Chinese Box

Censorship and China's Aids epidemic (?)

No one knows how many people in China have AIDS, and that's a huge problem.*

 About two years ago I was at a conference unveiling a new ad campaign to fight the outbreak of AIDS in China. The message wasn't "use a condom" or even "abstain from sex" the message was: over 50% of people with HIV got it through sex.

That's right, the message was, unprotected sex put you at a risk for getting HIV. The people unveiling the campaign said "people in China just don't realize that you can get AIDS through sex," the common thought is the most major way to get AIDS is through tainted blood.

They were quickly backed up by one of the reporters in the room, who stood up and asked "I thought it was really difficult to get AIDS through sex? and can't AIDS be cured by traditional Chinese medicine?"

This interacting came to mind when I read this post musing about the absence of sex in the Chinese edition of Cosmo. Which linked further to a crackdown sexual health related websites (though I could imagined benevolent ways to interpret the latter article). China's control over information is almost certainly having a very real and large effect on the transmission of STDs in the country. Consider:

1. We don't know how many people in China have AIDS.

2. We do know that there is a large drug problem in the area near the golden triangle.

3. Lack of information about AIDS is at a high enough level that educated people don't think it is transmitted (or at least not very likely to be transmitted) through sex.

4. While illegal, the Chinese government mostly turns a blind-eye to prostitution (unlike sexual education), particularly among migrant workers, who also have less access to any form of education.

5. Prostitution is so wide spread in areas with large numbers of migrant workers that it is impossible for prostitutes to self-enforce condom usage. (as it would mean giving up a large amount of business)

Simply put, if you want to see a country that is doing everything wrong when it comes to the spread of HIV, you don't have to look any farther than China.

* China does release an official number. In 2005 up to 760,000 people had AIDS. In 2009, the number had reached.... ::cough:: 740,000

American media deserves its fate

A lot of people are talking about the firing of Dave Weigel (last link is the trivial crap that got him fired, "of" is my favorite, there is plenty more out there if anyone cares). It doesn't really have much of a place on a blog thats ostensibly about China, and I have very little clue what I'm talking about in reference to Weigel's actual reporting, which I hadn't read for a while because I've stopped taking the American right wing seriously (which Weigel honorably hadn't), but I want to touch on it briefly since this blog is also ostensibly about transparency, and I think often the problems that arise with certain issues of "media responsibility," has to do with a very poor notion of what the media is, or what the media should be, that has oddly become the dominant viewpoint pretty much everywhere in the world over the past 50-100 years. Specifically, the media tries to report facts, but ignores its primary responsibility, giving people the information they need to make informed decisions.

There's a lot of emphasis put on the idea of "media bias." In America the right says all the journalists are liberals, and the left says all the media outlets have the interests of their corporate owners in mind. France started its own news channel to overcome the anglo-american bias of the BBC and CNN, and of course China thinks the whole world is biased against them, and that the government needs an outlet for its own form of the truth. 

I've had really really really annoying conversations with all the above parties (the worst was a China Daily reporter shouting about American media bias on a plane full of Chinese people), and it generally seems to me that these opinions stem from a conviction that "Media SHOULD be fact, but it IS opinion." Or more specifically, mixing up the fact that journalists aren't supposed to state opinions (but instead should express a situation through facts), with the idea that journalists aren't supposed to have opinions (you can't report on things that are blatantly false as though they are true, even if that's what one party says).

An example from the easily demonized Chinese government: During the Copenhagen climate talks, Wen Jiabao said that China would reduce carbon intensity (carbon usage per unit of GDP) by 45% by 2020. Mathematically, with China's targeted 8% growth rate, China would be outputting more carbon by 2020 even if it reduced carbon intensity by the targeted amount. I wrote this in my article, but had to remove it because my censor told me it was anti-Chinese bias.

American media does a very similar thing in most its standard newspapers (I have a strong - though odd - respect for wire reporting). It changes reporting about an issue to reporting about the discussion around an issue. 

Which is all fine and good as long as they are framing debate in a way that deals with real unknowns, but as soon as they begin to assume that certain parties can't be ignored, even if they're fairly crazy, they're being irresponsible journalists. (Compare the build up to the Iraq war with James Fallow's excellent "The fifty-first state" and you'll see the difference).

Of what I've read of Weigels he seemed to have a unique talent for seeing the serious in people who branded themselves on the fringe, which is the type of reporting the tea-party people needed if they wanted to do anything coherent in regards to government, which they obviously don't.

Anyways, working as a business journalist this is quite a bit more straight forward than as a political journalists (people make money off good reporting, lose money off bad), but a lot of straight forward matters of "what works" are turned in to political "who says" issues, which is bad for whatever country the conversation takes place, and why I think media outlets like the Washington post should drop off the face of the earth. Or as my one of my favorite politicians put it "socialism and capitalism don't matter these days, only pragmatism matters."

