Censored in China: ‘Today,’ ‘Tonight’ and ‘Big Yellow Duck’

BEIJING â€" Today. Tonight. June 4. Big Yellow Duck.

Type these seemingly innocuous words and phrases, in Chinese, into Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblog with more than 500 million registered users, and this message shows up: “According to relevant laws, statutes and policies, the results of a search for ‘today is June 4’ cannot be shown.”

Today is the 24th anniversary of the crushing of democracy demonstrations in Beijing by the army on June 4, and tonight a large demonstration is planned in Hong Kong in memory of the dead, who number in the hundreds, possibly thousands (the government has never given a figure.) That explains some of the censored words. But Big Yellow Duck?

Here’s why:

The image, circulating on Twitter (which is banned in mainland China anyway,) is a reference to this:

The ducks are a reference to a a large open-air art work of a single duck that has been floating in Hong Kong harbor and drawing excited attention there and in mainland China. It’s all off limits, as the state tries strenuously to control any discussion - or activities - about the anniversary today.

But there are signs, nonetheless. Yesterday I wrote how universities are on high alert; how fliers were thrown from a bus on Tiananmen Square on Sunday. There is a campaign to wear a black t-shirt as a sign of protest, though it’s not clear how much that has caught on inside China:

Then there was this image below, from the Web site BuzzFeed, showing a Lego man stopping Lego tanks.

It came from China’s Netease Web site, BuzzFeed reported, part of a slideshow to mark Children’s Day on June 1. BuzzFeed said these reader comments were made about the image: “You are a brave editor;” “A great way to let our children remember our history;” and, “He was not run over by the tank that day. His name is Wang Weilin. No one knows what happened to him. They ‘evaporated’ him.”

“By the end of the day, the photo was removed from the slideshow, but not before becoming a minor Internet sensation,” BuzzFeed wrote.

For a few hours this morning, one reference to June 4 had survived on Weibo - the number 64. In the early morning it was the 16th most searched term, rising by mid-morning to the 14th; then it was suddenly gone. Not before being cached by GreatFire.org (the name references the Great Firewall, China’s very large and sophisticated system of Internet censorship.) Here’s the cached image, with ’64’ near the bottom:

Today, the Global Times, a newspaper belonging to the Communist Party flagship People’s Daily, published an article strongly defending Internet censorship. It cited a recent decision by Germany’s constitutional court against Google as evidence that “Many countries are trying to regulate their Internet services.”

“Some claim that any regulation of the Internet is an anti-democratic effort,” the Global Times wrote. “This deceptive voice has gained support from Western public opinion, which makes China’s regulation of the Internet encounter more resistance than in other countries.”

In China, “People already understand that free speech can not go against social order,” the Global Times wrote, though it did not cite any evidence. “Internet regulation is not only an embodiment of the government’s will, but is also laid on the foundation of the public interest,” it continued. “Internet regulation has to be carried out until those spreading adverse remarks fear the strength of the public interest.”

As one person tweeted:

Homage Paid to ‘Rite of Spring,’ With Stravinsky and Without

LONDON â€" Wednesday was the 100th anniversary, to the day, of the first performance of “The Rite of Spring,” the Stravinsky-Nijinsky collaboration at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris that marked a revolutionary, game-changing moment in modern music and dance. There were celebratory performances all over the world of various versions of “Rite” â€" at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Maryinsky Ballet performed Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer’s reconstructed version of Nijinsky’s ballet alongside a new version by the German choreographer Sasha Waltz.

In London, an hour behind European time, audiences were still rushing to the theater or sipping drinks when the lights went down in Paris. But Sadler’s Wells, London’s major dance house, had its own “Rite of Spring” tribute, by Akram Khan, generally considered one of Britain’s most important choreographers.

Mr. Khan did not, however, create his own version of the ballet to the Stravinsky score, as innumerable choreographers have done. (My colleague Claudia La Rocco once suggested that there should be an annual quota for choreographers wishing to work with canonical scores, “rather like the system adhered to by moose hunters in Maine.”

Instead, he has created “iTMOi,” a fantasmagorical, dark-hued world of sacrifice, ritual, humiliation, fear and exaltation, set to a three-part commissioned score by Nitin Sawhney, Jocelyn Pook and Ben Frost. “iTMOi,” which must be a strong contender for worst title of the last decade (and why, why, why, the annoying typography?) stands for “in the mind of Igor,” and Mr. Khan speaks, in a program interview, of his extensive biographical research.

