If you’ve gotten your paws on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you’ve likely added lots of useful apps to it. You might, however, have overlooked the fact that there are lots of apps – many by Chinese developers – that you can use daily to help find your way around, speak the language, or get information.

I’ve chosen 10 China-relevant apps, most of which are free. Some of the free apps might be not quite so good as some pricey alternatives – eg: I’ve opted for the free DianHua dictionary over the $5 QingWen one. If you have any other app recommendations, share them in the comments.

In no particular order, here are my sweet 10 China apps (all prices are in USD, as they appear in Apple’s official China App Store. All the apps should be available worldwide):

Explore Shanghai/Beijing/Guangzhou/Hong Kong
99 cents each
App Store Link (for Shanghai version)…
These four separate apps (by the same Explore Metro company) are interactive subway maps (pictured, right) which work offline. They not only give you up-to-date maps, but also allow you to plan routes, and get train times and travel costs. Best of all, the app uses the devices ‘location services’ to tell you which subway stop is nearest to where you’re standing.

Aibang Trains (爱帮列车)
free
App Store Link…
This free app seems to be the best way I can find of searching national train times, and allows you to search by train number, or by departing and arrival stations. Very useful for checking that you can get where you need to go on the new ‘D trains’ (aka: bullet trains) as quickly as possible. The only downside to this app is that it requires you to be online, with either wi-fi or 3G.

Shanghai Guide
free
App Store Link…
There are lots more Shanghai-related apps, but this is the best free one, giving you a decent spread of events, shopping places, hotels, current concerts, restaurants and more, and allows you to search places according to name, price-levels, or recommendations. Plus, it all works offline. The main downside is that there’s not much info provided; for example: if I search for high-end malls, and click on Plaza 66, the app doesn’t tell me what shops there are actually inside.

City Fu
free
App Store Link…
This app covers Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Like the Shanghai Guide app, above, it has a good selection of places, which you can find by searching, or by browsing through the categories, and it all works offline. I really wish it’d allow for browsing of certain types of places within a vicinity; for example, it’d be useful to be able to browse only electronics stores in Xujiahui. Oh well; it’s still a good app.

DianHua dictionary
free
App Store Link…
I rate this as the best free bilingual CN-Eng dictionary. In addition to doing what you’d expect, it’ll also save (or ‘bookmark’) some of your most-needed words or phrases, and allow you to compile flashcards for studying purposes.

QQ
free
App Store Link…
If you have a QQ number, then this official app from Tencent is the best way to use it online (since the awesome multi-IM apps, like Meebo and Nimbuzz, don’t support QQ).

Douban.fm
free
App Store Link…
Since you’re on the other side of the planet, you’re barred from the Spotify and Pandora parties (curse geolocation filtering!), how about checking out Douban, the Chinese social-network based around what movies you’re watching and books you’re reading. So, once you have an account over at Douban.com, you can use this free app to stream music over wi-fi or 3G.

The Forbidden Palace
$4.99 with audio, or $2.99 without audio
App Store Link…
This is a unique, multimedia tour-guide (pictured, above) and interactive map for Beijing’s historic Forbidden Palace complex. I recently talked to the developer of the app, and he explained that his inspiration was the awfulness of the standard, clunky audio tours in museums such as the Louvre. Instead, he wanted to create something more hi-tech for a more convenient device: and this neat Palace Museum iPhone app was born. In addition to historical info – in either audio or text form – the app features a map that can plan a route for you, based on what you’d like to see most, or how much time you have available.

Autonavi Navigation (高德导航)
$14.99
App Store Link…
If you drive in China, you might like to know that this is China’s best-selling in-car GPS with maps iPhone app. It’s a lot cheaper than the $50-plus of European and American GPS apps, and is tailor-made to China’s roads. It’s only available in Chinese, but that shouldn’t be a problem to those (few brave laowais) who actually drive here.

Tangram Puzzle Pro
99 cents
App Store Link…
This classical 7-piece Chinese puzzle (pictured, right) – known as 七巧板 in Chinese – is a sort of shape-shifting jigsaw with a dose of zen. There are lots of different tangram-style apps, but I’d say this one is the best-looking, with some sweet animations and a nice interface. Once you’ve got this you can impress your Chinese workmates as you show that your mind is not a Descartian duality, but as lithe as a Daoist’s. There is a free ‘Lite’ version, if you’d like to try before you buy.

CNNIC’s digital certificate, which is probably in your computer right now, has not been proved to be maliciously spying, but it’s a matter of trust. Do you really trust CNNIC, the overlords of the ‘Great Firewall’, to not be potentially peeking into your email, Facebook, Paypal account or online bank? Nope, thought not.

These digital certificates are not viruses or malware; they’re genuine tools that sites use to encrypt and verify information, and are issued by third-party Certificate Authorities (CA). For this CNNIC certificate to be on your computer, it has taken numerous levels of consent: by the web browser makers (Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and more obscure ones, such as Opera) and by the CA ‘Entrust’, who will have evaluated, accepted and issued CNNIC’s digital certificate.

