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Action of “Omission” to Protest Chinese Censorship

What: To protest the implementation of the Green Dam Youth Escort filtering program on all computers sold in China, the blogger Ai Wei Wei is asking Chinese  users to boycott the Internet on July 1st, 2009.

When: July 1st is the date on which Green Dam much come pre-installed (or on an attached disk) for all new Chinese computers.

Where: People’s Republic of China

Why: To protest Green Dam in particular and Chinese censorship in general.

Who: We previously wrote about Ai Weiwei’s largely successful effort to collect the names of the children killed in the Sichuan earthquake last year.  He is also a well-known artist, who helped design the Olympic “Bird’s Nest” stadium in Beijing.

How: Via Twitter, Ai asked people to “Stop any online activities, including working, reading, chatting, blogging, gaming and mailing.  Don’t explain your behavior.”  The interesting aspect of this protest is that Ai is trying to create a political action which does not entail risk to participants.  By asking people not to acknowledge they are taking part in a boycott, Ai hopes to protect them from persecution by Chinese authorities.

It is hard to claim innocence when taking part in a political actions of “commission,” even one that is apparently innocent.  (In Belarus in 2006, for example, young people were arrested for assembling to eat ice cream.)  However, an action of “omission” puts the government in a more complicated position.  After all, not using the Internet isn’t criminal.  It will be interesting to see how many people participate in the action and whether or not the action of omission becomes a new strategy in digital activism.

Hat-tip: Stan Schroeder on Mashable

Image Source: Daily News

Images for Advocacy: Green Dam Girl

Green Dam Girl: “That unhealthy information is so gross; I’m a girl worth 40 million”
Mud Grass Horse: “I’m just an alpaca.”  (source: Danwei)

Background: Using pop culture references in an advocacy campaign is an effective way to get non-activists involved.  It’s also a way to subtly push a political agenda in a country where overt political messages are censored or where posting or passing on political messages can endanger the activist.

Because of the Chinese government’s limitations on freedom of speech and persecution of dissidents, Chinese activists have become masters of satire and symbolism.  The image above is a prime example of their techniques.  Originally published by Chinese blogger Hecaitou, this drawing uses on the visual language of Japanese anime while bringing together some of the greatest hits in Chinese political satire: behold…Green Dam Girl.

Tool:  satiric images spread online

How it’s being used: Green Dam Girl is a cartoon avatar for Green Dam, a piece of self-censoring software which will be mandatory on all computers sold in China starting July 1.  She’s also holding a rabbit, which is the software’s logo.  (Read a review of the software from the OpenNet Initiative.)  On her cap is an image of the river crab, a homonym for the word “harmony” in Chinese and a dig at the Chinese government which calls censorship harmonization.  (Read more on river crab from China expert Rebecca MacKinnon.)   Green Dam Girl is carrying a bucket of paint (or maybe soy sauce) to cover up all the filth on the Internet.

Finally, the animal she has chained up is an infamous mud grass horse.  Another great Chinese homonym, mud grass horse sounds just like “f— your mother” in Chinese and is another dig at censors.  A few months ago there was a group of very funny and popular videos with children singing ever so innocently about the exploits of mud grass horse… and sounding completely filthy!  (Read more about mud grass horse here.)   Of course, mud grass horse has been chained up because he’s part of the Internet filth that Green Dam Girl has been sent to destroy, but he says he’s been falsely accused - he’s just an alpaca!

Lessons:  1) Funny travels further than Angry, especially to engage an audience of non-activists.  (The Free Kareem campaign also uses cartoons to get their message across.)

2) Symbols and language tricks are a great way to get around censors and mock them at the same time.

3) Digital activism campaigns need the skills of people who do not have digital skills.  Someone who is good at drawing can help a campaign create great a poster, graphic, or logo and then all you need is a scanner to get it online.

Discussion: What if Tiananmen Square happened today?

Description: This week commemorations are occurring worldwide in observance of the Tiananmen Square protests and massacres of 1989. With the rise of Flickr and Twitter used for social justice, many digital activists wonder out loud if the now famed events would have transpired differently had social media tools been around twenty years ago. Clearly, the Chinese government knows the power of cyber-activism, as they have blocked most Internet social networks and foreign newspapers in the country ahead of the anniversary. Although there is an online blackout in China, activists still find ways to get their messages of protest out.

Digital Tools Being Used: various tools

What Are They Doing: Twitter has been blocked for the last two days, nonetheless, users worldwide have been using the hashtag #fuckGFW (Great FireWall of China) to express their outrage at the online blocking. Chinese blogger Xavier Lur said on his website TechXav that the Chinese officials created the drastic blockade to not only protect national security and prevent anti-government content from being seen, but it may have also been economics.

