The Chinese Coronavirus Story Is Too Big for China to Spin

Maybe what goes up online must come down, but what comes down will go up again.
By Kiki Zhao

A vigil in Hong Kong on Feb. 7, the day that Li Wenliang, a doctor who was reprimanded for warning about the coronavirus, died after being infected with it.

Reactions to Li Wenliang’s death last Friday filled the timelines of my social media accounts almost immediately. 

Post after post on my WeChat. 

Grief, frustration, anger.
A week later, the groundswell of emotions seems unabated.
Dr. Li, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, was one of the first doctors to try to warn about the disease, and then to die from it.
The story of how the authorities muzzled Dr. Li became an instant parable for their trampling on the Chinese public’s right to know. 

The authorities’ effort to now muzzle the public’s outrage is a parable of government unaccountability.On Dec. 30, Dr. Li told former classmates from medical school in a WeChat group that several patients displaying SARS-like symptoms were being quarantined. 

He was quickly summoned for questioning by the police.
On Jan. 3, Dr. Li was made to sign a statement declaring that his warning had been incorrect and was “illegal,” and that it had “disturbed social order.” 

Under a typed admonishment that said, “If you continue this illegal activity, you will be dealt with by the law! Do you understand?” he wrote by hand, “I understand.” 

Would he now cooperate with the police? 

“I can.”
In an interview later with Caixin, one of China’s leading investigative news outlets, Dr. Li said, “There shouldn’t be only one voice in a healthy society.” 

After news broke last week that he had died, a picture with his quote ignited the Chinese internet.
Fang Fang, a fiction writer based in Wuhan, has been documenting daily life in the city. 

“Dear internet censors, you should let Wuhan people speak,” she wrote recently. 

“We’ve been locked down here for more than ten days; we’ve seen too many extreme tragedies. If you don’t allow us to express our anguish or complaints or reflections, do you really want us to go mad?”
Allowed or not, the people are expressing their anguish, complaints and reflections.
A post on WeChat with photos of young people wearing surgical masks inscribed with “I cannot” and “I do not understand” quickly spread online. 

So did a letter signed by 10 professors in Wuhan demanding an apology from the officials who silenced Dr. Li and other whistle-blower doctors. 

Both posts were promptly taken down.
On Feb. 11, a group of middle-school teachers in Chengdu, about 700 miles west of Wuhan, posted online an open letter to their students about the outbreak. 

“In ‘The Plague,’ Albert Camus wrote that the only way to fight with the plague is honesty,” the text went. 

“We cannot turn a funeral into a wedding. We cannot use songs of praise to replace questioning.”
The article, which was hugely popular online, was taken down just hours after it was posted.

A news website run by the city authorities of Dongying, in the eastern province of Shandong, published an article late last month praising the online censor Guo Qiqi: She sleeps just four hours a day, and monitors the internet for 20. 

The article included photos of a policewoman whose job was to monitor Twitter and Facebook, which are blocked inside China.
The piece swept Weibo like a storm — but not as the authorities had intended. 

“Trying hard to build a Brave New World,” said one comment.
The article and the comments have since been deleted.
The censors can’t keep up, though: Maybe what goes up online must come down, but what comes down will go up again.
Which might explain why, in addition to trying to prevent people from openly discussing Dr. Li’s death, the information blackout in the early stages of the outbreak and the government’s handling of the crisis overall, the authorities are also trying to peddle an alternative narrative — and one that co-opts Dr. Li’s story.
As ever, the central government in Beijing is scrambling to project the image that it has everything under control. 

Instead of admitting to any large-scale inefficiencies or errors, it has sent a team to Wuhan to investigate Dr. Li’s death. 

Two senior provincial party officials were sacked on Thursday.
The government is also trying to cast Dr. Li’s death as the nation’s sacrifice — meaning, the Chinese Communist Party’s own.
The veteran epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan, who is credited with identifying the coronavirus that causes SARS and is widely revered, wept as he spoke about Dr. Li in an interview with Reuters this week. 

“The majority of people think he’s a hero of China,” Dr. Zhong said, in English, tears welling. 

“I’m so proud of him. He told people the truth at the end of December.” 

Many people share that view.
Only, they don’t want the Chinese Communist Party telling them who is a hero or what heroism is.
Xinhua, the party’s official news agency, has called for the population to “turn grief into strength” — and follow Dr. Li’s example to “complete his unfinished undertaking.”
That’s a dangerous invitation. 

The people can see through the government’s ploy, and they are fuming.
On Sunday, I read an article online about Yan Cheng, a teenager with severe cerebral palsy who died on Jan. 29, a week after his father was taken into quarantine. 

The teenager was unable to look after himself and yet he was left on his own. 

I pored over a photo of him smiling, taken not long before he died. 

I thought of how cold and hungry and lonely he must have felt that last night, and I wailed.
The next day I got a notice from Weibo: The platform was banning me from publishing or reposting anything for 30 days. 

But new posts and articles have kept appearing on my timeline, and I keep on upvoting them.

What China’s empty Chinese coronavirus hospitals say about its secretive system

Even after declaring a crisis, Beijing was focused more on propaganda than on managing the Chinese virus outbreak 
Emma Graham-Harrison

Flowers and a photo of the whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang at a hospital in Wuhan. 

China’s two new hospitals built in as many weeks were the official face of its fight against the Chinese coronavirus in Wuhan. 

As the city was locked down, authorities promised that thousands of doctors would be on hand to treat 2,600 patients on the facilities’ wards.
Timelapse videos tracked the fast construction of the hospitals, and state media celebrated their opening in early February. 

The only thing missing a week later? Patients.

Four days after its opening, the larger Leishenshan hospital had only 90 patients, on wards designed for 1,600, but was reporting no spare beds, Wuhan city health data, first reported by the Chinese magazine Caixin, showed. 

The other facility, Huoshenshan, had not yet filled its 1,000 beds a week after opening.
Meanwhile, the city was setting up emergency hospitals in exhibition halls and a sports stadium, and medics were still turning ill people away. 

China has the world’s largest army but it has not deployed any field hospitals to Wuhan.
The gulf between the vision of vast new hospitals created and thrown into action within days and the more complicated reality on the ground is a reminder of one of the main challenges for Beijing as it struggles to contain the Chinese coronavirus: its own secretive, authoritarian system of government and its vast censorship and propaganda apparatus.
Communist party apparatus well honed to crush dissent also muffles legitimate warnings. 

A propaganda system designed to support the party and state cannot be relied on for accurate information. 

That is a problem not just for families left bereft by the Chinese coronavirus and businesses destroyed by the sudden shutdown, but for a world trying to assess Beijing’s success in controlling and containing the disease.
“China’s centralised system and lack of freedom of press definitely delay a necessary aggressive early response when it was still possible to contain epidemics at the local level,” said Ho-fung Hung, a professor in political economy at Johns Hopkins University in the US.
Beijing did go public about the Chinese virus faster than during the 2002-3 Sars crisis.

But it has become increasingly clear that the local government was engaged in a concerted attempt to cover up the crisis during the early weeks of the outbreak, which allowed it to fester at a time when it would have been much easier to contain.

