connected, coordinated and cohesive.  Thus the scale and ferocity of the Chinese manhunts are unmatched anywhere else."

An example of this web activism:  Confidence in the professional standards of domestic scientific and academic research and academia is currently at rock-bottom, with a number of high-profile scandals (like the Hanxin Chip scandal) and the halls of academia widely acknowledged to be riddled with plagarism.  The government hasn’t done much to tackle it - probably because this would require a root-and-branch overhaul of the education system - so netizens have taken it upon themselves to police this field.  A website called New Threads was set up by Fang Zhouzi, a former biochemist, with the aim of exposing instances of academic fraud. 

But this is not necessarily a positive development.  No official oversight means no accountability, which means that there are few concrete regulations and things can get ugly. A few weeks ago Fang lost a libel case brought by one of the scientists he "exposed" on the website. And last month, a Nanjing professor won a case against popular blogging site blogcn.com.   One of the professor’s students had a blog on the site which, the professor alleged, containted derogatory material about him. 

The (almost too) obvious question, though, is why this net activism doesn’t spill over into the political realm?  When we hear of so many protests every year, why don’t we hear about any similar activity on the net ?  Well, at least until now, it would seem that our e-police buddies Chacha and Jingjing, and those other 30,000 online police monitors we’ve heard so much about, have been earning their keep.  By monitoring chatrooms and forums,  they have been well-positioned to clamp down on anything remotely threatening.   An example of this was the rapid rise and subsequent smothering of an online campaign protesting rocketing house prices in Shenzhen earlier this year. 

In this case, a Shenzhen-based business man, Zou Tao, organised an online petition calling on the city’s residents not to purchase houses until the government took action to combat soaring prices.  (House prices in Shenzhen had risen 20% in the previous 12 months).  More than 30,000 fellow citizens signed up in support.  But so successful did the campaign become become that the obviously worried local authorities stepped in and put the nix on Zou’s nascent social movement (along with his website, blog, mobile phone and personal email) just as he was preparing to travel to Beijing to take his campaign national. 

We may, however, have witnessed a turning point in this attitude this week, as netizens succeeded in rolling back a decision by the Forestry Ministry to auction off hunting rights for endangered animals.  (Although, it must be said that this regulation was so monumentally daft that it was surely bound to fail, regardless of the outrage brewing on the internet.) 

So, the moral of all this net activity is that companies such as Dell will have to tread carefully and pay close attention to the mood-swings of Chinese netizens.  KFC and Volkswagen are just two of the companies who have learned this lesson the hard way in recent months.  Chinese smartmobs are often sensitive, always tenacious and relentlessly unforgiving.  And such is the nature of the Chinese web-surfing experience that little problems can very quickly become amplified and turn into PR disasters.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has banned the screening of foreign cartoons during the so-called "Golden Hours" from 5 to 8pm, prime cartoon-viewing time for Chinese children.  The regulation will primarily affect Japanese cartoons like 网球王子(Tennis Prince) and 灌蓝高手(Slamdunk) which are extremely popular with young people. 

SARFT apparently thinks move will benefit the domestic cartoon industry by "clearing up the sky", while also bringing some unspecified benefits to Chinese kids ( Note the first sentence of this article which informs us that "Chinese children will be able to watch domestic cartoons during 5 to 8 every day".  And then note the paragraph later that says 80% of surveyed kids like the foreign cartoons, while "a certain number" - whatever that might mean - expressed dislike for the domestically produced ones.)   

This all sounds eerily similar to, and just as bizarre as the decision to pull The Da Vinci Code from cinemas at the height of its popularity, under the pretext of protecting and promoting the domestic film industry.  

However, this Xinhua report also includes criticism of the new regulation from the Southern Metropolitan News, which described the new regulation as a deprival of consuming rights of the public" and blamed the poor state of the domestic industry on the quality of the products being produced. 

