Authorities scour private chats on messaging apps for blacklisted words, sensitive images
One night this September, construction supervisor Chen Shouli fired off a joke in a chat group.
“Haha,” he typed on his black iPhone 7, followed by an off-color wisecrack about a rumored love triangle involving a celebrity and one of China’s most senior government officials.
Four days later, he says, the police telephoned, ordering him in for questioning.
“I thought, I haven’t done anything wrong, have I? I’m law-abiding,” recalls Mr. Chen, a wiry 41-year-old. “So I went in. Once I arrived, they wouldn’t let me leave.”
Mr. Chen was locked in a cell for five days, he says. According to the police report, his comment on the WeChat messaging app was deemed “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a broad offense that encompasses gang fighting and destruction of public property and is punishable by detention without trial.
.. Zhu Shengwu was an intellectual-property lawyer in cases involving technology firms such as search engine BaiduInc. before taking on a free-speech case this year. He says that monitoring closed chats is akin to eavesdropping in someone’s home.
.. After he called President Xi Jinping a “baozi”—a steamed dumpling—in one WeChat post, and Chairman Mao a “bandit” in another, Mr. Wang was arrested, court records say. A local court in April sentenced him to two years in prison, a term that was reduced to 22 months after a retrial last month.
.. Mr. Guo says he wants to expose what he calls China’s “kleptocrats” and bring rule of law to the country.
Alibaba’s Jack Ma Tells U.S. Companies to Stop Whining About China
Magnate tells firms to ‘follow the rules’ and plan for the long term
Companies that struggle here may simply not be taking the right approach, Mr. Ma said Tuesday at a prominent internet forum.
“I gave advice to Jeff Bezos 10 years ago,” Mr. Ma said, referring to Amazon.com Inc.’s chief executive. “I said: ‘Please send people with entrepreneurial spirit, not professional management. Because wherever you go, doing business in another country is very difficult.’”
.. “Give me five examples of Chinese companies that succeed in America,” he said. “Or Asian companies that succeed in America. Because it’s not easy to do business across nations, it takes time.”
.. Mr. Ma’s comparison is flawed, said Kenneth Jarrett, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. He said American firms have been active in China for a long time, while Chinese companies are just making inroads in the U.S.
.. Mr. Ma said foreign firms must be prepared to abide by China’s laws and not expect quick success.
“When you determine to come, prepare for it. Follow the rules and laws and spend 10 years,”
.. Facebook and Google cannot be accessed in China without VPNs, but both companies have been exploring ways to increase their presence here.
China’s Tech Giants Have a Second Job: Helping Beijing Spy on Its People
Tencent and Alibaba are among the firms that assist authorities in hunting down criminal suspects, silencing dissent and creating surveillance cities
The Chinese government is building one of the world’s most sophisticated, high-tech systems to keep watch over its citizens, including surveillance cameras, facial-recognition technology and vast computers systems that comb through terabytes of data. Central to its efforts are the country’s biggest technology companies, which are openly acting as the government’s eyes and ears in cyberspace.
Companies including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. , Tencent HoldingsLtd. and Baidu Inc., are required to help China’s government hunt down criminal suspects and silence political dissent. Their technology is also being used to create cities wired for surveillance.
.. The political and legal system of the future is inseparable from the internet, inseparable from big data,” Alibaba’s Mr. Ma told a Communist Party commission overseeing law enforcement last year. He said technology will soon make it possible to predict security threats. “Bad guys won’t even be able to walk into the square,” he said.
.. Tencent, the world’s largest online videogame company, dominates Chinese cyberspace with news, video-streaming operations and its WeChat app
.. “Experience has proven that WeChat is completely compromised,” especially for people on the government’s watch list, Mr. Hu said. “Everyone has a spy watching them. That spy is their smartphone.”
China’s New Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
China is following the same path to regional hegemony that Japan did in the 1930s.
.. Implicit in the 205-minute harangue were echoes of the themes of the 1930s: A rising new Asian power would protect the region and replace declining Western influence.
.. In the 1930s, Imperial Japan tried to square the same circle of importing Western technology while deriding the West. It deplored Western influence in Asia while claiming that its own influence in the region was more authentic.
Only about 60 years after the so-called Meiji Restoration, Japan shocked the West by becoming one of the great industrial and military powers of the world.
.. Japanese engineering students returned home with world-class expertise in aviation, nautical architecture, and ballistics — and a disdain for the supposed “decadence” of their mentors.
.. By 1941, Japanese super-battleships, fleet carriers, and fighter planes looked almost identical to British and American models. Often they were just as good, if not better.
.. Satellite Asian clients were expected to overlook Japanese bullying and imperialism in exchange for the advantages of trickle-down wealth from a rising Japanese economy and the paternalistic security offered by the Imperial Japanese Navy and ground forces.
.. China is currently following the Japanese model of the 1930s and early 1940s. All the parallels are there: claims of Western decline, appeals to pan-Asian solidarity, the bullying of neighbors, visions of a Chinese-led trading and currency bloc, new westernized Chinese weapons, and boasts that Beijing has combined the best of both Western technology and superior Asian discipline to become the superpower of the future.