You wouldn’t know it from the work, which is all to its credit. “iTMOi” begins with a menacing, high-volume guttural growl, chiming bells and a dimly lighted smoke-filled stage. A tall black man (T.J. Lowe) shouts out the story of Abraham and Isaac in the accents of a preacher, stretching and crumpling, giggling and shouting, before being joined by an ensemble, moving with convulsive, whirling urgency. A white-faced figure in a hoop skirt and outlandish hat (Catherine Schaub Abkarian) takes on a central role, anointing a small woman in white (Ching-Ying Chien) with powder, seeming to compel the dancers to move away or toward her.

Her role is never clear; neither are those of the individuals who emerge from the group. For a while you think the woman in white is the sacrificial victim of the “Rite” scenario. Later a man who has played a central, equally puzzling role, becomes the victim, his body, attached to ropes, jerking helplessly as he is lashed from all sides.

The ambiguity is obviously intentional, as is the symbolism. A dancer wearing horns prowls about the stage; a golden orb swings back and forth; smoke billows, a rectangular metal frame descends like a cage, then vanishes. If we are in anyone’s mind, it’s deep within the unconscious; the work, unevenly paced, full of longueurs, nonetheless plays out like a dream (or perhaps a nightmare) with its own deep logic, helped at different moments by Mr. Sawhney’s beautiful, melancholy strings, Ms. Pook’s strange vocals, and Mr. Frost’s impressive wall of sound.

There were no riots during “iTMOi,” as there famously were at the premiere of the Stravinsky-Nijinsky “Rite.” But afterward there was a sense that something â€" perhaps even something extreme â€" had happened.

Speak More Chinese, Ambassador Tells Thais

BEIJING â€" Some Thai police are corrupt and the justice system is slow, but perhaps more importantly, not enough Thais speak Chinese â€" that’s the gist of “a long list” of complaints by China’s Ambassador to Thailand, Guan Mu, delivered at a meeting with Thai officials Wednesday on the popular vacation island of Phuket, the Phuket News reported.

As China grows in financial muscle and strikes multimillion, even billion-dollar deals around the world, its people are traveling abroad in fast-growing numbers and encountering other cultures, often for the first time. It can be a rocky process.

Recently, there was much embarrassment at home after a teenage boy from Nanjing scrawled “Ding Jinhao was here” on a stone relief in Egypt’s 3,500-old Luxor Temple. There are reports about “cashed-up” Chinese tourists being the target of robbery in France.

Children defecating in public, while commonplace in China, is another contentious issue, including for people in Hong Kong and Taiwan; and in March, Rendezvous reported on how Chinese tourists to the Maldives were allegedly using room kettles to cook food, annoying hotel managers.

This comment by a reader called Vint Chavala published in The Nation, a Thai newspaper, noted: “Local businesspeople are complaining that Chinese tourists are too boisterous. They tend to drive speedily on the wrong side of the road, and often go against traffic on one-way streets. Chinese tourists also often stop in the middle of busy intersections â€" just to argue among themselves about directions.”

This month, China’s deputy prime minister, Wang Yang, spoke about the problem and admonished some Chinese tourists for their “uncivilized behavior.”

“They make a terrible racket in public places, scrawl their names on tourist sites, ignore red lights when crossing the road and spit everywhere, Mr. Wang said, according to Reuters news agency. “This damages our national image and has a terrible effect.”

Amid the criticism, the ambassador’s visit to Phuket struck a different, more combative, note.

Issues Mr. Guan thought should be addressed by Phuket authorities included security, theft, food poisoning, road accidents and, in particular signage, the newspaper wrote.

“In Bangkok there are Chinese signs and information, but in Phuket there are very few. For example, tourists don’t know what red flags” at the beach mean, the newspaper quoted Mr. Guan as saying.

Panompol Thammachatniyom, president of the advisory group to the Senate Standing Committee on Tourism, pointed out â€" apparently at the meeting â€" that there were 600 to 700 Thai guides in Phuket who speak Chinese, the newspaper wrote. “Why don’t Chinese tour companies use them?” he asked.

Mr. Guan’s answer: “I’m not talking about quantity. I’m talking about quality,” the newspaper wrote.

“The meeting began at 2 p.m. and was slow going, partly because all discussion had to go through an interpreter, even though Amb Guan speaks excellent Thai,” it noted, perhaps drily.

