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In June 2012, The New York Times launched its Chinese language website, CN.NYTimes.com. By October 2012, it was blocked in mainland China for publishing a story on the wealth accumulated by the family of former prime minister Wen Jiabao. A year later, it remains blocked. Craig Smith, managing director of The New York Times Company, China, speaks to Vanita Kohli-Khandekar about the controls on the media in China. Edited excerpts:
How does the control on online media in China function?
China maintains what's popularly called a 'Great Firewall' and is able to control what gets into the country. There are a limited number of gateways into the country and the government monitors whatever comes in. They have servers programmed to search by keywords. If the content is objectionable, two things could happen: One, the link breaks and, as a user, you might never get to see that page. For example, if you are browsing a foreign news site from China and you click on a headline and lose the connection. Two, they could block the domain name. Facebook and Twitter's domains are blocked in the mainland. The Chinese language sites of The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times (FT) and The New York Times (NYT) have their servers outside of China and so, are subject to these kinds of censorship.
How does social media operate in China?
Sina Weibo (like Twitter), Renren (like Facebook) have their servers inside the mainland, which is what the government wants. If a website is on a server inside China, it needs an internet content provider (ICP) licence. The ICP licence is regulated by the propaganda department, which gives them guidelines on what areas are taboo. But the actual censorship is left to the private companies that have licences and they are very vigilant. Yet, it is difficult to control; people find ways of talking about controversial topics in code. The result, however, is a lot of rumour is mixed with real news in China.
How has the ban impacted NYT's China plans?
We grew very quickly in the months before access to our site was restricted. Had we continued, we would have been profitable by now, since there is huge demand for advertising on sites such as ours from luxury brands. These brands invest a lot in retail and have a lot of consumers in China. So, these need to reach out to consumers with their advertising. What drives traffic to NYT and FT is not the western voice, but depth of our journalism and trust in the quality of our journalism. We are hoping the restrictions on our site will be lifted soon. Meanwhile, we have just launched a second Chinese language lifestyle site, cn.tmagazine.com.