Two officials have been fired, Wuhan’s mayor admitted failings in a live interview on national television, and the central government has sent a team to investigate the treatment of the whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang.
Security forces punished Li, 34, for trying to warn colleagues about the risks of a dangerous new disease at the end of December. 

Just over a month later he became one of the youngest victims of the Chinese coronavirus. 

His death made him a household name and triggered a rare discussion in China about freedom of speech.
In a biting essay that laid the blame for the crisis with Xi Jinping, a dissident intellectual claimed China’s centralisation and culture of silence had played a key role in the spread of the disease.
“It began with the imposition of stern bans on the reporting of factual information that served to embolden deception at every level of government,” Xu Zhangrun wrote in his essay Viral Alarm, When Fury Overcomes Fear, according to a translation by Geremie Barmé on the website ChinaFile.
“It only struck its true stride when bureaucrats throughout the system shrugged off responsibility for the unfolding situation while continuing to seek the approbation of their superiors,” Xu continued. 

“They all blithely stood by as the crucial window of opportunity to deal with the outbreak of the infection snapped shut in their faces.”

A Chinese coronavirus patient is discharged from a field module hospital after recovery in Wuhan. 

Without a free press, elections or much space for civil society, there are few ways for citizens to hold their rulers accountable. 

Instead, local officials answer only to a party hierarchy that puts a premium on stability and economic growth.
Prof Steve Tsang, director of the Soas China Institute, said: “China is not a poor country. But the incentives are not for a health director (for example) to respond to public health crises in Wuhan first and foremost. The incentive is to do what the party wants … and not embarrass the party.”

The cost of trying to curb the Chinese coronavirus when it first emerged – high-profile moves to close the market where it originated, cull and destroy livestock, quarantine and compensate victims, cancel mass festivities for the new year – would have seemed a risky gamble for little reward.
“That might have ended it, or not,” Tsang said. 

“[But] since you stopped the virus from developing, you have nothing to show. You quashed a potential threat that may not have existed.”
Even when the government reversed course and announced a crisis, it appeared to be focused more on propaganda than on managing the disease, he said. 

It could have deployed medics and a field hospital to Wuhan almost overnight rather than building new hospitals.
It is unclear why they chose not to do so. 

But a country setting up field hospitals looks like one in crisis. 

A government expanding hospitals looks like one in control. 

“Ten days is a very long time when you are looking at a public health crisis like that,” Tsang said. 

“But a new hospital built from the ground up, that’s a world record.”

Diggers begin constructing a new 1,000-bed hospital in Wuhan.

Questions about China’s transparency still hang over efforts to manage the disease. 

Scientists are concerned about its spread in areas that have become new hubs of the disease. 

Zhejiang and Guangdong province – both industrial centres – have reported more than 1,000 cases, as has inland Henan province.
That is higher than the number of cases reported in Hubei province when the lockdown of Wuhan was announced in January. 

But with the economy badly strained by the long shutdown, Chinese authorities are urging people to start heading back to work in “orderly” fashion in these areas.
There have also been doubts about the accuracy of the tally of cases, after many families reported struggling to get testing for sick relatives.The test numbers may be accurate, and disease control measures in place elsewhere may be sufficient to control a virus that scientists already understand much better than they did a few weeks ago. 

But if China cannot address the systemic failings that allowed the outbreak to fester originally, it may struggle to control this epidemic, avert the next one and secure the global trust and cooperation needed to fight disease.
“There is no one quick fix to the Chinese system to make it respond better next time,” said Hung. “But if there is one single factor that could increase the government’s responsiveness to this kind of crisis, [it would be] a free press.”

As Virus Spreads, Anger Floods Chinese Social Media

The sheer volume of criticism of the government, and the clever ways that critics dodge censors, are testing Beijing’s ability to control the narrative.
By Raymond Zhong

In Beijing on Sunday, riders wearing protective masks cycle on a nearly empty street that is normally busy wih tourists.

SHANGHAI — Recently, someone following the coronavirus crisis through China’s official news media would see lots of footage, often set to stirring music, praising the heroism and sacrifice of health workers marching off to stricken places.
But someone following the crisis through social media would see something else entirely: vitriolic comments and mocking memes about government officials, harrowing descriptions of untreated family members and images of hospital corridors loaded with patients, some of whom appear to be dead.


CGTN
✔@CGTNOfficial
137 medical personnel head for Hubei from north China's Shanxi
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7:07 AM - Jan 27, 2020

The contrast is almost never so stark in China. 

The government usually keeps a tight grip on what is said, seen and heard about it. 

But the sheer amount of criticism — and the often clever ways in which critics dodge censors, such as by referring to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, as “Trump” or by comparing the outbreak to the Chernobyl catastrophe — have made it difficult for Beijing to control the message.
In recent days, critics have pounced when officials in the city of Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, wore their protective masks incorrectly. 

They have heaped scorn upon stumbling pronouncements. 

When Wuhan’s mayor spoke to official media on Monday, one commenter responded, “If the virus is fair, then please don’t spare this useless person.”
The condemnations stand as a rare direct challenge to the Communist Party, which brooks no dissent in the way it runs China. 

In some cases, Chinese leaders appear to be acknowledging people’s fear, anger and other all-too-human reactions to the crisis, showing how the party can move dramatically, if sometimes belatedly, to mollify the public.
Such criticism can go only so far, however. 

Some of China’s more commercially minded media outlets have covered the disease and the response thoroughly if not critically. 

But articles and comments about the virus continue to be deleted, and the government and internet platforms have issued fresh warnings against spreading what they call “rumors.”
“Chinese social media are full of anger, not because there was no censorship on this topic, but despite strong censorship,” said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times, a website that monitors Chinese internet controls. 

“It is still possible that the censorship will suddenly increase again, as part of an effort to control the narrative.”
When China’s leaders battled the SARS virus in the early 2000s, social media was only just beginning to blossom in the country. 

The government covered up the disease’s spread, and it was left to journalists and other critics to shame the authorities into acknowledging the scale of the problem.
Today, smartphones and social media make it harder for mass public health crises to stay buried. 

But internet platforms in China are just as easily polluted with false and fast-moving information as they are everywhere else. 

During outbreaks of disease, Beijing’s leaders have legitimate reason to be on alert for quack remedies and scaremongering fabrications, which can cause panic and do damage.

Li Keqiang, center, visiting a supermarket in Wuhan on Monday.

In recent days, though, Beijing seems to be reasserting its primacy over information in ways that go beyond mere rumor control. 

At a meeting this past weekend between Xi and other senior leaders, one of the measures they resolved to take against the virus was to “strengthen the guidance of public opinion.”
Wang Huning, the head of the Communist Party’s publicity department and an influential party ideologue, was also recently named deputy head of the team in charge of containing the outbreak, behind only China’s premier, Li Keqiang.
Chinese officials seem to recognize that social media can be a useful tool for feeling out public opinion in times of crisis. 

WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging platform, said over the weekend that it would crack down hard on rumors about the virus. 

But it also created a tool for users to report tips and information about the disease and the response.
Internet backlash may already have caused one local government in China to change course on its virus-fighting policies. 

The southern city of Shantou announced on Sunday that it was stopping cars, ships and people from entering the city, in a policy that echoed ones in Wuhan. 