Mr. Guan wanted the Thai police to offer Chinese-language help hotlines.

“When Chinese tourists call 1155,” the Tourist Police hotline, “officers cannot speak Chinese, and the recorded messages in Chinese are complicated and difficult to understand,” he said.

Chanapan Kaewglachaiyawut, secretary of the Thai-Chinese Business Association, agreed that was a problem, pointing out the police pamphlet promoting the 191 emergency number used Google Translate for the Chinese message. “Google Translate should never be used, he said, because it was inaccurate,” the newspaper cited him as saying.

Mr. Guan then advised the Thais to copy China, where, he said, emergency calls go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs call center where many languages are spoken fluently.

Writing in the article’s comment section, a person called agogohome said: “The Chinese may have the most widely spoken language on the planet per head, but the ideal answer would be for everyone to speak â€" or at least understand, a common, global language. English for example.”

Mr. Guan may see things differently, and his approach had its admirers: “Alas, at least for today, it looks like only Chenese ambassador really cares about his citizens and he lets himself to express problems directly whithout diplomatic langauge. Great respet for him!” (sic) wrote Stranger.

Either way, it’s a pressing issue in Thailand, which has seen an already-huge rise in Chinese tourism in recent years spike again after the runaway success of “Lost in Thailand,” a low-budget “Hangover”-style film by Zheng Xu, released just before the Lunar New Year holiday.

According to figures from Thailand’s Tourism and Sports Ministry, nearly 2.8 million Chinese tourists arrived in Thailand last year, up by 62 percent from 2011. Over the Lunar New Year holiday alone there were about 270,000 Chinese visitors, the ministry said, based on initial estimates, making China the single biggest source of arrivals in those days.

Does Spelling Matter?

LONDON â€" A professor of English at one of the world’s most venerable centers of learning has outraged language purists by challenging whether spelling matters.

Simon Horobin of Magdalen College, Oxford was this week said to have prompted shocked gasps from an audience at the annual Hay-on-Wye literary festival in western England by suggesting that spellings of they’re, their and there could be standardized.

Spelling pedants should also be more relaxed about changes in standards of written English that have seen the adoption of spellings such as “thru” and “lite.”

Sound familiar? In March, Rendezvous reported on a grammar war that had broken out over the decision of an English council to ban the apostrophe from its local street signs.

Traditionalists have also lamented the growing use of SMS slang, which they fear is creeping into the classroom.

Mr. Horobin’s intervention comes at a time when the British government is introducing changes to the national school curriculum to include a list of 162 words that all 11-year-olds would be expected to spell.

He pointed out that the draft law announcing the reform managed to spell “bureaucracy” incorrectly.

The Oxford academic and spelling blogger, whose latest book is “Does Spelling Matter?”, said he was not proposing a spelling free-for-all but was inviting people to accept that spellings change.

“People like to artificially constrain language change,” he said this week. “For some reason we think spelling should be entirely fixed and never changed.”

Mr. Horobin has traced the evolution of a language that is derived from various origins and has undergone changes through the addition of foreign terms and shifts in pronunciation. Silent letters that were once pronounced survive in spellings such as “knight” and “through”.

He does not argue for wholesale spelling reform but rather for less rigidity on the part of the “grammar police.”

Above all, he argues that knowledge of standard spelling should not be confused with intelligence.

Simon Heffer, a newspaper columnist, agreed with him. “We all know some truly bovine people who can spell perfectly and some allegedly brilliant ones who can’t,” he wrote in a review of Mr. Horobin’s book.

It is clear that neither applies to Arvind V. Mahankali, the 13-year-old boy from New York who won the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night.

Arvind, who correctly spelled “knaidel,” a Yiddish word for “dumpling,” aspires to become a quantum physicist and plans to spend some of his prize money on paying for college.

Mr. Heffer said the advice of the “anything goes” school of grammar and spelling â€" he did not include Mr. Horobin in that category â€" was fine “until one has to write a job application that will be read by someone with more traditional views.”

What do you think? Does spelling matter? Does the ability to spell correctly reflect intelligence or merely rote learning? And should we be more relaxed about accepting that words change?

