World

Tighter Online Controls in China Point to Wider Clampdown

Published

10 years ago

February 17, 2015

Chinese people check on their smartphones on a street in Beijing Monday, Feb. 16, 2015. On the Internet, in college classrooms and in corporate offices, the Chinese Communist Party has raised the virtual wall separating the world’s most populous country from the rest of the globe. Experts say it reflects a distrust of outside influences that party thinks could threaten its control on society. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

JACK CHANG, Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — Working out of a Beijing office full of video game designers from around the world, Chinese-born Pin Wang and his startup Substantial Games should be the face of the innovative, forward-looking China that the country’s leaders say they want to build.

Pin and his team are attracting investors from across China while launching online games full of swords and sorcery that they hope will dazzle global eyeballs. But for several weeks, Pin’s team has struggled with a decidedly down-to-earth problem that’s hit countless companies nationwide: They’re unable to access their email, shared documents and other online services blocked by China’s Internet censors.

“Something that should take 15 seconds takes three or five minutes, and it screws with the way you flow or you work,” Pin said. “We don’t have the resources to move because we’re a startup. But we talk about it all the time.”

Chinese controls on information have tightened and loosened over the years, but Pin and others are feeling what many say is China’s most severe crackdown in decades on how people learn about the world around them, talk to each other and do business.

On the Internet, in college classrooms and in corporate offices, the Chinese Communist Party has raised the virtual wall separating the most populous country from the rest of the globe. Experts say it reflects a distrust of outside influences that the party thinks could threaten its control on society.

Companies that have depended for years on virtual private networks, or VPNs, to get around Chinese online censors and access business tools have seen those channels squeezed or shut down since the start of the year.

Academics who have long helped Chinese authorities distill foreign ideas into public policy have been told to watch what they say, especially about so-called Western ideas that clash with party doctrine. And many foreign companies that were welcomed into China’s booming economy have seen their offices raided by investigators and been forced to pay record fines in antitrust investigations.

Despite Chinese government pledges to create an innovation economy that leads the world, China ranked 22nd out of 50 countries, between Ireland and Spain, in a global innovation index released this month by Bloomberg financial news service.

“To have the best educational system and the best university has nothing to do with how many high-rises you have and how many good dining halls you have,” said Rowena He, a Harvard University lecturer. “The most important thing at the core is the intellectual freedom that makes up life in a university and academia,” she said. “But instead of opening up to reforms, we see the opposite.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying responded to the concerns of foreign businesses by pointing to a U.N. report showing China became the world’s top destination for foreign direct investment in 2014.

Hua also echoed previous government arguments that people online needed to first obey Chinese regulations on “healthy” Internet use.

“As long as foreign companies in China observe the Chinese law and refrain from undermining China’s national security and consumers’ interest, China will protect their legal rights and welcome their business expansion,” Hua said.

The tighter controls reflect instability within the party as President Xi Jinping shakes up the political landscape in a much-publicized anti-corruption campaign that’s netted thousands of government officials, said prominent China scholar Perry Link. The strategy echoes back to the political purges of Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, Link said.

“Since Xi Jinping has come in, the clampdown has been stronger and more unidirectional than anything since the Mao era,” Link said.

Professor Xia Yeliang was among the first to feel the consequences when the economics faculty of prestigious Peking University voted to expel him in October 2013. Xia had long been an advocate for democratic reforms in China and helped draft Charter 08, a bold call for sweeping changes to China’s political system.

Xia said more than 20 professors in China have been expelled or otherwise disciplined for their political teachings since Xi came to power. “Through my colleagues, I can sense that the ideological controls are getting much tighter,” said Xia, now a visiting fellow at the libertarian U.S. think tank the Cato Institute.

In that political climate, the government sees the Internet as a top threat and has responded by building a ubiquitous system for censoring what people in China can see online. Xi presides over the powerful Central Internet Security and Information Leading Group, which formed after he took power.

The list of controls grows every month.

Late last year, Chinese censors finally blocked all Google services after the U.S. company refused to cooperate with them in 2010. This month, officials required that all Chinese blog and chat room users register with their real names and promise in writing to avoid challenging the political system. In the coming weeks, new cybersecurity regulations will reportedly require foreign companies to turn over sensitive intellectual property and submit their products to security checks.

The party has paid especially close attention to the microblog Weibo and censored messages that touch on sensitive subjects, said Rogier Creemers, a research officer at Oxford University’s Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy.

“Weibo has become a venue for chaotic discussion, and part of the effect it had was it essentially meant the party had lost the initiative and couldn’t say what got into the public sphere,” Creemers said.

The latest moves are in line with Beijing’s longtime approach to regulatory change: It eases control on commercial or other activity, sees how it develops and then promotes aspects it wants while suppressing those it doesn’t.