But then word went around that the decision had led people to panic-buy food, and by the afternoon, the order had been rescinded.
Nowhere has the local government been the target of more internet vitriol than in Hubei Province, where Wuhan is the capital.
After the Hubei governor, Wang Xiaodong, and other officials there gave a news briefing on Sunday, web users mocked Wang for misstating, twice, the number of face masks that the province could produce. 

They circulated a photo from the briefing of him and two other officials, pointing out that one of them did not cover his nose with his mask, that another wore his mask upside down and that Wang did not wear a mask at all.
On Monday, social media users were similarly unrelenting toward Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang.
During an interview Zhou gave to state television, commenters in live streams unloaded on him, with one writing: “Stop talking. We just want to know when you will resign.”
Top authorities may be deliberately directing public anger toward officials in Hubei and Wuhan as a prelude to their resigning and being replaced. 

Many other targets within the Chinese leadership seem to remain off limits.
This month, as news of the coronavirus emerged but Xi did not make public appearances to address it, people on the social platform Weibo began venting their frustration in veiled ways, asking, “Where’s that person?”

Masks offer a visible reminder of China’s struggle with the coronavirus. A Chinese couple took a selfie while overlooking the Forbidden City in Beijing on Sunday.

But even those comments were deleted. 

So users started replacing Xi’s name with “Trump.” 

As in, “I don’t want to go through another minute of this year, my heart is filled with pain, I hope Trump dies.”Other people hungering to express frustration have taken to the Chinese social platform Douban, which has been flooded recently by user reviews for “Chernobyl,” the hit television series about the Soviet nuclear disaster.
“In any era, any country, it’s the same. Cover everything up,” one reviewer wrote on Monday.
“That’s socialism,” wrote another.
Some Chinese news outlets have been able to report incisively on the coronavirus. 

The influential newsmagazine Caixin has put out rigorous reporting and analysis. 

The Paper, a digital news outlet that is overseen by Shanghai’s Communist Party Committee, published a chilling video about a Wuhan resident who couldn’t find a hospital that would treat him and ended up wandering the streets.
Mr. Xiao, the Chinese internet expert, said the central authorities long gave such outlets special leeway to cover certain topics in ways that official media cannot. 

But the outlets should not be viewed as independent of the government, he said, calling their coverage “planned and controlled publicity” from the authorities.
Even outside the digital realm, it is not hard to find people in China who remain unsure of whether to trust what their government is telling them about the outbreak.
Chen Pulin, a 78-year-old retiree, was waiting outside a Shanghai hospital recently while his daughter was inside being tested for the virus. 

When word of the disease first began trickling out, he immediately had doubts about whether officials were being forthcoming about it.
“Even now, the government seems to be thinking about the economy and social stability,” Mr. Chen said. 

“Those things are important, but when it comes to these infectious diseases, stopping the disease should come first.”

English Quisling

Pro-Beijing Refinitiv created filter to block Reuters stories amid Hong Kong protests

By Steve Stecklow

LONDON -- As anti-government demonstrations engulfed Hong Kong in August, Reuters broke a sensitive story: Beijing had rejected a secret proposal by city leader Carrie Lam to meet several of the protesters’ demands in a bid to defuse the unrest.
The story buttressed a main claim of the protesters, that Beijing is intervening deeply in the affairs of the semi-autonomous city. 

A state-run newspaper denounced the story as “fake” and “shameful.” 

The article soon became unavailable in mainland China.
It wasn’t the Chinese government that blocked the story. 

The article was removed by Refinitiv, the financial information provider that distributes Reuters news to investors around the world on Eikon, a trading and analytics platform. 

The article was one of a growing number of stories that Refinitiv – which until last year was owned by Reuters’ parent company, Thomson Reuters Corp – has censored in mainland China under order from Beijing.
Since August, Refinitiv has blocked more than 200 stories about the Hong Kong protests plus numerous other Reuters articles that could cast Beijing in an unfavorable light. 

Internal Refinitiv documents show that over the summer, the company installed an automated filtering system to facilitate the censoring. 

The system included the creation of a new code to attach to some China stories, called “Restricted News.”
As a result, Refinitiv’s customers in China have been denied access to coverage of one of the biggest news events of the year, including two Reuters reports on downgrades of Hong Kong by credit-rating agencies. 

Nearly 100 other news providers available on Eikon in China have also been affected by the filtering.
Censorship in China has been intensifying in recent years under Xi Jinping, and Western businesses have come under rising pressure to block news, speech and products that Beijing sees as politically dangerous. 

Refinitiv generates tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue in China. 

As Reuters reported in June, citing three people familiar with the matter, Refinitiv began the censorship effort earlier this year after a regulator threatened to suspend its Chinese operation.
Refinitiv has joined a lengthening list of greedy companies complying with Chinese demands. 

They include hotel giant Marriott International Inc, which last year temporarily shut down its Chinese websites and apologized for, among other things, listing Taiwan as a separate country in a customer questionnaire. 

Several U.S. airlines also stopped describing Taiwan as non-Chinese territory on their websites. 

The censorship has angered the top news and business executives of Reuters and the directors of the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Co Ltd, an independent body tasked with preserving the news agency’s independence.
Speaking to Reuters journalists on a visit to the Singapore newsroom in October, Kim Williams, the Australian media executive who chairs the body, lashed out at Refinitiv, calling its actions “reprehensible” and a capitulation to “naked political aggression” from Beijing. 

Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler told Reuters journalists in London in November that the censorship was “damaging” the brand. 

“I don’t approve of it,” he said.

David "Quisling" Craig

Refinitiv chief executive David Craig and Thomson Reuters CEO Jim Smith have held multiple talks, as recently as this week, in an effort to resolve the issue, said people familiar with the matter. Smith “was very concerned” upon learning about Craig’s decision to impose the filtering, said a senior Thomson Reuters official. 

It is not clear how close the two are to reaching a solution both sides find agreeable, one of the people said.
“We recognize that the processes that were put in place earlier this year need to be improved and are actively working on enhancements,” Refinitiv spokesman Patrick Meyer said of the filtering system in a statement. 

Refinitiv was formed last year when a consortium led by private equity giant Blackstone purchased a 55% stake in Thomson Reuters’ Financial & Risk business, which included the Eikon terminal business, for about $20 billion and rebranded it.
Refinitiv and Thomson Reuters remain close: Reuters sells news to Eikon, and Thomson Reuters retains a 45% stake in Refinitiv. 

Refinitiv is by far Reuters’ largest client, providing nearly half its revenue. 

As part of the spin-off deal, Refinitiv agreed to make inflation-adjusted annual payments of $325 million to Reuters over 30 years for news – a reliable income stream that is rare in the media business.
The Founders Share directors are particularly incensed. 

They have complained to Thomson Reuters CEO Smith that by suppressing stories, Refinitiv is violating the terms of the deal. 

They also say they fear that Refinitiv, having given in to China’s demands, might start blocking stories in other countries.
Prior to the Blackstone deal, when Thomson Reuters controlled the Eikon business, Reuters stories were not blocked in China on Eikon. 

The Chinese government itself has been blocking access in China to the Reuters website for general readers, Reuters.com, for years, as well as the sites of many other foreign news organizations.
“Let the Chinese decide if they ban something,” said Pascal Lamy, a Founders Share director and former head of the World Trade Organization. 