So, what’s the drama, you ask… Well, in devious hands, these important data snippets can be configured to pry, spy and snoop on your web traffic and private data. A benign digital certificate could turn malicious if remotely reconfigured, so as to tap into a certain users encrypted web data. In one other scenario, CNNIC could possibly use this tool in conjunction with the Great Firewall to tunnel into your encrypted web sessions. And, remember, CNNIC has a history of putting malware on people’s machines, hence all the alarm bells ringing over this tiny, new development.

So, let’s get about blocking CNNIC’s ass off of your computer: It’s best not to delete it – it’ll only be re-added – so we’re going to need to ‘never trust’ it in your computer’s settings. Then, you’ll be safe and unsnooped upon. It’s pretty easy, taking it step-by-step…

Mac: Safari and Chrome
This applies only to the Safari and Chrome web browser (Firefox needs to be done separately, in its own settings; see below). First, use Spotlight to search for the Keychain Access app (or, find it in Applications > Utilities folder) and launch it. Now, in the Keychain Access app search-box you should type CNNIC, and if their digital certificate is on your laptop, you will see 1 or 2 of them. If there’s nothing, that’s good. But, if you have 1 or 2 of the little buggers, this is what to do next: right-click on one of the digital certificates and select Get Info. A new window will appear; in this, click on the little arrow to the left of the word “Trust” so that more options are revealed. Now, in the first drop-down box you should select “Never trust” which’ll cause all the others drop-down boxes to also change to ‘Never trust’. Now that certificate is never, ever trusted, and will not be re-added since it already sits there. Repeat on the 2nd, if there is one.

To check that it has worked, quit your browser(s), and then restart a browser and go to the website https://www.enum.cn where now a warning should appear saying that the site’s digital certificate is not trusted. If so, that’s great. If not (and the website loads normally), repeat the instructions more carefully.

Firefox (Windows, Mac, Linux)
First go to the Firefox ‘Preferences’ (on Mac), which is called ‘Options’ (I think) on Windows. Then, click the Advanced tab, then the Encryption tab, then click ‘View Certificates’. Next select the Authorities tab, and scroll down to find the CNNIC entry. Highlight the certificate, and then lower down click on the ‘Edit’ button, and in here you should now uncheck all the checkboxes, then click ‘Okay’. OK, that’s one blocked. Also scroll down to the Entrust.net entry, and see if there’s another CNNIC one in there. There’ll either be 1 or 2 in total. If there’s another one, repeat the above instrcutions.

To check that it has worked, quit Firefox, and then restart it and go to the website https://www.enum.cn where now a warning should appear saying that the site’s digital certificate is not trusted. If so, that’s great. If not (and the website loads normally), repeat the instructions more carefully.

Windows: Internet Explorer
I’m afraid I don’t have a clue how to do it on IE. And, seriously, with all the holes and bugs in IE, you should be thinking about ditching it for Firefox, pronto. But the Chinese blogger and techie Felix Yan, who first alerted me to this whole situation with his detailed blog post on the issue, has a step-by-step guide for Internet Explorer, though it’s all in Chinese, over on his site. Here’s the link for it.

Windows: Chrome
Google Chrome browser, for some reason, utilizes the digital certificates stored inside Internet Explorer, so you’ll also need to refer to Felix’s instructions for how to block CNNIC inside IE.

Well-wishers leave flowers at Google China HQ earlier today

Google has announced that it might soon pull the plug on its operations in China, citing grave concerns over some recent, bizarre hack attacks, and lack of freedom of speech.

The official notice on the main Google blog reveals that a concerted hacking attack, which originated in China, has been using phishing and malware to access the accounts of human rights activists.

In the statement, the Chief Legal Officer of Google, David Drummond, detailed the attacks in full. It was not stated explicitly, but I read in the implication that these concerted attempts to get into the Gmail inboxes and Google accounts of these human rights activists was actually government sponsored.

In addition, Mr. Drummond called-out “the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web” in China, but did not name any sites in particular, not even mentioning its own sites which are blocked (of which there are many: Youtube, Blogspot blogs, and Picasa Web Albums, to name only three of over a dozen).

So, if Google.cn is canned, and its offices in China closed (they employ 700 people right now), it will also end Google’s enforced policy of self-censorship in China, whereby Google.cn results are ‘harmonised’ of critical, anti-government material, as well as any sex or nudity.

Already, many in Silicon Valley are praising Google for taking a stand against repression and sinister interference. But is that really what motivates Google?

The most recent figures suggest that Baidu has 75% of the search users in mainland China, to Google’s 18%. So, this being the cost-benefit analysis world of business, perhaps Google is deciding that Google China is not viable.

