Of Red Crows, Train Crashes, and the Open Internet

Mickey Friedman
July 29, 2011

New evidence of the age-old battle between open and closed, freedom and control, takes us from the U.S.A. to China and home again.

The spirit of Red Crow, and a million permutations of Red Crow – bloggers, tipsters, tweeters – is revealed in the ongoing struggle between a Chinese government that is used to controlling, needs to control the spread of information and a new generation of internet-savy Chinese who believe they have a right to know the real story. Meanwhile, here at home, we face a growing threat to our privacy and our ability to freely use the internet. As you’ll see, Chinese net-users are showing us once again how important the free flow of information is.

The story is about a train crash. Last Saturday night, a high speed train lost power and came to a stop on a railway bridge near Wenzhou in eastern Zhejiang province. According to Michael Wines and Sharon LaFraniere of the New York Times, the struggle for accurate information began with this prophetic message on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo: “After all the wind and storm, what’s going on with the high-speed train? It’s crawling slower than a snail. I hope nothing happens to it.”

Several minutes later, a second bullet rain smashed into it from behind, the impact forcing six cars to derail, including four that fell from the bridge. 40 people died and 191 were injured.

At which point the information war began in earnest. According to the Times, the first reports came from a passenger reporting a power blackout and “two strong collisions.” Nine minutes later, another passenger posted a call for help, reposted 100,000 times: “Children are crying all over the train car! Not a single attendant here!” Two hours later, a call for blood quickly clogged local hospitals with donors.

Even though reporters from the major government-run Chinese newspapers made it to the scene, their papers had no coverage on Sunday.

That task was immediately assumed by a small army of citizen reporters. Even though the government tries to exercise some control of the content of the privately run Sina Weibo, the speed of the network, the skill of its 140 million users, enabled word of the tragedy to spread far and wide. And from then on it was a continuing effort to ask more and more questions, to question official answers, and to contradict government lies.

Sina Weibo users posted reports of passengers trapped in railroad cars, the slow response of rescue teams, sent photos of the dangling train cars. There were photos of government bulldozers crushing mangled cars and burying the first car of the oncoming train. Hours after government spokespeople announced there were no more survivors, word was spread of a toddler being pulled from the wreckage.

When word got out that the government had buried that rail car, people reacted with anger and the government was forced to unearth it.

Fifty hours after the accident, the government still hadn’t explained what happened. Then Railway ministry spokesman Wang Yongping defended the record of the government’s high-speed train system. The government’s explanation was that lightning had struck some equipment.” He insisted: “Chinese technologies are advanced and we are still confident about that.”

Sina Weibo users issued a volley of allegations of corruption and incompetence. “This land is a hotbed for the world’s most sprawling bureaucracy and most cold-blooded officials,” user “chenjie” wrote on Sina Weibo.

“Such a major accident, how could it be attributed to weather and technical reasons?” blogged Cai Qi, a senior Zhejiang Province official. “Who should take the responsibility? The railway department should think hard in this time of pain and learn a good lesson from this.”

From a Hubei Province blogger: “I just watched the news on the train crash in Wenzhou, but I feel like I still don’t even know what happened. Nothing is reliable anymore. I feel like I can’t even believe the weather forecast. Is there anything that we can still trust?”

The English-language Chinese paper, Global Times, responded to the rising demand for information:

After the accident, the authorities sacked three senior railway officials from the Shanghai Railway Bureau, including Long Jing, the head of the bureau. The MOR then named An Lusheng, the ministry’s general chief of command and control, to replace Long.

However, the new appointment quickly drew fire from the public as An was previously demoted in April 2008 after two trains collided in Shandong Province, killing 71 people.

An became the chief of the Chengdu Railway Bureau after the 2008 accident. In 2009, he was named as the head of the Shanghai bureau. One year later, he resumed his previous role at the MOR.

Global Times then summarized the attempts to discover the true cause of the crash:

Questions also arose over how lightning could cause a crash between such advanced trains.

Citing unnamed railway experts, the Economic Observer newspaper reported that all bullet trains are equipped with protectors that will force trains to stop after being hit by lightning.

“After the train stops, manual control will take over to either restart the train or raise the alarm. Apparently, in Saturday’s accident, human error was to blame,” the report said.

However, a spokesman for China South Locomotive, which built both trains in a joint venture with Canada’s Bombardier, told AFP that signaling operations were to blame for the crash.

General Electric in the US told AFP that the company supplied the signaling equipment on the line involved in Saturday’s crash, but said it did not provide “vital” equipment.
Some Internet users have also asked why there were no alarm systems on the trains that would have informed the drivers of the stopped train.

Citing a spokesman from Japan’s bullet train operator JR East, Reuters reported that trains in Japan were equipped with the Automatic Train Control (ATC) system, which automatically brakes if trains get too close to one another.

Japanese bullet trains have not had any accidents resulting in injuries or deaths since they started running in 1964, Reuters said.

