Good And Bad Things Happened To Mr. Anti

First, for the good thing.  From Hamish MacDonald's China's web censors struggle to muzzle free-spirited bloggers (Sydney Morning Herald, December 23, 2005):

When a dozen Chinese newspapers recently ran stories about a rash of sadistic cat killings in Shanghai by a perverse postgraduate student, it was another quiet triumph for a young man in Beijing called Zhao Jing.

To a widening blog readership in China and abroad, Zhao is better known by the pseudonym Anti. As well as indicating an oppositionist stance in English, it also strikes a dissident note in Chinese, roughly meaning "security alternative".

Thanks to Anti's persistent writings on his blog (http://mranti.blogneo.com/).  (translator's note: the URL is for Anti's English Blog.  If you want the cat story, you would have to go to http://spaces.msn.com/members/mranti/).  The activities of the Shanghai serial cat mutilator got into China's mainstream media, and this was far from a unique example.

...

Zhao Jing - aka Anti - is different. A graduate of Nanjing Normal University, Zhao, 30, is committed to the cause of democracy in China and earns his living interpreting for a big Western newspaper - which earns him monthly cups of tea with his case officer at the Ministry of State Security. "Anti is more direct, he's more active, he's working with a lot of foreign journalists and he also has this little character of being 'subversive'," Professor Xiao says. "He's also clever enough - he knows where is the limit, but he's right on the border. If he crosses he'll get a phone call or he'll be blocked."

Sipping coffee at a Starbucks in Beijing, Zhao says his previous blog was shut down in August, apparently because he had posted an internal letter by a journalist at the China Youth Daily, a newspaper attached to the Communist Party youth wing, criticising its editor.

Hits at his new blog are about 8000 a day and picking up, and with the help of interested friends he is posting English translations of important political commentaries by Chinese writers.

"I aim to highlight Chinese intellectuals," Zhao said. "I want to show the world how the Chinese mind thinks, the entire political spectrum from the far left to the far right, from the Maoists to the liberals and democrats."

Bloggers like Zhao are also an important input to China's intellectual debate, feeding in news from foreign language websites or external Chinese-language websites run from Taiwan, Hong Kong or the dissident diaspora.

The Anti website, for example, recently broke the news of the death of the exiled Communist Party reformer Liu Binyin, and discussed the resurgence of the Kuomintang in local Taiwan elections.

How long the party propaganda chiefs wear this is anyone's guess, but it must be pushing tolerance. The party chief, Hu Jintao, is putting all the party's 79 million members through Marxist re-education, and Beijing has slammed the whole idea of "public intellectuals" existing outside the party hierarchy.

But what do they do when their suspect suddenly veers to the defence of Shanghai's cats?

And now for the bad thing from a column by Qin Chen (秦尘) at Bokee.com.  This column has been removed by Bokee but the Anti blog carries a copy.  The title of the column is "The Hidden Threat of Anti and the Cunning of MSN."

[in translation]

The existence of Anti caused a number of foreign blogs to be shut down.  Blog-city was shut down.  Anti seemed to be the "bad luck charm" for foreign blog service providers, and he has also become the advertisement for the "fake freedom" offered by the foreign BSPs, as if the existence of Anti implies that freedom of speech is preserved.  Therefore, insofar as the development of the Chinese blogging culture, Anti constitutes a huge obstructive force.

I remember that there was a news item earlier that Chen Tianqiao said that NASDAQ does not understand the Chinese situation.  I say that the Best of Blogs competition in Germany also does not under the Chinese bloggers situation.  There is a difference between Chinese bloggers and global bloggers (or perhaps American bloggers).  Anti and other cannot represent Chinese bloggers.

Anti's moving over the MSN is a severely deplorable event in the development of Chinese blogging.  By moving his blog to MSN, he will influence a group of others to move their blogs to MSN.

Furthermore, we need to reflect: of all the BSP's that Anti has used, how come only MSN was not shut down?  Here, we must admire the cunning public relations methods of MSN.  We must also think that the Internet supervision departments are negligent about monitoring and controlling blogs, and that they have been lax with respect to MSN.  Our bottom line are being backed up step by step, and our market is being eroded step by step.