Or, more curiously, perhaps the GOOG is trying the Jedi mind-trick of folding a failing business while making it look like they’re the do-gooders.

Another possibility is that Google knows that threatening the authorities here is dangerous and counter-productive, and so this ‘threat’ is actually just a final shout of desperation; knowing that Google China is screwed, with no hope of being able to do business here without any state-level intervention.

So, what’s next? Google.cn will allow all search results as soon as this evening? A blockage of Google.cn – and maybe other Google domains, too – by the Beijing authorities? Perhaps the government will say “Don’t let the door hit you on the arse on the way out” and Google will leave, to a hero’s welcome in the Western media? Or, more forward-thinkingly, perhaps Google will do a ‘Yahoo!’ and pull out in order to focus on investment in Chinese start-ups instead?

Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and more: all blocked in China

Just a few months ago I posted here on Lost Laowai about China’s massive web-filtering system, and how it was becoming distinctly anti-social in that it was targeting social-networking and web 2.0 sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, which are characterised by allowing a fast flow of information and ideas.

Bad news: that’s getting worse, and this time there’s no identifiable reason. Usually, a wave of tightening-up on the internet by the Chinese government comes immediately after some particular incident; we saw it right after the troubles in Tibet, then again in Xinjiang, and recurring at sensitive anniversaries. But, this summer, no clear justification for new blockages – it just seems to be malicious, and that makes it more sinister.

So, to add to lengthy list of blocked websites from earlier this summer (see the footnote, at the end of this post) we must now add a few more:

Vimeo
Friendfeed
Bit.ly (URL shortening service)
Post.ly (URL shortening service)
Blip.tv
Yahoo Meme
Google Documents (accessible again)
Fileden.com
iTweet.net (a twitter web app)
Twitzap (a twitter web app)
Dabr.co.uk (a twitter web app)
TwitterGadget (a tiny twitter app on iGoogle)

The situation really is getting ridiculous. A few other ways to access twitter still exist, thankfully. Just this afternoon one China-based expat on twitter commented that “China no longer has internet. It has LAN” (h/t @illuminantceo), which is an apt description of how insular and freaky it’s getting.

It’s not just an inconvenience to laowais, remember. Such a crackdown has economic repercussions for everyone in the country, as well as drastically stifling creativity and the sharing of ideas (those last two, obviously, are actual aims of the Chinese government who implement the Great Firewall). It’s impossible to quantify the economic damage done by this web-filtering, and it might even amount to quite little, but undeniably it costs a lot of companies extra time and frustration, and limits some companies in dealing with foreign clients and partners.

So, this second major wave of censorship is clearly aimed at slowing or stopping the flow of information and ideas. It’s visible, too, in the Chinese webosphere, where severe Terms of Service on websites or constant filtering of content means that ’sensitive’ material is spotted and deleted (and the account removed) possibly within an hour of offending content being posted. Try putting up a sensitive video on Tudou or Youku, and see how long it lasts. Thus, Chinese websites don’t get blocked, as such, as there’s already that two-pronged devils fork of enforced compliance.

Foreign-based websites cannot be similarly coerced, so they just get blocked.

Even Virtual Private Networks are under stronger attack, as detailed quite recently by Rebecca Mackinnon (requires a proxy or VPN to access inside China).

Anger is clearly mounting over this. Right now, on twitter – despite there being fewer ways to access it – I can clearly see hundreds of tweets regarding the Great Firewall – labelled as #gfw and #fuckgfw – by younger tech-savvy Chinese people detailing sites that have been newly whisked away into purgatory, and also expressing a hell of a lot of anger aimed at the web-filtering system and the government in Beijing as well.

Just a few days ago, at the World Media Summit which was this year hosted in Beijing, China’s President Hu Jintao suggested “cooperation, action, win-win, and development,” in the realms of all world media, and called for “monitoring by the public and the safeguarding of the rights to be informed, to participation, to expression…..and their important functions put into play,” to an audience that included News Corporation CEO, Rupert Murdoch. If you’ve managed to avoid vomiting after such a display of hypocrisy, then you have a stronger stomach than I.

From where I’m standing, the Chinese government is failing its people with such extensive censorship; there’s a massive disparity between the kindness, good-natured openness and eagerness to learn of the Chinese people, and the paranoid, low-down, two-faced, narrow-minded bigotry of the Chinese government.

I’m ordinarily against intervention by foreign governments, but right now I’d love to see President Obama and some European leaders stand up – in the manner of John F. Kennedy Ronald Reagan on the Berlin Wall – and say “Tear down this Firewall.”

===

Footnote:

Here’s my previous block-list, from July 31st this year. All sites mentioned below except ‘blog.com’ seem to still be blocked.

