My husband was held 3 hours in a police station 2 weeks ago outside of Shanghai although he had a copy of his passport.

His company is having problem renewing his residence and work visa. He has been asked to go to the office to answer many questions but they have still not be able to schedule an appointment with him because everything is slowed at the moment ( even more so since the earth quake). He has to stay at home and cannot travel for his business until he gets his new visa.

Another colleague arrived to work shaken after she was grilled by the PSB for twenty minutes. The police stopped her near her home and were none too happy that she appeared to have two residential addresses.

Meanwhile, foreigners have been finding it more difficult to renew multiple entry visas from within mainland China or Hong Kong.

It is a funny time to be a foreigner in China. It’s counter intuitive to witness a tightening of procedures on the eve of China’s big international coming out party. There is also lots of international goodwill and sympathy towards China after the Wenchuan earthquake. Issues related to the Olympic torch protests have faded into the background. However, a Hong Kongese friend suggested that the Chinese Government is unwilling to take any chances about visitors engaging in any mischief so foreigners in China are being scrutinised very closely.

Anyway, look out for bunting around Huai Hai Lu and Nanjing Lu tomorrow. The Olympic torch relay is coming to Shanghai.

Related Posts
Don’t Forget Your Passport
China Visa Updates

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Tags: Shanghai, Olympics, visas, passport, PSB

The subsequent revelation that tens of thousands of people have died is making some of us uneasy that our self congratulatory tweets and blog posts were somewhat inappropriate.

Kaiser Kuo of Digital Watch wrote a very thoughtful, but ambivalent post about the role of Twitter in spreading news about the earthquake in Sichuan. On one hand, he recognises the value of Twitter as an effective communication tool that bridged the gap between the Chinese and English speaking world when he notes:

The other dimension to Twitter that proved very useful in this case was its global usership: there were lots of Chinese messages I was following, and I was among many people bilingual individuals translating more useful, insightful, or interesting tweets from Chinese into English. Call it “bridge microblogging.”
The Sichuan Quake and the Hubris of Twitter Users

However, he also argues that IM and other forms of media were also getting the message out of Sichuan when he writes:

On balance, though, I feel there’s something fundamentally unsettling that attention within the Twitter community should have shifted at all off the matter at hand and on to a celebration of the particular communication tool we were using. There’s no doubt that it was useful, but by no means did this episode drive a nail in the coffin of traditional media, which by my lights has been exceptionally good in its reporting — Xinhua, Phoenix, CCTV, and many other Chinese news organizations have really taken full advantage of the candor Beijing seems to be allowing and encouraging.

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Tags: Twitter, China, Sichuan, earthquake

Reports are emerging on international news sites that the death toll from yesterday’s Sichuan earthquake is 10 000 and rising.

Al Jazeera’s English site reported that there was extensive damage in the epicentre of Wenchuan County and surrounding areas.

The toll is expected to rise sharply as authorities and rescue teams make contact with the worst-hit areas of Sichuan.

Nearly 900 students might have been buried under the rubble, Xinhua news agency reported.

In Shifeng, two chemical plants were damaged, burying hundreds of people and forcing the evacuation of more than 6,000 others.

Rescuers are trying to locate survivors.

State media reported casualties in the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan as well as Chongqing, a municipality of 30 million people that neighbours Sichuan.

Buildings toppled in at least six counties near Wenchuan, Xinhua said.

About 80 per cent of buildings in Beichun county have collapsed, and about 10,000 people are believed to be injured there.

Similar stories have been published on news networks, including the BBC, New York Times and CNN.

Shanghaiist has been updating its site and publishing tweets several times an hour as new information becomes available. They cited a terrifying estimate from a Colarado geologist, Roger Bilham that the final death toll may be as high as 150 000 (Source: Rocky Mountain News).

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the immediacy of Twitter as a tool for breaking big news stories. We have also seen a number of videos and photos documenting the event, including this footage from a Sichuan university dorm.

Expect to see these sites carry diy footage of damage, survivor stories and tv news reports and as they get published on the Internet.

Let’s wish local services and relief agencies every success with their rescue efforts.

Robert Scoble also blogged that Twitter scooped the story before the news agencies. Robert Scoble is a former Microsoft employee and celebrity tech blogger who is not renowned for his coverage of China, but the Twitter angle shows the microblogging service is really good at breaking news stories. It is ironic that Scoble’s website is in accessible from China unless you use a proxy or a feed reader.

Twitter’s API allows you to update your status from the website, your cellphone, SMS and numerous desktop clients. There were stories of cellphone service being disrupted, but the Internet continued to function, allowing people on the ground to keep us informed via Twitter updates.

