Chinazism

Quentin Tarantino shows how to take a stand against China and shame the censors
By Sonny Bunch Quentin Tarantino speaks at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles on Oct. 2. 

Leave it to Quentin Tarantino, a filmmaker whose body of work demonstrates a keen understanding of the power of stories to mold our perceptions of the world, to show lesser lights how to take a stand against authoritarian repression.
Chinese officials abruptly canceled the release of “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood” in that country last week. 

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the shocking move came after Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter, complained to Chinese officials about the film’s representation of her father as a boastful fool fought to a standstill by a mere stuntman.
Tarantino, one of the rare directors with the power to demand final cut on his (relatively expensive) films, reportedly has no intention of re-editing the picture — not for Shannon Lee, not for Chinese censors squeamish about the film’s graphic violence, not for any reason. 

And in so doing, Tarantino proves yet again that he is one of the most important, most interesting, most provocative and most honest filmmakers working today.
Aside from his accountants and the bean counters at Sony, one can only guess how much money Tarantino is leaving on the table by sticking to his guns; he reportedly negotiated a massive back-end deal when selling his services on “Once Upon a Time,” asking for upwards of 25 percent of the first-dollar gross. (A “Sony insider” told the Hollywood Reporter he did not get this figure, but he probably got something close to it if he didn’t: according to Deadline, Tarantino earned something like $75 million between “Inglourious Basterds” and “The Hateful Eight.”)
On top of that are second-order financial considerations for Tarantino. 

Refusing to play ball with China might make studios more reluctant to back the auteur on projects going forward; even if he only has one more film in him, as he has promised, alienating revenue sources is a risky play. 

But for a true artist — someone with vision and confidence in it — it’s the only play to make.
Tarantino’s refusal to play ball is a vital statement of artistic freedom. 

But it’s only half the story. 

That he needed to defend the integrity of his movie at all is due to the actions of scolds who give the lie to the idea that advocates for social responsibility in film are not in league with censors.
“I think part of what is so troubling to me is that it places a lot of responsibility on the audience to interpret what’s factual and what’s not factual,” Shannon Lee told Vanity Fair around the time of the film’s release. 

Lee was not referring to the fact that Tarantino flagrantly messes with the course of history by negating the Manson Family’s murders of Sharon Tate and her friends at her house on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles. 

No, she was complaining about the artistic interpretation of her father as preening and cocky rather than her preferred depiction, humble and modest.
Her real complaint is not that audiences might have to sort through fact and fiction. 

It’s that Tarantino eschews her mythologizing. 

But the “Pulp Fiction” director is under no obligation to back up her family’s conception of the best-known Lee.
Jen Yamato, writing in the Los Angeles Times, noted all the ways critics of the scene believed it to be out of bounds. 

Jeff Yang suggested the treatment of Bruce Lee flirted with “exploitation.” 

Nancy Wang Yuen decried the idea that Lee’s “kung fu becomes a joke, and his philosophizing becomes a fortune cookie.” 

Combined with the fact that Tarantino refused to take seriously a ridiculous question about the number of lines of dialogue Margot Robbie had as Sharon Tate, and that’s it: “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” was slapped with the most dreaded of labels: “problematic.”
Of course, that designation didn’t really matter all that much, given that the vast majority of people really don’t care about these teapot tempests. (Repeat after me: Twitter is not real life.) 

If only there were a way to make the filmmaker care. 

By, say, partnering with a band of fascists and censoring his work with the aid of the government. Then our moral arbiters could make real change happen. 

Then they could truly achieve justice.
Tarantino’s refusal to revisit his film for the censors should shame not only those who would sell out Hong Kong protesters and imprisoned Uighurs so they can sell a few more sneakers and a few more movie tickets. 

It should also give pause to all who would denounce an artist for pursuing a vision that defies the bounds of political correctness. 

We’re often told that pursuing political correctness isn’t censorship — it’s just politeness.
Apparently, that’s not always the case.

Kick Confucius Institutes Off Campus

Chinese Propaganda Has No Place on Campus
Universities can’t handle Confucius Institutes responsibly. The state should step in.
BY ANDREAS FULDA

The exasperated expression on the face of Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, at a public hearing on the influence of autocracies on U.K. universities gave it away. 

Tugendhat had just asked what could be done to address self-censorship among Chinese students in the United Kingdom or the United States. 

The evasive answers by Alexander Bustamante, the senior vice president and chief compliance and audit officer at the University of California, and Bill Rammell, the vice chancellor at the University of Bedfordshire and chair of MillionPlus, the Association for Modern Universities, were met with a frown and the occasional glance at the chairman’s mobile phone. 

Tugendhat, a former British Army officer and counterintelligence expert, was not having it.
Tugendhat is not the only exasperated one in this discussion. 

Over the last 15 years, one question has come up again and again: the role of Confucius Institutes, funded and run by the Chinese party-state, in extending Chinese censorship to Western universities.
Since 2004, around 550 Confucius Institutes have opened worldwide, with close to 100 in the United States and 29 in the United Kingdom. 

In recent years, however, the enthusiasm with which university leaders around the world have embraced the institutes has soured. 

Increasing numbers of them have been shut. 

That’s partially thanks to the geopolitical shift against an increasingly autocratic Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Xi Jinping’s leadership and partially due to the institutes themselves being no more immune to the CCP’s waves of political repression than any other Chinese state institute—even abroad.
Confucius Institutes repeatedly stray from their publicly declared key task of providing Mandarin Chinese language training and venture into deep ideological territory. 

The institutes’ learning materials distort contemporary Chinese history and omit party-induced humanitarian catastrophes such as the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) entirely. 

At Confucius Institute events, politically sensitive issues like Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen cannot be publicly discussed either. 

In 2014, a conference in Braga, Portugal, that involved both the Confucius Institute headquarters and the Taiwan-based Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange as co-sponsors was unceremoniously interrupted by Confucius Institute headquarters chief Xu Lin. 

And under the conditions of the Seven Don’t Speak directive, mainland Chinese education workers are barred from talking about universal values, freedom of speech, civil society, civil rights, the historical errors of the CCP, official bourgeoisie, and judicial independence—even when overseas.
There is an existing problem of self-censorship among China scholars. 

A recent survey revealed that in the face of increasing CCP censorship, “researchers employ several tactics in the face of such pressures. Almost half — some 48% — of respondents adapted how they describe their project in order to continue doing it, 25% changed the project’s focus, and 15% discontinued a project because of concern for sensitivity — or feasibility as the likelihood of being denied archive access in China made many projects unfeasible.”

Confucius Institutes bring another factor in: the hope of money and the fear of losing it. 

In a report by the Royal United Services Institute on China-U.K. relations, Charles Parton, a former British diplomat and security expert, pointed out that the “problem does not lie primarily with teaching staff. Often, when they meet pressure, they are not backed up by university administrators. 

A number of professors have told the author that vice-chancellors and other administrators have not supported them when they have been subject to pressures which impinge on academic freedom.”
Confucius Institutes at universities can be likened to Perry Link’s “anaconda in the chandelier”—his metaphor for the power of censorship in China. 

While the anaconda may not move, its shadow nevertheless induces fear among staff, students, and university managers alike, and they react accordingly. 

Mindful of the importance of international student recruitment, there is little appetite among university administrators to jeopardize the steady stream of fee-paying international students from mainland China.
Confucius Institutes play a double role: They are both cultural and political organizations. 