Facebook
twitter
YouTube
Blogger blogs
Wordpress free blogs
Typepad blogs
Blog.com blogs
Opera blogs
Tumblr
LiveLeak
Google’s Picasa Web Albums (log-in accessible, but borked thereafter)
Google Image search results (very frequent re-set connections)
Orkut
Bebo

Cockney Rhyming Slang

The Cockney accent and mannerisms were famously mis-represented by the actor Dick van Dyke in the Mary Poppins movie, and has also been butchered by Johnny Depp as the pirate Jack Sparrow. But forget all that nonesense, and instead revel in the true wilful and playful spirit of Cockney culture that is ‘rhyming slang’: a sort of localised word-game where a word or phrase is supplemented by a cheeky rhyming expression.

Thus, a phone is a “dog and bone”; a “butcher’s hook” is a look; “Adam and Eve” is believe; “china”, as in a china plate, is a mate; and “Brahms”, as in “Brahms and Listz” means ‘pissed’. Yep, it wasn’t created for its brevity. So, if your friend got very drunk last night, you could say, “Me old china was Brahms last night”. Lovely.

As for the cartoony image at the top of this post: “mince pies” means eyes; “thrupenny bits” (three-penny bits) means tits.

So, in that spirit of playfulness, I present to you a dozen examples of my newly-created Chinese-Cockney rhyming slang. It requires three layers of meaning, so it’s not elegantly simple, but it gives all the insider clout of the best slang along with a healthy dose of subversiveness. How about these…

old man = lǎobǎn (老板) = boss
The old man is off on business in Shenzhen.

nice try = èrnǎi (二奶) = mistress
I’ve heard the old man is having a nice try.

knocker = bókè (博客) = blog
I use Google Reader to look at some knockers.

Barack = Barack Obama = the Dalai Lama
Only the return of Barack to Tibet will please its people.

Mr. Wang = fàláng (发廊) = red-light ‘hairdresser’
I’ll be home late, darling, I need to pay a visit to Mr. Wang.

chicken wing = fènqīng (愤青) = indignant/angry youth
All the chicken wings are getting in a flap over Japan again.

Jay = Jay Chow = gāocháo (高潮) = orgasm
-Remember that chick I picked up at Dairy Queen yesterday?
-Oh yeah…
-I made her Jay three times.

Willy Wonka’s tie = shānzhài (山寨) = fake
-Do you like my new iPod?
-Gaaaaaahhh, it’s Willy Wonka’s tie.

swing = swing low = jiāyóu (加油) = Come on!
-Swing, Jing Jing!
-Wow, she sure knows how to jump into water.

diamond ring = lìn bìng (淋病) = gonorrhea
-I need to call that girl I picked up at the Dairy Queen last week.
-Why?
-I think I might’ve given her a diamond ring.

stone = stone’s throw = péngyou (朋友) = friend/mate
Hello, me old stone.

fat cow = miànbāo (面包) = a loaf of bread
I’d like a donut and a fat cow, please.

Hmmm. If you can come up with anymore, unleash them in the comments.

YouTube RIP

On that date a Google spokesman, Scott Rubin, said, “We don’t know the reason for the block. Our government relations people are trying to resolve it.” Well, they didn’t resolve it.

This makes YouTube the largest and most popular single victim of a blanket ban courtesy of China’s ‘Great Firewall’ – an extensive, nationwide system of web monitoring, filtering, and blocking that is rumoured to employ as many as 30,000 people in hits hundreds of regional centres.

There have been brief blocks on YouTube in China before – as well as literally hundreds of other sites – which have then been lifted after a few weeks. But YouTube might not be so ‘lucky’ this time, and parent company Google might be doomed to a year or more of lost advertising revenue from the total shut-off of the China market.

Video-sharing
YouTube was never as popular within China as a number of homegrown video sharing sites – such as Youku and Tudou – so it may not have been a major part of the Chinese webosphere. But, crucially, being a foreign website, it was outside of direct intervention by the Chinese government, and therefore always an inconvenience and a ‘danger’ to the mantra of “social harmony”. Youku, Tudou and their ilk are expected to self-censor politically sensitive and overly-sexual content, or face reprisals such as potential blockage, a verbal attack by state-media, or – more likely – the removal of staff at the behest of local officials.

It is believed that footage appearing to show Han Chinese policemen beating a number of Tibetans during last years Lhasa riots were the straw that broke the camels back, and a faceless someone in one of the Great Firewall centres hit the big red button that turns off the whole of YouTube. No explanation, no accountability. But, undoubtedly, a number of young tech-savvy Chinese who did often use YouTube will have noted the blockage with some shame and disappointment.

Don’t be mean about Ataturk…
There is one precedent for all this: in Turkey, where YouTube has been fully blocked by state censors since May 2008 due to a number of videos hosted on YouTube that were deemed insulting to the country’s founding father, Ataturk, who died over eight decades ago. There was a slight bit more accountability and visibility in YouTube’s demise in Turkey in that Turkish law prosecutors had to seek a court-ordered shutdown.