Chinese Internet users, for example, still are avid consumers of social media, e-commerce and video streaming sites, even if the censors are always lurking, said Dali Yang, faculty director of the University of Chicago’s center in Beijing.

“This is a society with a tremendous level of information, people who are very well educated in terms of actual information and they know of history going back centuries,” Yang said.

Still, while Chinese leaders see the Internet as a source of prosperity and jobs, they are willing to give up commercial gains to enforce political controls. When the government clashed with Google, people in the industry warned that driving out the U.S. search giant would hurt China’s development.

Walling off China’s Internet has allowed some local websites such as search engine Baidu and Weibo to prosper in the absence of foreign competition. Other local companies, such as Pin’s startup, chafe at the restrictions.

Foreign entrepreneurs and companies, meanwhile, are trying to figure out whether the costs of doing business in China outweigh the benefits of tapping the world’s second-biggest economy.

Rich Chinese also are looking to leave the country. A survey by the British bank Barclays last year found that 47 percent of more than 2,000 high-worth Chinese are hoping to move within five years. The poll found that their top reasons were greater educational and economic opportunities for their children and overall economic security.

“Beijing is an attractive place to be because of the amazing talent,” said Beijing-based entrepreneur Nils Pihl, who heads the database startup Traintracks. “But it’s getting harder for us to stay, and my social feed is full of other CEOs saying they’re worried they will have to leave.”

AP Business Writer Joe McDonald contributed to this report.

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Retired Bay Area Journalist Finds Success in Paris with Black History Tours

In the late 90s, Stevenson finally realized her dream of living in Paris, now with her daughter. She started exploring the history of Africans in the city and would go on to teach others the same. Her business, which she named Black Paris Tours (BPT), received a significant boost when a family friend gave her a stack of cash and encouraged her to expand on the knowledge that she had only started to share with people she knew.

Published

2 months ago

February 18, 2025

Oakland Post

Ricki Stevenson, Blacks in Paris. Courtesy photo.

By Post Staff

There were two things Oakland-born, East Palo Alto-raised Ricki Stevenson always dreamed of:

Going to New York as a newscaster to tell the true story of Blacks in America.
Living and working in Paris one day.

Her dreams of life in Paris began when she was three years old and her mother, a former professional dancer, took her to see Josephine Baker perform. She was 11 when her parents took her to the Stanford University campus to meet James Baldwin, who was speaking about his book, “The Fire Next Time.” Ricki says that’s when she knew she’d one day live in Paris, “the city of light!”

But before that would ever happen, she had a tumultuous career as a newscaster across the country that was inspired by her family’s history.

Stevenson recalls marching with Cesar Chavez as he fought for labor rights for farm workers in California.

“Are we Mexican too?” she asked her parents. “No, but we will fight for everyone’s human rights,” they responded to her.

Ironically, Ricki’s paternal family roots went back to Greenwood, Oklahoma, infamous for the 1921 bombing of Black Wall Street. A time when Black people had oil wells, banks, and a thriving business community.

This background would propel her into a 25-year journalism career that gave her the opportunity to interview greats like President Jimmy Carter, PLO leader Yassir Arafat, James Baldwin, Rev. Jesse Jackson, UN Ambassador Andrew Young, Miriam Makeba, and the leaders of South African liberation movements.

A job offer from KCBS radio brought her back to the Bay Area in the 1980s. Then came the switch to TV when she was hired as a Silicon Valley business reporter with KSTS TV, working at the first Black-owned television station in northern CA (created and owned by John Douglas). Along the way, Stevenson worked as an entertainment reporter with BET; coproduced, with her disc jockey brother Isaac, a Bay Area show called “Magic Number Video;” lived in Saudi Arabia; worked as an international travel reporter with News Travel Network; and worked at KRON TV a news anchor and talk show host.

In 1997, Stevenson realized her dream of living in Paris with her young daughter, Dedie. She started exploring the history of Africans in the city and would go on to teach others the same. Her business, which she named Black Paris Tours (BPT), received a significant boost when a family friend, Admiral Robert Toney put a chunk of money in her hand. He said, “Ricki, my wife and I have been coming to Paris for 20 years, but in just two days with you and Dedie, we’ve learned and seen more than we ever did before.”

Years after BPT took off, Ricki met Nawo Carol Crawford and Miguel Overton Guerra, who she recruited as senior scholar guides for Black Paris Tours.

Guerra says he is proud of his work with Black Paris Tours in that it provides a wealth of information about the rich legacy of African and African American history and influence in Paris and Europe.

“I tend to have a feeling for history always being a means of a reference point backwards … you start to understand the history, that it isn’t just the United States, that it began with African people,” Guerra says.

