China Media Digest 0902 (week5-6)

2008 China Internet Communication Report

The report is released by NetEase.com, Inc. (163.com,网易), one of the leading Internet technology companies in China, in January, 2009. The report includes an annual top-10 ranking of Internet Hot Figures, Internet Hot Key Words, Entertainment Stars, Sports Persons, Entrepreneurs, Hot Movies, Hot Music Singles, Hot TV series, Fund companies, and A-share listed companies. The report summarizes facts of maximum interest to Chinese netizens in these ten fields as well as highlights common features and the latest status of such information. According to the report,

Who determines the report result? There are about 200 million netizens in China who are active in the application of various NetEase Internet products. They come from different regions of China and are engaged in different industries, but every click or search they have done, and any words they have posted on the Internet, have contributed to this report.

How was the data analyzed? The data was analyzed by collecting original data from five system platforms of NetEase, i.e., NetEase Blog, NetEase BBS, Youdao Search Engine, Netease Channels, and NetEase Posts. Such data were then used for linear conversion and linear transformation by standard statistical methods without changing the data order or distribution form. This produced a normal status measure, called the Internet transmission index, for each respective collection item.

It’s really worth reading if you are interested in the culture of China society and Chinese cyberspace. Just click the links to download the English version and Chinese version. Other related links:

Netease: The feature page of the report (in Chinese)
Yahoo: NetEase Releases 2008 China Internet Communication Report

Film ratings system: news, fake news or “old news” ?

From Danwei:

On February 2, Beijing Business Today ran a report under the headline “Tong Gang: A film ratings system will not permit Cat-III films.” The article reported that China had completed work on a law that would implement a film ratings system without opening the door to porn, and featured extensive quotes from Film Bureau director Tong Gang.

Implementing a film ratings system is a contentious issue that has been kicking around for years, so Tong’s disclosure, if correct, has the potential to bring major changes to the domestic film industry.

Too bad it’s not true: the director did utter the words quoted in the article, but he said them in an interview with The Beijing News in 2004.

Some Newspapers and even Xinhua were deceived by the story of Beijing Business Today. They used the headline such as “China completes motion picture law, banning porn, violence contents”. Unfortunately, it seems just a clumsy copy of a five-year-old interview.

A ‘Chinese CNN’

Following the first topic in CMD 0901, Peter Ford, a staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor, quoted the comment from two Chinese scholars in his article “Beijing launching a ‘Chinese CNN’ to burnish image abroad”,

“China’s image is very important, but the first question is the image of the medium itself,” cautions Gong Wenxiang, journalism professor at Peking University. “If the medium lacks credibility, it is unthinkable that it will improve the country’s image.”

“The strength of our voice does not match our position in the world,” complains Yu Guoming, deputy dean of the journalism school at People’s University in Beijing, who has acted as a consultant on the government’s TV project.

“That affects the extent to which China is accepted by the world,” Professor Yu adds. “If our voice does not match our role, however strong we are we remain a crippled giant.”

“The outreach effort is very natural because of the growing strength of the nation,” says Professor Gong. “They [officials] are clear about what to say but they don’t know how to say it with the best results.”

And so long as the party insists on controlling the media, China will have difficulty convincing foreign viewers to consider its point of view, he adds. “They have realized the problem of cross-cultural communications, but before serious political reform takes place they cannot do much.”

Anti-anti-vulgarity Campaign: Put Clothes on Famous Paintings

Chinese Internet users angered by censorship in cyberspace have dressed up images of famous renaissance nudes in a protest against Beijing’s crackdown on ‘vulgar’ online content. The campaign of “Put Clothes on Famous Paintings” (给名画穿衣服)

Via “Protest against Web crackdown”

The protest began last week after a user of the social networking site Douban.com complained that images of several paintings, including Titian’s nude ‘Venus of Urbino’, had been deleted from an online photo album.

According to blogs on the site, Douban’s administrators had told the user that posting pornography would endanger the site’s operations.

In response, protest’s organisers asked Internet users to clothe artwork to ‘save’ it from the censors, who have shut down 1,635 websites and 200 blogs in a one-month campaign against content that ‘harms public morality’.

The protest are not limited to 16th century art – one Internet user drew red underpants on the leaning, joined towers of state-run China Central Television’s headquarters in Beijing.

Also see the blog post “Chinese Netizens’ Anti-anti-vulgarity Campaign: Putting Clothes on Renaissance Paintings”.

More fancy pictures, check these blogs: Digging Pictures, Snower41.