So it’s highly likely that this year’s YouTube block will go on even longer; perhaps indefinitely, as it now is in Turkey.

2009 – with its anniversary of Tiananmen in 1989, the Urumqi riots, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) – is likely to be a grim year for freedom of expression, especially on the internet, proving that last years Olympics did little to encourage a more open and relaxed approach to dissent or alternative ideas – or the free exchange of ideas amongst people.

Anti-social
This last aspect has caused the most upset amongst the users of twitter – with some feeling patronised like a naughty child for the simple act of networking online: an innocent activity that is at the core of internet usage at the start of the 21st-century. In early June a young Chinese law graduate contacted the BBC News website on the subject of social-networking websites, such as Facebook, twitter, and YouTube, and observed:

“Those websites give us the opportunity to get different ideas, which can influence the way we think. I call this a mind revolution. I am certain that Chinese people won’t be so easily fooled anymore, which will make our government’s job a lot tougher and will eventually bring about democracy in China.”

Whoa, there. Don’t drop the D-bomb. Anyway, China has mostly been deprived of international ‘web 2.0′ sites during much of 2009 – undoubtedly alerting hundreds of thousands of Chinese web users to internet censorship within their country for the first time.

The web 2.0 casualty list this year is massive. All of these can be overcome with a free or paid VPN for some or all of your time spent browsing online. The twitter block is the easiest to overcome, by using – if you don’t know already – a web app to access the twitter network that doesn’t actually resolve through the blocked twitter.com URL (try iTweet, Hahlo, HootSuite, or the Twittergadget which you can add to iGoogle)

Here, off the top of my head, is the massive web 2.0 block list:

Facebook
twitter
YouTube
Blogger blogs
Wordpress free blogs
Typepad blogs
Blog.com blogs
Opera blogs
Tumblr
LiveLeak
Google’s Picasa Web Albums (log-in accessible, but borked thereafter)
Google Image search results (generally accessible; but very frequent re-set connections)
Orkut
Bebo

I think that’s it right now. Flickr is back and in good health. That list is just including the social-networking/web 2.0 kinda sites, and doesn’t count the hundreds of smaller politically-sensitive sites that are blocked. Feel free to add blocked web 2.0 sites in the comments.

So, roll on the next major national event: the CPC 60th anniversary. Because we can only hope that after that celebration the internet will start to get a bit more social again. It certainly can’t get any more anti-social.

This week Google has been under attack in China over internet pornography, especially with regards its ’search suggestions’ drop-down box, which can suggest some salacious terms for fairly innocuous words. For this, Google was “strongly condemned” by the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (CIIRC), which describes itself as a non-governmental organisation on its own website.

From the CIIRC’s condemnation, the situation escalated quickly this week, with the Chinese government clearly unleashing the hounds on Google, with all national media – which are, with no exceptions, state-controlled – running the story of how Google is polluting China’s youth with its lewd search suggestions and pornographic links to foreign websites. Thus, Google has been bashed by national and local TV and newspapers for three solid days.

Suggestive Suggestions…
Admittedly, Google was caught red-handed with its overly-sexual search suggestions. These things appear by default across the Google globe, so when I start typing “football” it will begin to suggest more precise terms, such as “football games”, “football results”, etc., which is all very useful. But, as the Chinese media has been showing all week, if you type the word “son” in Chinese, on Google.cn, it will then offer up crude suggestions, such as “son and mother incest”. In all fairness, they got busted. And, as I type this, Google has switched off the suggestions only on Google.cn.

Google has already put in place a lot of safeguards to appease the difficult Chinese market. In China, on Google.cn only (which will appear by default if you type in Google.com but you’re in China AND your web browser’s settings are set to Chinese-language) it is not possible to switch off the ‘SafeSearch’ feature, and a lot of politically sensitive and pornographic material has already been removed.

So, from within China, if you search for ‘Tiananmen Square’ you get only views of the plaza, and not images from the events of 1989. And, if you search for “sexy” (in either Chinese or English), you will find no nudity in the image search results, in accordance with partial or full nudity being banned in China. So, Google has already being done things “with Chinese characteristics” during its four years in the Chinese market, but it has still been caught in the wrong this week, and will not be allowed to forget it.

Fixing It…
Google is now hurrying to fix the problem, by switching off the suggestions (easy), and removing all pornography from its results (not so easy). Google people have explained how they met with some government representatives a few days ago…

“to discuss problems with the Google.cn service and its serving of pornographic images and content based on foreign language searches”

“We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results,“ a Google spokesperson said in an e-mail. “This has been a substantial engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed the large majority of the problem results”.
- an unnamed Google spokesperson

Unspecified “punishment” has been threatened by the Chinese government, and Google has been apologetic, issuing the statement: “We have been continually working to deal with pornographic content, and material that is harmful to children, on the Web in China”. But that may not placate the government.

