This is Beijing-Beijing English blog

Searching engine giant Google Inc. said Saturday that it would take all necessary steps to clean up pornographic searching results in its Chinese-language portal, Google.cn.

“We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results,” a statement from Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley in the United States said.

The statement given by John Pinette, communications director of Asian-Pacific Region, confirmed that the company’s representative in China had met with government officials to discuss problems with the Google.cn service and its serving of pornographic images and content based on foreign language searches.

The statement came after the Chinese authorities criticized some of the search results served up by Google violated the country’s Internet regulations and laws.

Xinhua acquired the statement after an e-mail request to Google on Friday. Telephone calls to the company’s Beijing office has not been answered since Thursday.

The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (CIIRC) Thursday “strongly condemned” Google’s Chinese portal for providing links to pornography and lewd information.

The national office for Internet pornography crackdown has started blocking some Chinese-language search results and suspended its associated word-search services since Friday from Google over concerns that these links contained pornographic content.

The California-based Internet searching company had been warned twice for providing those pornographic links by the CIIRC in the first four months this year.

The statement said the thorough review was a “substantial engineering effort” and the company “have addressed the large majority of the problem results”.

Jessie Zhang, a staff with Google’s PR agent in China, also provided a similar statement Saturday afternoon, saying that it would continue to communicate directly with Chinese government on its services in China and the progress of the current problem’s solving.

The company will make additional announcements, as necessary, the statement said, adding that Google had been continually working to deal with pornographic online content and material in China which could be harmful to children.

The national office for Internet pornography crackdown said further actions would be taken depending on Google China’s implementation of the orders.

China launched a major crackdown on Internet porn in January targeting popular online portals and major search engines such as Google and Baidu, the two major competitors in China’s Internet searching market.

In the past month, 1,001 Web sites had been blocked by the authorities for distributing porn and other lewd material and more than 4,000 web sites that were shut down also had been investigated, according to the CIIRC.

And… there we have it.

Michael Anti was right after all:

Danwei: In terms of new media, do you still feel that in China censors could control everything that’s happening in this area － you once said that if they shut off twitter, for example, it would be very easy, and information will just not get out.
Michael Anti: Twitter is a new thing in China. The censors need time to figure out what it is. So enjoy the last happy days of twittering before the fate of Youtube descends on it one day. [Emphasis added]

By the way, I want to point out that the Chinese Twitterland is funnier than the English one, for a Chinese tweet can have three times the volume of an English tweet, thanks to the high information intensity of the Chinese language. 140 Chinese characters can make up all the full elements of a news piece with the “5 Ws” (Who, What, Where, When and HoW). But the joy of the Chinese Twitterland is more fragile, and I hope that it will live longer in this country.

The block seems to be a URL keyword filter. Googling for “twitter.com” resets the connection, as does including the string “twitter.com” in any other URL. Access to the service is fine through proxy or VPN.

Update: It seems that photo sharing website Flickr.com has been blocked.

Update 2: Bing.com (the new Microsoft search engine) is gone too, probably for autoplaying Youtube videos when you put your mouse over them.

Update 3: Live.com and Hotmail.com have gone under. But MSN messenger seems fine.

Blogspot and Youtube remain blocked.

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You can always feel that the internet are also connected with the draditonal culture. 

On the traditional Dragon Boat Festival, we can feel it on the most influential search engine Google.cn and Daidu.com in China.

Blogger.com was blocked by China’s Net Nanny at the day before yesterday. I checked it just now, the result is that it is still not available now.

I also have blog on the blogger.com. We decide to move my blog from blogger.com to some China blog BSP, as we never know what will do by the the China’s Net Nanny.

China Telecom began to release third generation, or 3G, cell phone numbers in Beijing on Friday. Users in the capital can now register for its 3G network service using valid ID cards.

On the first day of the commercial launch, China Telecom sales centers saw many customers subscribing to the new service.

