Calls for Press Freedom in China\'s South

BEIJING - Something remarkable was under way in southern China on Monday: an open revolt at one of the country's biggest and most popular news groups against the propaganda authorities, who apparently censored an outspoken New Year's “greeting” in a major newspaper calling for constitutionalism and greater rights in China.

On Monday, protesters were gathering at the Southern Media Group headquarters in Guangzhou, capital of the southern province of Guangdong, holding handwritten signs and white and yellow chrysanthemums, the flowers of mourning, to express their outrage at the censorship.

Among the signs, according to photographs circulating online, were one reading: “You can speak, he can speak, I can speak: Speak well!”

A nother read, simply: “Freedom of speech.”

A row of people (below), each holding a single flower, held signs saying: “Each flower blooms into strength.”

For lots of photos of the scene, check out the blogger John Kennedy's Twitter feed, @28wordslater.

In a sign of how far the row is spreading, on Monday, some of the country's most famous actresses - usually known more for posing than for protesting - were joining in online, with the superstars Li Bingbing and Yao Chen both posting messages of support on their Weibos, or microblogs. (Ms. Yao has nearly 32 million followers on Weibo, while Ms. Li has more than 19 million.)

“Good morning, eight days work in a row and the weekend isn't the weekend,” read a post on Ms. Li's account, a reference both to the newspaper group's troubles and to the eight consecutive workdays mandated by the government after the New Year holiday.

“Good morning, t here is no warm wind from the south, take care everyone. Good morning, in the severe winter we wait for spring to come,” Ms. Li wrote, obliquely but pointedly, to a Chinese readership used to deciphering coded messages.

A message on Ms. Yao's microblog ran: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world,” citing Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The Southern Weekend Group is known for pushing the envelope on China's press freedoms, but it is also a major business with diverse interests and powerful friends in high places. Ms. Yao had been a guest of honor at an event sponsored by the group in December 2011, entitled, ironically, “China Dream,” a title very similar to that of the censored article, which also talked of “China's Dream” â€" a dream of greater civil rights.

The “New Year's Greeting” incident, as it's being dubbed, poses an early challenge to the new leader, Xi Jinping. As my colleague at The Times, Ian Johnson, wrote, the turmoil is “pitting a pent-up popular demand for change against the Communist Party's desire to maintain a firm grip.”

And although the year is young, the China Media Project, a Web site that closely monitors the news media, society and politics in China from Hong Kong, outside of China's “Great Firewall” of censorship, declared that the incident was “without a doubt one of the most important we will witness in China this year.”

The unrest at the influential Southern Weekly newspaper (it's also called Southern Weekend in English) began last week when journalists accused the propaganda chief of Guangdon g Province, Tuo Zhen, of censoring the paper's New Year's letter to its readers - traditionally a call for progress in the new year.

“The stand-off arose after the journalists blamed Tuo for turning the editorial, calling for political reform, into a tribute to one-party rule the day before publication. Hundreds of intellectuals, journalists and Internet users have since signed an online petition condemning the lack of press freedom and censorship,” the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.

As Ian wrote: “By Sunday night, the protests had transformed into a real-time melee in the blogosphere - a remarkable development in a country where protests of all kinds are tightly controlled and the media largely know the boundaries of permissible debate.”

By Monday morning, s everal different protest letters, signed by journalists, academics, students, and others, were circulating, the China Media Project reported.

In one, writers said that “the incident was like the fuse on a detonator,” with more than 1,000 stories censored or scrapped altogether last year, The South China Morning Post wrote.

“What we have been through was the endless routine of unjustifiable censorship, the killing of stories or entire pages and complete rewrites,” the petition lamented. People were fed up.

The Post quoted the Shaanxi-based China Business News, which apparently defied government orders to stay silent on the turmoil, as publishing a commentary saying the row was “a test of the leadership's ability to govern and heed public concerns.”

“The conflict between public opinions and authorities in Guangdong also underlines a pressing issue of gre ater importance: it is high time to review and reform our policies regarding media control,” The Post quoted the newspaper as writing.