China's censorship regulations are a clearly laid out state secret

This is fun

 Google is now numbering its requests for information, or removal of information from world governments. With the exception of China, which considers its censorship requests a "state secret." The distribution of which, as Stern Hu knows, can lead to some pretty hefty penalties.

Oddly, the government regularly states elsewhere that their censorship policy is open and transparent.

Sigh

The trouble with infotech behind the great firewall

A friend of mine who works for an IT outsourcing company in China, told me that the whole company's network has to work on a VPN. A lot of what they are doing involves testing the usability of phones on heavily used websites like Facebook and Twitter, which of course are blocked in China. The use of VPNs makes the job doable in China, but you have to wonder at what cost to their bottom line. 

Why Google should have stayed

Yasheng Huang is a writer I like. A high point from his article on the google affair (you should read all of it):

China's market for ideas is enormous. Last month, the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, went online and personally answered netizens' questions, even some that, by Chinese standards, were rather blunt. (One answer Wen gave on the real estate market prompted a blogger in China to post all the past statements Wen had made on controlling real estate prices -- alongside an index of rising prices.)

Baidu is just a bad company

I have to comment more about the whole Google event. Mainly I want to succinctly lay out why Baidu is a bad company that doesn't deserve the money they are getting off Google's withdrawal from China.

 I've published two separate stories on Baidu's screw-ups. First, in January 2009, I published a story on Baidu's attempt to recover from a series of scandals in 2008 (The linked story is a compilation, my piece is under the headline "Robin Li" Baidu's CEO). Among said scandals were:

1. Allegations that they were censoring news related to the poison milk scandal, in order to protect one of the companies.

2. An expose about their advertising practice which doesn't differentiate paid search results from real search results, which had the unseen consequences of promoting doctors that weren't real doctors, and other scam artists.

Both were especially damaging because a search engine is essentially about presenting users with authoritative content. Google had been rapidly eating away at Baidu's market share, and would continue throughout 2009 (Google's market share jumped from 22% to 30% between January and December). 

In December 2009, I suggested investors sell the stock based on the fact that: 

1. Google was rapidly eating away their market share.

2. Investment was obviously more speculative than fundamental at that point

3. Their new advertising system was still being tested

If I had known that google would do what it did I would have of course not published said story, but since then I have become less confident in their business plan and management.

Part of that is based on the fact that the management seems to lack confidence in the management. Baidu is losing top managers day after day. 

They are also venturing into content areas where it is nearly impossible to make a profit in China (video), or where their competitors have proved more competent (games). Their expansion over the past 2 years has proved breakneck and pointless. Baidu's attempt to expand in Japan is also proving to be a complete failure, dismantling their argument that they are better with Asian language search results.

I don't doubt that Baidu will benefit of Google's departure, nor do I doubt that they could prove to make their shareholders very very rich for a very long time. I just think its a bad company, that deserves to fail.

Update: This post has been picked up by the twittersphere, which is quite lovely, though its gotten a lot of comments a long the lines that its "short on argument." I wanted to clarify that I'm not arguing that Baidu deserves to fail because its running a poor service, which I think is what it sounds like from the tone (I had slept 4 hrs when I wrote it). You can argue that from the 2008 scandals, though overall I'd say the company's core service is at least on the level of Bing. I'm more trying to make the point that its poorly managed, and was in the process of imploding, when Google, to everyone's surprise, hit the self-destruct button. Baidu is going to plug on for decades now, but I'm fully convinced that if Google hadn't left it would have been the dominant browser by 2013.

Google is gone

Image by keso via Flickr

My attempt to write a post about Google ironically led to a collapse of my browser right as I was about to finish. (It was due to a glitch in Google's chrome browser for extra irony).

I don't have the energy to repost my full thoughts on the general fucked-uppedness of the event. Its made my online life much better because it inspired me to pay the money for a VPN, helping me discover twitter and thereby double my blog traffic. And I think it'll make the job of a China journalist a bit easier as the China netizens migrates to VPNs and foreign social networks. But its a serious blow to the education networks of common Chinese people. Which is important. Google and the Chinese government can both shrug this off, but China and the Chinese people will have some troubles with it.

I suggest James Fallows' recent interview with David Drummond for a good run down of the stuff that hasn't been widely reported already.

March Issue of China International Business

Wang Jing and Mo Mo - My Interview with two dancing girls in Wenzhou. I'm really quite happy with this article, and I might be publishing a longer version of it on the blog - they had a fairly in depth knowledge of the bar's finances, which had to be cut because of length.

The Porn Identity - Details about the country's crack down on "online porn" by which is meant "the internet." The entire article is worth reading just for the one paragraph describing all the bureaucratic entities involved.

Clear the Tracks - On China's high speed trains. I've long had the sneaking suspicion that all those analysts who say that China has a nearly unlimited amount of money are being overly optimistic. This is the first place where I've seen concrete evidence that the government doesn't have enough money to pay for its infrastructure drive.