We issue the call: Rise up, and oppose the Microsoft monopoly of 2.0.

1. We have our own blog service suppliers.  We have our own blogging systems that are no worse than MSN.  The Chinese people are smart, and their products are no worse than those of foreigners.  We need to support national products.  Blogs are an important supporting point for the next stage and to protect the national nature of the Internet.

2. We call on the national monitoring departments to increase their monitoring and supervision of MSN SPACES, especially with respect to their illegal offering of content services in order to restrict its monopolistic practices.

3. From the viewpoint of maintaining national information sovereignty and national products, the blogging market has very significant implications for the county.  The situation in China is that our blogs are more individualistic in emphasis.  In the evolving Internet, news means far less than the market.

4. We call for the vast number of blog service providers and traditional portals to put aside their sectarian interest, and set up Chinese blog service standards and open up the Chinese market in order to oppose Microsoft monopolizing 2.0.

5. We call on Bokee to unite with Tercent and increase their cooperation in exploring developments in blog search services and instant messaging applications.  We call on Bokee to work with Netease to explore the joint cooperation between the future blogs and electronic mail.  We call on all the Internet companies to pay attention to this problem and work together so that we can all win.

安替的存在，讓一些國外博客服務商關了，blog-city被封了，安替似乎成了國外博客託管服務商的“黴頭”，也成了國外服務商的“偽自由”的廣告，似乎安替的存在就意味著呼籲權的保證。因此，安替對於中國博客的民族發展來講，起著非常大的阻礙作用。
記得前些日子有個新聞，盛大陳天橋說納斯達克不懂中國行情，我看，德國世界博客大賽也根本不懂中國博客行情。中國博客與世界博客、或者說與美國博客是有區別的。安替等不能代表中國博客。
安替將博客遷往MSN，這是一次對國內博客發展事業的重要詛咒行為，他將博客遷往MSN，直接影響了一批人將博客導向MSN。
再者，我們反問一下，為什麼安替在的這麼多BSP裏面，就只有MSN沒有被封呢？我們不得不佩服MSN的狡猾的公關手段，我們也不得不感覺到一些互聯網主管部門對博客監管的忽視、對MSN的過於寬鬆。我們的底線一步一步地退讓，我們的市場一步一步地被侵蝕。

呼籲：起來，反對微軟壟斷2.0
一、我們有自己的博客託管服務商，我們有自己的博客系統，不比MSN差。中國人是聰明的，開發出的產品不比外國人差。我們需要支援民族產業。博客也是下一階段，維護民族網路產業的重要支柱。
二、呼籲國家主管部門加大對MSN SPACE的審核、對其非法提供內容服務進行調查，對其壟斷行為進行限制。
三、從維護國家資訊主權與民族產業角度看，博客市場對於國家的意義非常重大。中國國情表明，我們的博客更偏重於個人化、網路生存化，新聞的意義遠沒有市場的意義大。
四、呼籲廣大的博客託管服務商與傳統門戶摒棄門戶之見，打造中國博客服務標準，開放國內市場，一起反對微軟壟斷2.0。
五、呼籲博客網、騰訊聯合起來，加強合作，探索博客與即時通訊領域的未來發展合作空間；呼籲博客網、網易聯合起來，探索未來博客與電子郵件等的未來發展合作空間；呼籲所有的互聯網公司，都重視這個問題，尋求合作，以期雙贏。

Where do we even begin with this?  It seems that the Chinese government Internet monitoring/supervising department has been negligent and really needs to be scrutinising Anti's blog and MSN Spaces as a whole.  Presumably, if the government was up to its job, both would be banned forthwith.  Or if only the Anti blog was banned, then it would take away the "freedom" credentials of MSN and that is supposed to be a celebration for nationalism in China.  Meanwhile, the statement is inserted that Chinese blogs are more 'individualistic,' which I take to be an invitation to restrict (if not outright ban) news and commentary from blogs (not as any freedom of speech issue but because the market demands it!).