IHT Quick Read, Jan. 7

NEWS Sounding defiant, confident and, to critics, out of touch, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria on Sunday used his first public address in six months to justify his crackdown, rally his supporters and leave recent efforts toward a political resolution of the civil war in tatters. Anne Barnard reports from Beirut.

A group of top regulators and central bankers on Sunday gave banks around the world more time to meet new rules aimed at preventing financial crises, saying they wanted to avoid the possibility of damaging the economic recovery. Jack Ewing reports.

Turmoil at a leading newspaper is posing an early challenge for the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, pitting pent-up demand for change against the Communist Party's desire to maintain firm control . Ian Johnson reports from Beijing.

The French technology entrepreneur Xavier Niel has made a career of disrupting the status quo. Now his company, Free, has taken on Google and other Web companies by allowing its estimated 5.2 million Internet-access users in France to block Web advertising. Free is updating users' software with an ad-blocking feature as the default setting. David Jolly reports from Paris.

John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer, says he did not intend to harm national security, and he doesn't think he did. But in a first, he is set to be sentenced to 30 months in prison for disclosing classified information to a reporter. Scott Shane reports from Washington.

A year after Muscovites took to the streets to protest the government and Vladimir V. Putin's ongoing rule, the excitement that gripped many of the capital's young professionals appears to be gone. But in its place is a deepening sense of alienation that poses its own long-term risk to the system. Ellen Barry reports from Moscow.

At first glance the willingness of Al Jazeera, the satellite network owned by Qatar, to pay some $500 million for Current TV, Al Gore's struggling channel, seems like a vanity project. And it may turn out that way. But Qatar has developed one of the more energetic and sophisticated foreign investment strategies of the Gulf oil and gas producers. Al Jazeera's expansion plan in the United States can be seen as part of its ov erall plan to put itself on the map. Stanley Reed reports from London.

A small plane carrying four Italian tourists, including the head of the Missoni fashion business, disappeared off the coast of Venezuela on Friday morning, prompting a sea and air search. Vittorio Missoni, 58, an owner of the family-run label famed for its zigzag knitwear, and his wife were aboard the plane, which was missing after takeoff from the island resort of Los Roques. Eric Wilson reports.

EDUCATION Millions of children in Indonesian elementary schools may no longer have separate science classes if the government approves a curriculum overhaul that would merge science and social studies with other classes so more time can be devoted to religious educat ion. Sara Schonhardt reports from Jakarta.

More Western education institutions are looking to open up in Asia - and U.S. art and design schools are no exception. While the potential for growth is huge, given Asia's rising creative industries, the actual logistics can be complicated. Kelly Wetherille reports.

ARTS The principal problem with many Web sites is that their designers were neither rigorous nor imaginative enough in planning the way we will navigate them. Alice Rawsthorn on design.

SPORTS The first weekend of the year has its own folklore in England as the time when small clubs can rise and knock the giants out of the F.A. Cup. Rob Hughes on soccer.

On Sunday morning, the long-dormant N.H.L. began stirring to life. The 113-day lockout was over, finished at 5 a.m. after a grueling 16-hour bargaining session at a Midtown Manhattan hotel, and across North America, the game began to awaken from its slumber. Jeff Z. Klein reports.

Will 2013 Be the Year of the Electric Car?

The Hague -Last year was a good one for electric and plug-in hybrid cars, according to 2012 sales figures and experts.

For example, sales of the Chevrolet Volt, one of North America's most popular plug-in hybrid cars, tripled in the United States, according to year-end figures.

The 23,461 Volts sold last year represented only about a third of a percent of all new passenger cars sold in the United States, but such sales might be the harbingers of an automobile market shift toward green vehicles.

A new market study estimates annual global sales of 3.8 million electric or plug-in hybrid cars by 2020. The study, released by Pike Research last week, estimates that sales of plug-in cars will grow by 40 perc ent annually. During that same period, general car sales will grow by 2 percent, according to the research firm. In a press statement, Dave Hurst, the author of the study wrote:

“Sales of EVs have not lived up to automakers' expectations and politicians' proclamations, but the market is expanding steadily as fuel prices remain high and consumers increasingly seek alternatives to internal combustion engines.”

