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Persecuted Religious Movements, Product Reviews, & Internet Stats

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Weekly Review: Here are three interesting blog posts or news items from the past week that haven’t already been covered in our Daily Reviews that will help you fight your proclivity to pick sides, review products and services in China, & come to terms with China’s massive number of internet users:

the-connection-was-resetFalun Gong, China, and biases…

Charles Custer has another great post at ChinaGeeks that touches upon a theme that have been popular on CNR recently: extremism, truths in the middle, and the understanding we “desperately, desperately need.” It also helps that he uses the the well-known Falun Gong as something of a lightning rod to make his point.

I’ve gone ahead and reprinted the entire text of Custer’s post below, again for the benefit of readers in China blocked by the Great Firewall. It appears that the page or the page’s URL trips a keyword filter, thereby reseting the connection when you try visiting it. The rest of ChinaGeeks is accessible as usual though.

UPDATE: Our man Custer has changed the URL which should be accessible now now. The links in this post reflect the new address.

Here we go:

Falun Gong and the Hardest Thing About Studying China

There is nowhere on earth we can learn about or read about without bias, but even given the assumption that bias exists everywhere, China might be the worst country in the world to attempt to study if you’re trying to assess the veracity of anything remotely controversial.

Let’s take, for example, the most recent English language issue of the Epoch Times, sitting for free on a table near the entrance of Yale University’s Hall of Graduate Studies. This issue begins their series marking the tenth anniversary marking the outlawing of Falun Gong in China in 1999, and contains several articles documenting the events that led to the ban. Specifically, they say the regime “zeroed in” on Falun Gong after the publication of Zhuan Falun (Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi’s rambling treatise). They don’t mention why, what was contained in the book, or, for that matter, that their newspaper was founded by Falun Gong members. It is as though the CCPs banning of Falun Gong was a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky.

Of course, it’s not really a secret that the Epoch Times has an agenda. At best, their reports are “difficult to corroborate” (Orville Schell), at worst, they are an embarrassment to journalism. Still, they have their supporters. UPenn professor Arthur Waldron said “foreigners (and Chinese) who want to get a sense of what is really going on in China should pay at least as much attention to The Epoch Times as they do to the People’s Daily.”

As far as we can tell, he wasn’t intentionally being ironic, but it’s actually a great point. People searching for information on Falun Gong are likely to find a long list of articles and websites run by supporters or a long list of condemnations, depending on what language they’re searching in.

And the truth is, it’s very difficult to tell what the truth is. On the one hand, Falun Gong sounds an awful lot like some of the crazy cults that exist in the US; In the Zhuan Falun, Li Hongzhi writes that:

He can personally heal disease and that his followers can stop speeding cars using the powers of his teachings. He writes that the Falun Gong emblem exists in the bellies of practitioners, who can see through the celestial eyes in their foreheads. Li believes “humankind is degenerating and demons are everywhere”; extraterrestrials are everywhere, too; and that Africa boasts a 2-billion-year-old nuclear reactor. He also says he can fly.

On the other hand, at least some of the reported rights violations — which include some pretty horrifying things — are probably true. After all, the CCP is willing to abuse other citizens with reckless abandon, so why would Falun Gong practitioners be any different? As is often the case, it seems the truth lies somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, but when it comes to China, the extreme voices are often so loud they completely drown out any moderates. Here, it’s People’s Daily vs. Epoch Times. A few weeks ago, it was People’s Daily vs. World Uighur Conference. Whenever the next issue comes up it will happen again.

The problem, of course, is that most people don’t care as much as we do, and aren’t willing to spend hours sifting through drivel and propaganda for the little nuggets of truth that accidentally got left lying around. So they end up believing that either one side or the other murders babies, and everyone digs in further. Falun Gong is an “evil cult” or China is an “evil empire”; there is no middle ground.

This kind of extremism prevents understanding when understanding is what we desperately, desperately need.

For the record, I personally think that Falun Gong is about as crazy as Scientology, and that China has every right to ban the spread of anti-science superstition as it leads to people making idiotic medical decisions; but I also think China could easily enforce this ban in a way that is nonviolent and that allows Falun Gong believers to think whatever they want (and do whatever exercises they want) so long as they stop telling people qigong can cure all of their diseases.

Also for the record, I’ll be monitoring the comments here pretty carefully as this has the potential to lead to its own idiotic screaming match between extremists. What we’re talking about here is how extremism prevents learning, growth, understanding, and intelligent discourse (or how it doesn’t).