(Washington Post)  Bloggers Who Pursue Change Confront Fear And Mistrust.  By Philip P. Pan.  February 21, 2006.

When Zhao Jing moved his blog to Microsoft's popular MSN Spaces site last summer, some users worried the Chinese government would block the entire service. The censors had blacklisted the last site where the young journalist had posted his spirited political essays, and he seemed unwilling to tone down his writing at the new address.

But Zhao, better known by the pen name Anti, told fellow bloggers not to worry. If the government objected to his blog, he predicted, Microsoft would "sell me out" and delete it rather than risk being blocked from computer screens across China.

He was right. Four and a half months after he began posting essays challenging the Communist Party's taboo against discussing politics, Zhao published an item protesting the purge of a popular newspaper's top editors. Officials called Microsoft to complain, and Microsoft quickly erased his blog.

The December incident sparked outrage among bloggers around the world, and in Washington, members of Congress vowed to scrutinize how U.S. firms are helping the Chinese government censor the Internet. But the reaction inside China's growing community of Internet users was strikingly mixed.

Many rallied to support Zhao, but some objected to his "Western" views and said he deserved to be silenced. Others, especially those with a financial stake in the industry, said they worried Zhao's writing could lead officials to impose tighter controls on blogging. And a few said they were pleased that Microsoft had been forced to comply with the same censorship rules that its Chinese rivals obey.

The story of Zhao's blog -- and the ambivalence it met in cyberspace -- demonstrates that those trying to use the Internet to foster political change in China must contend not only with the censors but also with the apathy, fear and mistrust of their fellow citizens. The case also highlights the competing ethical and commercial pressures on companies seeking to profit from the Internet in China, including U.S. firms such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

With as many as 16 million people in China writing blogs, the Internet has provided a platform for citizens to express their views, shattering the Communist Party's monopoly on the media. The state still controls newspaper, magazine and book publishing, but the proliferation of sites that let users publish and even broadcast audio and video online have undermined the party's ability to restrict who can address the public and attract an audience.

Many have used the Internet to produce essays, books and even underground films that question the party's authority. But surveys show most Internet users are members of the urban elite who are benefiting from China's booming economy and have avoided writing about politics.

As a result, people using the Internet to pursue change often encounter resistance, both from those hostile to their views and from others who sympathize but worry that pushing too hard could imperil the freedoms already gained on the Web.

The Internet firms empowering Chinese confront different problems. To build audiences, they often push the censors' limits by offering users an extra bit of news or freedom. But because they need government licenses, there is also an incentive for them to curry favor with the censors. In addition, U.S. firms such as Microsoft must face critics who say they have a duty to do more than their Chinese rivals to promote freedom.

After Zhao's blog was deleted, he posted a message online cursing Microsoft and the young Chinese programmers who are helping the Communist Party censor the Internet. But a few weeks later, he moderated his criticism of Microsoft, still expressing anger but also noting that MSN Spaces remains China's most lightly censored blog site.

"In this political system, everyone has to compromise," Zhao said. "It's not black and white. Many of the people who delete my essays are also my friends."

Blogging arrived in China in the summer of 2002 as a response to censorship, but not by the government. Fang Xingdong, the author of a book that attacked Microsoft's market dominance as a threat to national security, said he created one of the country's first blogs after an essay he wrote about Microsoft disappeared from chat forums.

Although Microsoft denied it, Fang concluded the company had pressured the sites to erase his essay. When he posted it on his new blog, he realized he was using technology that could change China.

"The more I thought about it, the more excited I was," said Fang, now the chairman of Bokee, China's largest blog service provider. "I felt I had seen the future of the Internet. . . . Each individual would have the power to fully express his creativity."

Fang said he believed, then as now, that big corporations like Microsoft presented the greatest threat to freedom of speech on the Internet, not government censors. But when he launched his firm, he said, he devoted meeting after meeting to persuading party officials to accept blogging.

"At the time, they thought, 'If everyone can publish, wouldn't we lose control?' " Fang said. "But I argued that a blog is like a person's home, and very few people would put something inappropriate in their home."