IHT Quick Read: June 1

NEWS It’s as if Leipzig, Hanover and Dresden had disappeared in the blink of an eye, statistically speaking. Germany, which has been deeply concerned about its rapidly dwindling population, released the results of its first census in nearly a quarter of a century on Friday and found 1.5 million fewer inhabitants than previously assumed. Chancellor Angela Merkel was already worried about the shrinking numbers of taxpayers and able-bodied workers. How future smaller generations will repay German debts, much less the mounting liabilities and guarantees meant to contain the euro-zone debt crisis, is a central question here. Germany had not conducted a single census count since reunification, not even an effort to tally those in the former East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The disappearance of 1.5 million people, equal to almost 1.9 percent of the population, only exacerbates the longer-term downward trend. Nick Kulish and Chris Cottrell report from Berlin.

Inside a small government laboratory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, there are about 300 test tubes, each labeled with masking tape and containing an extracted tooth or a shard of bone. Day and night, dozens of these tubes rest on metal trays that vibrate with a motorized monotony. The shaking decalcifies the bone in a process that requires two weeks before material can be gleaned for a DNA profile. Outside the laboratory, people are waiting. There are at least 301 unidentified victims of last month’s horrific collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building. Those test tubes represent the only chance of identifying them. More than 500 people have given blood samples in the hopes of finding a DNA match. On a recent morning, Hasibul Islam Reaz, 10, placed a spindly arm before a needle, his eyes widening as his blood drained through a thin tube into a syringe. Jim Yardley reports from Dhaka, Banglaesh.

Unemployment in the euro zone continued its relentless march higher in April, according to official data published Friday, hitting yet another record, amid a prolonged recession and the absence of a coordinated response by policy makers. The jobless rate for the 17 countries that use the common currency rose to 12.2 percent, from 12.1 percent a month earlier, with 19.4 million people out of work, according to Eurostat, the European Union statistics agency. Some analysts said the number of people without jobs could hit 20 million by the end of the year. Despite the rise, most analysts do not expect the European Central Bank to cut interest rates or take other action to stimulate growth when its policy-making council meets in the coming week. Jack Ewing reports from London.

Japan is inching closer to the end of deflation and its factory output has picked up, data showed Friday, offering evidence that the country’s economy is slowly catching up with the high expectations set by the government’s bold economic policies. Core consumer prices, which exclude fresh food, fell 0.4 percent in April from a year earlier, the sixth consecutive month of decline, though the clip was slower than the 0.5 percent decline in March. Prices were supported partly by rising energy costs, as the weak yen added to Japan’s fuel import bills. Consumer prices in Tokyo rose 0.1 percent in May from a year earlier, the first increase in more than four years. It was a sign that nationwide prices could soon follow suit, ending the deflation that has long weighed on Japan. Hiroko Tabuchi reports from Tokyo.

ARTS Once in a blue moon, sheer necessity, caused by a lack of funds, inspires some of the most brilliant shows in the world’s great museums. “Birds in the Art of Japan,” showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 28, was put together by John Carpenter, who became curator of the department of Japanese art in 2011. Drawn from the department’s own collection, 125 works of art, supplemented by 15 others on loan from private U.S. collectors, are assembled in one of the most admirable displays ever seen in the museum. Sadly, there is no catalog. Souren Melikian reports from New York.

SPORTS Rafael Nadal has certainly done his part to spice up a rain-interrupted, so far shock-free week at the French Open. After losing the first set in his first-round match against Daniel Brands, Nadal did something unprecedented Friday at Roland Garros: He lost the first set in his second-round match, too, looking in dire need of a café solo on the changeovers. It is not often that one of the game’s greats gets an 11 a.m. start at a Grand Slam tournament. On another gray day in Paris, whose City of Light label clearly does not apply to the weather, there were big blocks of empty seats on the Suzanne Lenglen Court. But then Nadal, the seven-time French Open champion, did not think he should have been there either, a feeling he made clear after his four-set win over 35th-ranked Martin Klizan. Christopher Clarey reports from Paris.

24 Years Later, Tensions Continue Over Crushed Chinese Protests

BEIJING â€" Early June in Beijing is always tense, with tighter security and special workplace orders affecting some in the city as the authorities try to prevent public commemorations of the crushing of the student-led democracy movement of 1989.

This year is no different.

Starting early Sunday, administrators and party members at Beijing universities were placed on 24-hour work duty â€" that is, on call around the clock â€" until the end of Tuesday, the anniversary of the crackdown, to prevent outbreaks of unrest on campus, university sources said. Campuses elsewhere in the country were also affected; the United States-based China Digital Times reported similar orders, at Shenzhen University in the far south of the country, with party members and staff told “prevention and control efforts” must be “tight within” but appear “relaxed outside,” the Web site reported.