When discussing the equally controversial role of Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, student groups with strong ties to the Chinese embassies, the British academic Martin Thorley recently coined the term “latent network.” 

In Thorley’s words, the “latent network is one of multiple forms of power transmission by the Party-state over the periphery. The firewall between the public and the private, typically a far more robust fixture in liberal democracies, must be more permeable in a system where a single institution rules without effective legal oversight.” 

Thorley goes on to explain that “institutions within this network, though not necessarily controlled by the CCP directly in their day-to-day affairs, are dependent on CCP patronage and thus, subject to CCP direction.”
The fate of the Lyon Confucius Institute (LCI) underscores the danger that Confucius Institutes as latent networks pose. 

Following the arrival of an activist director from mainland China in the fall of 2012, an increasingly bitter conflict ensued over curriculum development. 

When LCI Chair of the Board Gregory Lee successfully resisted such attempts to introduce a CCP-style curriculum, the university’s relationship with Hanban, the Confucius Institute headquarters in Beijing, ended acrimoniously, and the LCI was closed. 

Any other global university currently partnering with Confucius Institutes may in the future share Lyon’s fate.
All this points to a critical truth: The decision to host Confucius Institutes on campuses should not be devolved to universities but made by the state.
Unless they’re willing to see the CCP’s grip tighten on their own institutions, governments worldwide should move to ban Confucius Institutes from operating on university campuses. 

Critics call this McCarthyism. 

But such a state intervention would not be undermining but in fact restoring academic autonomy and freedom of speech. 

Nobody is calling for intellectual restrictions or ideological tests for staff — merely for a recognition that money is power and that the CCP is ready to use it. 

Such state intervention would also provide the necessary cover for universities to terminate their existing cooperation agreements with Confucius Institutes without being accused of picking a fight with the CCP.
Opponents of such a state intervention should bear in mind that Confucius Institutes—just like any other cultural organization operating overseas—could still register as civic groups and rent out office space off campus and continue their public relations work. 

This is how Western cultural organizations like the Goethe-Institut, British Council, and Institut Français operate globally. 

Removing Confucius Institutes from universities could be considered an overdue standardization that brings them in line with common global practice.
Following such a ban, Confucius Institutes could also merge with China Cultural Centers, another Chinese cultural organization that operates with more than 30 branches worldwide.
But governments and universities alike should make up for the limited loss of revenue by fully funding Chinese language and contemporary Chinese studies provision. 

If China matters, they should put their money where their mouth is. 

It remains the responsibility of Western educators to proactively engage Chinese students and scholars as individuals and take the lead in introducing domestic students to mainland China, rather than letting the CCP and its outlets own the China story.

Legitimate Self-Defence: Fuck China

"South Park" declares 'Fuck the Chinese government' in 300th episode after China banned the show

• "South Park" fired back at the Chinese government during Wednesday's 300th episode after the country banned the show from its internet.
• In the episode, Randy Marsh declares "Fuck the Chinese government."
• "South Park" discussion forums were shut down, and videos of the show were removed from the Chinese internet after last week's episode mocked the country's censorship.
• The creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, issued a mock apology to China on Monday, saying "We too love money more than freedom and democracy."

By Travis Clark

Randy Marsh declares "Fuck the Chinese government."

"South Park" fired back at China during Wednesday's 300th episode after the country banned the long-running Comedy Central animated series.
In the episode, titled "SHOTS!!!," Towelie forces Randy Marsh to declare "Fuck the Chinese government." 

Marsh is reluctant at first since he's been selling marijuana in the country.
Last week's episode, called "Band in China," mocked Chinese censorship and Hollywood's reliance on the country's box office to boost potential blockbusters. 

It referenced China's crackdown on Winnie the Pooh, which has become a symbol of resistance against China's ruling Communist Party and its dictator Xi Jinping.
China retaliated by shutting down "South Park" discussion forums and removing clips and episodes of the show from its internet, as first reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
"South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker issued a mock apology to China on Monday, saying "Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn't look just like Winnie the Pooh at all."

The statement mocked the NBA's apology to China after the Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted on Friday (and then deleted) an image with the slogan "Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong" in solidarity with the Hong Kong protesters.
"Band in China" was projected onto screens throughout Hong Kong's Sham Shui Po district on Tuesday, according THR.

Wikipedia Is Now Banned in China in All Languages

BY HILLARY LEUNG

An error message for the blocked Wikipedia website page is seen on a computer screen on March 23, 2018.

China has expanded its ban on Wikipedia to block the community-edited online encyclopedia in all available languages, the BBC reports.
An earlier enforced ban barred Internet users from viewing the Chinese version, as well as the pages for sensitive search terms such as Dalai Lama and the Tiananmen massacre.
According to Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), an internet censorship research group, the block has been in place since late April.
The Wikimedia foundation said in a statement that it did not receive any notice of the censorship.
Wikipedia joins a growing list of websites that cannot be accessed in China, which in recent years has tightened its grip on access to information online. 

Google, Facebook and YouTube are among the sites already banned, forcing Internet users to use virtual private networks, or VPN, to bypass what has become known as the “Great Firewall” of China.
Reporters Without Border’s 2019 World Press Freedom index ranks China at 177 on a list of 180 countries analyzed. 

China is not just issuing censorships locally, but is also attempting to infiltrate foreign media in an attempt to deter criticism and spread propaganda.
Wikipedia is also blocked in Turkey.

China Is Burning Books Again

Censors are on the lookout for political mistakes—even in print runs for foreigners.
BY AMY HAWKINS

Books about Chinese dictator Xi Jinping are displayed at the Beijing International Book Fair in Beijing on Aug. 23, 2018. 

The year is 1925, and Shanghai is in flux. 

Communists, Nationalists, and Triad gangsters are all fighting for control of this vice-laden city, and one “preeminent bon vivant,” Victor Sassoon, is fighting to keep evil at bay. 

Almost a century later, however, on China’s south coast, Sassoon is burnt to a crisp, a victim of the government’s ever-tightening restrictions on the imaginative world.
Victor Sassoon was a real person—but he’s also the hero of The Sassoon Files, a roleplaying game supplement (think Dungeons and Dragons) designed by Jesse Covner and Jason Sheets, two Americans living in Japan. 

Last week, via a recorded video message, Covner broke the news to their 511 followers—who had crowdfunded $24,183 to make the book a reality—that the entire print run of The Sassoon Files had been destroyed by the factory in Guangzhou contracted to fulfil the order. 

A government official had visited the manufacturer and ordered that all the books be destroyed within 24 hours, even though they were scheduled to be shipped directly overseas, with no plans for sale to the Chinese market. 

“I couldn’t believe what I heard,” lamented Covner. 

“I’d never heard of China’s government getting involved with printing issues for export to foreign markets.”
The Sassoon Files is the latest casualty of the Chinese government’s ever-increasing political paranoia and determination to control the global narrative. 

Whether it’s demanding that Cambridge University Press censor its offerings in China, grooming foreign journalists, or expanding its infiltration of Western newspapers with inconspicuous supplements from the state-run China Daily, Beijing’s propaganda drive has gone from the defensive to the offensive.
As the journalist Louisa Lim and researcher Julia Bergin have argued, the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on an “aggressive drive to redraw the global information order.” 

