china

Rumor: China authorities eye Microsoft-Yahoo deal

"According to Zaobao.com, Beijing has intervened into Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo by asking Chinese online e-commerce service provider Alibaba to provide detailed information on the acquisition and by keeping a close watch on the process of the acquisition as well as its possible influence," writes ChinaTechNews.com.

Chinese authorities have an interest in the deal partly because Yahoo is a major shareholder of Alibaba, a major online marketplace where manufacturers find customers.

The Olympics would be wise to embrace athlete blogs, not just permit them

The English-language China blogosphere is crowded, interconnected, and decidedly lacking in jocks. All the more reason to see what Olympic athletes have to say about their experience in China this summer. Luckily, the IOC, after forbidding athlete blogging in the past, has lifted its ban. Kudos, but a little more vision would really bring the Olympics into the digital age.

Imagethief, whose post reminded me of the news, says, "It will be interesting to see if this becomes a route to expression for athletes who have something controversial to say but don't relish the idea of a 1968-style … Read more

China Mobile running 400,000 unlocked iPhones

As many as 400,000 unlocked iPhones were running on China Mobile's cellular network at the end of last year, according to market research firm In-Stat.

Apple sold 3.7 million iPhones in 2007, and more than 10 percent of them are in China, In-Stat said, attributing that information to China Mobile. That helps explain part of the "iPhone gap" created by the difference between Apple's shipping totals for 2007 and the activations reported by its carrier partners in the U.S. and Europe.

Despite Apple's attempts to keep iPhone unlocking under wraps with new … Read more

Former Chinese professor to sue Google, Yahoo over censorship

From The Times of London:

A former Chinese university professor who was dismissed after he founded a democratic opposition party, plans to sue Yahoo and Google in the United States for blocking his name from search results in China.

Guo Quan, an expert on classical Chinese literature and the 1937 Nanjing massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops, last week issued an open letter pledging to bring a lawsuit against Google after he discovered that his name had been excised in searches of its Google.cn portal in China.

He told The Times that he had now found that the … Read more

CNET Asia's Little Red Blogger interviewed

Rick Martin, author of CNET Asia's Little Red Blog, was recently interviewed by the China Business Network, a podcasting powerhouse covering, well, business in China. Check it out.

Recalling Rep. Lantos, who assailed Yahoo over China policies

Rep. Tom Lantos, a Democratic politician who relentlessly assailed Yahoo and other Internet companies for doing business in China, died of esophageal cancer on Monday. He was 80 years old.

Lantos--who was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee--represented one of the most liberal congressional districts in the nation, including portions of San Francisco and the cities on the peninsula immediately to the south. A secular Jew born in Hungary, he was the only Holocaust survivor to be elected to the U.S. Congress.

In technology circles, Lantos was best-known in recent years for lambasting executives from Yahoo, Google, Cisco … Read more

China keeps information in, not just out, with Internet filtering

James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic and a blogging resident of Beijing's Chaoyang District, has written a good outline of how China's online filtering apparatus works: "The Connection Has Been Reset."

Aside from the fact that The Atlantic has made the lovely choice of freeing its content, the news to me was that China's filtering system is working in reverse:

Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese media at the University of California at Berkeley journalism school, told me that the authorities have recently begun applying this kind of filtering in reverse. As Chinese-speaking people … Read more

How to easily access BBC News from China

I mentioned this in my last post, but it deserves its own: there's an extraordinarily easy way to read BBC News from within China. All you need to do is use this URL: newsvote.bbc.co.uk.

As far as I can tell, this is the same site as news.bbc.co.uk, which is blocked in the mainland.

I don't know how long this has been around, but I caught it in the comments on The Peking Duck. Thanks, Liuzhou Laowai! Enjoy your pithy BBC write-ups, everyone!

China browsing restrictions may drop off during Olympics

Something was going to give.

As Beijing prepares for the Olympics and the attending flood of foreigners, many of them reporters, expected to arrive this summer, the government's controls over the Internet have become increasingly sophisticated. But would the Olympic organizers really be OK with dozens of stories about reporters and athletes unable to reach Wikipedia and BBC?

Apparently, decision makers are indeed worried about press regarding censorship. AFP quotes an Olympic organizing committee representative as saying, "I believe you will be able to (access banned sites such as the BBC), but I can't give you a … Read more