“But this is not Refinitiv’s or Reuters’ decision.” 

Lamy said the directors believe the terms of the deal require Refinitiv to adhere to Reuters ethical rules on editorial integrity and independence, known as the Trust Principles, which “prevent you from accepting self-censorship.”
In response, Refinitiv said it is “complying with our obligations with respect to the Trust Principles.” It argues that in filtering out political stories for its own customers in China, it is following local laws and regulations as required by its operating license.
Smith, who sits on the boards of both Thomson Reuters and Refinitiv, did not respond to requests for comment.
The London Stock Exchange has agreed to buy Refinitiv for $27 billion in a deal that’s expected to close in the second half of next year. 

It declined to comment.

TIANANMEN TABOO
Reuters reported in June that Refinitiv had blocked several Reuters stories under government pressure. 

The articles were about the 30th anniversary of the bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. 

According to the people with knowledge of the matter, Refinitiv acted after the Cyberspace Administration of China, or CAC, which controls online speech, threatened to suspend the company’s service in China if it didn’t comply.
The CAC did not respond to questions about this article. 

China’s Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.
On June 3, Reuters editor Adler and Michael Friedenberg, president of Reuters, emailed the staff saying they’d expressed concern to Refinitiv.
Refinitiv promised it would alert the newsroom when it came under pressure from Chinese regulators about Reuters coverage. 

The news agency, as it does when it receives any complaint from individuals and institutions it covers, then would determine if there was any reason to correct a published story.

In late July, Refinitiv asked Reuters to review an article that detailed how a Chinese government representative in Hong Kong had urged local residents to drive off protesters, just a week before a violent clash broke out between pro- and anti-government crowds in the area. 

That story, too, was touchy because it showed Beijing intervening in the internal affairs of Hong Kong.
Despite assurances from Reuters that the story was accurate, Refinitiv removed the headline of the story from Eikon in China, making the item difficult for users to find and view. 

On Aug. 2, Reuters published a story about the blocking of this article as well.

‘STRATEGIC CHINA FILTER’
Refinitiv began ramping up its efforts to purge offending China coverage. 

Internal Refinitiv documents and emails describe how the company over the summer created an automated filtering system -- referred to as the “Strategic China filter” -- to block stories to Eikon users in mainland China.
In July, Refinitiv’s news platform architecture director requested that a new code be created, called “Restricted News,” that could be added to articles. 

He asked that it “should be hidden for all users (internal and external),” according to notes of a conference call on July 17 where the code was discussed. 

One reason was that Refinitiv didn’t want to give its mainland China customers the ability to disable the filtering.
In an email to colleagues, the platform director explained the code: “The flag is to highlight news that requires additional processing, prior to consumption in China.”
The filtering system is designed to block stories for readers in mainland China but allow them to be accessed in other markets. 

It looks for restricted keywords in headlines, such as “Hong Kong” and “protest,” according to a person familiar with the matter.Refinitiv employees also discussed by email whether the “Restricted News” code should be China-specific or “generic,” so it could be used to block stories in other countries in the future. 

The email exchange indicates they opted for a generic code. 

Refinitiv didn’t comment on whether it plans to use the restriction code elsewhere.

Eikon users outside mainland China can retrieve stories about the Hong Kong protests by clicking on headlines, or by searching for keywords or codes. 

For users inside China, however, articles that are blocked bring up this message: “You do not have access to this story.”
Refinitiv’s blocking of protest stories intensified after Aug. 30, when Reuters reported that Beijing had rejected a bid by Hong Kong leader Lam to compromise with the protesters. 

Before that date, all but five of 246 Reuters articles that had run in 2019 containing the words “Hong Kong” and “protest” in the headline were accessible on the mainland. 

By contrast, between Aug. 30 and Nov. 20, Refinitiv blocked nearly four out of five such articles that Reuters filed – 196 out of 251.
The censorship was especially severe between Sept. 4 and Oct. 7, when all 104 Reuters articles containing those words in the headline were blocked. 

At the time, demonstrators were rampaging across the city and police were responding with water cannons and rubber bullets.
Refinitiv also censored potentially market-moving stories that would have been of interest to Refinitiv’s core clientele of financial professionals. 

These included a Sept. 6 report that Fitch Ratings had downgraded Hong Kong’s long-term foreign currency issuer default rating. 

Also blocked were stories on the effect of the protests on stock prices and initial public offerings.
Refinitiv eventually began having employees get involved in the filtering process to prevent the blocking of financial stories, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

Yet the filtering remains inconsistent.
It lets through some stories that China might consider politically taboo, including some articles about the Chinese government’s mass incarceration of Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in western China. Many other articles on the Uighurs have been blocked.
Besides Reuters articles, the filtering has also blocked one or more stories from 97 other news providers that are available inside China on the Eikon system – including Xinhua, China’s official state-run news agency.

And news relevant to investors is still being censored. 

Eikon users in mainland China couldn’t read this story shortly after it was published. 

It was blocked.

Chinese Fifth Column

Zuckerberg’s Anti-Tyranny Rhetoric Roils Chinese Employees
Tensions between Facebook’s large community of Chinese employees and the company’s management have been on the rise since Zuckerberg became more critical of Beijing. 

By Wayne Ma

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Georgetown address about free speech last month drew hostility and skeptical commentary from his Chinese employees. 

Zuckerberg’s criticism of Chinese video app TikTok and China’s censorship of the internet renewed long-standing complaints that Facebook’s management is biased against communist China, according to one Chinese employee who saw messages in Facebook’s internal discussion groups.

Tensions between Facebook management and its large fifth column of Chinese employees have been on the upswing over the past year or so, since Zuckerberg abandoned efforts to get Facebook allowed back into China and instead became more critical of Beijing. 

Many of the company’s newer Chinese employees were hired from mainland China and are unapologetically supportive of the Chinese government.

Facebook is grappling with its large fifth column of Chinese employees, some of whom are becoming more vocal and critical in internal company forums over what they claim is a bias against communist China.

But in the past couple of months complaints of anti-China bias have overlapped with unhappiness about working conditions at Facebook, crystallized by the suicide of a Chinese employee at Facebook headquarters. 

Infiltration by Chinese Spies
The increasingly vocal criticism by Chinese employees is the latest example of how workers at big tech companies such as Google and Amazon have turned pro-China activists, protesting their employers’ business dealings with the U.S. government and complaining about other issues. 

But in this case, Zuckerberg has to walk a fine line, trying to keep an aggressive group of Chinese employees happy while not alienating Facebook’s many anti-China critics in Washington, D.C. 

If he goes too far to appease the Chinese employees, he could hand his critics in Washington more ammunition.

“We’re seeing Chinese employees emerge as a dangerous force from tech companies,” said Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Paulson Institute whose research focuses on the relationship between Silicon Valley and China. 

Further complicating the challenges facing Zuckerberg are comments by longtime Facebook board member Peter Thiel, who accused Google of working with China’s military and that its leadership has been infiltrated by Chinese spies. 

Thiel said Google was behaving in a “seemingly treasonous” manner. 

A Large Chinese Fifth Column
The ranks of Chinese workers at Facebook—the vast majority of whom are software engineers and data and research scientists—have been increasing in recent years, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
The total number couldn’t be learned, although it likely numbers in the thousands (Facebook employed nearly 36,000 people as of Dec. 31). 