Part of this drive is controlling what can and can’t be produced in what used to be the world’s workhouse, regardless of who the intended audience is, or of the commercial consequences. 

The printing industry in China is worth about $93 billion—making up more than 10 percent of the worldwide total, and second only to the United States.
Jo Lusby, a former CEO of Penguin Random House North Asia who now runs her own publishing consultancy in Hong Kong, stresses that rules about what printers in China can print have always been in place, and those with a license to print foreign ISBNs know that they will face extra administrative hurdles and scrutiny. 

“It’s like trying to print a T-shirt that says ‘Free Tibet’ in China—that factory would get shut down,” she explained. 

Industry veterans have navigated these murky waters for a long time. 

What has changed, though, is the expanding list of topics deemed sensitive.
Earlier this year, this list was put in writing for the first time and circulated among publishers. 

Its scope is farcical: As well as widely known sensitive subjects such as Tibet, Taiwan, and the Tiananmen Square massacre, any mention of any political figures whatsoever is verboten. 

Lusby said that even the phrase “Deng Xiaoping-era policies,” a common proxy term for the reform and opening up of China that began in the 1980s, has been flagged before.
This rule is where The Sassoon Files faltered—one of the options in the game is to work as a secret agent for Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s second in command. 

“The cultural department examined the books and found some false reports about the men of Chinese history, so did not allow us to print [them] and ordered us to destroy the books,” a spokesperson for China Seven Color Group, the factory used by Covner and Sheets, told Foreign Policy. 

Covner and Sheets declined to comment, citing security concerns for their friends and colleagues in China.
It is not just newcomers who have had print runs scuppered by China’s censorship laws. 

Last year, the Australian publishing house Hardie Grant was forced to abandon two book projects after its Chinese suppliers refused to cooperate. 

Both issues were cartographical: In one book, the font used for Taiwan on a hand-drawn map was the same size as that used for China, which was “unacceptable,” they were told; the other book, a children’s atlas, showed a hard border between China and Tibet. 

Maps are a particular shibboleth in China, where “incorrect” images are regularly destroyed.
Sandy Grant, Hardie Grant’s co-founder, said that he hadn’t anticipated any problems, given that neither book was pegged for release in China. 

Still, the publisher tried to find workarounds. 

But when the illustrator of the Taiwan map refused to compromise on the design, and color printers for the children’s atlas in other countries were too expensive, both books had to be dropped. 

“We don’t want to change what we do,” Grant said, “but anything that requires international mapping we will [now] not do or look at very carefully.”
Grant believes the result of China’s demands is that self-censorship “is not just a risk in the industry—it is prominent.” 

As in many other sectors, such as technology, aviation, and film, publishers around the world are having to consider how far they are willing to capitulate to China’s view of the world in order to exploit its economic offerings. 

In the case of publishers, though, it is not about reaching a Chinese audience—it is about what version of China to communicate to the rest of the world. 

For Lusby, the issue of self-censorship is not clear-cut, although she conceded that it can “creep in” in the “tiny judgement calls” that publishers are forced to make over, for example, whether Taiwan should be listed as a separate country. 

Major academic publishers have already conceded to censoring for the Chinese market, if not the global one.
Any publisher has to consider the cost of printing in order to be commercially viable. 

Cheap black-and-white printing is available worldwide, but China still has a market edge when it comes to color or other special features—one publisher estimates that it is 40 percent cheaper to print books in China than it is in North America. 

This could change, though, as publishers feel less confident about investing resources into print contracts that could fall through at the last minute or be subject to lengthy delays. 

Printing is where “the commercial meets the political,” Lusby said, adding that rising labor costs in China and delays caused by factories being forced to close because of air pollution reduction targets have meant that Chinese printers are becoming less competitive.
What is certain to make Chinese printers less competitive is book burning. 

China Seven Color Group said that The Sassoon Files was the first time that it had been forced to take destructive action—a technique once common in the bonfires of the Cultural Revolution.

Publishers might be willing to put free speech concerns aside for the sake of profit, but if Chinese printers are forced to bear the brunt of the government’s obsessions, they’ll pay a sharp price.

Reddit Users Rally Against Chinese Censorship After $300 Million Funding Round

By TARA LAW 

As news that Chinese company Tencent will invest $150 million in Reddit ricocheted across the popular aggregation website, Redditors expressed fears about censorship — and shared a lot of Winnie the Pooh and Tiananmen Square pictures.
The deal with Tencent, a holding company which specializes in technology, is reportedly part of Reddit’s plan to raise $300 million to support the company’s operations, according to a report released Tuesday by TechCrunch. 

Reddit, which boasts 330 million active users and bills itself as the “Front Page of the Internet,” is inaccessible in China.
Reddit confirmed the deal Monday morning, saying that it raised $300 million in a funding round led by Tencent and joined by several of the site’s existing investors. 

The deal gives Reddit a market valuation of $3 billion. 

The company did not offer further comment about the funding round.
Most of the backlash has been in the form of a number of posts to one of the site’s most popular groups, r/pics, which has over 20 million subscribers. 

Redditors have written that they feared the site, which is famously a bastion of free speech (with some exceptions) and the home of many niche communities, could end up facing censorship as is seen in China. 

There, the government blocks references to the bloody 1989 massacre in the Beijing square, as well as images that are more subtly subversive, such as the iconic and lovable Disney bear.
Since the deal was first reported five days ago, numerous Reddit users posted threads and memes criticizing the investment, arguing that it would cause Reddit to clamp down on freedom of expression outside of China. 

One post, which included the iconic image of a single man stopping a tank in Tiananmen Square, was by far the most popular post of the week and “up-voted” more than 200,000 times.
Some Reddit users posted Winnie the Pooh as an example of how arbitrary Chinese censors could be.
Winnie the Pooh has been an outlaw in China since 2017. 

The Chinese government appeared to tire of Chinese social media sharing an image of the cartoon bear walking with Tigger compared to a photo of Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama.
“Reddit is now funded by Chinese investors, so let’s remember that Xi Jinping is so insecure in a meme that he banned Winnie the Pooh nationwide,” wrote Redditor kproxurworld, from r/pics
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Others also posted the iconic image of a man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square.
“Given that Reddit just took a $150 million investment from a Chinese censorship powerhouse, I thought it would be nice to post this picture of ‘Tank Man’ at Tienanmen [sic] Square before our new glorious overlords decide we cannot post it anymore,” wrote user FreeSpeechWarrior, from r/pics
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However, other users pointed out that Reddit is huge, and a $150 million purchase is not a controlling share in the company, which was valued at $2.7 billion at the time of the sale, according to Tech Crunch.
“A lot of people seem to think it’s a majority buy out for some reason,” wrote user Lunariel.
China has previously been very willing to censor western companies for referencing Winnie the Pooh. 

Last year, the country blocked HBO’s website after a segment of an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver mocked China’s ban on Winnie the Pooh and censorship in the country overall.
Chinese censors’ aversion to Winnie has also been blamed for the embargo of the live-action Winnie the Pooh film Christopher Robin last summer, although it might have been just a regular victim of China’s cap on foreign films. 

China only allows in about 40 foreign films annually.

Twitter Users in China Face Detention and Threats in New Beijing Crackdown

By Paul Mozur

An online data processing center in Nangong, China. Twitter is blocked in China, but users in a small but active community in the country gain access with special software.

