Results tagged “wengan”

Local officials are still trying to strike the proper balance between transparency and the traditional Chinese methods of information dissemination (or lack thereof) which we have all become so familiar with — namely, "monitoring," "controlling" and "blocking."

After Xinhua reported that county officials in Weng’an—including its Communist Party secretary, Wang Qin, and head of the county government, Wang Haiping—were fired on Friday following the June 28 riots, Western media has hailed Weng’an as a turning point for China. Both WSJ and TIME remark that Xinhua’s handling of the Weng’an incident is remarkable in itself; not only did state media report the riots almost immediately, but quickly produced "unusually long investigative stories." Adding to this assemblage of information are the voices of Chinese bloggers, who are doing their part to increase transparency in China. "Aggressive Chinese bloggers make an art of challenging Chinese government propaganda. This week, they can claim a victory," writes Geoffrey Fowler and Juliet Ye for the Wall Street Journal. "The Weng'an incident and its seemingly more open coverage are signs of the greater latitude enjoyed by the state media in the wake of the May 12 Sichuan earthquake," adds Simon Elegant of TIME.

To bolster confidence against terrorist attacks in the upcoming Beijing Olympics, Xinhua gives us stills from a CCTV special of the armed police demonstrating anti-terrorist tactics in Jinan, capital of Shandong Province.

China's bloggers have always gone to extreme lengths to share information and criticism. But after the Weng'an riots this weekend, bloggers have had to become especially crafty when distributing information on the riots and their aftermath. In addition to burying coding inside search phrases that hide the words from online censors and taking a screenshot of written text, the Wall Street Journal reports netizens on Tianya.cn now flipping sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally to get past all the usual keyword blocks. Sinobyte suggests that this new method might be better than most, since Chinese is an ideographic writing system "probably easier to read in odd inversions than most alphabetic languages." Sinobyte further explains that since Chinese words are split into meaning-based units, reading reverse text is more like reading the English word "bass ackwards" instead of "sdrawkcab ssa."

     

While yet more versions of the Weng'an, Guizhou riot have surfaced on the internet, the Guizhou provincial government has also finally given its version — which, believe it or not, has sparked off a new pop phrase on the Chinese internet — "I'm here to do push-ups" (我来做俯卧撑的). Netizens are now suddenly flooding the forums with pictures of TV host Ou Zhihang (区志航) doing push-ups in his birthday suit by famous Chinese landmarks such as the Tiananmen in Beijing, Lujiazui in Shanghai and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou.

By Hilary Faxon and Adrienne Wong

As usual, Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth is on top of the incident, busy piecing together all the information he can find. He informs us that Weng'an is now a sensitive word, the uncle of the female student is still alive, and the body of the student is still resting in a refrigerated coffin awaiting autopsy despite this popularly-believed story. Soong also observes that the Xinhua story (which all Chinese media are made to carry) opens more questions than it answers, paving the way for all sorts of unsubstantiated rumours to dominate public opinion.