All material on the Chinese webosphere is already subject to nationwide self-checking, where the punishment is usually getting shut-down, with no legal recourse, as happened to many websites last year during a massive ‘purge’ of indecent material, where Google’s rival Baidu, was actually the main focus of the censure.

Ulterior Motives…?
Possible motives for government and state-media attacking search engines are numerous, but the two most significant ones are fear of losing influence, and fear of losing revenue; both of which are likely to occur as younger, tech-savvy Chinese – some of whom are now fluent in English, or one or two other languages – are choosing their news sources on the web, and not all of them are domestic, and therefore contains news that has not passed through the state’s filter.

As for revenue, in attacking search giants like Baidu and Google, and video-sharing sites such as Youku and Tudou, the state, and state-media, can keep a check on new media which might well steal lucrative ad revenue, especially if corporations figure that a lot of young people spend more time online than watching either national or local news shows and dramas, which are the time-slots with the priciest advertising packages.

One More Thing: “Green Dam”
To throw one more ulterior motive into the mix, the whole Google debacle this week could well be linked to the upcoming, government-sanctioned web filter, dubbed “Green Dam-Youth Escort”, or ‘Green Dam’ for short. This piece of filtering sofware reared its head two weeks ago, when the Chinese government mandated it ought to be compulsory on all brand-new PCs sold in China from July 1st (as well as installed in retrospect on every computer in schools across the country).

This left PC makers scrambling to jump to another new restriction in its China operations, while at the same time not being seen to be a party to stifling of free speech – because many fear that ‘Green Dam’ is not just a porn filter to protect young eyes, it is also a political filter to wash young minds. Indeed, by peering into the software package, it is clear that it will also filter politically-sensitive keywords, as well as (attempt) to detect fleshy skin-tones that would indicate images of naked people.

In just the week after Green Dam emerged, it was exposed as containing stolen code from a US firm’s web filter app, and in tests Green Dam has been seen to have failed to detect African-American porn (because it was focusing only on pinky flesh tomes), sensde that pigs were naked humans, and began to filter any site beginning with the letter ‘F’ after a tester deliberately visited a poltically sensitive website.

The backlash against Green Dam has been swift and surprisingly large, in China as well as around the world. Search twitter trends for the hashtag #greendam or look at the satirical cartoons made by Chinese netizens and it is clear that younger web users have been outraged at their government having insulted their intelligence by mandating software to shepherd their time on the internet.

“Don’t be Evil”…?
So, although Google has been found to have some sexual content in their search suggestions and web searches from Google.cn, it may be a whipping boy in a propaganda campaign gearing towards the launch of Green Dam on all new PCs, with no signs of the government backing down over Green Dam, despite calls for a rethink based on security and online freedoms. But, Google in China will survive, and this will prove to have been just another fiery hoop that it has had to jump through in order to have access to China’s 300 million regular web users.

As for Chinese netizens, the spectre of Green Dam approaches, but there are some get-outs: it’s not compulsory on old machines, it only works with Internet Explorer (so, go get Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari – all of which are much better than IE anyway – if Green Dam has been slapped onto your office or school PC), only on the Windows operating system, and Green Dam is uninstall-able on new machines that have come with it.

Flamingoes in Shanghai Zoo

I spent all of last weekend in Shanghai with my girlfriend, with two main purposes: to do some shopping for summer clothes; and to visit Shanghai Zoo, as my girlfriend has never seen any wild animals in the flesh, despite being quite expert on them from being addicted to CCTV-10’s nature shows and BBC natural science documentaries.

Shanghai Zoo is one of two such tourist attractions in the city, the other being the Shanghai Wildlife Park, which has an online petition for its closure from overseas animal-rights activists, and has been the scene in recent years of cruel stunts such as the ‘Animal Olympics’ and ‘Buy a duckling to feed to the crocodiles’.

Shanghai Zoo though has managed to remain boringly uncontroversial. And as there are few interesting or recent reviews of it online, here’s my input on the matter and my review of the place.

Lions in Shanghai Zoo

Worth seeing?
If you’re visiting Shanghai for the first time from out of town, or from overseas, then the answer is ‘no’. There’s plenty more to see in Shanghai to keep you occupied for a week without needing to see the zoo.

However, if you’re in the area and really want to have a pleasant morning or afternoon looking at a halfway decent variety of wildlife, then Shanghai Zoo is worth half a day of your time, at a reasonable price. If you have kids, you could make it a day-trip, but be prepared to walk several kilometres.

Getting there
Shanghai Zoo is westwards of the city centre, near Hongqiao airport. There are buses direct from the city center that go out past the zoo (such as from People’s Square), but that’ll be a long, hot ride in Summer. The way I did it I think was best: get to Hongqiao Road metro station (it’s on Lines 3 and 4), and then get onto Hongqiao Road itself, and, heading westwards, go to the nearest bus stop (just 100 metres away), and take either the 748 or 911 bus. Both buses are just 2 RMB each and have air-con, but are almost always busy. The ride is about 20 to 30 minutes on the bus, depending on traffic.