Fang's company, and others like it, expanded quickly as millions of Chinese embraced blogs as a channel to express themselves and an alternative to the bland fare on state media. Pioneers using pen names such as Mu Zimei, a young reporter who detailed her sexual escapades online, and Meizi, a housewife who described the meals she prepared daily, attracted huge audiences, demonstrating the potential of the Internet to render the party's culture czars irrelevant.

Like most journalists, Zhao Jing dismissed the blogosphere at first. But near the end of 2004, the slim, fast-talking native of southern China began to see it as a potential medium for journalism.

Zhao, 30, was a news junkie, a former computer technician who got his start in newspapers when an editor spotted a political essay he posted on an Internet bulletin board. He picked the pen name Anti because he believed it reflected his contrarian spirit, and in 2003, he was one of the few Chinese reporters to travel to Iraq to cover the war.

But the Communist Party shut down his newspaper, the 21st Century World Herald, after it published a retired official's call for political reform, and Zhao was summoned home before the war began. Despondent, he quit and turned to the foreign press, working briefly as a researcher in the Beijing bureau of The Washington Post before moving to the local office of the New York Times.

He launched his blog in December 2004 with high hopes. "Most blogs were diaries or entertainment, but I wanted to do something different," he said. "I wanted to produce a high-quality blog about politics, like a column, with each entry good enough to publish in a newspaper or magazine."

Zhao polished his writing before posting it. He gave each entry a strong headline and an eye-catching photo. In the beginning, he spent $60 a month to buy ads on Google that would appear when users searched for information on hot political issues.

"Anti's Daily Thoughts on Politics and Journalism" tackled a variety of subjects, from public attitudes in Jordan toward the war in Iraq, to the growth of democracy in Taiwan, to the state of Chinese journalism. Zhao generally refrained from topics sure to upset the censors. But his political views were clear.

"I thought of myself as a salesman, and what I was selling was the concept of democracy," he said. "People think discussing politics is dangerous, but I wanted them to relax, to see it was normal and that it's not so sensitive."

By July, Zhao said, his blog was getting 7,000 visitors a day.

Then, in August, he posted a copy of a letter by an editor at the China Youth Daily who had attacked a plan to muzzle the paper's reporters. Hours later, the government blocked access to his blog, and every other blog on Blog-City, the overseas site where he had set up his page.

Zhao posted a message apologizing to his fellow bloggers for cutting them off from their readers in China. Then he moved to MSN Spaces.

Microsoft has struggled in China. Piracy of its software is rampant, and much of the public sees the company as a foreign bully. Analysts believe it is losing money here. When it launched its free blogging platform last May, part of the Chinese version of its MSN.com portal site, it hoped to turn things around.

The site was the result of years of negotiations with Chinese officials. Microsoft lined up the Beijing Youth Daily, a state-owned newspaper, and others to provide content. Just before the launch, it struck a partnership with a state-owned investment firm in Shanghai run by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former president Jiang Zemin. The joint venture marked one of the first times a foreign-invested firm had obtained a license to provide Internet content in China.

Free speech advocates quickly attacked Microsoft for preventing Chinese bloggers from using words such as "freedom" and "democracy" in the titles of their blog entries. But MSN Spaces was a hit, and in less than five months, surveys showed it was overtaking Fang Xingdong's Bokee as the most popular blog site in China.

Bloggers flocked to the site because of its superior software, which made it easy to include slideshows and was linked to Microsoft's popular instant-messaging program. But Zhao said he chose MSN Spaces because it seemed less heavily censored than its Chinese competitors.

While Chinese firms used filters to stop bloggers from posting entries with prohibited keywords, Microsoft applied its filter only to the titles of entries. And while Chinese sites often erased politically sensitive content, Microsoft didn't appear to be deleting much. Meanwhile, other foreign blog sites, like Google's Blogger, had been blocked by the government.

"Anti's Blog" thrived at its new address. Zhao continued to write about Taiwan, opposing independence for the island but praising its democracy. He mocked North Korea, picking apart propaganda photos from President Hu Jintao's visit to Pyongyang. He examined the success of a Chinese television program modeled after Fox's "American Idol," comparing it with an experiment in democracy.