I didn’t learn about the earthquake from Twitter this afternoon even though it’s always on in my Gmail window. Instead, a colleague told me about the story at the end of the school day. Her husband is a journalist for the Shanghai Daily and tremors were felt in this city a few minutes later. Wangjianshuo blogged about this too.

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Tags: Chengdu, Sichuan, earthquake, Twitter

Embedded Video

From June 1st, Chinese people will have to pay to get plastic bags or bring their own. This is a great idea, but how easy will it be to enforce?

Thanks for the link Shanghaiist.

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It was the internet story of 2007, the website that brought you sneezing pandas, laughing babies, an epic battle on the African savannah and a guest appearance by Tony Blair in a video starring George Bush’s dog.But for any web surfers in China, these and other gems purveyed by the video-sharing phenomenon YouTube look likely to become impossible to access, after the authorities signalled yesterday that they would no longer tolerate the “broadcast of degenerate thinking” on the internet.
The Guardian

Here is the same story in Techcrunch.

China has moved to censor and control online video websites under new measures that could block YouTube and other services in China.

Under the new regulations that will be in place starting January 31, sites that provide video programming or allow users to upload video must have a permit and be either state-owned or state-controlled. Permits for video hosting sites will be subject to renewal every three years and operators who commit violations may be banned for up to 5 years.

Chinafilm.com, a site run by the state-run China Film Group said that the majority of online video providers in China are currently privately owned.
Techcrunch

Maybe it is a slow news day in the first week of the new year, but why is this so different to anything that has happened before? I follow technology news from podcasts on Techcrunch, Ziff Davis, CNET, Twit, The BBC and Revision 3. There was scarce coverage earlier in the year when Flickr images were blocked from within China. You rarely hear anything when Wikipedia’s status changes. Youtube does not work all the time and international podcasts continue to distrubute their content using Feedburner even though it will not work with podcatchers such as Itunes when you try to download using their feeds in China. The Internet outside of China has a tendency to ignores these issues or they jump to false conclusions. For example, Techcrunch erroneously claimed that search engines such as Yahoo and Google had stopped working in China. I have previously discussed the need for good quality English language technology news sources. (See my earlier post)

After I was burned by Techcrunch on the earlier GFW story, I have always been a little sceptical about their Chinese coverage. However, this story about new regulations for video sites has also been picked up by The Guardian. I am still waiting for some more rigourous perspective and look forward to further analysis about what this means from other sources including Shanghai Daily, Danwei, CWRblog and Shanghaiist. In the meantime, I left this comment on the Techcrunch post.

You currently need to be registered to run a blog or host your own website from China. That has not stopped Chinese based bloggers such a s Danwei, Wangjianshuo, Shanghaiist, Sinosplice or the infamous Chinabound from hosting elsewhere using services like Dreamhost or even Blogger. Of course, The Great Firewall could block your domain and Blogger is usually inaccessible here.

This new policy about video sharing sites may or may not be a big deal. Youtube was blocked for several weeks at the end of 2007 after a Chinese version of their site was launched, but normally there is no official notification or justification that a service has stopped working. One day, you can access it and the next day it is blocked. Perhaps Youtube will become semi permanently blocked like Wikipedia, but Google has a history of adapting itself to be compliant with China’s culture of Internet censorship. It is more likely that the China’s Youtube copysites like tudou.com will have to register with and be subject to more control from the Chinese government.
Comment left in Techcrunch

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Tags: China, Internet

It would be good to find out about Chinese technology trends from a local point of view and I am not talking about the platitudinal state sponsored media or general English language news blogs. I would like to read a well informed local English language technology blog that is on par with the best coverage from Techcrunch. It seems I may have found something good to put into my RSS reader. This morning, I came across a Chinese column in The Register by David Feng, which mentioned that Chinese net users have recently embraced their own version of Twitter called Jiwai.de. Here is an extract:

Meet the local Twitter, Jiwai.de. Hosted fully inside mainland China, fast, and all in Chinese, it’s Twitter for 172 million. It’s probably no wonder that it’s been all the rage. It’s both local (remember China’s really a huge intranet at that) and it’s in the local lingo.

And then there’s the interface. Does Jiwai.de look like Twitter? It doesn’t, actually. Much of Twitter is in sky-blue. Jiwai.de is more orange-y. And it has tabs – the stuff you don’t see on Twitter.

Jiwai.de or Twitter? | Reg Developer

It turns out that David has been syndicating some posts from the Chinese Blognation site, which seems to be just what I was looking for. Blognation has sites covering technology and Web 2.0 stories in thirteen countries, although recent internal strife means that the future of the blognation network is uncertain if not unlikely. ( See this announcement by Blognation’s boss, Sam Sethi). I hope that David Feng can continue to blog full time about Chinese technology issues even if Blognation does not survive.