A cute sign in Shanghai Zoo

Tickets
Two options: either a standard 30 RMB each ticket for access to pretty much everything, or a 45 RMB ticket that adds the ‘Elephant Show’ which runs from 2 to 3pm each day. Note that without getting that added extra you won’t actually get to see elephants clearly, as the rest of the time they’re just locked up in their little elephant house.

The birds and the bees
The reptiles area and the bird enclosures where the best part of the zoo, in that they had the best variety of species and better looking environments. There was also a nice park-like atmosphere. Many birds, such as pheasants, flamingoes and peacocks had had their wings clipped, which is a pity, but it explains how they were able to be kept in the open, divided from you by only a low mesh fence. A large bird-house with 10-metre high netting, where smaller exotic birds could fly freely, was a nice touch.

A giraffe in Shanghai Zoo

The big beasts
The other animals however were more of a disappointment, especially in terms of their environments; which were mostly rocky, dusty, and often littered with trash. Is a bit of grass that hard to grow? The bears especially had a miserable, barren patch of rubble on their enclosure.

In fairness though, the tigers and lions, in their large open pits, had better landscaping, and the big cats looked healthy and active.

Pandas, being China’s national icon and diplomatic gift of choice, had – perversely – the most miserable looking house. Set inside a concrete building, with concrete floors and white-tiled walls, it was viewable to the eager throngs of humans through thick glass, and it was a disappointment that they did not have an outside ‘pit’, such as the big cats and bears.

A panda in Shanghai Zoo

I suspect, though, it was to prevent the pandas being fed stuff by us humans, who, despite the ‘Love me. Don’t feed me’ signs all over the place, were constantly being thrown pieces of bread, peanuts, and various snacks.

In addition, there were the fun gorillas, monkeys, kangaroos and lots of less ‘popular’ four-legged stuff such as deers, bison, zebras, etc. The elephants, annoyingly, were locked away and barely visible, and seemed to be viewable only at their ’showtime’ if you’d bought the 45 RMB ticket that included the ‘Elephant Show’.

Thankfully that was the only ’show’ in the zoo, and no animals were made to perform elsewhere in any fashion, which was a huge relief.

In short…
If you’re a local or expat in the area, Shanghai Zoo is actually worth the quite low 30 RMB price tag, despite it being a bit of a trek from the centre of the city. In addition to the animals, there’s some nice park area, and a large lake at the centre.

It will be good to see Ding Hui (丁慧) in action on TV, when he is actually brought out to the public later this month, and could then be seen in the next regional or national game (he plays for the Zhejiang volleyball squad). He’s preparing for the 2012 Olympics, in which he’ll represent China.

Before all that, however, it’ll also be interesting to see how Chinese people react to quite a ground-breaking step. China is far from mono-cultural, in the sense that it is home to over 50 ethnic Chinese minorities; but it is still all very unused to the concept of mixed-race marriages, and immigration, and is enormously sensitive to foreigners in positions of power in China.

Chinese national volleyball player Ding Hui

From the UK’s Telegraph newspaper (the full article) we learn that, “Ding Hui…is affectionately nicknamed Xiao Hei, or Little Black, by his team mates”. ‘Little Black’… really? Are you serious? *Facepalm*

That doesn’t bode too well for his reception into wider Chinese society, where any divergence from majority Han Chinese looks or actions are rigorously inspected, and can even generate outright racist comments on lively Chinese BBS/discussion groups. There’s also little cultural awareness of other groups: for example, most Chinese know little or nothing about Islam, despite China having nearly 21 million Muslims (most of whom belong to three distinct ethnic groups: Hui people, 9.8 million; Uyghurs, 8.4 million; and Kazakhs, 1.25 million).

In the “Little Black” nickname there are elements of the ‘casual racism’ that was endemic in British society (and, I suspect across Europe and North America) until it largely ended in the 1960’s or 70’s, as evidenced in the unfunny sitcoms in the UK in the 1970’s that centered around a black family moving in next door to a white family. Although the ‘casually racist’ white male of those sitcoms was made to look like the idiot for being so outdated, it would be massively uncomfortable to have to watch that show now.

And so, I hope that Ding Hui will have a warm and understanding welcome on the national stage, and open many closed minds in the subjects of mixed-races and a new form of multi-culturalism and pluralism in 21st century China.

There’s already been golfing sensation Tiger Woods in the US, and F1 racer Lewis Hamilton in the UK, but they have come late enough into a blossomed multi-racial and more accepting society to not ruffle any feathers. Ding Hui will ruffle feathers, provoke a debate, and probably upset a lot of nationalists although he’d probably prefer not to. If the debate does get quite heated, he can at least take solace in the great pull that a fresh face has for advertisers in sports, and dream a dream of the Tiger Woods and Lewis Hamilton style advertising deals that could be coming his way.

