The China Thread

[Sheilbh]

What I'm not getting is how western money isn't chasing the obvious opening of tiktok without the dictatorship.

Once again repeating my geriatric millenial cry of "bring back Vine!"

[Admiral Yi]

It does seem Tik Tok lost out to Instagram.

Just a hunch.

[The Larch]

Every big platform copied Tik Tok's format, now Facebook, Youtube and Instagram all have a similar story/short/whatever feature.

That hasn't made Tik Tok any less popular, AFAIK.

[celedhring]

They are even tiktoking Spotify...

[Josquius]

What I'm not getting is how western money isn't chasing the obvious opening of tiktok without the dictatorship.

We overstate the importance of tiktok. Youtube got that market cornered really.

Tiktok should be banned.

I think your age might be showing here.
I don't see the appeal of tiktok either. But for teh yoof apparently short form is where its at and youtube's half arsed efforts in that direction aren't really getting anywhere.

[Grey Fox]

What I'm not getting is how western money isn't chasing the obvious opening of tiktok without the dictatorship.

We overstate the importance of tiktok. Youtube got that market cornered really.

Tiktok should be banned.

I think your age might be showing here.
I don't see the appeal of tiktok either. But for teh yoof apparently short form is where its at and youtube's half arsed efforts in that direction aren't really getting anywhere.

Nah, Youtube says it has 50 billions daily views on shorts.  Last time Tiktok updated the figure it was only reaching 1 billion views.

[Josquius]

Strange tiktok is the one you always hear a big buzz about (even aside from the China business) then. Quality of impressions or just the media being silly?

[mongers]

Talking of notching up viewing stats, Xi and Putin have now met 40 times. 

[The Minsky Moment]

Nah, Youtube says it has 50 billions daily views on shorts.  Last time Tiktok updated the figure it was only reaching 1 billion views.

That can't possibly be right; Tiktok has over 1 billion users, and average user is on over 90 minutes per day. It has to have far more than 1 billion daily views. 

My understanding is that tiktok has been cleaning instagram's clock, at least with the under30s. 

[Grey Fox]

Nah, Youtube says it has 50 billions daily views on shorts.  Last time Tiktok updated the figure it was only reaching 1 billion views.

That can't possible be right; Tiktok has over 1 billion users, and average user is on over 90 minutes per day. It has to have far more than 1 billion daily views. 

My understanding is that tiktok has been cleaning instagram's clock, at least with the other 30s. 

It's possible because Tiktok doesn't seem to want to update it's figure.

[Sheilbh]

To the surprise of no-one:

Midjourney CEO Says 'Political Satire In China Is Pretty Not Okay,' But Apparently Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping Is Pretty Okay

Free Speech from the pretty-not-okay dept
Fri, Mar 31st 2023 10:46am - Sarah McLaughlin

As a rule, it's a good idea to be particularly suspicious of defenses of censorship that — coincidentally — materially benefit the people espousing them. In this case, the argument in favor of censorship is coming from founder and CEO of AI image generator Midjourney, David Holz. And Holz makes clear that he is willing to exempt Xi Jinping from the tool's capabilities to retain Midjourney's viability in China.

That's right: Xi Jinping, one of the most powerful and repressive government officials in the world and most deserving of political skewering and mockery will be one of the few exempt from it, at least where Midjourney is concerned. Some other terms are restricted, though Holz won't make the list public — "Afghanistan" for example, and now some depictions of arrests after the fake Donald Trump arrest fiasco — but Holz reportedly treats China as a unique case.

His quote about it is a doozy. From The Washington Post:

But the year-old company, run out of San Francisco with only a small collection of advisers and engineers, also has unchecked authority to determine how those powers are used. It allows, for example, users to generate images of President Biden, Vladimir Putin of Russia and other world leaders — but not China's president, Xi Jinping.

    "We just want to minimize drama," the company's founder and CEO, David Holz, said last year in a post on the chat service Discord. "Political satire in china is pretty not-okay," he added, and "the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire."

He wants you to simultaneously believe that his program is so important that it must do whatever is necessary to remain accessible to people within China, but so unimportant that it doesn't matter if fundamental political expression about one of the most powerful authoritarians in the world can't be created on it. It doesn't add up.

It's no surprise that a tech CEO would be willing to make trade-offs for the Chinese market. At this point, it's more surprising if one won't do so. But Holz's position is particularly careless and reveals an increasingly serious threat to free expression on and offline today: individual countries' censorship laws, particularly those of powerful countries like China, are setting global rules sometimes enforced by tech companies anxious to display their compliance. It's not just Midjourney's China-based users that can't satirize Xi Jinping — that rule applies to users everywhere, even in the United States.

Local laws are suddenly not so local anymore, and people like Holz have no qualms about aiding their illiberal international spread.

What this means in practice is that authoritarian leaders don't just get to subject their own countries to repressive laws limiting political speech. They also get to set the rules for global communities which are not, and should not be, under any expectations to abide by them. Zoom engaged in such practices in 2020 when it applied Chinese law to users outside mainland-China, shutting down online Tiananmen memorials held by users in Hong Kong and the United States. In response to well-deserved criticism, Zoom announced it would no longer allow Chinese law to dictate policies outside mainland China. Midjourney took notes, it seems, and learned a different lesson.

Holz's exact words were "the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire," but his meaning was clear: Midjourney's interest in being accessible in China is more important than its users' interest in engaging in political expression.

This acquiescence signals to authoritarians of all sorts that if they want to control their image on the global internet, ramping up repressive efforts at home will be rewarded. As if they needed more incentive. Oversee a large enough financial market and censor enough people and you, too, may be able to control your reputation on the global internet.

Will Midjourney stop with just Xi Jinping? Or should we expect satire of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for example, to be next on the chopping block if Midjourney wants access to an increasingly unfree India?