SHANGHAI — One man spent 15 days in a detention center. 

The police threatened another’s family. 

A third was chained to a chair for eight hours of interrogation.
Their offense: posting on Twitter.
The Chinese police, in a sharp escalation of the country’s online censorship efforts, are questioning and detaining a growing number of Twitter users even though the social media platform is blocked in China and the vast majority of people in the country cannot see it.
The crackdown is the latest front in Xi Jinping’s campaign to suppress internet activity. 

In effect, the authorities are extending their control over Chinese citizens’ online lives, even if what they post is unlikely to be seen in the country.
“If we give up Twitter, we are losing one of our last places to speak,” said Wang Aizhong, a human-rights activist who said the police had told him to delete messages criticizing the Chinese government.
When Beijing is unable to get activists to delete tweets, others will sometimes do the job. 

Mr. Wang refused to take down his tweets. 

Then, one night last month while he was reading a book, his phone buzzed with text messages from Twitter that contained backup codes to his account.
An hour later, he said, 3,000 of his tweets had been deleted. 

He blamed government-affiliated hackers, although those who were responsible and the methods they used could not be independently confirmed.
A Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment on the government campaign.
China has long policed what its citizens can see and say, including online, but the recent push shows that Beijing’s vision of internet control encompasses social media around the world. 

Messages on WhatsApp, which is blocked in China, have begun to appear as evidence in Chinese trials.
The Chinese government has increasingly demanded that Google and Facebook take down content that officials object to even though both companies’ sites are inaccessible in China. 

After the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui used the platforms to lob graft accusations at top Chinese leaders, Facebook and Twitter suspended his accounts temporarily, citing user complaints and the disclosure of personal information.
Twitter may be banned in China, but the platform plays an important role in political debate and the discussion of issues in the country. 

To access the service, a small but active community uses software to circumvent the government’s controls over what people can see online. 

According to an estimate based on a survey of 1,627 Chinese internet users last year by Daniela Stockmann, a professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Germany, only 0.4 percent of China’s internet users, roughly 3.2 million people, use Twitter.
While it remains off limits for people in China, official media outlets like the Communist Party-controlled People’s Daily newspaper and the Xinhua news agency have used Twitter to shape perceptions of the country in the rest of the world.
“On the one hand, state media takes advantage of the full features of these platforms to reach millions of people,” said Sarah Cook, a senior analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group based in the United States. 

“On the other hand, ordinary Chinese are risking interrogation and jail for using these same platforms to communicate with each other and the outside world.”
LinkedIn, the business networking service and one of the few American social media outlets allowed in China, has always bowed to the country’s censors. 

It took down the Chinese accounts of Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was once imprisoned in China, last month and Zhou Fengsuo, a human-rights activist, this month. 

The company sent emails to both containing language similar to the messages it sends users when it removes posts that violate censorship rules.
“What we’ve seen in recent weeks is the authorities desperately escalating the censorship of social media,” Mr. Humphrey said. 

“I think it’s quite astonishing that on this cloak-and-dagger basis, LinkedIn has been gagging people and preventing their comments from being seen in China.”
Both accounts have been restored. 

In a statement, LinkedIn apologized for taking the accounts down and said it had done so by "accident". 

“Our Trust and Safety team is updating our internal processes to help prevent an error like this from happening again,” the statement said.

Peter Humphrey, a private investigator who was once jailed in China. LinkedIn, the business networking site, took down his Chinese account last month.

With Twitter, Chinese officials are targeting a vibrant platform for Chinese activists.
Interviews with nine Twitter users questioned by the police and a review of a recording of a four-hour interrogation found a similar pattern: The police would produce printouts of tweets and advise users to delete either the specific messages or their entire accounts. 

Officers would often complain about posts that were critical of the Chinese government or that specifically mentioned Xi Jinping.
The police have used threats and, sometimes, physical restraints, according to Twitter users who were questioned. 

Huang Chengcheng, an activist with more than 8,000 Twitter followers, said his hands and feet were manacled to a chair while he was interrogated for eight hours in Chongqing. 

When the inquiry was over, he signed a promise to stay off Twitter.
Those pulled in for questioning do not necessarily have the biggest presence on the social network. Pan Xidian, a 47-year-old construction company employee in Xiamen with about 4,000 followers, posted a comic by a dissident cartoonist known as Rebel Pepper, along with criticism of human-rights crackdowns. 

In November, the police called him in for 20 hours of questioning. 

After being forced to delete several tweets, he was allowed to go, and he thought his ordeal was over.
But officers showed up at his workplace a short time later and threw him into a car. 

They asked him to sign a document that said he had disturbed the social order. 

He complied. 

Then they showed him a second document, which said he would be detained. 

He spent the next two weeks in a cell with 10 other people, watching propaganda videos.
“In this era, we certainly know fear, but I can’t control myself,” Mr. Pan said while crying during a phone interview after he was released. 

“We’ve been living a very suppressed life.”
“We’re like lambs,” he added. 

“They’re taking us one after another. We have no ability to fight back.”
The crackdown is unusually broad and punitive. 

When censoring domestic social media in the past, officials have targeted prominent users. 

People were questioned or detained less frequently and more haphazardly.
The current push appears to be well coordinated between local and national law enforcement authorities, said Xiao Qiang, a professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Actually taking nationwide action, physically calling in all of these people, we’ve never seen that before,” he said.
The new approach involves broad action by China’s powerful Ministry of Public Security, which oversees law enforcement and political security. 

Several Twitter users said local authorities had specifically cited the internet police, a branch of the security ministry that monitors online activity. 

The agency, which refers to such local enforcement as “touching the ground,” was taken over last summer by a hard-liner known for a crackdown on telecom fraud in Xiamen, a city on the southeast coast.
The security ministry and the Cyberspace Administration of China, which regulates the internet, did not respond to faxed requests for comment.
The police have impressed upon activists that they can see posts outside China’s wall of censorship. After a four-hour grilling of a Twitter user with a small following who had complained in a post about the environment, a police officer offered him some advice. 

The user, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of further reprisal, recorded the interrogation and provided a copy of the audio.
“Delete all your tweets, and shut down your account,” the officer said. 

“Everything on the internet can be monitored, even the inappropriate comments in WeChat groups,” a reference to a popular Chinese messaging app.
“This is truly wholehearted advice for you,” the officer added. 

“If this happens a second time, it will be handled differently. It will affect your parents. You are still so young. If you get married and have kids, it will affect them.”
The efforts have dampened debate on Chinese-language Twitter, said Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher with Human Rights Watch, who chronicled the crackdown in November. 

Still, not all users have gone quietly.
“Many activists want free speech,” Ms. Wang said in an interview. 

“Even when they’re harassed and intimidated, they’re very brave and continue to tweet. This is an act of defiance to censorship and oppression.”

Orwellian China

Thousands of low-wage workers in “censorship factories” trawl the online world for forbidden content, where even a photo of an empty chair could cause big trouble.
By Li Yuan

Li Chengzhi had a lot to learn when he first got a job as a professional censor.
Like many young people in China, the 24-year-old recent college graduate knew little about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

He had never heard of China’s most famous dissident, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in custody two years ago.
Now, after training, he knows what to look for — and what to block. 

He spends his hours scanning online content on behalf of Chinese media companies looking for anything that will provoke the government’s wrath. 

