A week after the Sichuan earthquake lit up instant messengers and Twitter, Google statistics show a huge drop in searches during a national moment of silence.
Google China users stopped searching almost completely during a national moment of silence on May 19, 2008
(Credit: Google China)Users apparently observed the silence while sitting at their computers. Meanwhile many people around the country paused.
My experience seems a bit odd in retrospect. Having just landed in Shenzhen, a Mainland metropolis across the border from Hong Kong, I found people at the pick-up area speechless, but surrounded by blaring bus horns. I considered the possibility that the sound, which I couldn't determine the source of at the time, was an air raid siren or fire alarm. I still don't know if it was just angry drivers who wondered why traffic had stopped or a sort of alarm to mark the moment. [UPDATE: My friend Austin Ramzy writes that rescue vehicles honked in Sichuan as well.]
I spent the following week in Hong Kong, where the earthquake of course dominated the news and much discussion among foreign journalists. Now in Shanghai, acquaintances reported seeing people crowded around the television yesterday. When I got online again, I knew it was the newest aftershock.
Television seems to be dominated by hopeful stories. Record rescues, hard-working soldiers sifting through rubble, national leaders consoling and rallying earthquake victims. Foreign media on the other hand broadcasts its usual extremely sad images. Mothers digging through concrete slabs looking for children, sons wearing lost fathers' clothing.
A three-day period of mourning last week was marked online by the temporary shutting of several entertainment websites, including Tudou, and myriad commemorative displays.
Whether people here know anyone in the affected areas or not, the national character of this ongoing loss of life is impossible to avoid.
Link via Jacky Peng and Global Voices Online
Tudou, which had been scolded for insufficient censorship (namely, of porn) and faced either threats or rumors of a government shutdown as recently as last month, is looking a little healthier this week.
Tudou, the largest video-sharing Web site in China, finally officially announced its $57 million series D financing at a $150 million valuation, which is the largest round of funding ever for a Chinese Internet company. (This takes) Tudou's total fund-raising to $85 million over the past three years. (In previous rounds of funding), Tudou raised $500,000, $8.5 million, and $19 million respectively.
This is not likely a low-risk investment. Not only are Internet companies hard to predict, but the video sector in China is heavily regulated and subject to shutdown orders on a moment's notice from authorities.
There are real incentives for the government to keep these companies going, however: they grow the economy, they represent Chinese successes, and they circulate a lot of material that is in no way illicit. But I see one more bump in their future.
Tudou is still a bastion of copyright infringement. Entire TV series, just as before the recent crackdown, are available on the site. If authorities get serious about their intellectual-property efforts, or just want to make a public gesture in that direction, Tudou will need to be ready to quickly remove a vast amount of material from its site and institute controls more like, say, YouTube.
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.
Rumors are flying: Tudou, a hugely popular streaming video site based in China, has been instructed to shut down by a Chinese government authority. Tudou is still online as of this writing, but if it goes down, a major haven for streaming television will be gone.
The rumor can be summarized quickly. China's State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) supposedly instructed Tudou to close its doors, and word is it's because the people responsible for taking down illegal material missed some porn.
Anyone who has looked through sites such as SurfTheChannel is probably familiar with Tudou, which means potato and is named with "couch potato" in mind. Whereas YouTube tends to take down copyrighted material relatively quickly, Tudou is less vigilant about copyright.
As for its potential shutdown, Danwei, one of the most reliable sources on Chinese internet news, tracked down some facts but nothing conclusive. One unnamed Tudou source told a Chinese source that they haven't been asked to shut down.
Meanwhile, Marbridge Consulting, whose staff watch the Chinese tech industry closely for a variety of clients claims to have confirmed with unnamed authorities that Tudou has been ordered to shut down, but they don't say whether the report they've translated is accurate in saying that the shut-down may be temporary.
Internet-based copyright infringement is pretty much the only way people can keep track of TV and movies from abroad in Beijing. It's hard to even find legal DVDs, and if there aren't even illegal DVDs to buy, it's often trivially easy to find entire movies on Youku or Tudou.
Yesterday, a Chinese public-security ministry official asked for international help in copyright enforcement, noting that many infringers use Web sites hosted outside Chinese jurisdiction.
"Copyright infringements, by their very nature, are international crimes. To effectively curb such activities, (we) need enhanced international cooperation on law enforcement," said Gao Feng, the official.
I don't doubt that international borders are a challenge for Chinese enforcers, but they certainly could do more here. The illegal streaming versions of movies and TV series from Chinese video sites are even fueling viewers in the United States, where DVDs are no minor investment. The only sacrifices for viewers are the need to wait for buffering and some loss in resolution.
Until legal DVDs or iTunes-like download or rental services are available to the Chinese market, however, I can't imagine that people will stop watching the free or cheap pirated versions.
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