Elsewhere in the capital, uniformed and plainclothes police presence was heavy, especially around Tiananmen Square, the epicenter of the 1989 protests that the army ended by firing on unarmed civilians, killing hundreds, possibly thousands of people on the night of June 3-4.

On Sunday afternoon, an unknown person threw “bunches” of what appeared to be fliers out of a bus on Tiananmen Square, according to an eyewitness on another bus. Photographs show the police picking white pieces of paper off the street amid stopped traffic. In an interview, the eyewitness said a person sitting next to her said “June 4″ but declined to speak further. Outside, passersby photographed the scene and some picked up pieces of the thrown paper, but their content was not known. Fliers have been used in the past to spread political messages on sensitive political anniversaries. During last year’s Communist Party congress, buses crossing the square were ordered to tape their windows shut to prevent such incidents.

In her home in western Beijing, Ding Zilin, the mother of Jiang Jielian, who was 17 when he was shot dead by troops 24 years ago, changes the number on the memorial she keeps for her son with every passing year.

This year Tiananmen Mothers, the group founded by Ms. Ding, 76, a former philosophy professor, issued a statement saying that despite having been ignored by the government for nearly a quarter of a century, they would not give up their search for justice.

Signed by 123 living members, and with the signatures attached of 33 deceased members who had signed such statements in the past, the group wrote: “The Tiananmen Mothers will certainly find a way out of the field of death.”

They have written 36 open letters to the government since 1989 asking for dialogue, an accounting of the tragedy and punishment for those responsible, the group said. “To this day, all our efforts have been in vain, we have received not a single response from the government,” they wrote.

Nor do they think anything will change soon: “Facts have clearly shown that during the past nearly quarter century, China’s top leaders have never been real political reformers. Jiang Zemin was not, Hu Jintao was not, nor is Xi Jinping, who just took office,” they wrote. “They come one after another, as if through a revolving door; and as they move forward, they become ever more distant and outrageous, causing a universal feeling of despair to descend on the people from all sides,” the group wrote.

The group accused Mr. Xi of taking the country backwards into a Maoist past, saying that “we have not seen him reflect upon or show remorse in the slightest for the sins committed during the three decades of Maoist communism. We also have not seen him criticize in the slightest or make anyone accountable for the three decades of Deng-style ‘lame reform,’ ” they added, referring to economic reforms initiated by the former leader Deng Xiaoping.

Another well-known Beijing-based voice called for an accounting of the June 4 tragedy: Bao Tong, a former aide to the reforming leader Zhao Ziyang, who was deposed after the crushing of the demonstrations.

In an interview with Mr. Bao, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post wrote that Mr. Bao said the tragedy must be “completely repudiated” if China is to move forward.

“The former top aide of reformist leader Zhao Ziyang said all Chinese people â€" including top leaders â€" should stop protecting the legacy of Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong and reflect on the events of June 4, 1989,” the Post wrote.

Over the weekend, the Chinese authorities reacted angrily to a statement by the United States calling on China to fully account for the tragedy, accusing it of “prejudice.”

China had already reached a “clear conclusion” about the event, said Hong Lei, a Foreign Ministry spokesman. China declared the democracy movement a counterrevolutionary rebellion, though today it more commonly refers to it as “political turmoil,” as Mr. Hong did.

Mr. Hong said the U.S. government should “correctly treat China’s development.”

What exactly is “China’s development”? In the next post, two authors warn the growing global footprint of China’s state capitalism â€" poses a real threat to democracy around the world.

IHT Quick Read: June 3

NEWS A long struggle over urban spaces is erupting as a broader fight over Turkish identity, where difficult issues of religion, social class and politics intersect. Tim Arango reports from Istanbul.

Some branches of the Syrian Red Crescent work in rebel areas and others in government-held regions, with crews in Damascus pursuing neutrality with surprising vigor. Anne Barnard reports from Damascus.

A French experiment in cracking down on digital media piracy by threatening to kick copyright cheats offline is about to end â€" without solving the problem. Eric Pfanner reports from Serraval, France.

Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court ruled Sunday that the laws that governed the election of the country’s only operating house of Parliament as well as the body that drafted the country’s postrevolutionary Constitution were invalid. Ben Hubbard reports from Cairo.