It is also possible that this may be another case of authorities applying a bandaid to the repercussions of shoddy economic planning.  According to the article, the government decided in 2004 that 60% of all cartoons shown in each quarter should be domestically produced ones.  This led to a rapid increase in investment in the industry, and the number of cartoons being produced soared.  But since, as noted above, these cartoons don’t seem to be very popular with "the yoof", and with new cartoons being produced all the time, a lot of people must have been losing a lot of money. 

So is this new rule that "clears the skys" for domestic producers another example of ass-backwards, reactionary economic planning? (Much like the ban on electric bikes introduced in Zhuhai, Guanzhou and several other cities, which was designed to force people to buy cars and thereby reduce the massive overcapacity in the domestic auto industry.)

In related news, the much hyped Chinese animated feature film Thru The Moebius Strip, the most expensive animated film in Chinese history, has apparently tanked at the domestic box office, pulling in just 100,000 yuan in it’s first week of release.  

UPDATE:

Foreign media outlets have picked up this story and are really going to town on it.  Dozens of agencies from the BBC to CNN have drawn attention to this new regulation by highlighting that the Simpsons can now not be shown on Chinese TV.  (CNN headline: D’oh! China Primetime Ban For Homer)

The problem is that this blog has never once seen an episode of the Simpsons on Chinese TV, nor does it know anyone else who has.  As mentioned above, the new regulation primarily affects Japanese cartoons, as most Western cartoons (with the exception of Tom &  Jerry and some other classics) have never been shown here and aren’t popular..  Yet another example of lazy foreign reporting.  

Beijing-based TV station BTV has been busy trying to make the city a better place to live by teaching the city some manners.  A weekly show running on BTV at the moment aims to educate viewers about the fundamentals of politeness by exposing the unsavoury behaviour of some Beijing citizens.

In last night’s edition, a reporter waited in the lobby of a large store and followed unsuspecting shoppers out the door in order to see how many of them would hold the door open for him.  He tried several different approaches, sometimes sending messages or talking on his phone, sometimes carrying several large boxes.  

Incredibly, out of 100 unwitting guinea-pigs, a whopping 5 deigned to hold the door for him.  The other 95 let it swing back and hit him.  (The 5 well-mannered folks each received a free gift of an Olympic Friendly toy.)  

Every week, the programme investigates a different example of antisocial behaviour, for example how many seconds would Beijing’s drivers wait behind a slow-moving car before blasting their car horns? (Answer: not very long at all).  In this blog’s favourite edition, a reporter ‘dropped’ her bags of shopping in front of oncoming cars, spilling the contents all over the road, in an effort to see how many drivers would stop and allow her to pick the things up, and how many would drive right over them.  Don’t laugh: several drivers actually did put the foot down and run over her food, more than the number who waited patiently as she gathered her stuff.   (Most of the drivers drove around her as she worked.)

While a few lessons in common courtesy wouldn’t go amiss in just about any city in the world, in Beijing this is a matter of some urgency.  1 year and 361 days from now, the eyes of the entire world will be on Beijing, and tens of thousands of foreign tourists and journalists will be milling around the city. Some residents are starting to worry that the talking point of the Games won’t be the events on the track, or the quality of the air, but rather the unbefitting behaviour of the cityfolk.    

Toodou.com is a Chinese version of Youtube.  The most-watched videos of all time on Toodou are as follows:

1: China Wins the World Cup.  Spoof movie in which the Chinese team wins the 2006 World Cup.  After Serbia and Montenegro are kicked out for splitting into two countries, China are invited to take part and Jackie Chan puts the team together.  They get beaten 14-0 by Holland in the first game but subsequently adopt a 10-0-0 formation that takes them all the way to the title.  Very funny but tasteless in places.

2:  Beautiful Girl!!  Racy pop video.

3:  The Embarassment of the Big Eyed Woman.  ‘Hilarious’ advert from Down Under featuring a woman answers her vibrator instead of her mobile phone.