Meta-information censorship and the creation of the Chinanet Bubble

The question of who controls meta-information online has become a hot-button issue with profound political implications. The present article explores how state-led online censorship in the People’s Republic of China can create information bubbles, and how it is possible to analyze them. The article is based on a systematic comparison between 3,000 Google.com and Baidu.com image search results on a series of selected, potentially sensitive, keywords. This allows us to discern how censorship and information bubbles are connected, and how it is possible to detect and analyze them. To facilitate this, we offer a typology for conceptualizing the different dimensions of internet censorship. Our analysis points to the importance of censorship on metainformation and suggests that generally censored internet contents can also spill over to a liberal context through the Sinophone internet.</p

GAUGING PUBLIC INTEREST FROM SERVER LOGS, SURVEYS AND INLINKS A Multi-Method Approach to Analyze News Websites

As the World Wide Web (the Web) has turned into a full-fledged medium to disseminate news, it is very important for journalism and information science researchers to investigate how Web users access online news reports and how to interpret such usage patterns. This doctoral thesis collected and analyzed Web server log statistics, online surveys results, online reprints of the top 50 news reports, as well as external inlinks data of a leading comprehensive online newspaper (the People\u27s Daily Online) in China, one of the biggest Web/information markets in today\u27s world. The aim of the thesis was to explore various methods to gauge the public interest from a Webometrics perspective. A total of 129 days of Web server log statistics, including the top 50 Chinese and English news stories with the highest daily pageview numbers, the comments attracted by these news items and the emailed frequencies of the same stories were collected from October 2007 to September 2008. These top 50 news items’positions on the Chinese and English homepages and the top 50 queries submitted to the website search engine of the People’s Daily Online were also retrieved. Results of the two online surveys launched in March 2008 and March 2009 were collected after their respective closing dates. The external inlinks to the People’s Daily Online were retrieved by Yahoo! (Chinese and English versions), and the online reprints were retrieved by Google. Besides the general usage patterns identified from the top 50 news stories, this study, by conducting statistical tests on the data sets, also reveals the following findings. First, the editors’ choices and the readers’ favorites do not always match each other; thus content of news title is more important than its homepage position in attracting online visits. Second, the Chinese and English readers’ interests in the same events are different. Third, the pageview numbers and comments posted to the news items reflect the unfavorable attitudes of the Chinese people toward the United States and Japan, which might offer us a method to investigate the public interest in some other issues or nations after necessary modifications. More importantly, some publicly available data, such as the comments posted to the news stories and online survey results, further show that the pageview measure does reflect readers’ interests/needs truthfully, as proved by the strong correlations between the top news reports and relevant top queries. The external ininks to the news websites and the online reprints of the top news items help us examine readers\u27 interests from other perspectives, as well as establish online profiles of the news websites. Such publicly accessible information could be an alternative data source for researchers to study readers\u27 interests when the Web server log data are not available. This doctoral thesis not only shows the usefulness of Web server log statistics, survey results, and other publicly accessible data in studying Web user’s information needs, but also offers practical suggestions for online news sites to improve their contents and homepage designs. However, no single method can draw a complete picture of the online news readers’ interests. The above mentioned research methodologies should be employed together, in order to make more comprehensive conclusions. Future research is especially needed to investigate the continuously rapid growth of the “Mobile News Readers,” which poses both challenges and opportunities to the press industry in the 21st century