This explains everything

It’s the Irresistible Force meets the Immovable Object. Apple, the Californian electronics firm, and China Mobile, the state-owned telecommunications giant, have been locked in a slow, secretive, yet embittered year-long struggle to release and control Apple’s iPhone in mainland China.

By “control” I refer to both revenue from user contracts/subscriptions, as well as to the profit from Apple’s innovative ‘App Store’, which is an online shop for extra, useful applications that can be added to the iPhone smartphone by the user; some are free; most need to be purchased using a credit card in the App Store, which can only be accessed via Apple’s iTunes software.

In both those areas, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and China Mobile (NYSE:CHL) have locked horns over their positions on pocketing the profits from user contracts, and keeping control of the revenue from the ‘apps’. And both firms refuse to budge.

Like two goats locked in haughty conflict over a, erm, lady goat, Apple and China Mobile are not going to get anywhere without someone conceding ground, so that one of them can get the lady goat release the iPhone in mainland China on their own terms. In the meantime, both companies are losing out on extra revenue as hundreds of thousands of middle-income Chinese go ahead and get a grey-import unlocked iPhone sourced from Hong Kong or Europe, albeit at the exorbitant price of between 5000 to 7000 RMB for the 8- and 16-gigabyte models.

What They Want
China Mobile, as most state-owned firms (albeit one listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and boasting the world’s largest number of subscribers) doesn’t care too much about what customers want, and has decided on its own objectives regardless. Depending on which sources you believe, China Mobile either wants 1: Wi-Fi to be ripped out; 2: all the revenue from user contracts; 3: rip out the ‘old’ 3G chip and replace it with the new Chinese TD-SCDMA standard chip instead, for forthcoming TD-SCDMA connectivity; 4: to set up its own ‘App Store’ from which users can download more apps, and which doesn’t require a credit card. Or, perhaps, all four demands, or a combination of the four.

Apple, meanwhile, likes to keep things simple, doesn’t like being messed about (Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, spends his Christmas Eve making music executives cry), and doesn’t bend to weird demands from outside sources, so they’re being as ‘immovable’ as China Mobile is. Specifically, they will not 1: rip out wi-fi connectivity, although they curiously obliged for only the Egyptian market late last year; and 2: allow anything but their own App Store to be able to add apps to the iPhone, and thereby keep app revenues all to themselves; 3: they’re thinking that 3G is the global king right now, until ‘4G’ pops up. Contracts are, apparently, no longer an issue, as Apple has dropped the subscription model.

Where I call BS
China Mobile, in its demands for setting up its own store for adding applications to the iPhone, has effectively identified this as the sticking point. But, their motives don’t hold up to scrutiny, as they’re claiming that customers won’t be able to access Apple’s own store as it requires a credit card. But that is nonsense now that almost all of China’s middle-income punters have at least one credit card, and they’re surely going to be the people likely to buy a pricey smartphone; thus it seems that China Mobile is hoping to keep people in the old habit of having to schlep to its own stores to add credit and do anything to their phone, rather than giving the freedom of an online store. Apple already has an Apple App Store for China (though not a full iTunes store) with plenty of apps, but who-knows how many punters.

As for TD-SCDMA… Well, apart from a few TV adverts showing a man on the train waving oddly at his mother during a ‘video call’, and promoting a vague ‘3G lifestyle’ (“3G生活”) and highly unrealistic notions of watching TV on your mobile, it’s not clear what shape TD-SCDMA will take, and few results have been released of localised tests in 8 specific cities. Creating a new standard might be as disastrous and costly as the recent Bluray vs. HD-DVD format war.

Apple, then, has curiously not opted to sell the iPhone ‘unlocked’ in mainland China, simply to get it out there, and to bypass the grey market. But, upon closer inspection, it has only offered unlocked phones in markets where local competition laws have demanded it, as those laws have disallowed one carrier having sole right over release. That’s because Apple loves control as much as its control-freak CEO, and so it will only do a full release in China when it has one exclusive carrier (but only China Unicom, NYSE: CHU, remains as an option), nothing needs to be ripped-out, and the App Store is the only way to add apps to the device, as is the case in every other country around the world.

Lost the Battle; Won the War
Result? An impasse, since November 2007 when iPhone started to roll out in other countries besides the US. One solution is China Unicom, who will launch a standard 3G network (ie: not TD-SCDMA) on May 17th this year, prompting the top-flight tech blog Ars Technica to call a May 17 release for Apple’s slim smartphone here in the mainland on that same day.

But don’t hold your breath, as wi-fi is still a stumbling block, with no legit phone sold in China allowed to have wi-fi (hell knows why). If it does happen, it’ll be a huge boost for China Unicom, which is the minnow of China’s telecommunications duopoly.