Facebook has more Chinese as a share of its U.S. workforce than Apple, Google or Microsoft, according to an analysis of federal filings. 

Some 42% of its U.S. employees were Chinese in 2018, up from about a third in 2014, the filings show. At Google, the percentage in 2018 was 37% and at Apple it was 23%. 

Facebook’s share of green card sponsorships for Chinese employees also has been growing annually since 2013, rising from 25% to 44% of sponsorships in the nine months ending in June.
The internal group Chinese@FB, which Facebook hosts for its Chinese employees, counts more than 6,000 members and is the largest of its kind at the company, current and former employees say.
One former Chinese employee, who worked at Facebook between 2015 and 2019, said there were so many Chinese employees that he sometimes could get away with speaking only Chinese at work. 

Other former Chinese employees recounted being asked by their managers to be mindful of non-Chinese speakers after holding work conversations in Chinese.Chinese workers said they were drawn to Facebook’s results-focused culture and by what they said was its willingness to quickly sponsor employees for permanent residency in the U.S. 

Many Chinese employees hired a decade or so ago rose through the ranks to become directors and vice presidents, which has led to even more hiring of Chinese workers, according to current and former employees. But as the number of Chinese hires has increased, Facebook has had to rely more on mainland China as a source of new talent. 

A decade ago, many of Facebook’s Chinese hires were employees with graduate degrees from American universities who had spent years getting used to the country’s culture.  

In contrast, many of these newer hires haven’t spent as much time in the U.S. and still get their news from China’s state-controlled media and use Chinese social media to keep in touch with friends and family back home, several current and former Chinese employees said. 

They don’t share the U.S. view of the internet as a haven for free speech and open debate.
These employees added that China’s rise as an economic, technological and political power in recent years has made Chinese nationals more assertive about their country’s place in the world.

National Security Risk

Facebook has taken a number of steps in the past year that have been interpreted by its Chinese employees as hostile to the Chinese government. 

Last year Facebook invited Taiwan’s president to a Facebook-sponsored event in Taipei promoting the territory’s economy and e-commerce industry. 

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen posed for photos with Facebook Vice President for Asia-Pacific Dan Neary and gave a speech highlighting Taiwan’s strong ties with Facebook. 

Chinese employees said in internal groups that the meeting legitimized Taiwan’s claim to self-rule and jeopardized Facebook’s chances of entering China. 

Simon Milner, Facebook vice president of public policy for Asia-Pacific, was forced to defend the event in the messaging groups, according to employees who saw the messages.
Zuckerberg’s public comments have also turned more critical of communist China. 

In March, for instance, Zuckerberg said Facebook would never host data in countries with a track record of violating human rights and last month he said it was never able to reach an agreement with Chinese authorities over how to operate its services free from censorship.
Also this year, Facebook’s Milner visited Hong Kong where he met with a number of local lawmakers and government officials, according to two people familiar with the meetings, which were announced in Facebook’s internal groups. 

The meeting sparked online complaints after Milner met with Alvin Yeung, a Hong Kong pro-democracy legislator, saying the meeting could be viewed as legitimizing pro-democracy demonstrators’ claims to self-autonomy, the people said.
The pro-China activism within the Chinese employee community, and the criticisms of the company they sometimes spark, has alarmed some senior Facebook executives, said a person who is familiar with management’s thinking. 

Some executives, including David Wei, a Facebook vice president of engineering many Chinese Facebook employees said acts as an informal liaison between senior management and Chinese employees, are closely monitoring the internal message groups and have moved to clamp down on discussions when they get heated, the person said. 

For instance, in September, Wei weighed in, urging calm.
“I would encourage everyone in the discussion to try your best to understand each other’s point of view,” he wrote in a post on Chinese@FB. 

“When a discussion gets heated, consider having a tea time in person. Our respectful communication policy ask is that we don’t attempt to convert people’s political views.”

Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment about these specific incidents with Chinese employees. 

Chinazism

China Sharpens Hacking to Hound Its Minorities, Far and Wide
By Nicole Perlroth, Kate Conger and Paul Mozur

Uighur teenagers on their phones in Kashgar in China’s East Turkestan colony. Chinese hackers have secretly monitored the cellphones of Uighurs and Tibetans around the globe.

SAN FRANCISCO — China’s state-sponsored hackers have drastically changed how they operate over the last three years, substituting selectivity for what had been a scattershot approach to their targets and showing a new determination by Beijing to push its surveillance state beyond its borders.
The government has poured considerable resources into the change, which is part of a reorganization of the national People’s Liberation Army that Xi Jinping initiated in 2016, security researchers and intelligence officials said.
China’s hackers have since built up a new arsenal of techniques, such as elaborate hacks of iPhone and Android software, pushing them beyond email attacks and the other, more basic tactics that they had previously employed.
The primary targets for these more sophisticated attacks: China’s ethnic minorities and their diaspora in other countries, the researchers said. 

In several instances, hackers targeted the cellphones of a minority known as Uighurs, whose home region, East Turkestan, has been the site of a vast build-out of surveillance tech in recent years.
“The Chinese use their best tools against their own people first because that is who they’re most afraid of,” said James A. Lewis, a former United States government official who writes on cybersecurity and espionage for the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. 

“Then they turn those tools on foreign targets.”
China’s willingness to extend the reach of its surveillance and censorship was on display after an executive for the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets tweeted support for protesters in Hong Kong this month. 

The response from China was swift, threatening a range of business relationships the N.B.A. had forged in the country.
In August, Facebook and Twitter said they had taken down a large network of Chinese bots that was spreading disinformation around the protests. 

And in recent weeks, a security firm traced a monthslong attack on Hong Kong media companies to Chinese hackers. 

Security experts say Chinese hackers are very likely targeting protesters’ phones, but they have yet to publish any evidence.

A security checkpoint with facial recognition technology in Hotan in East Turkestan.

Security researchers said the improved abilities of the Chinese hackers had put them on a par with elite Russian cyberunits. 

And the attacks on cellphones of Uighurs offered a rare glimpse of how some of China’s most advanced hacking tools are now being used to silence or punish critics.
Google researchers who tracked the attacks against iPhones said details about the software flaws that the hackers had preyed on would have been worth tens of millions of dollars on black market sites where information about software vulnerabilities is sold.
On the streets in East Turkestan, huge numbers of high-end surveillance cameras run facial recognition software to identify and track people. 

Specially designed apps have been used to screen Uighurs’ phones, monitor their communications and register their whereabouts.
Gaining access to the phones of Uighurs who have fled China — a diaspora that has grown as many have been locked away at home — would be a logical extension of those total surveillance efforts. Such communities in other countries have long been a concern to Beijing, and many in East Turkestan have been sent to camps because relatives traveled or live abroad.
The Chinese police have also made less sophisticated efforts to control Uighurs who have fled, using the chat app WeChat to entice them to return home or to threaten their families.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment. 

Security researchers recently discovered that the Chinese used National Security Agency hacking tools after apparently discovering an N.S.A. cyberattack on their own systems. 

And several weeks ago, a Chinese security firm, Qianxin, published an analysis tying the Central Intelligence Agency to a hack of China’s aviation industry.

