The iTunes Store was blocked in China two weeks after an album released by Tibet activists appeared, but after the Olympics Games concluded, it was available once again.
Silicon Hutong has written a concise summary of what happened:
- The album was featured on the front page of the site - a choice I would wager was made by Apple, not by the activist organization that produced the album;
- The album went live in the days leading up to the Olympics;
- Pro-Tibetan activists have been attempting to leverage Beijing's hosting of the Olympics to draw attention to their cause;
- The activists told the Associated Press that they had contacted athletes directly and provided free downloads to the athletes and urged them to play it in Beijing as an act of solidarity.
- The activists then issued a press release telling the world that this was, in effect, a protest, and that at least 40 athletes in the village had downloaded the tunes.
- The site was then blocked, fifteen days after the album went up.
- The Games ended, the athletes went home, and the site was unblocked.
- The album is available for purchase here in Beijing under the same conditions as everything else on iTunes - got a foreign credit card that bills to a foreign address, and the songs are yours.
The post goes on to examine at great length the ups and downs of Apple's apparent decision to feature this content. It also opines that "the content itself was not a problem - what set the Chinese government off was the concern over a potential protest in the Olympic Village. Apple was a target only to the extent that it was seen by the Chinese authorities as aiding that protest."
I tend to think this particular episode, in contrast to Yahoo China, Google China, and MSN's complicated dealings with Chinese censorship, is really not such a big deal. I also think this degree of examination of possible motivations on the part of the censors is a stretch.
It's very possible that rather than concerns specifically about a protest, the album (and whole store) was blocked after the activists' press release merely because that was the first the censors heard of it. Unblocking the store after the sensitive political period of the main Games is pretty standard behavior, just as many sites were restored after the actual unrest in Tibet earlier this year.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's foundation received an undisclosed sum in exchange for his keynote address at an event held by Alibaba, the Chinese internet company that controls China Yahoo* and has been accused of aiding China's crackdown in Tibet.
China Yahoo posted images of individuals sought by the government.
(Credit: France24 via Rebecca MacKinnon)Some activists are trying to tie this money to Sen. Hillary Clinton, saying it conflicts with her statements on China. In addition to claiming she "stood up to" China's government in a speech while Bill was president, she has said President George W. Bush should not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in August because of the recent events in Tibet.
Bill's foundation took Alibaba's money. Alibaba has been criticized recently for an incident in which Yahoo.cn posted a "most wanted" page with photographs of individuals the government sought in connection with the recent unrest. Here, according to the Los Angeles Times how one activist makes the connection from there to Hillary's position:
"A former president of the United States received a donation from a Chinese firm that is involved in censorship, and now his wife is running for president. This is a shame of the U.S.," said Harry Wu, an exiled Chinese activist based in Washington.
I'm all for responsibility with money in politics, but I think this is a stretch. Wu references China Yahoo's censorship of search results. But Microsoft's MSN and Google both also censor results in their Chinese versions. Should candidates then be penalized for taking money from Bill Gates or Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Oh right, the question is, should candidates' spouses be penalized for having any relationship involving money with these three or their companies?
I think it would be hard to make a principled argument that didn't condemn all of the candidates if closely examined. If you want to condemn them all for dealing with money in politics, I won't blame you.
* I have not always been perfectly clear on this. China Yahoo is a subsidiary of Alibaba and is no longer controlled by Yahoo itself, despite the name.
Yahoo China and MSN China both briefly posted a "most wanted" list with photos of people Chinese authorities are trying to track down surrounding the recent events in Tibet, a French TV website reports.
Rebecca MacKinnon reports that the lists were down when she checked, and offers a guess as to what happened:
I wouldn't be surprised if the local editors just automatically ran it because everybody else in China was running it, then got over-ridden by management in the U.S. who realized how badly this would play outside of China... Such is the disconnect between China and the West on the Tibet issue.
Yahoo has an especially public history of aiding Chinese authorities in a much more proactive way, most famously in the Shi Tao case, when Yahoo gave authorities identifying information about online comments led to Shi Tao's imprisonment. Yahoo has scarcely heard the end of that, and its representatives, as well as some from Microsoft, have been called before U.S. Congressional committees. (Now the company's blog has called for Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to push for his release.)
Wherever you stand on these issues of cooperation with law enforcement, companies would be wise to think before they post.
UPDATE: Xinhua reports that portals including Yahoo had published the material.
A Chinese agency promised to shut or punish video sharing websites for hosting prohibited material, but this was going on before the incidents in Tibet made a different agency's occasional blocking of YouTube famous.
An AP reporter says the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) announced Friday that the leading Chinese video site, Tudou, would be penalized. The report notes that no mention was made of Tibet, but doesn't make clear the most important part: that this all started before the demonstrations in Tibet did. I am sure SARFT takes politically sensitive films into account in addition to their advertised concern about obscene material, but it's important to note how Tudou's travails began.
As I reported earlier, rumors that Tudou had been ordered to shut down started circulating in the first week of March, with a failure to catch some pornographic material on the site as the justification.
That story got more complicated after a mixture of denials and partial acknowledgments of SARFT action and a 24-hour shut-down of Tudou that the website said was for a server upgrade, a reason few commentators believed at the time. But the site did come back online on schedule.
At the time, rumors emerged of a "blacklist" that was circulating as a precursor to some sort of punishment in compliance with new regulations that require video providers to be state-run (but were modified to grandfather in already existing sites if they were vigilant about SARFT's rules).
Beating the AP with a bit of detailed information, Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei reports that Tudou will be one of 32 sites to be punished, while 25 others will be shut down all together. So, after all, unless the penalty is massive, Tudou will live on to fight (and probably keep on with free illegal TV and movies) another day.
As for YouTube, it's been much reported that YouTube is inaccessible in China since the beginning of the current situation out west. (I have been in Japan the whole time, so haven't experienced this myself.) But this is not the first time YouTube has been blocked. The most recent example I know of was during last year's 17th National Party Congress when the site was blocked and then unblocked at a time suspiciously near that important political event.
On Monday, I'll be able to talk first-hand about what's on- or off-line from Beijing. For now, Osaka is my new favorite city in Japan.
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