A commentary by the People’s Daily warned that safety may have been neglected during the rapid expansion of China’s railway system.

Ninemsn.com reported that the Chinese government had ordered the media not to probe further into the tragedy. The China Digital Times said the nation’s media had been ordered to focus on positive stories such as blood donors coming forward and free taxi services.

“All reports regarding the Wenzhou high-speed train accident are to be titled ‘7.23 Yong-Wen line major transportation accident’ and use ‘in the face of great tragedy, there’s great love’ as the major theme,” the directive said.

“Do not question. Do not elaborate. No re-posting on micro-blogs will be allowed!”

The People’s Daily, the Chinese-language Communist Party mouthpiece, carried stories Tuesday of how villagers “dashed to the disaster scene” to help with the rescue effort after the crash.”

The government continued to make mistakes.

When the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao finally made it to crash scene to pay his respects and address the people, he began with an excuse that didn’t quite withstand the scrutiny of many citizen journalists and bloggers:

I have been ill recently and have been confined to bed for 11 days. It was not until today that the doctor reluctantly gave me the permission to check out of the hospital. That is why I am here six days after the accident. I’m ready to take your questions.

The mention of Wen’s illness set off a mass online search into Wen’s whereabouts over the past 10 days. The search revealed that, in the last ten days, the Chinese Premier had been extending condolences to his Norwegian counterpart, and posing for photographs with the President of Cameroon last Friday and Japanese businessmen on Sunday.

In the following days, public pressure has forced the government to double the offer they made to the families of victims. And has revived concerns of widespread corruption in the Railway Bureau.

According to the Economic Observor:

A television producer for China’s state news channel has been suspended after a half-hour report that featured hospital interviews with survivors of the crash, a Southern Weekly reporter wrote on his microblog.

Wang Qinglei, who produced 24 hours for CCTV, wrote on his blog that “journalists, doctors and teachers can help protect basic human rights” and that “as long as a country has journalists who resist pressure…it still has the soul.”

What we have here is a inspiring example of the power of people, using the extraordinary ability of ordinary people to communicate with immediacy, spontaneity, and to have that information passed on to millions.

And yet here in the land of Tom Paine, a powerful combination of the leaders of industry and corporate communications with conservative members of Congress and the proponents of government control are trying to create their own shut-off valve on the open use of the internet.

Their first salvo is couched as a campaign to protect copyright concerns, and they’ve constructed a way to censor communications that rivals their Chinese counterparts.

The Protect IP Act (the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011) was introduced in May 2011 by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT.) It was designed to deny access and linking to “pirate” or “rogue” websites, especially those registered outside the U.S., “dedicated to infringing activities.”

The Department of Justice could seek a court order against one of these sites then demand that “information location tools,” defined as a “directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link,” to “expeditiously” make the target website invisible. Simply put, with the help of search engines like Google and with the cooperation of your local internet provider and browsers like Safari and Explorer and Firefox they could make these sites disappear forever, and any other sites that actively link to those sites as well.

Now one can passionately believe in the need to protect copyright, and to be concerned by continuing violations of copyrights, yet be worried by what this legislation requires. It turns search engine owners and browser companies and internet providers into arms of the government, forcing them to action against sites the government has determined violate this law, to actively disable our access to these sites.

Senator Ron Wyden has emerged as a fierce defender of the internet. He issued the following statement:

I understand and agree with the goal of the legislation, to protect intellectual property and combat commerce in counterfeit goods, but I am not willing to muzzle speech and stifle innovation and economic growth to achieve this objective. At the expense of legitimate commerce, PIPA’s prescription takes an overreaching approach to policing the Internet when a more balanced and targeted approach would be more effective. The collateral damage of this approach is speech, innovation and the very integrity of the Internet.

The Internet represents the shipping lane of the 21st century. It is increasingly in America’s economic interest to ensure that the Internet is a viable means for American innovation, commerce, and the advancement of our ideals that empower people all around the world. By ceding control of the Internet to corporations through a private right of action, and to government agencies that do not sufficiently understand and value the Internet, PIPA represents a threat to our economic future and to our international objectives. Until the many issues that I and others have raised with this legislation are addressed, I will object to a unanimous consent request to proceed to the legislation.

The second salvo comes in the form of HR 1981, approved yesterday by a House committee. The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, and 25 other civil liberties and privacy groups have expressed opposition to this legislation, claiming the sponsors want to force Internet service providers to keep track of and store their customers’ information: including your name, address, phone number, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses.

It’s called the “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act.” According to cnet News, Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill said, “It represents a data bank of every digital act by every American’ that would ‘let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.'”

“The bill is mislabeled,” said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”

Now more than ever it’s appropriate to take lessons from our friends in China, and to take advantage of the power of an open internet. And to vigorously oppose efforts to take that away from us.

May a hundred flowers bloom. Mao may not have meant it, but more than fifty years later, the netizens of China do. And so do I. May a million red crows fly.