The attention was quickly moved on to the rescue mission. The crash site is in a reasonably populated area, only about 4 kilometres outside the Wenzhou South train station. Besides rescue workers, local residents (many joined the initial rescue) and journalists reached the site fairly quickly. The fiasco of the rescue operation was on full view, live to many eyewitnesses and many many more Weibo users sitting in front of the screen waiting for latest update.

Many questions have been raised, in particular to the rushed end of the rescue operation, the total number of people killed and the decision of burying locomotive and carriages of the crashed train right away. These, along with the compassionless and arrogant demeanour of the spoke person from railway ministry, fuelled suspicion and anger, propagated quickly among re-posting Weibo users. Even the arrival of China’s premier Wen Jiabao at the crash site and an on the spot press conference couldn’t calm all the emotions.

What the press conference did was to give journalists an anchor to launch attack on the railway ministry, who is not only responsible for the safety of the railway, but also in charge of the rescue mission. For a week, Chinese journalists had almost free run on the story, producing many in-depth analyses and human interest stories, along with bold criticism towards railway officials while questioning China’s high speed rail strategy.

The authority, inevitably, responded in the way they knew best. On Friday evening, many journalists posted on Weibo the news that they had received a directive ordering them to strictly minimize coverage of the crash and remove any criticism towards the railway ministry. Many out-of-line mini-posts on Weibo had been deleted at the same time. A lot of journalists reacted by posting the images of the ‘killed-off pages’ of next day’s newspapers.

While most of newspapers seem to toe the line, there are exceptions. Some weekly newspapers and magazines were in better position to defend themselves because the next issue had already been sent to printers while the directive arrived. Among them, a weekly business newpaper, Economic Observer (a publication I write for) devoted 8 pages for the train crash and its aftermath. On the front page the headline says ‘There is no miracle of Wenzhou’, clearly referring to a callous remark made by the railway ministry spoke person. Being a business newspaper, it also raised the issue of railway ministry being too powerful, although the suggestion of ‘splitting the railway ministry’ doesn’t sound very realistic.

It’s been rumoured in the last few days that the railway ministry’s priority was resuming normal service instead of saving lives, which was denied by an unnamed official. Indeed the normal service did resume within 48 hours of the crash. However after allowing the press to run free in the last seven days, the censors may find it’s little bit more difficult to resume the normal service.

Suddenly the crash became the most discussed subject, and weibo.com added a special section for the discussion of this accident. It does not escape censorship though. Many tweets have since been deleted ‘by the original poster’, so the site claims. But it helps that this happened in a Saturday evening when perhaps the censor’s response wasn’t fast enough. According to China Digital Times, a directive was indeed sent to various news organisations later, stopping them from reporting anything out of the official line. But it was too late to stop this accident became the hottest discussion on weibo.com.

It’s interesting to see how witness accounts and reportage were propagated through weibo.com. Without any news from official channel, users of weibo.com were first alerted by tweets sent by residents living near the accident site. The accident that a high speed train hit from behind a stationary train previously stricken by lightning, happened in the outskirt of the city of Wenzhou, a well-off and highly populated area. Many witnesses were equipped with digital cameras, mobile phones and internet connections. Photos and videos of the accident flooded in, then being re-tweeted by many others.

Among those who were doing the re-tweeting are some Chinese journalists. Unlike their western counterparts, many Chinese journalists operate on weibo.com in a semi-official way. Those that appear to be the official account of a publication or a news organisation do not strictly follow the editorial line. By merely re-tweeting the witness accounts, they lend their influence and credibility without getting their organisations into too much trouble.

When journalists arrived the scene, some of them immediately started to tweet whatever they had seen, most of what they tweeted were not likely to appear on their publication/broadcasting. There was an angry scene in a press conference where journalists fiercely pursued (‘beaten’ was used metaphorically on weibo.com) an official from the Railway Ministry. Local TV station actually broadcasted the press conference live. Some of the footages have since appeared on Chinese video-sharing website. How long will they survive is anyone’s guess.

The ‘human interest’ stories which you often read after the initial reportage of accident now are on your screen immediately. Soon after the accident, some tweets sent a few minutes before the crash by passengers on the train were discovered and re-tweeted while no news about their survival. There was also a moving scene of local people queuing up to donate blood (resulting in a traffic jam), recorded by weibo.com users. It’s chaotic, unfiltered and sometimes rumour-ridden.

Weibo has beaten the censorship, at least for a while.

The sad truth is that those who have made the effort of climbing over the GFW in order to access Twitter and like are belong to the 30%. In the same survey, over half the participants said their online activity won’t be affected by Google’s leave. This figure looks to increase if nothing happens.