Chinese authorities have shut down 162 Web sites that had been found providing pornographic and “lewd” content in their audio or video segments, according to a statement released by the country’s online watchdog Monday.

The blocked Web sites had not acquired permits to broadcast audio and video programs issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), said a statement issued by the Special Operation Office for Crackdown on online Porn and Lewd Content.

The Web sites include www.baigujing.com, www.bt990.com and other sites mainly based in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong Provinces.

The Web sites added to a total of 341 audio and video sites that have been blocked by the SARFT and telecommunication authorities since Chinese government launched a nationwide campaign in January to sweep off pornographic and obscene contents on the Internet.

So far, more than a thousand of Web sites have been blocked by the authorities for distributing porn and other lewd materials in texts and pictures.

The SARFT also asked all Web sites not to post TV series online which had not been censored by the administration.

Youtube seems have been blocked in China again. I tried just now, but it is still unavailable.

This kind of things offen occurd in China, lot of  western websites are blocked by the China’s Net Nanny.

China launched a website here Saturday to offer guidance on parenting and serve as a platform for parents across the country to share parenting experiences through blogs and online forums.

The Society said at the launch ceremony that it has hired 50 Chinese experts on education, psychology, nutritional health, juvenile delinquency prevention, to research into parenting and offer consultations online.

Mostly with only one child, Chinese parents now pay more attention to parenting guidance offered by professionals rather than holding on to experiences from older generations.

The website would also update parents on the latest events related to parenting, according to the Society.

The website, www.chinajtjy.org.cn, is affiliated to the China Family Education Society of the All-China Women’s Federation.

Baidu Inc., which operates China’s most popular Internet search engine, said Thursday its unaudited net profit in the fourth quarter of 2008 soared 31.3 percent year-on-year to 288.7 million yuan (US$42.3 million).

Total business revenue for the quarter increased 58 percent to 902.1 million yuan (US$132.2 million), the Beijing-based company said in a statement.

Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group, the fourth largest in the world, Thursday announced its most drastic personnel and strategic changes in the last three years amid the worldwide economic crisis and declining sales.

Change No 1: Liu Chuanzhi, the 65-year-old founding chairman, will return to his old post.

In 2005, Liu handed over his job as Lenovo chairman to Yang Yuanqing but still kept the position as vice-chairman of Legend Holdings, Lenovo’s parent company.

Change No 2: A shift in sales strategy to the domestic market.

Change No 3: A stronger focus on the consumer, rather than corporate, market.
 
Change No 4: Yang becomes president and chief executive, replacing Bill Amelio, a former Dell executive whose contract with Lenovo has expired.

Liu started Lenovo’s predecessor company 25 years ago and was Lenovo’s chairman until 2005, when the company acquired IBM’s PC division.

In the following three years, the company has been remolding itself into an international company and trying hard to expand outside China.

Liu said in a statement issued Thursday: “Lenovo has grown successfully on the international stage, but at this important time, we want to pay particular attention to our China business as it represents the foundation of our global business and growth strategy.”

He denied that Lenovo would give up on mature markets abroad.

The Lenovo announcement came the same day it posted a net loss of $96.7 million for the third quarter ending December, the first since 2005.

The company’s PC shipments in the quarter shrank 5 percent year on year due to a continued decrease in worldwide demand as well as a slump in the Chinese market, according to the company.

Yang said Thursday that the China business will make up a bigger share in the company’s total revenue in the short term and that Lenovo would continue to expand in the consumer market.

As Lenovo’s largest market, the Chinese mainland contributed 45 percent of total revenue. Although shipments in the mainland declined 1 percent in the third quarter due to the economic slowdown, its overall market share in the region grew 1.8 percentage points to 30.5 percent.

That presents a sharp contract to Lenovo’s major oversea markets.

According to research firm IDC, Lenovo’s share in the global PC market dropped from 8.2 percent in 2007 to 7.7 percent in the third quarter.