While we are in this space, there is another worthy English language technology blog that deserves to be added to your blog feed. It is called The China Web2.0 Review. Both sites are in Technorati’s Top 100,000 and the Chinese Blognation site has content that has been picked up by the Register so it gives me some confidence that the sites have some authority. Beyond spotting obvious mistakes and checking the response to stories, it is pretty difficult for a non Chinese speaker to audit these sites for errors. I like Techcrunch for keeping me informed about all sorts of new services from Ning to Flock, but their track record on China is pretty shaky. I lost confidence in Techcrunch’s Chinese coverage when they falsely informed their readers that Google had been blocked by the GFW. (See this post) China Blognation and China Web2.0 Review are both written by native Chinese speakers who are based in this country so they should be in a better position to avoid such basic errors.

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Tags: China, Internet, blogs, media, technology

LONDON (Reuters) – A retired Scottish school teacher was recovering on Monday after spending nearly four days trapped inside a men’s toilet with no food or mobile phone.
David Leggat was locked inside the bathroom at a lawn bowling club near the Scottish city of Aberdeen after the door jammed and the handle on the outside fell off.
The 55-year-old kept warm by dipping his feet in hot water but only managed to get about three hours’ sleep a night in the freezing temperatures, the local Evening Express newspaper reported.
He was rescued when the cleaner at the club, which is little used in winter, turned up to collect her cleaning equipment. Leggat said a survival course he had once done had helped him endure his captivity.
The cleaning lady said he looked shaken and grey when he emerged. Leggat was stoical. “At least there was a toilet to use,” he said. “The only thing I regret is not getting trapped behind the bar.”

It is funny how this story gets to be the most widely read on Reuters. At least he got out and it is reassuring that there are other people on this planet who are more accident prone than me.

Human resources company Croner, which commissioned the study, warned that such bloggers could be sacked from their job for gross misconduct.

Croner surveyed 2,000 people who keep a personal internet blog or diary and 39% said that they made harmful comments.

Bloggers should consider the potential impact of all postings, Croner said.
Source: BBC

Also see this Guardian article from 2005, which has case studies about employees being dismissed after writing critical blog entries.

Contrast the mild relaxation of blogging rules in China with the possibility of being fired for indiscrete online activity in the UK. (See this post in Shanghaiist)  You may not be but in prison in the UK for writing a satirical blog post about Tony Blair, but he could certainly fire you if the soon to be Ex-PM was your boss.

Companies could go beyond knee jerk reactions by considering the ideas presented in Clive Thompson’s recent Wired article promoting a new blogging paradigm of ‘radical transparency’. The idea is that companies like Redfin engage in public self criticism as a healthy sign that they are open to open to dialogue, new ideas and change.

I have been trying out a new piece of software that aims to bridge the gap between reading a newspaper on the screen and in its printed form. The software is called New York Times Reader. It is free to download and use (Download here). It is supported by advertisements. The reader allows you to download and view a wide selection of its recent articles.

I had some trouble installing this software, because it only runs on Windows XP and Vista using Microsoft’s .Net Framework 3.0. The reader is using a new technology called Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, which allows viewers to sync new content and view it offline in places like buses and planes. There is a long wait at the beginning to download the software and then it takes some more time to grab the articles. The sync function took a long time before it connected to grab some stories, but then it mostly worked without any problems.

The text looks wonderful on the screen and it can be easily resized. Otherwise, the reader looks just lke a printed newspaper. The text is organised into columns and photographs are embedded into the articles. There are options for selecting text, anotating stories and E-mailing notes to other people, but that has been around for nearly ten years in Encarta Encyclopedia.

The interface was a little confusing at first because it jumped straight to the newspaper’s front page for the Saturday edition, but I could not find any stories about technology or music. Earlier weekday editions had more stories and were organised into sections that made it much easier to find relevant articles. The reader has a number of navigation tools that became easier to use after a short learning curve. It has keyword searches or you can read one page at a time. You can also use your scroll keys to navigate your way around the newspaper.

There are lots of stories about New York and the US that may have little appeal to an international audience, but I am mainly going to use the reader to look at stories about technology and global issues. I like te software a lot and intend to use it. This is the first time I have seen such an attractive and easy to read newspaper software tool. There are some limitations, however. It does not run in an Internet browser so you have to download the reader and it take several attempts to get it to work. You can not use this software to grab links or photos to reference stories or make deep links in blogs. There is no sound and video content. The New York Times Reader is purely a reading experience, but you still need a powerful, reasonably modern computer to run it and the software does not run on Mac OS or Linux.

Expect to see other international newspapers and magazines offer this experience using the same technology, but you may have to pay for extra.

Correction
The Times Reader is not free. After March 27th 2007, you will have to pay $14.95 a month or $165 a year to subscribe to the Reader. Before, it seemed too good to be true.

Links:
nytimes.com,
firstlook.nytimes.com