But as his audience grew, Zhao exercised more restraint. He worried about the censors. He also knew that swaying China's Internet users would be difficult.

"With more readers, I needed to be more reasonable," he said. "I always said I supported democracy, but I tried to explain it in a sensible way. Otherwise, people would start calling me a traitor or an American running dog."

Occasionally, though, Zhao said he felt he had to speak out, no matter how sensitive the subject. He attended and described the funeral of the ousted party leader who opposed the Tiananmen Square massacre. He defended a teacher fired for discussing the Communist Party's violent past with her students. He wrote about the death of an exiled Chinese journalist.

Soon Zhao's blog was receiving an average of 15,000 visitors every day, and he was becoming a controversial figure on the Web.

In December, a college senior in the eastern city of Yanghzou posted a tirade calling Zhao a "huge obstacle to the development of Chinese blogging culture" and attacking him for moving his blog to MSN Spaces instead of a Chinese site.

The student, Zhang Ming, also called on the government to protect the country's own Internet firms, to be more vigilant about monitoring and censoring Microsoft's site and to investigate the "illegal services" it offered.

"Anti has become an ad for the fake freedom offered by foreign blog service providers, as if the existence of Anti implies that freedom of speech is preserved," he wrote.

The essay was featured on Bokee, and Zhao responded by demanding the firm clarify whether it shared the student's views. Bokee then deleted Zhang's essay.

But Fang, the Bokee chairman, also expressed concern about Zhao. "I understand his views, but I don't agree with his methods," he said. "If you use blogging as a political tool, you could destroy the development of blogging in China. When people like Anti come out, there's a lot of pressure on us. They're pursuing freedom, but it results in less freedom."

One popular Shanghai blogger, who declined to be identified, compared Zhao to an airline passenger who stands up and curses hijackers. "He makes the other passengers uncomfortable and nervous," the blogger said. "What he is saying might be right, but it makes the situation unpredictable, and perhaps more dangerous for everyone."

The situation came to a head in late December after the party replaced the top editors of the Beijing News, a scrappy tabloid that Zhao admired for its aggressive reporting. Zhao said he knew it was risky to write about, but decided he could not stay silent.

He expressed disgust on his blog and urged readers to cancel their subscriptions to the newspaper in protest.

One day later, on Dec. 30, the Shanghai Municipal Information Office, an arm of the party's propaganda department, called Microsoft's joint venture.

Zhang Xiaoyu, a senior official in the agency, said the government told Microsoft to remove Zhao's blog because it contained comments on the news, and only Chinese Web sites with licenses could publish such material. He said bloggers were barred from writing about "political, economic, military or diplomatic news."

Microsoft, which by then was hosting 3.3 million blogs in China, deleted Zhao's blog the next day. A company official said the Internet laws are vague and selectively enforced, and managers were caught off-guard by the request. He said Microsoft decided to comply because it came from an agency with regulatory authority.

Many bloggers rallied to support Zhao, and several used their Microsoft blogs to post copies of his next essay blasting the computer engineers who help censor the Internet. "These political forces are approaching day by day, nibbling at our space, our ideals," wrote one, a Beijing journalist. Isaac Mao, co-founder of one of China's first blogging firms, suggested a boycott of Microsoft.

Others defended Microsoft, saying the Chinese people should blame the censors, or themselves, for doing nothing to fight them.

Microsoft launched a policy review, then announced it would take down blogs only when it received notice from the government. By contrast, Chinese Internet firms often censor themselves without waiting for the authorities to call.

Microsoft also said it would disclose the government order when it removed a blog. The company has taken down at least four blogs since then, including one in which the offending material appeared to be a discussion of its new policy.

Meanwhile, a Microsoft executive called Zhao and offered to send a CD with a backup of his deleted blog. Zhao, who now writes on an overseas site the government tries to block, said he was happy to receive the call, but surprised to learn it involved another compromise: Microsoft said it could only send the disc to an address outside China.