Shanghaiist’s has a good summary of the Google v. China standoff. On the Guardian website, Tania Branigan has canvassed the opinions of some bloggers and media insiders. Whether Google decided to end its self-censorship purely out of moral reasons I’m not sure. I agree with some of Evgeny Morozov’s analysis. I guess it’s more likely they are fed up with the restraint and criticism while not seeing much gains in Chinese market.

Anyway, what Google has done is to blow it into the open, burn the bridge, making the stakes incredibly high. Now Google.cn is not censored, will the servers be forced to shut down, or moved out of China? And then what? Will Chinese government have to block Google.com as well?

Among the multinationals in China, Google is the one who has the power, influence and resources to make a clear stand on censorship. And now it has the will too. For that it should be praised.

Well the victims’ memories tend to be longer. For many Chinese the Opium War was the turning point of China’s recent history, when a weak and inward looking empire started to crumble, facing a new kind of foreign aggression coming over the sea. Twice under the threat of British warships, China was forced to open ports, sanction opium trade, accept the cession of Hong Kong, and pay a huge indemnity. Many years of humiliation followed.

A few days ago, when the British government went public to ask Chinese government to save Akmal Shaikh’s life, I was worried that his fate had already been sealed. Chinese authorities, even if they were prepared to show clemency, won’t be able to do so in public. Not mention that this was a case that has little sympathy from Chinese public opinions. I don’t know what efforts being made by the British government to save Akmal Shaikh’s life, but going public would certainly push China into an unchangeable position.

It is not that China wants to revenge for the humiliation of the Opium War, far from it. Many in China have a warm and friendly feeling towards Britain. The reaction to this incident on various Chinese websites has been a mixture of irritation (foreign power wants to dictate what China should do) and admiration (a government that would do anything to save its citizen). But once it became public, the authorities in China had only one choice, to stand firm and not give way. Any backing down or showing leniency under foreign demand would invoke the memories of a weak, timid, spineless government that was the court of Qing Dynasty in its dying days.

The Foreign Secretary David Miliband said in his blog that “We need to understand China (and the massive public support for the execution). They need to understand us.” He should have known that pressurizing China to accept western demands won’t work. There is a thin line between asking for clemency and lecturing about human rights. With the Opium War in mind, when dealing with China, turning understanding into demanding would only make things worse.

What the Copenhagen shows us is that this kind of summit doesn’t work when facing such a complicated and pressing issue. Many were over-optimistic before the summit, hyped by Miliband himself, to expect the countries would smooth over their huge difference and work out a treaty with binding targets that will affect all involved. The summit now looks ill prepared, badly organised, without a solid foundation and well communicated understanding. Trying to knock out a deal while all the participants having their own interests to protect, was not realistic.

All major players came to Copenhagen with their own baggage. China, along with India, Brazil and Russia, doesn’t want the binding carbon emission cutting targets to straightjacket its economic growth. Developing countries like China and African countries rightly feel the injustice of taking the burden of emission cut while the industrialized countries who had burned a large amount of fossil fuels now washed their hands by passing the manufactory to developing countries.

The fatal flaw is that the world leaders failed to bring their people with them. There is no real public pressure for the leaders to do something racial now. President Obama arrived Copenhagen empty handed, and then diverted to attack China for not agreeing an international inspection system. (Do we really like WMD style inspectors jetting around the world searching for secret carbon emission?) He went back to the States somehow claiming victory over China. Yes we know his hands are tied, with a resisting domestic opposition to pacify. But that just illustrates how unhelpful and hollow that Ed Miliband decided to single out China.

It’s sad that after all the efforts of scientists and environmental campaigners, the world population are largely not convinced that they have to do something themselves. But all is not lost. The bright side is that the political will does not seem to diminish despite all the disappointment. I believe China is committed to cut carbon emission because for China there is an opportunity to catch up or even lead the green technologies and low carbon industry, and the leadership sees that.

Post-Copenhagen, people are desperate to find a way forward. But playing the blame game isn’t the way.

Valued itself as a website through which its members can ‘discover, translate and read the best internet contents not in Chinese’, Yeeyan has been doing a valuable work of introducing foreign language (mostly English) news and stories to the Chinese readers through an unofficial channel. It ran like a social network. Members of shared interest congregated around specific topics or particular publications before picking up pieces from foreign news sites and translate them into Chinese.

Since its launch three years ago, Yeeyan’s been providing a great service China’s young, vibrant and inquisitive internet population, the ‘netizens’. By overcoming the language barrier, and because of Yeeyan’s social networking nature, varieties of information and opinions around the world become quickly accessible to a much wider audience. Early this year the Guardian started to cooperate with Yeeyan to make some of its contents available in Chinese. (The Guardian published a cautious response yesterday.) Recently a Telegraph channel was also setup on Yeeyan.

