InsideGFW

The article below was written by Leslie Jones and me, it was posted on urbanatomy.com. Please go to here for a better edited version and pictures of those famous people.

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For Chinese netizens hungry for information that won’t make it into tightly-controlled traditional media outlets, Twitter is one of the best resources going – along with an assortment of blogs and the forum 1984 BBS. In July 2009, after riots in Xinjiang, the micro-blogging service was blocked. Now, it can only be accessed via proxy server inside China. (more…)

Yesterday I was cycling to The Camel to watch the America VS Ghana football game. While biking through Ju lu road, I saw a Cheng Guan vehicle parked beside the street. Some Cheng Guan were driving some homeless people away from their camping spot.

These homeless people were kind of different from the normal ones. They had bikes with three super big bags on the rear axle of each bike. It seemed like they were doing some kind of garbage recycling for a living.

After evicting them from their spot, the Cheng Guan got into their vehicle and left. I followed, waited until they found another place and settled in, then I went forward to have an interview with one of them. (more…)

I had dinner with Jack the other night, and we started talking, as we usually do, about the various social problems facing China. After talking for a while, he asked me to do a guest post on his blog about some of the ideas I had been talking about. So here I am. (more…)

After having moved to Shanghai, I see myself step by step slowly changing into a journalist. If there is one man I would like to become, then it would be Wang Ke Qin.

Wang is the chief journalist of China Economic Times now and is one of a kind unlike other ‘journalists’ in town that hold Marxist views. Some say Wang is the Chinese version of muckraker Lincoln Stiffens due to several big exposés by him including the recent ‘Shanxi vaccine scandal’.

(“Many people will know who Li Ke Qing is (a popular Hong Kong singer), but only a few will know Wang Ke Qin and the Ministry of Health of Shanxi will surely get away” said Li Cheng Peng the famous football commentator and journalist when commenting on the Shanxi vaccine scandal.)

Chinese Media is always strongly controlled by the government with the slogan of ‘Emphasizing positive news’ and ‘The Good of Society Before All Else’, so I was always surprised to see Wang’s stories getting published. Yet, the people exposed easily get away and the muckraker who exposed them often ends badly.

There were some underground stock markets in Lanzhou in 2001 controlled by the local Mafia and protected by the Lanzhou government which did not have legal agreements and licenses to run. By downloading stock data from the Internet and showing them on the big screen for investors, they successfully fooled hundreds of people to use them as agency to buy and sell stock shares where all the money was routed directly into their own pockets.

A text message including his home address and the message “We are going kidnap your daughter and wife from your home.” was sent to Wang on the 7th Feb 2001, 5 days after his new story about the underground stock market got published. A few hours later he received another call informing him that the Mafia is willing to pay five million RMB for his life. Wang had to ask the police to protect his family. ”I have four police officers staying with me and my family for protection.”

This was only the beginning of the bad luck. ”My colleague told me over the phone that I had gotten fired again.” Wang lost his job one month after the Southern-eastern newspaper published his new scoop of ‘the dark side of voting for bad men’ which exposed Ding Xi village’s officials abusing their power and forcing the villagers to vote for bad men in the town. Every village needed to vote for some ‘bad men’ depending on the population of the village. The Governor mandated the village’s population to vote for more than 5 percent representation of ‘bad men’ and beat or arrested those who failed to fill that quota.

”I was shocked when I saw hundreds of farmers kneel down in front of me and said to myself that you must find out what is behind this.” When Wang went to the town for the second time, he had to dress like a farmer and hide his camera and voice recorder in a bag full of straw to get though three blocks as some officers had gotten news of Wang coming to investigate them and thus hired the local mafia to look out for him.

Thank God the Chinese Economic is brave enough to accept him to be their chef journalist after he got fired and that they published his new expose on the Shanxi vaccine scandal as it was really bad quality and some children becoming physically disabled or even dying as a result.

Just right after the Shanxi vaccine scandal went public, China’s biggest and state-run news agency Xin Hua published an article written by a “journalist” from the Xin Hua Shanxi branch’ denying the authenticity of Wang’s story and backing up the Ministry of Health of Shanxi. Half a month has passed since the scandal was exposed, but the government hasn’t taken any action besides covering and hiding. Thousands of children are still being administered the vaccine with continued side effects and China is still too “special” to be shaken by the muckraker.

*Muckraker: a term coined by Theodore Roosevelt and which describes individuals who seeks to expose corruption of businesses or government to the public.

“He is a real Buffet menu in China” people say about Liu Yi Qian.

From time to time people say that the chances to succeed in China are unfair, The government controls all the resources and could easily smash individuals, but the existence of 47 years old Liu Yi Qian seems to be a tough argument to refute. He was born into a normal family and has already become a successful Chinese entrepreneur.

“I will not let any chance of making a great profit slip away” he has said. At his school, teachers always told their students to study hard and every day (study for a better social status) and university students are greatly respected by society, but young Qianyu said to his peers: “You guys keep on studying, I am going to quit school and start making money.”

After quitting middle school he went into the shoe trade for ten years working at a small family factory where he learned that the easiest way to make money is by letting other people do the job. So he taught the workers to make different parts of shoes that he then assembled together. “I could make more than 100 RMB every day.”

In the mid 1980s, taxis were really rare and the people in the cities were always waving their hands to try to catch one even with the possible charge of 50 to 60 for a three to four kilometer drive. So he spent 16,000RMB to get a driver’s license and bought two cars to run a taxi business with his brother for two years. Then after that he opened a shop in Yuyuan market.

The Chinese stock market first opened in the early 90′s when the people did not understand stock and trade very well, so some of stocks’ price went sky high. Liu took this chance and bought 100 shares of the Yuyuan market at 100 RMB per share, and sold it one year later when the price was 10000 RMB per share.

After he found out that money is the easiest way to make more money, he started reselling stock licenses (it’s like a lottery, if you get the right number you would have the right to buy stock) in 1992. From calculations he discovered that ten percent of the licenses will get the right number and could be sold for the price of 6000 RMB. So he bought a lot of licenses at the price of 30 and sold those with the right numbers for 6000 RMB and made a fortune.

After saving up enough capital, he started his own company Xin Liyi. This was a holding company with four employees and it’s only function was to buy corporate shares not available to individuals. With this company he controlled the shares of several holding companies and insurance companies which helped him to increase capital and buy more companies. Now he is the #256 richest man in China according to the Hurun rich list of 2008.

There is a story about how when once a government official wanted to have an interview with Liu at the Shangri-La hotel in Shanghai and where he had turned up wearing a t-shirt, jeans and sneakers, the mayor had felt really uncomfortable about it. “They gave me a suit and shoes and made me wear them” said Liu.

Liu also seems to be very much a family man. Every day he will go back to his home to see his wife and son. “I always felt uncomfortable when I was not at home” Liu said. “My wife looks out for the family a lot and in my office there are pictures of my wife and mother hanging everywhere” he added in addition.

“Yes, I made a lot of money from the stock market, but the largest profit I ever made is from art. I do not know anything about art. “I bought this because I wanted to have it; I want to take it away from other people and I like this kind of feeling” Liu said after buying a 4,365,000 RMB ancient Chinese painting.

Some people say that Liu is the living example of the Chinese dream, as even within such an unfair society, Liu has achieved his dream and become a tycoon.

But what liu says about this? I interviewed him last day and when I asked him does he think the Chinese young man could achieved their dream now, he told me ‘No, time is different now, at my time everybody is the same, nobody had the money and we all had the same basis, but it is different now. The society was already finished its classification, people who born with nothing do not have that kind of chances anymore.