Read this excellent post at its original location here »

china-internet-userChinese websites for product reviews…

We haven’t featured an Adam Schokora “Friday 5″ post in a while so we’re a bit overdue for recommending that CNR readers take a gander over yonder for a collection of notable websites and web resources in and for China, this time for product reviews for restaurants, travel, cosmetics, information technology (IT), and education:

travel ::
Visiting someplace new with an untested tour agency can be an unsettling prospect, so many Chinese netizens turn to specific websites that offer peer recommendations and ratings. General review sites for travel include the popular portal for booking plane tickets and hotels, Ctrip (http://www.ctrip.com/ ). CTrip features a destination guide (http://destguides.ctrip.com ) whose landing page lists top-rated destinations, which at the moment are Hunan’s Zhangjiajie (http://bit.ly/oPHbt ), with over 11,626 reviews, and Yunnan’s Lijiang (http://bit.ly/yoij8 ), with around 1,600 reviews. Each review page has a combination of photographs, routes to nearby tourist and scenic spots (such as the Tiger Leaping Gorge outside of Lijiang), and a temperature graph for the area. In addition to rating the sites, netizens can ask and answer specific questions. The review section of travel portal Let’s Travel Together (http://www.17u.com/comment/ ) is more comprehensive, with destinations in every major city including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, and smaller ones such as Wuhan and Suzhou. The website has community features in addition to straightforward reviewing: 17u hosts a blog section (http://www.17u.com/blog/ ) whose posts can be promoted through a “digg”-type system. On a smaller scale is the Yododo travel website (http://www.yododo.com/ ), which lets netizens search for reviews and upload videos from their favorite destinations (http://bit.ly/LYxf1 ). Yododo’s reviews are short and quick (http://www.yododo.com/review/ ), more like a message board than the in-depth analysis encouraged on other sites, and feature only one or two lines for each city. The range of travel review websites is quite broad: many individual destinations have websites devoted to them alone, where netizens can appraise food, lodging, and attractions. Zhangjiajie, for example, has a travel site with a review section (http://www.zjjok.com/dianping/ ), and the city of Wuhan hosts a travel website (http://www.gotowuhan.com.cn ) with a review subsite (http://dp.gotowuhan.com.cn/ ), as well as blogs (http://blog.gotowuhan.com.cn/ ) and a BBS discussion forum (http://bbs.gotowuhan.com.cn/ ).

If there’s a problem with Schokora’s “Friday 5″ posts, its the fact that the vast majority of these websites are all in Chinese and thus difficult to use for anyone who doesn’t actually read Chinese. Nonetheless, it’s free market research and information, which would be useful for anyone business-inclined. Do with it as you would. Read the full monty here »

China has more internet users than America has people…

You may have already heard the recent news that China now has a whopping 338 million internet users, especially since it got plenty of play on all the major news portals presenting it as a “hm, that’s interesting” news item of the moment. For those of you who haven’t, ChinaGeeks ran an a post a few days back with more “hm, that’s interesting” comparisons to help you digest what 338 million is like, along with a brief question as to how these massive and growing numbers relate to China’s internet censorship. An excerpt:

To start with, let’s get a handle on just how large a number that is. If every single person in the United States used the internet, we wouldn’t hit that mark. In fact, according to the US census bureau, China has more internet users than every other country has people (except India). But perhaps a visual aid is in order:

one-hundred-million-pennies100,000,000 pennies.

That’s what a hundred million pennies would look like, stacked as tightly as possible. 300 million pennies would weigh over 900 tons, or approximately the weight of six blue whales. For an alternative frame of reference, open this site 338 times and count the dots. That’s how many people are using the internet in China right now.

Of course, by the time you finish counting all of those dots, there will be more. A lot more. In the past six months alone, 40 million Chinese people have joined the ranks of China’s netizen community. Some Chinese are using their phones to access it (155 million). Some are playing games (30 million new online gamers in the past six months). Some are online shopping (14 million new users in the past six months). Plenty are downloading music and watching videos.

Yeah, there are a lot of people in China. This is just another way to wrap your head around it. Go read the entire post »

Bonus! If you’re a bit well-versed in the internet or curious to learn more, you can also venture over and read a piece by a certain Ian Bell who is very skeptical of China’s internet numbers, suggesting that the government is playing up the numbers to attract foreign investment. If you’re well-versed in the internet industry, you’ll probably spot the glaring assumptions and errors in rationale immediately (i.e. Using Compete, Comscore, and Alexa to measure Chinese internet traffic? Are you serious?). If not, be sure to read the comments by Kaiser Kuo and Sage Brennan underneath the post.

I personally want to insinuate (well, so much for that) that Ian Bell’s approach to the issue is tainted with a bit of ethnocentrism, most telling in his flabbergasting of why “giants” like Microsoft, Google, Cisco, eBay, and Yahoo! haven’t been as resoundingly successful in China as he imagines they should be. The implication that they were somehow deceived or denied success by the shady Chinese government damnably overlooks the first thing that matters in business: how well one’s service/product meets the needs of the target market. So why does Ian assume success for them? Just because they were successful in the West?

Ian does make a few other tangential points in his piece, many of which aren’t really points as they are clichéd snipes, but I won’t discuss them at this time. Either way, the responses by Kuo and Brennan have good information for anyone interested in China’s internet scene. Go ahead and take a gander »

That’s it for this week. Have a link to a blog post that shouldn’t be missed? Be sure to share it with everyone in the comments, and don’t forget to tell us why you recommend it!

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