He knows how to spot code words that obliquely refer to Chinese leaders and scandals, or the memes that touch on subjects the Chinese government doesn’t want people to read about.
Li, who still has traces of youthful acne on his face, takes his job seriously. 

“It helps cleanse the online environment,” he said.
For Chinese companies, staying on the safe side of government censors is a matter of life and death. Adding to the burden, the authorities demand that companies censor themselves, spurring them to hire thousands of people to police content.
That in turn has created a growing and lucrative new industry: censorship factories.
Mr. Li works for Beyondsoft, a Beijing-based tech services company that, among other businesses, takes on the censorship burden for other companies. 

He works in its office in the city of Chengdu. 

In the heart of a high-tech industrial area, the space is bright and new enough that it resembles the offices of well-funded start-ups in tech centers like Beijing and Shenzhen. 

It recently moved to the space because customers complained that its previous office was too cramped to allow employees to do their best work.
“Missing one beat could cause a serious political mistake,” said Yang Xiao, head of Beyondsoft’s internet service business, including content reviewing. (Beyondsoft declined to disclose which Chinese media or online companies it works for, citing confidentiality.)
China has built the world’s most extensive and sophisticated online censorship system. 

It grew even stronger under Xi Jinping, who wants the internet to play a greater role in strengthening the Communist Party’s hold on society. 

More content is considered sensitive. 

Punishments are getting more severe.
Once circumspect about its controls, China now preaches a vision of a government-supervised internet that has surprising resonance in other countries. 

Even traditional bastions of free expression like Western Europe and the United States are considering their own digital limits. 

Platforms like Facebook and YouTube have said that they would hire thousands more people to better keep a handle on their content.
Workers like Li show the extremes of that approach — one that controls what more than 800 million internet users in China see every day.
Beyondsoft employs over 4,000 workers like Li at its content reviewing factories. 

That is up from about 200 in 2016. 

They review and censor content day and night.
“We’re the Foxconn in the data industry,” said Yang, comparing his firm to the biggest contract manufacturer that makes iPhones and other products for Apple.
Many online media companies have their own internal content review teams, sometimes numbering in the thousands.
They are exploring ways to get artificial intelligence to do the work.
The head of the A.I. lab at a major online media company, who asked for anonymity because the subject is sensitive, said the company had 120 machine learning models.
But success is spotty.
Users can easily fool algorithms.
“The A.I. machines are intelligent, but they aren’t as clever as human brains,” Mr. Li said.
“They miss a lot of things when reviewing content.”
Beyondsoft has a team of 160 people in Chengdu working four shifts a day to review potentially politically sensitive content on a news aggregating app.
For the same app, Beyondsoft has another team in the western city of Xi’an reviewing potentially vulgar or profane content.
Like the rest of the world, China’s internet is rife with pornography and other material that many users might find offensive.
In the Chengdu office, workers must put their smartphones in hallway lockers.
They can’t take screenshots or send any information from their computers.
The workers are almost all college graduates in their 20s. They are often unaware of, or indifferent to, politics. 
In China, many parents and teachers tell the young that caring about politics leads only to trouble.
To overcome that, Yang and his colleagues developed a sophisticated training system.
New hires start with weeklong “theory” training, during which senior employees teach them the sensitive information that they didn’t know before.
“My office is next to the big training room,” Mr. Yang said.
“I often hear the surprised sounds of ‘Ah, ah, ah.’”
“They didn’t know things like June 4,” he added, referring to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. 
“They really didn’t know.”
Beyondsoft has developed an extensive database based on such information that Yang calls one of its “core competencies.”
It also uses anti-censorship software to regularly visit what it calls anti-revolutionary websites that are blocked by the Chinese government.
It then updates the database.
New employees study the database much like preparing for college entrance exams.
After two weeks, they have to pass a test.
The screen saver on each computer is the same: photos and names of current and past members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s top leadership.
Workers must memorize those faces: Only government-owned websites and specially approved political blogs — a group on what’s called a whitelist — are allowed to post photos of top leaders.
Workers are briefed at the beginning of their shift on the newest censoring instructions sent by clients, which the clients themselves receive from government censors. 
Workers then must answer about 10 questions designed to test their memory.
The results of the exam affect the workers’ pay.
One question on a recent Friday: Which one of the following names is the daughter of Li Peng, China’s former premier?
The correct answer is Li Xiaolin, a longtime target of online ridicule for her expensive fashion taste and for being one of many children of senior officials who come into high positions or wealth.
That’s a relatively easy one.
A tougher test is parsing the roundabout ways that China’s internet users evade stringent censorship to talk about current affairs.
Take, for example, a Hong Kong news site’s 2017 commentary that compared the six Chinese leaders since Mao Zedong to emperors during the Han dynasty.
Some Chinese users started using the emperors’ names when referring to the leaders.
Beyondsoft’s workers have to know which emperor’s name is associated with which leader.
Then there are the photos of an empty chair. 
They refer to Mr. Liu, the Nobel laureate, who wasn’t allowed to leave China to attend the award ceremony and was represented by an empty chair.
References to George Orwell’s novel “1984” are also forbidden.
Beyondsoft’s software trawls through web pages and marks potentially offensive words in different colors.
If a page is full of color-coded words, it usually requires a closer look, according to the executives.
If there are only one or two, it’s pretty safe to let it pass.
According to Beyondsoft’s website, its content monitoring service, called Rainbow Shield, has compiled over 100,000 basic sensitive words and over three million derivative words.
Politically sensitive words make up one-third of the total, followed by words related to pornography, prostitution, gambling and knives.
Workers like Li make $350 to $500 a month, about average pay in Chengdu.
Each worker is expected to review 1,000 to 2,000 articles during a shift.
Articles uploaded to the news app must be approved or rejected within an hour.
Unlike Foxconn workers, they don’t work much overtime because longer hours could hurt accuracy, said Yang, the executive.
It’s easy to make mistakes.
One article about Peng Liyuan, China’s first lady, mistakenly used the photo of a famous singer rumored to be linked to another leader.
It was caught by someone else before it went out, Yang said.
Li, the young censor, said the worst mistakes were almost all related to senior leaders.
He once missed a tiny photo of Xi on a website not on the whitelist because he was tired.
He still kicks himself for it.
When asked whether he had shared with family and friends what he learned at work, such as the Tiananmen massacre, Li vehemently said no.
“This information is not for people outside to know,” he said.
“Once many people know about it, it could generate rumors.”
But the massacre was history.
It wasn’t a rumor.
How would he reconcile that?
“For certain things,” he said, “one just has to obey the rules.”

Cease-Fire

After Trump summit, no mention in China of 90-day deadline or trade concessions

By Anna Fifield

In this Dec. 1, 2018, photo, President Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping attend their bilateral meeting at the G-20 Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

BEIJING — China seems to have a markedly different view of the trade war cease-fire reached with the Trump administration over the weekend, with state media making no mention Monday of the 90-day time frame or the reduction in tariffs on imported American cars or indeed any specifics about buying more American products.
That raises the prospect that the two sides have come away from their meeting in Buenos Aires, on the sidelines of the G-20, with very different ideas about what comes next.
“Do we have another Singapore summit, where the North Korean delegation went home with a very different set of perspectives?” asked Paul Haenle, a former Asia adviser to former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, now running the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center in Beijing. 