He says:

Without blocking Google, Baidu cannot success. Without blocking Wikipedia, Hoodong cannot success. Without blocking Blogger, Blogcn cannot success. Without blocking YouTube, Youku cannot success. These huge International Internet Companies do not pay taxes to China Government, but the Internet Companies in China do pay taxes. The Chinese government wants to make more bucks, so and to boost their GDP. Also, they want to “protect” China websites and hence blocking successful International websites.

What is the potential Impact: “Ellen” (she asked to not have her real name used) is a Chinese college student and blogger who was only a toddler twenty years ago. She says that as much as the Chinese government tries to block the Internet, they will eventually realize that censorship will increasingly be hard to regulate as more people get connected.

“The revolution is happening in cyberspace,” she said in an e-mail message. “If Tiananmen happened today, the government wouldn’t be able to suppress anger towards them around the globe. I might not see YouTube or read blogs in Beijing, but someone else can in Singapore, in Cairo, in Nairobi, in Rio, in London, in New York. My country is fighting an uphill battle, and it needs to put up their white flag.”

DigiActive’s Introduction to Digital Activism

It’s been a long time in coming, but here is DigiActive’s official introduction to digital activism.  This short presentation (19 slides) includes the following content:

• definition of digital activism
• examples from 3 countries (Colombia, Pakistan, China) including 3 different tools (social networks, mobile SMS, blogs)
• qualities of good digital activism: sustainability, effectiveness, reproducibility
• challenges to digital activism: the need for online-offline coordination, elitism and inequality of access, hype and tool transience, and persecution of digital activists
• what DigiActive does in this space and ways to get involved

Like all DigiActive content, the presentation is created under a Creative Commons Attribution License, so we encourage you to download it, use it, and remix it with your own content.  You can download the presentation here.

Chinese campaign reports quake victims

Background: On May 12, 2008, an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale shook China’s Sichuan province, killing at least 68,000 people. Among the stories of grief and outrage that emerged afterwards was the large number of schools destroyed by the earthquake and the children that died within them. Unlike surrounding buildings, many of which survived, the schools were particularly vulnerable because of shoddy workmanship. These “tofu-dregs schoolhouses,” a result of corruption that siphoned off construction money, meant that the buildings which should have been the more earthquake resistant were in fact the least. Despite outrage, there was little official response from the Chinese government.

Shortly after the quake, prominent Chinese artist and blogger Ai Weiwei visited the quake site and blogged about what he saw, particularly parents who had lost their child. As a result of these posts, readers of his blog volunteered to help him create a list of all the children who had died.

Tools: blogs, citizen journalists crowd-sourcing data collection offline

Crowd-sourcing + self-publishing : On December 15, 2008 Ai formally announced a campaign to collect the names of all children who had died in the quake before the one-year anniversary on in May 2009. Volunteers went out to the towns and villages affected and interviewed school officials and the parents of children who were killed. On his blog, Ai recorded both the results of the investigation and the stories of how it was carried out. In one poignant anecdote, a volunteer is stone-walled when seeking the names of deceased students from an elementary school principal. “We just are trying to find the truth!,” says the volunteer, frustrated. “The government has already announced the truth,” replies the principal. (This anecdote was translated by China Digital Times, an excellent resource for information about this campaign.)

Censored: In April and May, as the quake anniversary approached, the administrator of Ai’s blog began deleting his posts on the project. Two actions were taken to combat this censorship. First, the list was moved to a server outside of China. Also, according to Professor Xiao Qiang, other bloggers began to mirror the censored data on their own sites, in order to discourage the take-downs.

Result: The campaign succeeded in collecting and publishing the names of 7,605 students who had been killed. In addition, the Chinese government finally released its own list of 5,205 names shortly before the anniversary deadline, probably a result of pressure from Ai’s grassroots movement.

Implications: The most critical element of this campaign is the synergy between online and offline efforts. For every blog post or new name added to the list, there was the work of a volunteer (many of whom were detained) heading out into the towns of Sichuan with a camera and notepad. Without Ai’s blog, which acted as an alternative information channel, the names of the students could not have been published. But the digital element was only part of the campaign - the final step, in fact. Social media can simplify many of the tasks of activism (in the time it takes to call one person you can email thousands), but campaigns in which activists use the internet as an excuse to sit back in their armchairs are unlikely to succeed.

image source: wikimedia

R@D: Case Study on Vietnam’s Blogger Movement

Note: Although this article was not produced for R@D, we found it to be an excellent overview of the digital activism context in Vietnam and are publishing it here with the consent of the authors.

The purpose of Research@DigiActive (R@D) is to produce applied, thought-provoking, actionable research at the cutting edge of Digital Activism. It seeks to highlight and disseminate studies in the new academic field of digital activism by publishing short papers by promising scholars. To submit a paper or get more information, please contact our Director of Applied Research, Patrick Meier, at Patrick AT Digiactive.org.