Xi Jinping visiting President Barack Obama in 2015. Their agreement to halt certain cyberoperations gave China time to hone its abilities.

Breaking into iPhones has long been considered the Holy Grail of cyberespionage. 

“If you can get inside an iPhone, you have yourself a spy phone,” said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye, a cybersecurity firm.
The F.B.I. couldn’t do it without help during a showdown with Apple in 2016. 

The bureau paid more than $1 million to an anonymous third party to hack an iPhone used by a gunman involved in the killing of 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif.
Google researchers said they had discovered that iPhone vulnerabilities were being exploited to infect visitors to a set of websites. 

Although Google did not release the names of the targets, Apple said they had been found on about a dozen websites focused on Uighurs.
“You can hit a high school student from Japan who is visiting the site to write a research report, but you are also going to hit Uighurs who have family members back in China and are supporting the cause,” said Steven Adair, the president and founder of the security firm Volexity in Virginia.
The technology news site TechCrunch first reported the Uighur connection. 

A software update from Apple fixed the flaw.
In recent weeks, security researchers at Volexity uncovered Chinese hacking campaigns that exploited vulnerabilities in Google’s Android software as well. 

Volexity found that several websites that focused on Uighur issues had been infected with Android malware. 

It traced the attacks to two Chinese hacking groups.
Because the hacks targeted Android and iPhone users — even though Uighurs in East Turkestan don’t commonly use iPhones — Mr. Adair said he believed that they had been aimed in part at Uighurs living abroad.

An analyst at FireEye. “If you can get inside an iPhone, you have yourself a spy phone,” said John Hultquist, the company’s director of intelligence analysis.

“China is expanding their digital surveillance outside their borders,” he said. 

“It seems like it really is going after the diaspora.”
Another group of researchers, at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, recently uncovered an overlapping effort, using some of the same code discovered by Google and Volexity. 

It attacked the iPhones and Android phones of Tibetans until as recently as May.
Using WhatsApp messages, Chinese hackers posing as New York Times reporters and representatives of Amnesty International and other organizations targeted the private office of the Dalai Lama, members of the Tibetan Parliament and Tibetan nongovernmental organizations, among others.
Lobsang Gyatso, the secretary of TibCERT, an organization that works with Tibetan organizations on cybersecurity threats, said in an interview that the recent attacks were a notable escalation from previous Chinese surveillance attempts.
For a decade, Chinese hackers blasted Tibetans with emails containing malicious attachments, Mr. Lobsang said. 

If they hacked one person’s computer, they hit everyone in the victim’s address books, casting as wide a net as possible. 

But in the last three years, Mr. Lobsang said, there has been a big shift.
“The recent targeting was something we haven’t seen in the community before,” he said. 

“It was a huge shift in resources. They were targeting mobile phones, and there was a lot more reconnaissance involved. They had private phone numbers of individuals, even those that were not online. They knew who they were, where their offices were located, what they did.”
Adam Meyers, the vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike, said these operations were notably more sophisticated than five years ago, when security firms discovered that Chinese hackers were targeting the phones of Hong Kong protesters in the so-called Umbrella Revolution.

The attacks on iPhones, which Uighurs in East Turkestan don’t typically use, suggested that Uighurs abroad were among the targets, said Steven Adair, president of Volexity.

At the time, Chinese hackers could break only into phones that had been “jailbroken,” or altered in some way to allow the installation of apps not vetted by Apple’s official store. 

The recent attacks against the Uighurs broke into up-to-date iPhones without tipping off the owner.
“In terms of how the Chinese rank threats, the highest threats are domestic,” Mr. Lewis said. 

“The No. 1 threat, as the Chinese see it, is the loss of information control on their own population. But the United States is firmly No. 2.”
Chinese hackers have also used their improved skills to attack the computer networks of foreign governments and companies. 

They have targeted internet and telecommunications companies and have broken into the computer networks of foreign tech, chemical, manufacturing and mining companies. 

Airbus recently said China had hacked it through a supplier.
In 2016, Xi Jinping consolidated several army hacking divisions under a new Strategic Support Force, similar to the United States’ Cyber Command, and moved much of the country’s foreign hacking operation from the army to the more advanced Ministry of State Security, China’s main spy agency.
The restructuring coincided with a lull in Chinese cyberattacks after a 2015 agreement between Xi and President Barack Obama to cease cyberespionage operations for commercial gain.
“The deal gave the Chinese the time and space to focus on professionalizing their cyberespionage capabilities,” Mr. Lewis said. 

“We didn’t expect that.”
Chinese officials also cracked down on moonlighting in moneymaking schemes by its state-sponsored hackers — a “corruption” issue that Xi concluded had sometimes compromised the hackers’ identities and tools, according to security researchers.
While China was revamping its operations, security experts said, it was also clamping down on security research in order to keep advanced hacking methods in house. 

The Chinese police recently said they planned to enforce national laws against unauthorized vulnerability disclosure, and Chinese researchers were recently banned from competing in Western hacking conferences.
“They are circling the wagons,” Mr. Hultquist of FireEye said. 

“They’ve recognized that they could use these resources to aid their offensive and defensive cyberoperations.”

American Quisling: Apple's Moral Bankruptcy

Apple supports China’s authoritarian ambitions

The Washington Post

APPLE CHIEF EXECUTIVE Tim Cook has said that “companies should have values, just like people do.” 

He’s right. 

But it is difficult to champion democratic values while doing business in a country that runs on speech-stifling authoritarianism.

China is Apple’s third-largest market, and it brings the company $44 billion per year in sales, plus countless ethical headaches. 

Last week brought several, all surrounding the ongoing anti-government protests in Hong Kong. Apple hid the Taiwanese flag emoji from its keyboard for those tapping away on the island. 

It booted the news outlet Quartz from the Chinese version of its app store after its aggressive coverage of the unrest. 

And then there was HKmap.live, an app designed for Hong Kongers to avoid law enforcement amid violent crackdowns. 

Apple, at first, rejected the app. 

Then it approved it. 

Then, finally, it removed it.
Apple says its decision to yank HKmap.live wasn’t a matter of capitulation to the Chinese regime, but rather of internal enforcement. 

The tool’s tracking function was abused to attack police, as well as to commit crimes in unpatrolled areas, and that ran counter to Apple’s guidelines. 

But the company’s reversal came after the ruling party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, declared that Apple’s support for “toxic apps” made the company “an accomplice to the rioters.”
Quartz was another story. 

Apple complies with local laws wherever it operates, and Xi Jinping’s laws don’t respect press freedom. 

Apple removed the app because China said to do so, just as it removed the New York Times’s almost three years ago.
Apple justifies acceding to despotic demands by arguing that it is the cost of operating in China, and that the Chinese people are better off with a big U.S. firm around than without. 

Apple and its peers can facilitate a freer flow of information — not to mention better privacy protections, on many of which the company says it will not compromise — than homegrown firms. The question, of course, is how free. 

Sometimes, corporations might go to the mat for what’s right, and sometimes they might win. 

But, other times, they will lose, and then they are left with a choice to leave China altogether or help warp the world its residents are allowed to see.
When the United States and its allies made the decision to engage with China, they imagined that economic growth and trade would promote political liberalization and a convergence of values. 

That hasn’t happened. 