A ruling by China’s top court is one of a number of recent signals that China’s long-assumed tolerance for foreign investment may be on the wane. Neil Gough reports.

Chinese state-owned companies have poured more than $2 billion a year and hundreds of workers into Iraq, and have accepted lower profits to win contracts. Tim Arango reports from Baghdad, and Clifford Krauss reported from Houston.

EDUCATION Millions of young people in India are seeking hands-on instruction in market-friendly skills. Private academies offering short, practical courses are filling the gap left by formal colleges and universities. Amy Yee reports from Ghaziabad, India.

ARTS The factory at 101 Spring Street in New York where the artist Donald Judd once lived and worked is opening to the public this month after three years of restoration. Alice Rawsthorn writes from New York.

SPORTS The British and Irish Lions got their 125th anniversary tour off to a winning start in Hong Kong, but it wasn’t the eight tries that they scored in the 59-8 triumph over the Barbarians that caused the biggest stir â€" it was the energy-sapping conditions the match was played in. Emma Stoney reports from Hong Kong.

Novak Djokovic learned about the death of his former coach, Jelena Gencic, after winning his French Open match in Paris on Saturday. Christopher Clarey reports from Paris.

Turks Abroad Show Support for Protests at Home

LONDON â€" Around the world this weekend, members of a widely scattered Turkish diaspora staged peaceful demonstrations in solidarity with the protests at home against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In Berlin, London, Paris and other European cities, demonstrators took to the streets to denounce the Turkish authorities’ response to the unrest sparked by popular anger at plans to demolish a park in Istanbul.

In New York, hundreds rallied at Zuccotti Park, the focus of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, to express their solidarity with those who have faced tear gas and water cannons from riot police during the Turkish protests.

In Sydney, Turkish expatriates called on Australians to support the protest movement in their country, which they said was directed at a government attempting to stifle democracy.

Many of the protestors abroad were Turkish students and immigrants among more than five million Turkish citizens who live and work abroad, predominantly in Europe. As many as half of those live in Germany, a magnet for Turkish emigration for half a century.

My colleague Tim Arango writes from Istanbul that many Turks view the large-scale redevelopment of Istanbul as a reflection of the growing autocratic ambitions of Mr. Erdogan and his government.

“In full public view, a long struggle over urban spaces is erupting as a broader fight over Turkish identity, where difficult issues of religion, social class and politics intersect,” Tim writes.

Those same issues are faced by Turks abroad, where Mr. Erdogan is said to have cultivated the large Turkish diaspora in order to lift the popularity of his Justice and Development Party, the A.K.P.

According to Der Spiegel in Germany, that has involved him acting as the self-styled patron of Turkish immigrants as part of a policy that critics say is driving a wedge between immigrant families and mainstream society.

It quoted Mr. Erdogan as saying at a campaign rally in Germany in 2011: “I am here to represent your interests. You are my family, and you are my siblings.”

In 2010, the government established an office for Turks Abroad and Related Communities to coordinate contacts with Turks abroad.

Kemal Yurtnac, who heads the department, said recently its aim was to transform Turkish people living abroad from just a “crowd of Turkish people” into an organized force capable of defending its rights, while working at the same time to influence decision-making in their host countries.

The stated objective is to help Turks abroad defend their democratic rights. However, critics quoted by Der Spiegel suggested the diaspora agency was being used as part of a lobbying effort on behalf of the Turkish government.

According to Ali Dogan, chief representative of Turkey’s Alevi community in Germany, politicians in Ankara had always tried to exert influence on Turks abroad. But no one, he told Der Spiegel, behaved as shamelessly, and strategically, as Mr. Erdogan.

Mr. Erdogan’s A.K.P. won 61 percent of the overseas vote in the elections in 2011, a higher proportion than in Turkey itself.

The expatriate tally was limited by a rule that Turks had to return home to cast their ballots at airport polling stations. The government is changing the rules in future elections in order to increase the overseas turnout.

Despite Mr. Erdogan’s relatively high popularity among the diaspora, the weekend demonstrations in Europe and elsewhere were an indication he also has some vociferous opponents among Turks abroad as he confronts the unrest at home.