He was referring to the summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which seemed to produce different definitions of the word “denuclearization.”
In the absence of a joint statement or a joint news conference after their meeting, each side has been putting their own spin on the summit and its outcome.
President Trump portrayed the agreement as a second chance for Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, saying he would give the Chinese leader 90 days to deal with the structural issues in the trading relationship — like forced technology transfer and industrial espionage. 

If no deal is reached in that time frame, the American president said he would go ahead with his previous plan to raise tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese products from 10 to 25 percent, which had been due to kick in on Jan. 1.
President Trump had been threatening to increase the existing tariffs and also to impose new tariffs on the remaining $267 billion worth of goods that China sells to the United States each year.
President Trump tweeted late Sunday night that China “has agreed to reduce and remove tariffs on cars coming into China from the U.S. Currently the tariff is 40%.”
But there was no mention of any of this here on Monday.
The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, ran a photo of Trump and Xi shaking hands and smiling at the top of Monday’s front page. 

But the story, while stressing agreement and cooperation, had nothing about buying “very substantial” amounts of agricultural, industrial goods and energy products, as the White House said, and nothing about the 90 day deadline. 

Nor was there anything about tariffs on car imports into China.
Nor did news bulletins on CCTV, the state broadcaster, include any mention of buying more American goods or coming to an agreement within 90 days. 

Only the nationalist Global Times tabloid mentioned the time frame, and then the attributed it to the White House alone.
Neither was there any sign of the White House contention that Xi had promised to reconsider Qualcomm’s bid to buy NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch rival. 

The $44 billion deal collapsed after Qualcomm, the American smartphone-chip maker, failed to get Chinese regulatory approval.
What Chinese state media did say, however, was that the two sides would work to “gradually” to decrease the trade imbalance — a statement that appears to be at odds with the rapid progress that President Trump wants.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang did little to clear up the discrepancies on Monday, saying that the two sides’ readouts from the meetings spoke for themselves.
“I only want to stress that the two leaders reached important consensus and the teams on the two parts will follow through on the consensus,” he said at a press briefing. 

The two sides would “speed up” their talks and “attempt to conclude a mutually beneficial agreement at an early date.”
Asked specifically about the 90-day deadline, the spokesman demurred. 

“I think you should focus on that we discussed and agreed,” he told reporters. 

“We agreed to hold off on imposing new tariffs. This agreement is quite significant since it has stopped our trade dispute from escalating and also opens up new prospects for win-win cooperation.”
Chances are that both sides are “cherry picking” the details that suit them, said Zhao Hai, an economics specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.
While Trump has come under fire from industries that are suffering from the Chinese tariffs, like soy beans and pork, so too is Xi navigating sensitive economic terrain at home. 

The Chinese economy was already slowing before the trade war erupted.
Stock markets, at least, seemed relieved at the truce, however temporary. 

China’s benchmark Shanghai composite index closed up 2.57 percent Monday.
“This is hopefully a turning point for both sides to stop and rethink the direction they were heading in,” Zhao said. 

But the “downside” was the 90-day time frame set by Trump. 

“The U.S. needs to lower its expectations,” he said.
Indeed, other analysts said that the delay in tariffs appeared to be win for China.
“The Chinese are always playing for time and any pause that involves more talking is a victory for Beijing, as it only adds to the chances they have for a shift to a more favorable US domestic political environment,” wrote Bill Bishop, publisher of the influential Sinocism newsletter.
“As we have learned with the waning ‘maximum pressure’ campaign on North Korea, once you step back from the brink it is difficult to marshal the support to return to it if the talks do not bear fruit,” Bishop said.
The real question now is whether the world’s two biggest economies can make progress on substantive matters in the next three months. 

Just having China buy more American goods and shrinking the trade deficit will not solve the broader structural problems in their economic relationship.
“Is China going to make the changes that the international community desperately hopes that China makes, so that foreign companies can complete on a level playing field?” asked Haenle of Carnegie-Tsinghua.
These changes include allowing greater access to the Chinese market and stopping foreign companies from having to hand over their technological secrets as a condition for operating in China.
Mei Xinyu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, doubted that the truce would lead to a solution to the long-term trade problems.
“The two sides seem to have a very different understanding of the priorities when it comes to handling the structural problems,” Mei said. 

“The United States think it’s all about unfair trade practices while China believes it’s about low national savings. It’s one problem with two interpretations.”
Given that, Mei was not optimistic about what would come after the 90-day truce. 

“I think we should be prepared for the protracted war,” he said. 

“Personally, I’m preparing for the U.S. to impose tariffs on all Chinese exports.”

Chinese Oscars: Beijing cuts live coverage after winner calls for independent Taiwan

Speech by documentary filmmaker Fu Yue censored after she calls for Taiwan to be recognised as an independent entity

By Benjamin Haas in Seoul

Taiwanese director Fu Yue, left, delivers a speech next to producer Hong Ting Yi after she won best documentary at the 55th Golden Horse Awards in Taipei. 

The Chinese-language version of the Oscars, the Golden Horse Awards, have become the latest flashpoint in tense relations between China and Taiwan after a film director questioned the island’s political status.
Documentary filmmaker Fu Yue called for Taiwan to be recognised as an “independent entity” during her acceptance speech, fighting back tears as she said, “this is my biggest wish as a Taiwanese”. 

Her speech was quickly censored on Chinese television and streams, with the coverage going black.
For decade China has claimed Taiwan as part of its territory, but the island has been independently ruled since 1949, and in the past two decades has become a flourishing democracy in contrast to Beijing’s authoritarian government. 

Chinese officials often bristle at suggestions of Taiwanese independence, and have gone to great lengths to poach Taiwan’s diplomatic allies.

After Fu’s comments, a mainland Chinese actor, Tu Men, echoed Beijing’s line on the status of the island, referring to it as “Taiwan, China”, drawing a rebuke from Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen.
“We have never accepted the phrase “Taiwan, China”, and we never will accept this phrase, Taiwan is simply Taiwan,” Tsai wrote in an online post. 

“I am proud of yesterday’s Golden Horse Awards, which highlights the fact that Taiwan is different from China, and our freedom and diversity is why this is a land where artistic creations can be free.”
Chinese authorities have banned their citizens from participating in the ceremony next year, according to reports in Taiwanese media.
The debate comes ahead of local elections in Taiwan, which are widely seen as a referendum on Tsai’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive party (DPP). 

The controversy quickly spread online, where each side took turns praising or condemning Fu’s actions.

Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, who disappeared earlier this year only to reemerge after admitting to tax evasion, used her now mostly dormant social media account to post a map of China with the phrase “China cannot lose one bit of itself”. 

The image was first posted several years ago by the Communist Youth League, and nationalism has seen a sharp rise under Xi Jinping.
That national fervour may have caused a Chinese runner first place in the Suzhou marathon, after organisers tried to thrust a Chinese flag into her hand during the final stretch of the race. 

After two failed attempts and one Chinese flag thrown to the ground – which itself can result in a three-year prison sentence – the Chinese runner eventually came second behind her Ethiopian rival, trailing by five seconds.

Tech Quislings

When Google makes China’s firewall great again
Sundar Pichai thinks the search engine should be willing to work with Chinese censors. Will employees go along with the plan?

By Mark Bergen

If you’re planning on moving to China anytime soon, here’s a piece of advice: Get yourself a WeChat account. 

