China’s Tencent Invests $300 Million In Russian Facebook And Zynga Backer DST

Last Updated on Monday, 12 April 2010 02:28 Written by Daisy Harley Monday, 12 April 2010 02:28

Today is a big day in Asia’s Internet industry. Earlier today, Korea’s NHN said it will buy major Japanese portal Livedoor, and now Tencent, China’s largest Internet company, has announced [PDF] it plans to invest $300 million in cash into Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies (DST).

DST itself has been in the news repeatedly over the last few months, especially after investing $200 million in Facebook and $180 million in Zynga last year. On its homepage, the firm claims its portfolio companies command 70% of all page views on the Russian speaking web.

Tencent racked up $1.8 billion in revenues last year [PDF], with operating profit reaching a staggering $882 million. The Shenzhen-based company’s key service is instant messaging platform QQ, which boasted no less than 523 million active users at the end of last year. Tencent also operates a web portal (QQ.com), a social network (Qzone) with nearly 400 million active users (self-reported), a gaming portal (QQ Games), a search engine (SOSO), and a number of other services.

Tencent will get a 10.26% stake in DST, 0.51% of total voting power and the right to nominate “one observer” to DST’s board of directors. Both companies also said they’ll be entering a strategic partnership, without providing details.

The tie-up with DST is by far the biggest international commitment Tencent made to date. The motivation is obvious: the company may be the biggest in China’s huge web market (and even one of the biggest worldwide) but internationally speaking, it’s a nobody. In the US, Tencent (unsuccessfully) launched QQ Games in 2007, followed by an international version of the QQ messenger and a smaller investment in India one year later.

But I have a feeling Tencent will do a lot more to boost its presence outside China in the months to come.

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/chinas-tencent-invests-300-million-into-russian-facebook-and-zynga-backer-dst/

Update: China’s Firewall Mistakes Google For Radio Free Asia

Last Updated on Tuesday, 30 March 2010 02:08 Written by Daisy Harley Tuesday, 30 March 2010 02:08

There may be a simpler explanation behind the increased blockage of Google search results in mainland China today than a deliberate government crackdown. It seems that the Great Firewall of China which automatically filters out a long list of objectionable material on the Web from ever entering China is mistaking Google for Radio Free Asia, one of the sites blocked by China.

According to a Google spokesperson who just got back to me, this seems to be what is happening:

Lots of users in China have been unable to search on Google.com.hk today. This blockage seems to have been triggered by a change on Google’s part. In the last 24 hours “gs_rfai” started appearing in the URLs of Google searches globally as part of a search parameter, a string of characters that sends information about the query to Google so we can return the best result. Because this parameter contained the letters rfa the great firewall was associating these searches with Radio Free Asia, a service that has been inaccessible in China for a long time–hence the blockage. We are currently looking at how to resolve this issue.

If this theory is correct, any URL that includes the letters “rfa” in a row could also be blocked. It is not clear why the Great Firewall cannot figure out the difference between the rfa.org URL and a string of letters that happens to include the same letters (without the .org). Another theory: China knows exactly what it is doing and it is just messing with Google.

Image credit: Flickr/The Humanaught.

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/30/china-firewall-google-radio-free-asia/

John Brown: China’s Public Diplomacy: Have You Ever Tried to Call the Chinese Embassy?

Last Updated on Friday, 26 March 2010 07:45 Written by Daisy Harley Friday, 26 March 2010 07:45

“In modern times, public diplomacy is becoming increasingly important. Governments of countries worldwide attach great importance to public diplomacy to promote their soft power and influence.”

–”Getting smart with public diplomacy,” People’s Daily Online (March 26, 2010)

Much appears in cyberspace about mainland China’s growing public diplomacy (PD) programs, from media events meant to persuade to Confucius Centers meant, supposedly, to educate. As I compile my Public Diplomacy Press Review, which is based on internet media/blog items, I find references to China’s PD far outnumber those of other countries, with the exception of the U.S., Israel, and perhaps Canada (other countries often mentioned in relation to PD, but not as frequently as China, are Turkey and India). Japan and South Korea also appear on occasion. Practically nothing from Africa, except sometimes from Ghana and South Africa. Latin America? Just about nada, except for usually critical articles about Chavez from US right-wing sources.

The above general comments are, of course, observations not backed by statistics, but rather from my near-daily searches on the internet that lead me to conclude that China, far more than most countries, is striving to represent itself overseas as a soft-power, user-friendly country “into” PD. Scholars such as Joshua Kurlantzick have written authoritatively about such issues.

But have you, ordinary citizen like myself, ever tried to touch base with the Communist Chinese Embassy in Washington? Its website is, to put it charitably, under construction. If you click on an all-important part of any website, “contact us,” you get the following message: “Sorry, the webpage you browsed has been deleted!.

I did find a phone number — only one mumber, for a humongous, recently-built embassy, frankly an architectural obscenity full of totalitarian implications, occupying a large amount of physical space in NW Washington. The number (if you’re patient enough finally to discover it at the bottom of the embassy’s website) is (202) 328-2500. I tried calling this number for some three hours, but it was constantly busy.

Yes, the Chinese embassy site does have a section, “Public Diplomacy” — but it emphasizes official government statements pertaining to the issue. To me, as a former State Department bureaucrat knowing all too well that going up the career ladder means making the bosses in Washington happy — rather than worrying what the “natives” in other countries think — that smells like Chinese Embassy employees just advertising what headquarters wants on paper (or should I say computer screens) rather than “engaging” with the host country.

I should note, at this point, that my attempts to reach the Chinese Embassy were an effort to arrange a meeting of students taking my “International Affairs: Public Diplomacy” course to talk with Chinese diplomats regarding what their government often writes about — public diplomacy and its importance. The goal of this encounter would be to understand China’s relations to the world from a PD perspective.

But, as its one phone line that’s constantly busy suggests, the non-reaction of the Chinese mission to an effort from this teacher to “reach out” internationally suggests, at least from a “micro” perspective, that Chinese Embassy officials are essentially inaccessible to expand the dialogue with the public in the host country.

We Americans, whose tendency is to preach, are all too often guilty of this kind of elitism (exclusiveness?) in our own diplomatic posts abroad. Much has been written about our “fortress embassies,” where diplomats are hidden behind walls for “security” reasons. Could we be just afraid to mingle with the natives, much as Chinese diplomats appear to be?

FULL DISCLOSURE

1. My “Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review” blog, which means no harm to anyone and whose essential aim is to amuse, is apparently “filtered out” in China (as I recently learned from one reliable source; please correct me if I’m wrong).

2. No, I’m not a Google contractor — and we all know about its problems in China — although my blog is a free-of-charge “Google” one.

More on China

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-brown/chinas-public-diplomacy-h_b_515546.html