Vagueness: Identity and Understanding Across Literatures East and West

The twentieth century witnessed an explosion in cultural exchanges between East and West. Through the increasing ease with which ideas could be communicated across the globe, and with which people, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, could move between distant countries, intercultural cross-fertilization became increasingly important to both “Eastern” and “Western” art. Yet this intellectual and physical movement also brought new forms of art that defied previous modes of interpretation, and called the very concepts of East and West into question. This dissertation uses the great exchange of people and ideas in the twentieth century to ask what identity cross-cultural literature can have and how we as critics should understand the heterogenous materials “East-West” literature presents us. My study addresses itself to debates in comparative literature and world literature. In particular, the concept of “literary worlds,” or of works of literature as imaginative worlds unto themselves, is the starting point of this thesis. Though the theory of literary worlds is rich and informative, it falters when dealing with texts founded on different ontologies as it can run the risk of highlighting superficial similarities without attending to deep-level differences. Recent work in philosophical logic, philosophical approaches to vagueness, and Asian Analytic Philosophy fortifies the theory, and the strengthened concept of literary worlds serves as a methodological framework throughout this dissertation. The ensuing chapters compare literary responses to East Asian texts or sets of texts, then consider what sort of epistemic and ontological relations obtain between these different literary works. Chapter II looks at Ted Hughes’ and Chou Wen-Chung’s unfinished operatic adaptation of the Bardo Thödol. Hughes and Chou worked to make the Eastern and Western material from which they were constructing the Bardo fuse in a coherent East-West text. The process by which they attempted to carry out that fusion is the subject of the chapter. Chapter III considers two adaptations, one by Paul Claudel and one by Mishima Yukio, of the classical Japanese Nō play Kantan. The ways in which Claudel and Mishima borrowed from Kantan to suit their own aesthetic and philosophical visions provides a fascinating case study of identity relations between literary worlds bearing the same origins but having different coherences. Chapter IV compares the poetry of Paul Claudel and Kuki Shūzō written in the 1920s, during which time Claudel lived in Kuki’s native Tokyo and Kuki in Claudel’s native Paris. To craft short poems on life in one another’s cities, Claudel and Kuki drew from similar sources and experiences, yet, as their critical writings show, held divergent views of the fundamental structure of art and, indeed, of the universe. The extent to which these divergent metaphysical viewpoints affect the structure of each poet’s poetic worlds is considered. Finally, Chapter V treats the exile poetry of Bei Dao along with Ted Hughes’ rewriting of a poem on his native Calder Valley into a “Chinese history”. Both Bei Dao and Hughes have spoken in depth about the effects of tradition on poetic composition and reception, and the chapter ruminates on how that conception changes over time, and what it means for Bei Dao’s and Ted Hughes’ poetry and our comprehension of it. The Conclusion reconsiders the modified theory of literary worlds advanced at the start of the dissertation, and reflects on how the findings of the previous five chapters might affect future study of East-West and comparative literature

Annual Report 2011

[Excerpt] This is the Commission’s 10th Annual Report on China’s human rights and rule of law developments. As in the past, the Commission has assessed the Chinese government’s record on the basis of China’s own Constitution and laws and international human rights standards, relying on research based in large part on reports and articles published in China. As Commission research has shown this past year, Chinese officials continue to deny Chinese citizens their rights in order to preserve the Communist Party’s notion of political stability and harmony. China’s stability is in the United States’ best interest, but the Commission believes that stability will not result from repressing rights for perceived short-term gain, but only by ensuring and protecting the rights of all Chinese citizens

Tribal Margins: Dalit Belonging and State Recognition in the Western Himalayas

Tribal Margins analyzes the project of tribal fashioning in the Western Himalayas against the backdrop of affirmative action politics. Specifically, it unpacks the discursive loop between government-administered ethnological paradigms for positive discrimination and its effects on ethnic belonging and spirituality. These dynamics are located among the Gaddis of Himachal Pradesh, a heterogeneous tribal/Dalit community traditionally associated with transhumant pastoralism on both sides of the Dhauladhar Mountains. The 2002 awarding of Scheduled Tribe (ST) status to only high-caste Kangra Gaddis has instigated a range of tribalizing strategies from Dalit groups who identity as Gaddi and are partially assimilated into tribal life. These low-status groups demand tribal recognition as both a form of social justice in the face of longstanding social discriminations and as a pragmatic strategy for state support amid the growing tide of neoliberalism. They rightly contend that the demographics of Himachal Pradesh (with the second-highest Dalit population in India) cause fierce competitiveness within the Scheduled Caste quota – about four times as competitive as the Scheduled Tribe quota. Many have mobilized under the trending discourse of Scheduled Tribe Dalit (STD) and fused indigenous ethnic associations with the pan-Himalayan struggle for double SC/ST status. The analysis of marginalized social formations in the tribal margins fundamentally reconceptualizes how political subject formation trickles into social life. The introduction of self-identifying Gaddi Dalits, largely sedentary laborers and former landless tenants, into the transhumant tribe disrupts the colonial literature on Gaddis. It further unsettles assumptions of tribal egalitarianism and complicates how South Asian sociology theorizes the discrete borders of tribal and caste organization. Understanding the intersectional identity of Gaddi Dalits speaks to the broader issue of tribal casteism and the double marginalization of low-status groups who remain misrecognized by the state and discriminated against in their everyday lives. In short, it imagines new trajectories of ethnic belonging and social justice for Himalayan Dalits. Each chapter attends to these trajectories within the lived experiences of Gaddi Dalits, specifically Halis (former landless tenants) and Sippis (wool-workers and shamans). The experience of fractured caste consciousness has led to ongoing legal woes due to their juridical liminality. These dynamics shape how Gaddi Dalits experience divinities, exorcism and witchcraft. Individual chapters trace forms of spirituality, religious conversion and ritual practice that provide powerful personal arenas for the re-articulation of ethnic identity and the burgeoning emergence of tribal multiculturalism. The presence of Tibetan refugees in Gaddi villages around Dharamsala has injected contestatory forms of sociality, modern aspiration and cosmopolitan competencies into tribal performance