He said that it’s been a pleasure to watch people learn something they didn’t know before and to take them through the city to key points in Black history, like hangout spots for writers like Baldwin and Richard Wright, restaurants in the busiest parts of Paris, the home of Josephine Baker and so much more.

Although the tours are open to all, Guerra hopes that those of African descent from all over the world can embrace that they don’t have to just stay where they are because movies and media have portrayed cities like Paris to be only white, it’s multicultural and accepting to all.

“We’ve been here, and we’ve been there, going way back when. And we shouldn’t be considered or consider ourselves to be strangers in any place that we go to,” he said.

Stevenson notes they’ve had 150,000 people take their tour over the years, with notables like former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, Smokey Robinson, Steve Harvey, Miriam Makeba, and more.

Friends and former media colleagues of Stevenson compliment the BPT crew on their knowledge of the city and their ability to always keep it interesting.

“He [Guerra] just had a deep, deep wealth of knowledge and he was constantly supplanting information with historical facts and the like. I love that it was demonstrating and showing how Black people have thrived in Paris or contributed to the culture in Paris,” Candice Francis said.

She toured in the summer of 2022 and stated that in the two weeks that they visited Paris, BPT was the highlight of her trip. She shared that she was proud of Stevenson and the life she’d managed to manifest and build for herself.

“Even if you’re visiting Paris for the tenth time, if you haven’t taken the tour, then by all means, take it,” Francis emphasized.

Magaly Muñoz, Gay Plair and Paul Cobb also contributed to this story. You can book your own adventure with Black Paris Tours at www.blackparistour.com.

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COMMENTARY: Will a Dictator’s Loss Change Trump’s Tune?

What’s happened in Syria has the potential of reshaping the politics of the entire Middle East. The U.S. can’t afford to sit back and do nothing. Now is the time to exert peaceful, diplomatic influence on how Syria maintains stability and goes forward with a new democracy.

Published

4 months ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

iStock.

By Emil Guillermo

In our polarized country, half of America can’t wait, while many of us still wonder, “where’s Kamala?”

I hope President-elect Trump — who famously said during the campaign that he’d be a dictator on day one — eats his words.

Dictators aren’t doing so well these days.

Last weekend, the dictator Bashar al-Assad was run out of Syria and sought exile with his puppet master/dictator Vladimir Putin of Russia. In just about two weeks, a coalition of rebels applied enough pressure to end a family regime in Syria that lasted 50 years.

al-Assad’s wealthy family dictatorship plundered Syria and ruled in terror.

It sounds all too familiar to Filipino Americans, many of whom came to the U.S. fleeing the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

al-Assad’s end was different from the Filipinos who forged a peaceful People Power movement that chased the Marcos family to Hawaii where they sought refuge from their U.S. puppet handlers.

But as in Manila, there was cheering on the streets of Syria. Men, women, and children. Christian, Muslims, different sects and ethnicities, all united against al-Assad.

al-Assad has been described as a genocidal narco-trafficking tyrant, whose friends were America’s biggest enemies, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, said Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, on CNN.

Moustafa said it was amazing that there would be no more Russian airstrikes, no more al-Assad gulags torturing civilians. “To see good triumph over evil is an amazing thing,” he added.

But last weekend has some trickle down.

Consider that we are talking about al-Assad, the one Tulsi Gabbard consorted with and hyped to her colleagues when she was in Congress. Now Assad has been shamed into exile with his puppet master Russia, and Gabbard wants to be the U.S. director of national security? Given her wrongheaded judgment on al-Assad, can she be trusted with any national secrets?

It’s still not over in Syria, as now there will be a scramble to see what kind of governing democracy emerges.

Predictably, Donald Trump has said, “The United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved.”

Nouveau isolationism?

Overall, the ouster of the dictator should give Trump pause.

If by nominating MAGA loyalists like Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, Trump’s testing the evolution to strongman rule in the U.S., he should consider what happened before last weekend.

In South Korea, a weak president tried to declare martial law and was voted down by Parliament. That’s a faux strongman.

Let’s hope Trump learns a lesson from the week’s news.

The next president sets the tone for a politics that’s already toxic.

He needs to remember the joy in Syria this week when an autocrat was dumped in the name of freedom and democracy.

About the Author

Emil Guillermo is an award-winning Bay Area journalist. His commentaries are on YouTube.com/@emilamok1. Or join him at www.patreon.com/emilamok

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Black History

Biden acknowledged America’s ‘Original Sin of Slavery,’ Pledged Infrastructure Dollars and Long-Term Financial Aid

“Our people lie at the heart of a deep and profound connection that forever binds Africa and the United States together. We remember the stolen men and women and children who were brought to our shores in chains and subjected to unimaginable cruelty,” Biden said in remarks at the National Museum of Slavery, which is built near the chapel where enslaved individuals were forcibly baptized before being sent to America. The museum was built on the property of Álvaro de Carvalho Matoso, one of the largest slave traders on the African coast.