Open up the “super app,” as it’s known in China, and you can do almost anything: Pay your cab fare, order from a five-star restaurant, buy fruit from a street vendor, or even give alms to a panhandler—they often wear QR codes slung around their necks. 

It’s possible to spend long stretches in China without so much as touching a banknote.
This makes the world’s second-largest economy an internet-enabled paradise, albeit with an important caveat. 

Much of the internet isn’t available. 

Facebook, Twitter, and parts of Wikipedia are all blocked by the “Great Firewall,” the program of government censorship that keeps anything even vaguely subversive offline. 

You can read the BBC, but only if you speak English. 

China blocks the broadcaster’s Mandarin news service, along with Bloomberg.com, the New York Times, and pretty much any news that contradicts the Communist Party line about Tibet, Falun Gong, Taiwan, or the country’s slowing economy.
And there’s no Google. 

The website that for many people is indistinguishable from the internet hasn’t operated in mainland China since 2010, when founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page decided that removing controversial links from search results, as the government in Beijing requires, was unacceptable. 

“We don’t want to run a service that’s politically censored,” Brin said at TED that year. 

His employees applauded the move as a perfect expression of the company’s “Don’t be evil” ethos.
But in 2016 a small team that included Sundar Pichai—the new chief executive officer of Google, which had been reorganized as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.—began working on China-related projects, including a program, known as Dragonfly, to bring Google’s search engine back into the country. 

The plans, which were detailed in a report published in early August by the Intercept, a web news outlet, were remarkably granular. 

They included protocols to censor results to the government’s liking, barring search terms such as “Tiananmen Square” and ensuring that users looking for information about air quality would only get data approved by Beijing. 

Google’s prototype also required users to submit identifying information, including phone numbers, which could allow Chinese intelligence agencies to root out dissidents.
The revelations about Dragonfly reverberated widely, and the company’s efforts to quiet the furor only prolonged it. 

“You don’t make the world’s information universally accessible and useful by kowtowing to dictators,” tweeted Brandon Downey, a search engineer who’d worked on an earlier effort to bring Google’s services to China before leaving for another job in 2014. 

“I just hope this story is wrong.”
It wasn’t. 

Two weeks later, Pichai acknowledged the program.
But at a weekly all-staff meeting, he and Brin argued that Dragonfly was being overplayed by the media.
It was merely “exploratory,” Pichai said.
“Every year or so there’s a new kind of project to do something or other in China,” Brin told staff, according to a transcript obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek. 
“We experiment with what it might look like.”
The mood inside the room was tense, and Google’s corporate message boards were instantly flooded with debate.
As the meeting continued, someone in the auditorium began leaking Brin’s and Pichai’s comments to New York Times reporter Kate Conger, who relayed them, verbatim, on Twitter.
Suddenly, those tweets were projected on screens behind Brin.
A person shouted, “F--- the leaker!”
Brin, according to three people who witnessed the scene, seemed more alarmed by the leak than by the ensuing outburst.
If employees were going to talk to the press, he said, they would have to shut down the meeting.
Pichai changed the subject.
Five days later, on Aug. 21, Jack Poulson, a Google senior researcher, submitted a resignation letter. “I cannot work at a company that will not internally or publicly clarify its ethical red lines,” he wrote. It was part of a wave of resignations that came in the days following the meeting.
Pichai dug in, and, according to people familiar with his thinking, he remains interested in launching Dragonfly, or something like it.
“It’s a wonderful, innovative market,” he said at a conference in October, referring to China’s 800 million internet users.

Google’s Chinese search engine in 2006.

The Valley’s tech giants tend to share his enthusiasm.
China’s consumers have embraced mobile phones, digital payments, and streaming media in unprecedented numbers.
But Google employees worry that Pichai is being willfully blind to the compromises China is asking the company to make. 
The search giant grew gigantic “on the premise that they were somehow exceptions to the corporate norm,” says a Google employee, who, like many interviewed for this story, declined to be identified discussing sensitive matters.
“They have immense and, in some ways, unprecedented power. And the checks on this power are currently scarce.”
These fears found expression in a memo Downey circulated privately in late August.
He was known within Google as an idealist; after Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency had intercepted Google data, Downey railed against the program as an example of government overreach.
“F--- these guys,” he wrote about the NSA in a widely shared Google Plus post.
In his new memo, Downey contrasted the altruistic ambitions of Google’s founders with what he presented as a company now motivated by a desire for growth and profit.
Dragonfly, Downey pointed out, also happens to be the name of Brin’s megayacht. (A Google spokesman says this is a coincidence.)
“Google has changed,” Downey wrote.
Google declined to make Brin, Pichai, or any other executive available for an interview.
The company, which is also under fire for its handling of sexual harassment complaints, has yet to explain how search in China would square with its long-standing pledge to protect the privacy of its users. 
Privately, executives have argued that if Google wants to continue growing globally, it will have to work with governments that don’t share its values.
Interviews with more than 18 current and former employees suggest the company’s predicament resulted in part from failing to learn from mistakes that played out a decade earlier, when it first confronted the realities of China’s economic and political might.
This history is known to many at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., but mostly unknown outside of it.
In an interview in September, Downey, 42, elaborates.
“There’s this Utopian idea: Technology will come in, and people will take these tools, change their government, and get their freedom,” he says.
“We tried that experiment, and it didn’t work.”

Downey, photographed at his home in Mountain View.