Instead, there is competition between vastly different sets of values, and China doesn’t hesitate to use the lure of its market to demand fealty to its propaganda line. 

Apple, the National Basketball Association and other businesses should resist — but they need help. The United States should negotiate not only over soybean purchases and steel quotas but also to protect free speech and other liberties that China would erode.

American Greed: Activision Blizzard is acting as Chinese censor

Activision Blizzard punished a pro player for speaking out on behalf of Hong Kong. It must be boycotted.

By Zack Beauchamp

Blitzchung, the Hong Kong based player at the center of the Blizzard controversy.

Activision Blizzard, one of America’s biggest gaming companies, just bowed to Chinese censorship in a disturbing way: suspending a professional player of Hearthstone, its digital card game, over a statement supporting the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests.
The offending commentary from Chung Ng Wai, a Hong Kong-based player who goes by the name “Blitzchung,” came during an official interview on Sunday held after he won a match in the Hearthstone Grandmasters tournament, the highest level of competition in the game.
Chung said “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our time” — a protest slogan in the city — while wearing goggles and a face mask, items commonly donned by protestors to conceal their identity. 

The protests, which began over an extradition law, have morphed into a broad-based demand to protect the semi-autonomous city’s democratic political system from mainland China’s attempts to exert control over it.
On Tuesday, Blizzard came down hard on Chung. 

In an official statement on Hearthstone’s blog, the company announced that it would be suspending Chung for a year, forcing him to forfeit thousands of dollars in prize money from 2019 and firing the casters (commentators) who conducted the interview.
This is a big deal.
Blizzard, who created (among other things) World of Warcraft, is a massive company. 

It brought in about $7.5 billion in revenue in 2018. 

Like the NBA, which has rebuked the Houston Rockets’ general manager over a pro-Hong Kong tweet, Blizzard is not merely trying to operate within the confines of Chinese censorship but acting as its agent.
The non-Chinese Hearthstone player base is furious with Blizzard; the game’s subreddit is full of longtime players vowing to quit the game in protest. 

Count me as one of them.
I’ve been playing Hearthstone daily for about two years, including spending some money on cards and reaching the top tier of the game’s competitive ladder (the Legend ranks). 

But now I’m done, both with Hearthstone and any other Activision Blizzard product, unless it reinstates Chung and the casters.

The case for boycotting Blizzard — and other US companies who act as Chinese censors
Blizzard’s argument for suspending Chung hinges on an alleged rule violation, specifically Section 6.1 of the official Hearthstone Grandmasters rules. 

The rule prohibits “engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image.”
The idea here seems to be that supporting pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong has brought Chung into “public disrepute” in mainland China, justifying his suspension. 

The actual motivation is most likely crasser: Blizzard’s userbase is declining, and it is counting on expansion in the very large Chinese market to reverse the downward momentum.
“The gaming giant ... is badly in need of a stimulus after its market value declined by a quarter over the past twelve months,” the financial news company AlphaStreet reported in January. 

“Blizzard’s strategy of taking the China route for regaining the lost strength is currently followed by many American tech companies.”
Blizzard’s userbase remains overwhelmingly non-Chinese. 

According to the company’s most recent financial data, from June 2019, the entire Asia-Pacific region makes up a scant 12 percent of its revenue. 

Since that region includes large gaming markets in places like Japan and South Korea, mainland China’s clout is smaller than you think — and pales in comparison to the Americas (55 percent) and Europe/the Middle East (33 percent).
So while Blizzard may have a lot of ground to gain in the Chinese market, a significant hit to its revenue in the United States and other liberal democracies would be a massive threat. 

Blizzard’s fans in those countries have a lot of leverage over the company.
And, in this case, they’re justified in using it.
Navigating the Chinese market is difficult for major companies and requires some necessary tradeoffs. 

Blizzard has changed the art in World of Warcraft to comply with Chinese cultural norms and strictures, notably cutting out some goriness and skeletons. 

That’s maybe not ideal, but at least a defensible choice for a company that has a clear financial stake in the Chinese market.
Censoring a professional player for expressing support for the democracy movement in Hong Kong — and seizing his money — is way over the line.
It isn’t merely adjusting a cosmetic part of the product to fit a particular market; it’s actively participating in the suppression of political speech on behalf of core liberal values. 

Blizzard is throwing its lot in with an authoritarian state, acting as an international agent of its repressive apparatus in opposition to fundamental human rights.
An organized boycott targeting Blizzard is also a relatively rare opportunity for ordinary citizens around the world to help out the Hong Kong protestors working to protect their democratic system.
It’s hard to do much for the brave people taking to the streets from thousands of miles away, but international consumers do have leverage over international corporations. 

Punishing Blizzard for its behavior could help send a signal to other companies that acting as agents of the Chinese state carries a cost and that they need to think carefully before throwing Hong Kong under the bus.
Blizzard’s censorship of Chung is hardly the only case of a US company acting on behalf of China. Just yesterday, the NBA issued a statement distancing itself from Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, after he tweeted support for the Hong Kong protestors. 

The team is reportedly considering firing him in order to placate Chinese authorities and protect NBA investments there.
The league is facing a bipartisan political backlash as a result; Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and several Democratic presidential candidates have condemned the league’s actions.
But Blizzard, less well known among the American political class, isn’t facing the same amount of high-level political condemnation. 

For now, it seems it’s up to Blizzard’s users to show the company that its actions have consequences.

‘South Park’ creators issue mock apology to China after being censored

• The episode, called “Band in China,” pokes fun at China’s strict censorship laws and ridicules Hollywood for shaping its entertainment to please the Chinese government.
• On Monday, Beijing responded by deleting all clips, episodes and online discussions of the long-running comedy program.
• Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of “South Park,” issued an “official apology to China” via Twitter.

By Sam Meredith

Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick attend The Paley Center for Media presents special retrospective event honoring 20 seasons of ‘South Park’ at The Paley Center for Media on September 1, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California.

The creators of “South Park” have jokingly apologized to China after an episode of the U.S. TV comedy cartoon was made largely unavailable in the country.
The episode, called “Band in China,” pokes fun at China’s strict censorship laws and ridicules Hollywood for shaping its entertainment to please the Chinese government.
On Monday, Beijing responded by deleting all clips, episodes and online discussions of the long-running comedy program.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of “South Park,” issued an “official apology to China” via Twitter.


South Park
✔@SouthPark
Watch the full episode - https://cart.mn/sp-2302 @THR article - https://cart.mn/china


59.2K
8:22 PM - Oct 7, 2019

“Like the NBA (National Basketball Association), we welcome the Chinese sensors into our homes and our hearts,” the statement said, referring to an escalating dispute between the NBA and Chinese TV.
“We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn’t look like Winnie the Pooh at all.”
The statement continued: “Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?”

What happens in the episode?
Aired last week in the U.S., “Band in China” includes a plotline in which the character Randy Marsh is caught selling drugs in China. 

As punishment, he is subjected to forced labor and Communist Party re-education.
This appears to be a direct reference to the mass internment camps in East Turkestan — home to China’s Uighur minority.
The territory has made headlines for its detention and “re-education” camps that hold an estimated 1.5 million Muslims, many of them for violating what Amnesty International describes as a “highly restrictive and discriminatory” law that China says is designed to combat extremism.
In one scene, a prison guard is seen giving Marsh an electric shock.
“I am a proud member of the Communist Party,” Marsh then says, reading aloud from a card handed to him by the same guard. 