Published

5 months ago

December 8, 2024

Oakland Post

President Biden met today with President João Lourenço to highlight the transformation of the U.S.-Angolan relationship and reaffirm our joint commitment to continue working together to address global challenges.

President Biden met with President João Lourenço to highlight the transformation of the U.S.-Angolan relationship and reaffirm our joint commitment to continue working together to address global challenges.

Will Biden’s aid for an above-the-ground Railroad help ease the pain for the African Americans’ Underground Railroad?

By Post Staff
And news dispatches from the Guardian, CNN and AP

When President Joe Biden went to Angola this week the purpose was ostensibly to advance the Lobito Corridor, an unfinished 800-mile railway project meant to facilitate the transfer of critical minerals from interior countries to western ports for exports.

But in a visit to the country’s slave museum, he acknowledged America’s dark past and its connection to Angola in the presence of three descendants of the first captives who arrived in Virginia from Angola in 1619.

The child of two of those captives — Antony and Isabella — was William Tucker, born around 1623. Three of his descendants were present when Biden spoke at the country’s slave museum and humbly acknowledged how the horrific history of slavery has connected the United States and Angola.

“While history can be hidden, it cannot and should not be erased. It should be faced. It’s our duty to face our history,” he said. “The good, the bad and the ugly. The whole truth. That’s what great nations do,” he said.

“It was the beginning of slavery in the United States. Cruel. Brutal. Dehumanizing. Our nation’s original sin. Original sin. One that’s haunted America and cast a long shadow ever since,” Biden spoke as he honored the Tucker family.

After introducing Wanda Tucker, Vincent Tucker and Carlita Tucker, he delivered a hopeful vision for the future in a major speech from the country that was the point of departure for millions of enslaved Africans.

(Wanda Tucker now serves as the faculty chair of psychology, philosophy and religious studies at Rio Salado College in Arizona.)

The museum was built on the property of Álvaro de Carvalho Matoso, one of the largest slave traders on the African coast.

Biden told the attendees that he’s proud to be the first president to visit Angola and that he’s “deeply optimistic” about the future relationship between the nation and the US.

“The story of Angola and the United States holds a lesson for the world. Two nations with a shared history, an evil of human bondage,” Biden said. “Two nations on the opposite sides of the Cold War, the defining struggle of the late part of the 20th century. And now, two nations standing shoulder to shoulder working together every day. It’s a reminder that no nation need be permanently the adversary of another.”

Biden’s trip aimed to highlight U.S. investments in Angola and the continent in the face of deepening Chinese influence in the region, as Beijing has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Africa through its Belt and Road Initiative.

Biden took a swipe at China’s moves, without calling out the country by name, and argued the US presents a better alternative.

“The United States understands how we invest in Africa is as important as how much we invest,” Biden said.

“In too many places, 10 years after the so-called investment was made, workers are still coming home on a dirt road and without electricity, a village without a school, a city without a hospital, a country under crushing debt. We seek a better way, transparent, high standard, open access to investment that protects workers and the rule of law and the environment. It can be done and will be done,” the president said.

Biden’s speech comes during what likely could be his last trip abroad as president and as he seeks to deepen relationships with Angola and other African nations at a time when China has made significant inroads in the continent with hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure investments, far outpacing the U.S.

During his remarks, Biden touted U.S. efforts to expand its relationships across Africa, including billions of dollars in investments in Angola.

He also announced over $1 billion in new US humanitarian assistance for Africans who have been displaced by historic droughts across the continent.

“But we know African leaders and citizens are seeking more than just aid. You seek investment.

So, the United States is expanding its relationships all across Africa,” Biden said, adding later: “Moving from patrons to partners.”

Ahead of his remarks, the president also met with Angolan leaders, including young people at the museum.

Biden started his day with a bilateral meeting with Angolan President João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço at the presidential palace in Luanda.

The two men discussed trade and infrastructure, including the US and Europe’s investment in the railroad. They also discussed mutual security interests as Angola has played a key mediating role in the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In November, Angola announced their Incremental Production Decree of fiscal terms designed to enhance the commercial viability of developing oil and gas fields. The decree enhances the commercial viability of developing fields in mature blocks, underexplored areas and stranded resources, while encouraging exploration near existing infrastructure. The US Railroad infrastructure investments could play a major role in enabling increased recovery from producing fields and extending the lifespan of critical infrastructure, the decree is set to generate billions in offshore investments, create jobs and drive economic growth, solidifying Angola’s position as a leading oil and gas producer.