A Photographic Feast in the South of France

Many photography festivals take place in southern France from the spring to fall, and the three-year-old Photomed, one of the newest and fastest rising, just opened in Sanary-sur-Mer, southeast of Marseille. The festival focuses on Mediterranean photographers and images, and is under the artistic direction of Jean-Luc Monterosso, founder and director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. Mr. Monterosso and his team have been successfully striking a balance between exhibiting big-name photographers â€" the edition this year includes Nino Migliori, Gabriele Basilico, Fouad Elkoury and the filmmaker Costa-Gavras â€" and showcasing the young and lesser-known, with the spotlight this year on Lebanon.

The town of Sanary, slightly off the beaten track â€" if it is possible to say that about the French Riviera â€" has a rich cultural history. Aldous Huxley wrote his “Brave New World” there, and the town provided sanctuary to many German intellectuals fleeing Nazism, including Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann and his family.

Photomed exhibits extend to nearby Bandol, the island of Bendor and to the Hotel des Arts in Toulon, where Gabriele Basilico’s exhibit on Mediterranean cities, “Urban Obsession,” is exhibited. This year’s Photomed Festival is dedicated to Mr. Basilico, who died in February. His widow, Giovanna Calvenzi, explained how Mr. Basilico, who had an aversion to monuments, loved recording cities “in movement, that were constantly evolving.”

It is fitting that the central room in the Hotel des Arts is devoted to Mr. Basilico’s riveting photographs of Beirut after the 15-year civil war in 1991. Mr. Basilico was part of an extraordinary group of photographers that included Robert Frank, Raymond Depardon, René Burri, Josef Koudelka and Fouad Elkoury that was commissioned to record the devastation in central Beirut. Mr. Elkoury, like Mr. Basilico, also studied architecture. At Photomed he is exhibiting a selection of solitary and intimate shots from his archives. Mr. Elkoury was visibly moved at the sight of Mr. Basilico’s pictures, saying “I think he had the greatest sensitivity of all of us. He was generous, and wanted to understand everything.”

Providing a sharp contrast to images of war-torn Beirut is the work of Paris Match’s celebrity photographers, Bruno Mouron and Pascal Rostain. An exhibition of their work, called “La Dolce Vita,” showcases black-and-white shots of celebrities such as Brigitte Bardot or Sophia Loren enjoying moments of Mediterranean life that have never been exhibited before.

“It was not aggressive in those days,” Mr. Rostain said. “These kind of photographs can’t be taken today â€" there are press attachés and so on â€" we actually spent time with people, we were lucky to be included in their intimacy.”

The filmmaker Costa-Gavras, now 80, opened up his personal archive of photographs to Mr. Monterosso for a preview at Photomed of what will be a major exhibition of his images at the end of June at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. Also in his 80s and no less fit is an Italian master of humanist photography, Nino Migliori, whose stunning photograph of a diver in mid-air snapped in 1951 was chosen for the Photomed poster. Work that spans 65 years of Mr. Migliori’s career is exhibited here, allowing viewers to see how his work evolved as he he experimented with different methods.

Mr. Migliori said he was happy to be sharing the gallery space with the work of some young Lebanese photographers, referring to a show curated by the photojournalist Tony Hage. Some members of this talented group has worked, like Mr. Basilico, on the concept of an evolving city, although in this case it is always Beirut. Caroline Tabet’s deliberately blurred images express her feelings about a city that is disappearing before her eyes because of demolition and reconstruction. Joanna Andraos’s staged photographs in a ghostly villa examine memory and traces of the civil war, while Tanya Traboulsi’s images of herself and her alter ego in their daily routine deal with solitude.

The island of Bendor, owned by the Ricard family of the pastis apéritif, lends an exhibition space each year to Photomed. Currently, two contrasting views of Greek photography are exhibited. Katerina Kaloudi’s nostalgic black and white images were taken between 1988 and 2005, but they seem to be straight out of the 1950s. Stratis Vogiatzis provides a particularly strong portfolio of photographs of fishermen and the fishing industry in nine Mediterranean countries taken over four years. There is a phantasmagorical element to his color photographs, and Mr. Vogiatzis aptly describes fishermen as “the gatekeepers to a world that is totally unfamiliar to us.”
Raised on the island of Chios, Mr. Vogiatzis said, “The sea is everything to me.”

Many other exhibitions are included on the Photomed itinerary, including the work of six photographers from Slovenia and a series of portraits of local winemakers in the Bandol region taken by the Moroccan photographer and filmmaker Daoud Aoulad-Syad, who was encouraged at the beginning of his career by Henri-Cartier Bresson. How could he not continue?

Photomed 2013 runs until June 16.