Lastly, Holz may argue that he's helping Chinese citizens — and not just his own company — by attempting to ensure that Midjourney will be available in China. But his claim that he wants to preserve "the ability for people in China" to use this tech is paternalistic in a way Holz doesn't seem to realize. Chinese citizens, after all, may themselves want to use Midjourney to satirize their own government. Why does their freedom to satirize their ruler matter less than the freedom of the rest of the world to mock their leaders?

In fact, in the later months of 2022, protesters in cities across China held up blank sheets of paper in country-wide demonstrations to protest not just the country's restrictive COVID policies, but the many things that Chinese citizens aren't allowed to voice. This censorship is a result of oppressive and wide-ranging governmental control over what they can say in every forum, online and off. But it's reinforced when foreign companies, in this case a U.S.-based AI image generating tool, are all too eager to do their part in enforcing those restrictions — not just on the population legally bound by them, but on the rest of the world, too.

Companies like Midjourney may be the vanguard of new technology and the changing internet. But censorship is nothing new, and they won't change the game by willingly conducting reputation management for authoritarian governments.

That, one might say, is "pretty not-okay."

Sarah McLaughlin is Senior Scholar, Global Expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Listened to a really interesting podcast on China and Hollywood recently. They made the point that through the 2010s there was a lot of focus on films that could be screened in China. China has a quota on foreign films - there are ways around it if it's a local "co-production" - but ultimately needs to go through censors. Some genres were just not ever allowed really: Chinese censors don't like certain sorts of sci-fi, they don't like gore, they don't like ghosts or spiritualism, they don't like sexuality etc. But lots of others can succeed and Marvel had the most success.

But since 2020 there has been a huge shift from Chinese censors. The foreign films let in always reflect underlying politics and as US-China relations aren't great that means Hollywood are losing out. Films Hollywood previously would have expected could be shown are now being routinely turned down - so Marvel had six films on the bounce turned down. Part of this was also zero covid and as China is now open again some more films are being allowed back (in part, the theory goes, to get people back into the cinema).

The other pressure is that Hollywood is more and more focused on streamers which are just not allowed in China. China apparently made it very clear, very early in Netflix's existence that they will never be allowed in because China has their own fairly successful domestic streamers and have no intent in exposing them to competition from Netflix, Disney Plus etc (which, interestingly, frees up Netflix to make more Taiwanese Chinese language content).

Apparently because of all of this studios have basically decided to treat Chinese earnings as found money. It is no longer part of their budgeting or planning. All of that is done on the basis of not being able to release in China. If they can and they earn an extra $100million in China then that's just treated as an upside/free money.

I feel like it's a model that other industries should probably take note of - I suspect it's one they'll have to learn at some point or other.

[frunk]

I wonder if Winnie the Pooh will also be banned.

[Duque de Bragança]

I wonder if Winnie the Pooh will also be banned.

This one will be, most likely:

[Sheilbh]

Big state visit by Macron (accompanied by over 50 business leaders) to China - where the consensus is that he got played like a fiddle.

The trip was a little controversial within Europe so Macron added vdL who was always on a separate agenda. But the Chinese made it very clear. Macron was greeted with full military band and honours by the Foreign Minister, vdL at the passenger terminal by the Ecology Minister. The VdL read-out was also fairly robust from teh Chinese and EU perspective - for example she raised Taiwan, Macron's line was "I'm neither Taiwan, nor the United States".

The context is that VdL (again, I think, very impressively) gave a very strong speech on China recently and is apparently being depicted in the Chinese press as a US lapdog. VdL's message is consistent - no change to status quo on Taiwan, Xi needs to use his influence on Russia, the EU needs to de-risk from China and as relations have worsened the CAI is not a basis for a deal. I think she's right.

Macron on the other hand got very special treatment - it feels like China (like Russia before them) have realised he is susceptible to a bit of flattery. Macron noted that the lengthy meetings he had with Xi showed "France is not considered a country like any other". China reporters are noting that they can't remember a time under Xi that a Western leader got such positive wall-to-wall coverage, and Macron got huge crowds waving at all of the bits of his visit such as to Guangzhou University. Some of his Tweets from the state visit frankly have a whiff of Sino-Soviet friendship or Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai

There were joint meetings and some have said it was good cop-bad cop but most I've read dismiss that and say the messages were incredibly disjointed and the Chinese were really playing divide and rule.

At the end China and France announced a 50+ point action plan. From the people I've seen there were several French commercial deals signed on nuclear energy, wind, pork and cosmetics (not exactly "de-risking" trade relations) Aside from that the only concrete Chinese commitments were that Xi would call Zelenskiy (no specified timeframe) and a specific reference to the Zaporishya nuclear plant. The other big win was French recognition of Burgundy as a protected geographical indication (obvs). On the French side from analysts I've read there were more concrete (but still not huge) wins on access to French digital and 5G markets (Xi mentioned Huawei and some think Macron is walking back the block on them), space cooperation, formalised "dialogue" between PLAN and French fleet in the South Pacific. As former PM Jean-Pierre Raffarin (who was attending with Macron) put it to Reuters, "flattery works".

Within hours of Macron's plane taking off from China, China announced military operations around Taiwan.

I think VdL and the EU have a good and clear eyed strategy on China if member states are willing to commit. Sadly the combination of Scholz's (also very business heavy) visit and Macron's gives the impression that key member states are still looking at the economic upside and the partnership angle and, maybe for France, the classic thing of trying to distinguish their policy from the Americans.

[mongers]

Chinese propaganda videos of their military/naval pre-invasion drills seem a bit better than those of the Russian border military exercise from before Feb 2022; question is will this help lull the Chinese into believing their own BS and risking a Tiawan invasion, something that's likely to be as successful as Putin's war?