Title: Vietnam’s Blogger Movement: A Virtual Civil Society in the Midst of Government Repression

Authors: Duy Hoang, Cuong Nguyen, and Angelina Huynh
of the pro-democracy organization Viet Tan

Abstract: Despite the increasing popularity of social media in Vietnam, government persecution of online political activists have put significant limitations on digital activism in that country. The paper begins by discussing popular technology platforms and summarizing the success stories of online citizen journalism. However, the actions of the government to curtail online activism - blocking of critical sites, collaboration with foreign companies to create a censorship mechanism similar to the Great Firewall of China, and imprisonment of digital activists - has made the overall outlook bleak. The paper ends with policy recommendations for those outside the country who wish to support the human rights of and online freedom of expression of those in Vietnam.

Read the publication…

Guide:”Blog for a Cause!” now in Chinese

We are excited to announce that Global Voices Advocacy’s “Blog for a Cause!”, the blog advocacy guide written by DigiActive co-founder Mary Joyce, is now available in Chinese. Thanks so much to the dedicated activists at Global Voices Advocacy who organized the translation. You can download the guide by clicking the image below:

The guide is also available for download in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

Tools: The Hub

Tool Description: Witness, an organization dedicated to creating exposure of human rights violations all over the globe through the use of video, has launched a beta version of The Hub. The Hub is a collection of videos that focus on human rights issues. Anyone can create an account and upload a video as long as it relates to human rights. Each video page has information and resources about the issue and links to the campaigns where you can take action.

Activist Application: Activists in China have been uploading videos to The Hub to show instances of police violence upon civilian protesters. The videos were originally uploaded to Chinese video hosting sites, but were quickly taken down. There is also a heavy focus on the 2008 Olympics and how bringing the Olympics to China has only made their human rights worse.

Ease of Use: If you or your organization have a video already made, the ease of use is simple. Just follow these steps to create an account and upload your video.

Theory: Chinese Gamer Activism Goes Offline

In 2006, 10,000 Chinese gamers protested at the government office inside the virtual world of The Fantasy of the Journey West due to the perceived presence of a Japanese flag (pictured).

Sociologist Matthew Chew of Hong Kong Baptist University is interested in online and offline activism by Chinese gamers. Game corporations are media businesses in the real-world but function as authoritarian states in the virtual worlds they create. Gamers are real-world middle-class cultural consumers, but grassroot, politically active citizens in the virtual world, notes Chews. Can virtual world gamers become a source of real-world political change?

Chinese gamers have been carrying out numerous forms of real-world and online protests since 2003. In 2004, some gamers went to the office of The9 and it resulted in a violent confrontation with security guards. Sit-in protests are common, as well as lying down pretending to be dead in a straight line along a road. The Moliyo Incident in 2007 involved hundreds of gamers ransacking the publishers office, spraying graffiti and destroying furniture. Grievances include rent seeking activities, mistreatment of virtual property theft, duping problems, termination of individuals gaming accounts, and technical instability (lag, frequent crashes).

The China Internet Network Information Center estimates that 31.8% of China’s 125 million Internet users played online games in 2006.

Campaign: Blogging for Land Rights in China

Chinese Translator’s note: I have submitted the following blog post on behalf of Digiactive.org’s China correspondent, Zola Zhou. The Chinese text from Zola’s original post is displayed in the image below the translation. Additions to the original text are marked in brackets.

After the Reform and Opening policy began to dramatically alter China’s economy at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, the country has undergone an almost unfathomable transformation. One of the most striking areas of change has been in real estate development. Old neighborhoods have been razed to make way for office towers and seemingly endless rows of high rise apartment buildings.

Many of China’s booming middle class citizens, who still remain in the minority on a national scale, have eagerly taken residence in 21st century China’s urban comfort. This onslaught of development has also caused hardship for countless families and individuals that have been left behind or pushed aside to make way for “progress.”

Knocking down a house in Sipingfang, to the left, officials are beating up a young girl and child (red circle).

Description: In the town of Sipingfang, in China’s Hunan Province, residents have found Zhou Shu Guang [the author], who has helped them establish a website to preserve their rights: www.sifangping.com. Moreover, Zhou provided two days of in-home instruction to teach them how to use the blog process to publish articles that introduce their circumstances. Residents of Sifangping hope that this website can become a bargaining chip in negotiations with the government to acquire reasonable compensation rates.

Digital activism tool: Blog

How These Tools Are Being Used: Given that domestic Chinese media never provides coverage on issues of residence demolitions and relocation, citizens affected by these activities frequently have no way to appeal to higher authorities in a court setting to acquire reasonable compensation [for land appropriated by the government]. Therefore, they are left with no other choice but to publish their stories online. They hope that this website will be viewed by more people, and that they can become model resisters against forced relocation. This web site has an international domain name and the mainframe is located in America, thus the Chinese government is unable to delete it.

Outcome: [No word yet on whether the blog is helping the residents of Sipingfang gain better compensation for appropriated land.]

Read more »