Downey grew up in Bayou La Batre, a small town in southern Alabama, where he fell in love with the internet.
“It was just an unalloyed good,” he says of his first experience dialing up on a 2,400-baud modem he bought by mowing lawns one summer in high school.
When Google arrived in 1998, he saw it as a force for freedom and “a miracle.”
Then in 2004, something miraculous happened: Downey, who’d earned a degree from Tulane University, landed a job at the company writing code for the back-end systems of its search engine.
At the time, Google’s founders were struggling to square the ideals of the early web with the realities of running a for-profit company.
As early as 2002, Brin, who was born in the Soviet Union and has made no secret of his dislike of authoritarian regimes, was consulting experts on Chinese censorship.
“He gave me the impression that he was genuinely thinking about the issue of China and human rights,” says Xiao Qiang, a prominent China-born human-rights activist who now lives in the U.S. Xiao suggested to Brin that the search engine would be a liberalizing force there.
After months of planning, Brin and the executive team devised a strategy to deal with the requirements of China’s censors.
A local partner would filter results, and Google would store user data on servers outside the country. On the bottom of each page of censored results, coders added a disclosure in small type that informed web surfers that certain sites had been withheld, which was seen as a sort of middle finger to the People’s Republic.
“Let me tell you,” says Downey, who contributed code to the effort, “the Chinese government was not happy about that disclaimer.”
Employees nicknamed the service Dragon Index.
When Brin went to Xiao with the plans in 2006, the activist gave his blessing.
“It’s better than not being there,” he said at the time.
Brin and many Google employees agreed.
At the time, the web looked like a democratizing force.
Many assumed that Google, even if handicapped, could open the floodgates.
“People really believed that providing some information was better than none,” Downey recalls.
During a debate on an internal mailing list, an employee argued that Dragon Index was “not only not evil, but one of the most good things we’ve done.”
The message was published last month on Twitter by Vijay Boyapati, a former Google engineer.
One of the things he found most “disturbing” in retrospect, he wrote, was “the willingness of my former colleagues to not only comply with the censorship, but with their enthusiasm in rationalizing it.”
Almost as soon as Google started the service, demands from Beijing’s censors escalated. 
In 2006 the search engine had to filter out just a few hundred terms, Downey says; by the Beijing Olympics, two years later, the number had climbed to 10,000.
In addition to its web search engine in China, Google also created a search service for news articles, which was subject to even more stringent rules.
Chinese officials required the company to restrict Google News results to Chinese websites only and to suppress several large sections—World, Nation, and Business, according to Boyapati.
The government asked Google to commit to pull any article that offended the censors within 15 minutes.
Unlike search pages, blacklisted News results didn’t include a disclaimer. 
“No one in the company knew this,” Boyapati says.
“It just sort of came down from management.”
Then in December 2009, Google’s security team discovered something far more troubling.
Hackers had somehow tapped the system the company used to store people’s passwords. 
The hackers also injected malicious code onto staffers’ computers in Beijing. 
According to company sources and an account in Steven Levy’s book In the Plex, Google traced the attackers to China and quickly discovered their aim: to spy on email accounts maintained by dissidents. 
Marty Lev, Google’s security chief at the time, was forced to drive to Stanford University to rescue the laptop of one victim, a student who led pro-Tibet protests.
Soon after, Google learned that the hackers had somehow also stumbled onto the source code for google.com, the company’s version of Coca-Cola’s secret formula.
Immediately, Google sequestered a team in a top-secret “war building,” a participant recalls.
This person says the team was warned that their work could be controversial and would probably mean China would never grant them a visa again.
Like everything at Google, the building had a code name: Helm’s Deep, after the fortress in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books in which humankind, pursued by Sauron’s all-seeing eye, hides from the forces of evil.
Inside Helm’s Deep, the conversation turned to how to respond to China’s aggression.
Eric Schmidt, then CEO, argued that Google could wield more influence by staying in China.
Brin led the other flank, according to five people involved in the discussions.
Those people recall Brin as the most animated, raging less about the source code theft than about a state coming after Google users.
“Sergey was pissed off,” a former executive says.
Brin won out.
On Jan. 12, Google announced it was ending search in China.
“Our objection is to those forces of totalitarianism,” Brin told the New York Times. 
In Beijing people laid flowers at Google’s campus in a mix of grief and mockery over its departure. Reports surfaced that police had banned the practice, and the phrase “illegal flower throwing” quickly became a subversive joke on the Chinese web.
Downey and some co-workers made T-shirts bearing the phrase, another middle finger to the Politburo.

Outside Google’s China headquarters in Beijing on Jan. 13, 2010, shortly after the company announced it was pulling out of China.

Despite this experience, Google never really gave up on China.
The company tried many times, often fruitlessly, to tiptoe back.
A former Asia staffer says there was a running joke that the company was always one quarter away from some launch in China.
Among the key players was Pichai, who spent years running Android, Google’s free mobile operating system, before being elevated to CEO in 2015.
Around 2013, according to a former product manager, Pichai stopped a presentation, insisting that the Android numbers were incorrect because, as was customary at the time, they didn’t include usage of Android in China.
“It’s the biggest country in the world,” Pichai said, according to the ex-employee. “It doesn’t make sense not to think about it.”
During Pichai’s tenure, Google tried to bring its Android app store to China, just as Apple offers one to serve iPhone owners there.
Managers, including Pichai, felt the app store could be a side door into the country—hence the effort’s internal name, Sidewinder—according to two people who worked on it.
Beijing never rejected the proposal outright, but it never greenlighted it, either, these people say.
Other paths also dead-ended.
A former manager recalls a Kafkaesque scene when Google applied for a license to create digital maps of China’s roads.
A government official listened to the pitch and assented, with one condition: Google must avoid politically sensitive areas.
“Sure, where are those?” the company rep asked.
“Oh, no,” the official said, “we can’t tell you that.”
Today, internet users in China can search Google only with a virtual private network, or VPN, which gets around the Great Firewall via cloud servers. (China banned “unauthorized” VPNs in March; some still seem to work.)
And more modest Google offerings have made it past regulators.
Last year the company launched its translation app in China with regulators’ blessing.
This year it offered Files Go, a file-management app for Android phones, and a doodling game, Guess My Sketch, available on WeChat.
Pichai confers regularly with Martin Lau, president of WeChat parent Tencent Holdings Ltd., according to a Chinese tech veteran who knows both.
Part of Pichai’s interest in China stems from his focus on artificial intelligence.
Google is widely regarded as the world leader in the field, but Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has designated AI a priority as part of an ambitious industrial policy.
Google responded by opening an AI lab in Beijing in January to try to take advantage of China’s talent pool in the field.
And in September the company sponsored a government-organized AI conference in Shanghai.
The event’s title: “AI for everyone.”
China’s embrace of AI could eventually support the country’s efforts to control speech on the web. 
A 2017 cybersecurity law mandates that companies host Chinese customer data on servers in the country and requires users to sign up for online services using real names and mobile numbers.
That’s why prototypes of Dragonfly linked searches to phones.
Poulson, the researcher who resigned, says this was hidden from some on Google’s privacy review team, which he cited as a “catastrophic failure.”
“It feels like a war on truth,” Downey says.
Outside experts have raised similar concerns.
“Authorities can access the user data when they see fit,” says Lokman Tsui, a former policy manager for Google in Hong Kong.
“It’s impossible for Google to operate search in China without violating widely recognized human rights.” 
Tsui, now a journalism professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was among those who signed a public letter in August asking the company to reaffirm its 2010 commitment not to censor its search engine.
So did Xiao, who now says he’d advise Google’s founders to stay out: “China has no boundaries between the state and private companies. If you go there, you must be part of digital totalitarianism.” 
But nobody at Google asked Xiao for his opinion this time; he can’t recall when he last spoke to Brin.

Brin at the 2018 Breakthrough Prize award ceremony in Mountain View.

After the contentious August staff meeting, Google publicly defended its China plans, in part by criticizing Baidu, the country’s dominant search engine.
“Today people either get fake cancer treatments or they get valuable information,” Pichai said in October at a Wired conference in San Francisco.
The reference was probably lost on most of the audience, but it would have been well-known in China, where a Baidu search ad for an experimental medical treatment was blamed for giving misleading information to a young cancer patient, who later died. (Baidu tightened restrictions on medical ads in response to the incident.)
To ease tensions, Google has been holding informal meetings with staff opposed to Dragonfly to bring skeptics around.
Supporters argue that Google, even in limited form, will be an improvement over Chinese search engines and that the compromises the company is being asked to make have been made by other American tech giants.
Poulson says that at a staff meeting, Brin justified Dragonfly by pointing out that no one had complained about Sidewinder, the app store project.
According to someone close to him, Brin’s about-face on China came as a result of traveling to the country at least three times since 2016, during which he met with Google staff, tinkered with Chinese apps, and on one occasion met with a champion Go player.
But many at Google don’t seem convinced.
One participant in the meetings says the C-suite seems paralyzed, caught between whatever fallout will come with proceeding in China and the costs of ignoring an enormous business opportunity.
Downey sees no room for moral ambiguity.
“Google has no principled excuse left for doing this,” he wrote in August.
His essay ended with the most damning of critiques for a company that’s always seen itself as above concerns about revenue and profit.
“Google,” Downey wrote, “is acting like a traditional company.”