Arnaud de La Grange from Le Figaro asks whether this is going to turn into the “New President Security Services’ Nightmare“, Aujourd’hui La Chine collects Chinese reactions in Beijing here and ChinaSmack has translated an impressive list of Chinese reactions there.

BTW, you noticed Wen is speaking in Chinese… at Cambridge !

It started all here on Dec. 26th by ChinaSmack, when Chinese Netizens noticed in pictures the Commissioner of the Nanjing Housing Administration Bureau was smoking very expensive cigarettes and wearing an expensive watch that a government official should not be able to afford [Read: on his salary]. ChinaSmack has translated in his post the numerous comments originally from Tanya. [Update: this link has been "harmonized"]

Yesterday, The Strait Times revealed this Government Official had been dismissed and that authorities in Jiangsu province where Internet users exposed an allegedly corrupt official’s taste for luxury have made posting information about private life illegal.

The ruling Communist Party’s parliament in eastern Jiangsu province approved a law making it illegal for people in the city of Xuzhou to publish ‘private information’ on the Internet, the China Daily reported.

But now, anyone in Xuzhou who posts ‘private information’ online will be fined up to 5,000 yuan and could be barred from using the Internet for six months.

Today the news has been reported by Shanghaiist and China Digital Times [Proxy required] as well.

Among the several conclusions, this has drawn my attention:

Internet Filtering (“the great Firewall”) is only one part of Chinese Internet censorship

Domestic web censorship is not centralized at all

Domestic web censorship is outsourced by government to the private sector

Domestic web censorship is inconsistent – if you can’t post successfully in one place, it’s usually possible to post your content somewhere else, at least for at least a while

The system of “managing” user-generated web content in China appears to follow a similar logic and approach as the system for controlling professional news media

You don’t need to be an activist to be willing to freely navigate the Web… Here is a handy workaround I wrote previously to acces any website from China Mainland.

Log on www.skype.com and you will be redirected automatically to http://skype.tom.com – no choice, this is the Chinese version of Skype. Then look at the color of the Siteadvisor icon on your web browser, it turns from green to full red which is a strong invite to leave the page. Asking more details at SiteAdvisor, you will then discover that the Skype Tom page in China is hosting Adware-BDsearch, a generic trojan considered as harmful to your computer.

I discovered this long ago adn advised friends to download Skype from the US site instead.

Yesterday, the New York Times revealed that surveillance of Skype messages was found in China. At last…

A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.

The list also serves as a filter to restrict text conversations. The encrypted list of words inside the Tom-Skype software blocks the transmission of those words and a copy of the message is sent to a server. The Chinese servers retained personal information about the customers who sent the messages. They also recorded chat conversations between Tom-Skype users and Skype users outside China. The system recorded text messages and Skype caller identification, but did not record the content of Skype voice calls.

The researchers said their discovery contradicted a public statement made by Skype executives in 2006 after the content filtering of the Skype conversations was reported. At the time the company said that the conversations were protected and private.

So if you don’t want your private conversations log to be stored on a Chinese computer somewhere you don’t want it to be, make sure you use a US version of Skype and make sure you correspondent is doing the same as well.

Read the full article here.

Also in French from Reuters here. [Update] The previous link has been removed from Yahoo archives.

According to the South China Morning Post (subscription required), the Chinese government has taken to censuring financial media in effort to stem the floodgates of discontent brewing over dismal market sentiment.

With the craziness of the financial meltdown in the United States, the Shanghai Stock Exchange has followed the rest of the world down the rabbit hole. Within 10 minutes of the opening of the SSE on Tuesday morning, right after the declared bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the SSE Composite fell by almost 5% but slowly steeled itself back around the 2000 mark.

The idea of the SSE breaking the 2000 barrier might have seemed impossible this time last year but the stock market has been free-falling, losing more than half its value since January. Frustrations have been mounting despite varied efforts by the regulators to stem the volatility (loan controls, bank reserve rates, administrative fiats, etc). Calls for government intervention have grown louder as fund managers, academics and regulators debate the efficacy and timeliness of a Chinese-styled bailout.

The interesting point is now, because this is the real issue behind the figures:

SCMP reports that perennial fears of social disunity have led the Communist Party’s Publicity Department (rather than the securities regulator) to verbally inform major financial websites to sift out negative and sensitive commentaries, reports and headlines about the hard-hit markets. There is no paper trail backing up such claims, but editors of online financial media have confirmed them.

Read rhe full post here.

But what is interesting here is this:

But censors are blocking all comment on the motives of the man on every website. Was he an activist of the Falun Gong banned movement? Was he a Tibetan Buddhist? How about a disgruntled property rights activist?

Whatever the cause, there is a story there, and the government may not want the motive to come out. But at least it’s a step in the right direction to allow Xinhua to report the news. Here’s the agency’s latest story:

Read the full story here.