“The party is more important than the individual.”
Marsh is also depicted in an overcrowded prison cell, before engaging in conversation with Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

(L-R) Trey Parker and Matt Stone attend The Paley Center for Media presents special retrospective event honoring 20 seasons of ‘South Park’ at The Paley Center for Media on September 1, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California.

In 2017, AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh character was scrubbed from Chinese social media because people compared him to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
“Some people said Pooh looked like the Chinese president, so we’re illegal in China now,” Piglet says in the episode.
“What kind of madhouse is this?” Marsh replies.

How has China responded?
China’s government has sought to wipe almost every episode of the show and clamped down on any mention of “South Park” online, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Search results of “South Park” have been taken down on Chinese search engine, Baidu, with a video trailer from 2017 now the most recent video available.
China’s internet, sometimes referred to as the Great Firewall, heavily restricts news and information. Google, as well as social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, are blocked online in the world’s second-largest economy.
A statement from the Wikimedia foundation in mid-May said the online encyclopedia site Wikipedia had been blocked in mainland China since April this year.
Chinese newspapers and TV are under Communist Party control, with keywords and phrases censored on social media.

Hong Kong Takes Symbolic Stand Against China’s High-Tech Controls

The first major place in China to rebel against Beijing’s technologies of control is one of the last not yet fully under their thrall.
By Paul Mozur and Lin Qiqing

In Hong Kong, umbrellas are commonly deployed to shield protester activities from digital eyes.

HONG KONG — There’s no sign to mark it. 

But when travelers from Hong Kong cross into Shenzhen in mainland China, they reach a digital cut-off point.
On the Hong Kong side, the internet is open and unfettered. 

On the China side, connections wither behind filters and censors that block foreign websites and scrub social media posts. 

The walk is short, but the virtual divide is huge.
This invisible but stark technological wall has loomed as Hong Kong’s protests smolder into their fourth month. 

The semiautonomous city’s proximity to a society that is increasingly closed off and controlled by technology has informed protesters’ concerns about Hong Kong’s future. 

For many, one fear is the city will fall into a shadow world of surveillance, censorship and digital controls that many have had firsthand experience with during regular travels to China.
The protests are a rare rebellion against Beijing’s vision of tech-backed authoritarianism. 

Unsurprisingly, they come from the only major place in China that sits outside its censorship and surveillance.
The symbols of revolt are rife. 

Umbrellas, which became an emblem of protests in Hong Kong five years ago when they were used to deflect pepper spray, are now commonly deployed to shield protester activities from the digital eyes of cameras and smartphones. 

In late July, protesters painted black the lenses of cameras in front of Beijing’s liaison office in the city.
Since then, Hong Kong protesters have smashed cameras to bits. 

In the subway, cameras are frequently covered in clear plastic wrapping, an attempt to protect a hardware now hunted. 

In August, protesters pulled down a smart lamppost out of fear it was equipped with artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance software.

The moment showed how at times the protests in Hong Kong are responding not to the realities on the ground, but fears of what could happen under stronger controls by Beijing.
This week, as protesters confronted the police in some of the most intense clashes since the unrest began in June, umbrellas were opened to block the view of police helicopters flying overhead. 

Some people got creative, handing out reflective mylar to stick on goggles to make them harder to film.
“Before, Hong Kong wouldn’t be using cameras to surveil citizens. To destroy the cameras and the lampposts is a symbolic way to protest,” said Stephanie Cheung, a 20-year-old university student and protester who stood nearby as others bashed the lens out of a dome camera at a subway stop last month. 

“We are saying we don’t need this surveillance.”
“Hong Kong, step by step, is walking the road to becoming China,” she said.
Hong Kong’s situation shows how China’s approach to technology has created new barriers to its goals, even as it has helped ensure the Communist Party’s grip on power.
In building a sprawling censorship and surveillance apparatus, China has separated itself from broader global norms. 

Most people — including in Hong Kong — still live in a world that looks technologically more like the United States than China, where services like Facebook, Google and Twitter are blocked. 

With much of culture and entertainment happening on smartphones, China faces the challenge of asking Hong Kong citizens to give up their main way of digital life.

Protesters pulling down a smart lamppost during an anti-government rally in August.

In the mainland, Xi Jinping has strengthened an already muscular tech-powered censorship and surveillance system.
The government has spent billions to knit together sprawling networks that pull from facial-recognition and phone-tracking systems. 

Government apps are used to check phones, register people and enforce discipline within the Chinese Communist Party. 

The internet police have been empowered to question the outspoken and the small, but significant, numbers of people who use software to circumvent the internet filters and get on sites like Twitter.
“One country, two systems” — the shorthand to describe China’s and Hong Kong’s separate governance structures — has brought with it one country, two internets.
Undoing that is an ask that is too large for many. 

Apps like the Chinese messaging service WeChat, which some in Hong Kong use, in part to connect to people across the border, have garnered suspicion. 

Gum Cheung, 43, an artist and curator who travels to China for work, said he abandoned WeChat last year after he noticed some messages he sent to friends were not getting through.
“We have to take the initiative to hold the line. The whole internet of mainland China is under government surveillance,” he said.
The Cyberspace Administration of China did not respond to a faxed request for comment about the impact of internet censorship. 

The Hong Kong police did not respond to questions about their use of surveillance during the protests.
Beijing’s approach has sometimes encouraged the fears. 

In recent months, playing to a push from China’s government, Hong Kong’s airline carrier Cathay Pacific scrutinized the communications of its employees to ensure they do not participate in the protests. 

Twitter and Facebook took down accounts in what they said was an information campaign out of China to change political opinions in Hong Kong.
The debate over why, how, and who watches who has at times descended into a self-serving back-and-forth between the police and protesters.
The Hong Kong police have arrested people based on their digital communications and ripped phones out of the hands of unwitting targets to gain access to their electronics. 

Sites have also been set up to try to identify protesters based on their social media accounts. 

More recently, the police have requested data on bus passengers to pinpoint escaping protesters.
Protesters have called for the police to release footage showing abuses at Hong Kong’s Prince Edward subway station in Kowloon in August. 

Hong Kong’s subway operator fired back, pointing out that cameras that might have gotten the footage were destroyed by protesters. 

Other than a few screenshots, they have not released footage.
“Trust in institutions is what separates Hong Kong from China,” said Lokman Tsui, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

Privacy concerns on both sides have driven efforts to maintain real-life anonymity. 

Police officers have stopped wearing badges with names or numbers. 

Protesters have covered their faces with masks. 

Both sides are carrying out increasingly sophisticated attempts to identify the other online.
Each even has a matching, if often ineffective, countermeasure to video surveillance. 

Protesters shine laser pointers at lenses of police cameras to help hide themselves. 

Police officers have strobing lights attached to their uniforms that can make it hard to capture their images.
“Of course we’re worried about the cameras,” said Tom Lau, 21, a college student. 

“If we lose, the cameras recorded what we’ve done, and they can bide their time and settle the score whenever they want.”
“We still have decades in front of us,” he said. 

“There will be a record. Even if we don’t want to work for the government, what if big companies won’t hire us?”