Plug-in cars, be they hybrids like the Chevrolet Volt, or all-electric cars like the Nissan Leaf (both of whose successes in the United States in 2012 were reviewed in this story by my colleague Bradley Berman), will contribute most of the growth, while non-plug in hybrids - now the most dominant force on the low-emission front - are expected to grow at 6 percent.

By 2020, there could be as many as 4.4 million all-electric vehi cles on the world's roads and another 3.4 million plug-in hybrid cars, predicts the report's author.

Currently, all-electric vehicles make up only a sliver of the market, while substantially more drivers invest in hybrid cars. (Our report on fuel efficient vehicles last year explains the difference and the advantages of the competing technologies).

In the United States pure electric vehicles made up roughly 0.3 percent of cars sold in 2012, while hybrids or plug-in hybrids accounted for 3 percent, according to another market study. Here in Europe, electric cars are mostly seen as part of corporate fleet s or city car sharing programs, like the Parisian “autolib” program.

Despite the fact that Europe is lagging behind the United States in plug-in cars on the road, the company predicts that by 2018 Germany will come in at third place for plug-in hybrid cars, after the United States and China. Japan, meanwhile, will dominate the non plug-in hybrid market, with almost half of all plug-in cars sold in that country.

In the United Kingdom the number of all-electric cars is expected to double in the coming year, according to one industry expert.

Ben Lane, the managing editor of nextgreencar.com, told the Guardian newspaper:

“The pricing is not yet quite right and the range is still not long enough. Very few people in 2012 were willing to pay a significant sum more for a c ar that still cannot do everything.”

There are other issues, too. A recent University of Indiana survey of 2,300 adult drivers in the United States, found that most were ignorant and apathetic about plug-in electric cars, as Bradley Burman reported for the Wheels blog some weeks ago.

Quoting John Graham, who designed the latest study, Bradley wrote:

“We found substantial factual misunderstandings of electric cars in our sample of 2,000,” Dr. Graham said. “In some cases, the misunderstandings would cause one to be more pessimistic about the vehicle than they should be. And in other cases, it would cause people to be more optimistic than they should be.”

The Political Realignment on Full Display

The House Republicans' vote on the fiscal cliff deal, in which a solid majority of party members went against their speaker, reflects the conservative and Southern drift of recent decades.

“On the fiscal deal, his own majority leader and whip deserted him, as did seven current committee chairmen and almost two-thirds of his caucus,” as I write in my latest Letter From Washington.

But the regional realignment, visible in where the votes came from and where they didn't, portends much more dangerous territory - and consequences - in the votes to come.

Lawmakers are braced for a tougher battle in the next two months over the debt ceiling and across-the-board spending cuts that neither side likes…The White House believes Republican leaders privately realize that holding the nation's full faith and credit hostage to cutting popular programs is a loser. Congressiona l Republicans dismiss Mr. Obama's lines in the sand, saying that he invariably backs down and that any economic fallout ultimately hurts his presidency.

What the vote last week tells us about the votes to come: The deal passed the House, 256 to 173, with most Democrats in favor. It was brought to the floor with the support of Speaker John Boehner yet the Republican rank and file voted 151 to 77 against it.

More than half the votes against the Boehner-backed measure came from representatives from the 11 Southern states of the old Confederacy. These states were once solidly Democratic. Now Republicans command big majorities in each of these House delegations. These members voted 78 to 12 against the debt package.

Conversely, representatives from large non-Southern states stuck with the speaker. Republican members from California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois voted 30 to 12 for the fiscal package.

The clout of these big-state Republican delegations has declined dramatically as the Southern influence in the party increases. A little more than 30 years ago, when President Ronald Reagan took office, the California House delegation was almost evenly divided; today, the Democrats hold a 39 to 14 advantage. The small margin in New York the Democrats had then has widened to 21 to 6. There are no Republican House members from any of the six New England states in the new Congress.

It's the opposite situation in the South. In 1981, 19 of the 24 Texas House members were Democrats; today, the Republicans hold a 24 to 12 advantage. The same trend is apparent in Florida, where Democrats dominated 11 to 4, and Republicans now have a 17 to 10 advantage.