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7月21日 Big Bro tells me what tunes to sing, and collects a feeNow it's all over the news. The government wants to crack down on music piracy in the prosperous Karaoke industry. The Ministry of Culture has taken upon itself to build a national "Karaoke music reservoir", to which (all? not sure yet) Karaoke bars are supposed to subscribe. This reservoir will supposedly have gained copy rights for thousands of songs from record companies, and will digitally calculate the times every song is sung, collect copyright fees accordingly from the Karaoke bars and pay to the copyright owners.
There is one little annoying twist to the grand scheme: "unhealthy" music will be filtered out of the system and in theory, one will never be able to sing about the gloriousness of capitalism, or "My Love is Naked" by Zheng Jun, which happens to be my favorite tune, at Party World again. Hell, Zheng Jun and naked love will emerge triumphant and beat the hell out of censorship, I have no doubt. But that's beside the point really.
Here comes the real problem. Hats off to China Business Post, whose July 20 story reveals the dirty secret behind the MOC's ostensibly noble intentions: Zhongwenfa, a mysterious company owned by the Ministry, has started negotiations with major record companies for building up the reservoir.
Zhongwenfa's spokesman, a shady character without even a first name, tells the newspaper that record companies and copyright owners can join the system on a voluntary basis. But the company will provide access to its reservoir and hardware to Karaoke bars, for a fee, on top of the royalties to be paid to copyright owners, of course. The newspaper then interviewed an EMI spokesman and a spokeswoman from Melody, a big Karaoke chain. They sound very diplomatic of course, but my interpretation of what they said is: we manage fine on our own, so fu** off. 7月10日 Quote of the Day“Reporting without authorization is not allowed—this has always been a silent but obvious rule. What we have done is merely put it down on paper. We didn’t expect it to cause such controversy," Caijing magazine quoted an official with the State Council Information Office as saying, in a story on its English-language Web site today.
What is surprising is that State Council officials admitted that they were under tremendous pressure from the storm of media outcry. They do feel ashamed of themselves, how touching. But my friends told me that the officials were actually more concerned about criticism from foreign media outlets -- isn't there plenty of that -- than from domestic media outlets. That is even more surprising to me, and sad too.
7月4日 Not Convinced at AllI am glad the protests in the past week amounted to something. The mandarins are finally speaking up, defending their position, and we finally get to know who's behind the stupid law.
Wang Yongqing, a deputy director of the State Council's Legal Affairs office, issued a statement saying the proposed fines for the media "only apply in cases where a media outlet violates rules by releasing false information or carrying false coverage, in a aggravated manner or which causes serious consequences."
"This will not affect the news media covering emergency events in a NORMAL manner," Wang said.
In the statement, Wang does refer to "recent controversies" over the proposed law, and defends those controversial clauses as saying in emergency situations, "eleasing untrue, inaccurate or false information may lead to unneccesary panic, even cause severe damage to society." So, the intention of the law is to prevent the media from doing the above.
He went on to stress that the law would require governments to increase transparency by providing numerous sanctions even criminal punishment for insufficient releases and cover-ups.
As many observers have pointed out, the fatal problem of the law lies in who makes the rules and who defines all the terms. Who is to say what is "NORMAL" and what not? Who judges what is sufficient release by the government? Who is to decide what is true and what not, if only the government knows the truth? And of course, who is to judge if the media reports are accurate?
If all these questions remain unclear, what is the point of those clauses but a broad excuse for all levels of government to shut the media up? Wang's definition may carry some sense, but it won't be up to him to define the law once it's passed. What he says today doesn't necessarily stand tomorrow. As long as those clauses remain, the storm of criticism and controversy should remain, even get bigger.
Further proof that Wang has no idea at all what he's talking about: this New York Times story quotes him as saying this law applies to foreign media as well?! I would love to see them try to enforce that -- "Mr. Joseph Kahn of the New York Times, you're hereby fined for reporting on sudden events in China without proper approval for 78 times in the past year -- that would be 7.8 million yuan, or US$ 1 million. Please wire the above mentioned sum into the State Council Information Office account within five working days. Thanks." Ha! 7月1日 Cabbie StrikeFor several days I've heard that Beijing's cab drivers are going to stage a protest this weekend. Today, there indeed seem to be many fewer cabs in the streets and many people have to wait for minutes to get one.
But why am I not reading about this in the newspapers? In my only cab ride today, the cabbie told me that he expects at least one third of the city's cabbies to be taking the day off. "We are shunning in particular places like the airport, and the railway stations." It may take people hours there to get a cab. He said he saw the senior city officials and dozens of police vehicles near both train stations today -- to watch out for potential unrest as well as ask taxi companies to force their drivers to go there. Still it seems the number of striking drivers is not high enough to make their point.
I noted that the city had recently rolled out some cab-friendly measures -- vacant cabs can legally drive on the express ways of the Beijing's second and third-ring roads now, whereas in the past they could only take the surface roads of both ringroads if not carrying passengers. The cabbie said it is precisely the news of the impending strike that prompted city officials to make these largely meaningless gestures of compromise. But these few measures only cover a small portion of the striking drivers' long list of complaints.
Most importantly, they complain that taxi companies had raised their monthly rent fees after the cab rate hike, from 1.6 yuan to 2 yuan per km, which happened in late May. But newspapers had carried stories citing company officials as swearing over their mothers' graves that they wouldn't raise rent for the cabbies. So, all the benefits of the rate hike now goes to the cab companies, while their original excuse for the hike -- to raise cabbies' income turns out to be just a hoax.
Now it comes back to my question: if the strike indeed happened, why the hell am I not reading about this, anywhere? My guess would be, city officials, like everybody else, learned about the strike plans and told all the newspapers and radio statioins to shut up. They came up with some pathetic last-minute gestures trying to pacify the cabbies and hope to keep things under wraps.
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