There has been little information available about the circumstances causing Yeeyan’s (hopefully temporary) closure. Those who run the website are clearly aware of the restrictive environment, having tried to stir away from the political sensitive stories. The suspension came as a surprise to some and sad news to many. I hope Yeeyan will sail through this crisis, because if not it would a big loss to our all.

Well they are fighting a losing battle. Bai Gong has been commonly used to call the White House for many years (I doubt it has ever been called anything else). Bai Wu is plainly ridicules. I’m not sure whether this is political correctness or purely bureaucratic – in order for Chinese not to confuse President Obama with a monarch?

Washington Post also managed to read into the choice of Aobama and Oubama as a political gesture. Aobama is used in China mainland, while Oubama is used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. So Beijing’s insistence of using Aobama in the face of American ’standardization’ must have some political undercurrent? It even suggests Ao (奥) in Chinese could mean ‘difficult to understand’, ‘abstruse’ and ‘obscure’, as if using Aobama is Beijing’s way of subtly demeaning Obama. I have to say this is fanciful over-reading. The simple fact is Aobama or Oubama doesn’t have much difference. Aobama, if you read aloud in Mandarin Chinese, sounds better, more masculine I would say, than Oubama. The character Ao itself, meanwhile, belongs to a pool of Chinese characters often used to translate foreign names, not associated with ‘difficult to understand’ etc. in such case.

Perhaps we shouldn’t dwell on Obama’s official Chinese name, because he’s in danger of acquiring an unflattering nickname there. A lot of English media reported in headline that in a Shanghai ‘town hall’ style meeting, Obama ‘attacked Chinese internet censorship’. No he didn’t ‘attack’ anything. Instead, he was trying to tip-toe around this sensitive issue in order to satisfy his domestic audiences, not to offend the Chinese authorities, and charm the Chinese internet population. A difficult task indeed.

Chinese internet users, the proud ‘netizens’ as they call themselves, were not amused. Often fierce and verbally inventive, they have started to call Obama ‘Xi Ni Ma’ (稀泥马), which can be roughly translated back to English as something like ‘muddling horse’. If you’re familiar with the story of ‘Cao Ni Ma’ (grass mud horse), you will know this plays on the similar spirit. ‘Ma’, the last syllable in Obama’s Chinese name, means ‘horse’ – nothing derogatory here, mind you. ‘Xi Ni’, though, is to describe the act of muddling through to make everyone pleased.

To be fair to Obama, nobody should expect him can somehow change China’s internet censorship by denouncing it publicly in China. Indeed part of exchange on that meeting itself was censored, so is his interview with Southern Weekly newspaper rumoured to be. I guess that is not the first thing in his mind when he touched down in Shanghai. He certainly has more pressing issues to talk about with the Chinese leaders. The result is that Obama bat off this censorship question relatively well but, (not) helped by the social network media, he may have to leave China with a nickname that I don’t think he’s too eager to keep.

The worry is always that when the migrant workers come back to the city after Chinese new year, and couldn’t find a job, what will happen? An often quoted figure is 8%, the GDP growth China must achieve to provide enough jobs for the labour market. The forecast for 2009 by various organizations seems all below that, thus the prediction of widely spread social unrest in China this year due to the mass unemployment. However in my opinion more social unrest there may be, but they are unlikely going to distablise the Chinese society in large scale. Chinese government do realize the seriousness of the economic downturn and high unemployment, and have been quick to disperse measures to stimulate economy and provide new jobs. There may be nothing imaginative in Chinese government’s approaches, but they do have the crucial ammunition – plenty of cash in hand.

Meanwhile the government also hope that establishing a civil society with more citizen participation may help to resolve some of the social issues. The year 2009 is called Civil Society Year Zero by the official media. That will be a constant struggle, and bound to be going forwards and backwards in unpredictable fashion. The detention of 08 Charter’s initiator Liu Xiaobo, harassment of its signatories, censoring influential websites including the recent closing down of bullog.cn are all seen as part of the government’s attempt to silence their critics. However the founder of bullog.cn, Luo Yonghao, is surprisingly optimistic about the website’s possible re-opening in the future. In no time a list of where to find the bullog.cn blogs from alternative places started to circulate around internet. And now a “ghetto version” (shanzai) of bullog.cn, operated by one of the famouse citizen journalist, Zola, is online. Willingly or not, the Chinese government are giving their critics space, and sometimes even use the online opinions to counter corrupted local officials. The critics themselves, while stressing they are not dissidents, have also learned to operate in this environment.

It’s safe to bet the Year of Ox won’t be a bull year. The road ahead is bumpy to say the least, but Chinese people have gone through time tougher than this.