§ Advent of locally developed social media (Weibo in China)

• Chinese political leaders/authorities are going to great lengths to ensure that China and its communications system control the information from capitalist powers such as the United States.

• officials of China’s Public Security Bureau (an agency that concerns itself with crimes ranging from murder to cultural espionage)

  • • are trying to contain the influence of the Internet by erecting around China a so called “firewall” or fanghuo qiang (a direct translation from the English).

    • The more prevailing and popular phrase for it is wangguan (literally, “net wall”), a name that invokes many centuries of Chinese efforts to repulse foreign invaders.

Sina Weibo

• microblogging service that has been called a Twitter clone

  • • launched on August 14, 2009

    • allows people to create, distribute, and discover Chinese-language content

• has become the premier platform for important political and social discourse in China

• March 2017 -- Sina launched Sina Weibo International Version

• June 2020, Weibo was among 58 other Chinese apps that were banned by the government of India

• carefully censored by the Cybersecurity Administration of China

  • • Sina Weibo has attracted criticism over censoring its users

    • sets strict controls over the posts on its service

      • • URL shortening services (including Google's goo.gl), or containing blacklisted keywords are not allowed on Sina Weibo

        • Posts on politically sensitive topics are deleted after manual checking

        • Nearly 30% of the total deletion events occur within 5–30 minutes

        • nearly 90% of the deletions happen within the first 24 hours

China's Dark Turn -- John Stossel

§ Anti-IMF and anti-World Bank activism

Background on the IMF

• International Monetary Fund (IMF) was founded at the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire in 1944

• Goals: the IMF promotes market economies, free trade, and high growth rates

Supporters of the IMF believe:

• the global economy delivers markets that operate with maximum efficiency, speedily directing goods and services wherever there is demand for them and always expecting the highest returns possible

• the new economy is the only way to bring prosperity

  • • the kind previously enjoyed only by industrialized nations to the developing world

Overview of Criticism of the IMF

• Who they are:

  • • nongovernmental organizations ranging from labor unions to tribal-rights activists

• their view:

  • • the global economy is an untamed juggernaut that is neither inevitable nor desirable

    • a force that rewards the few and impoverishes the many

    • They assert that globalization diminishes the sovereignty of local and national governments

    • transfers the power to shape economic and political destinies to transnational corporations and global institutions such as the IMF and the WTO

    • the hallmark of globalization—rapid economic development—is responsible for:

      • • the destruction of the environment

        • the widening gap between rich and poor societies

        • the worldwide homogenization of local, diverse, and indigenous cultures

• in recent years, many of the nations who created the IMF (United States, United Kingdom, etc.) have joined the criticism

Anti-IMF movement after the Cold War

• global justice movement emerged in the 1990s

  • • international coalition of political activists, concerned scholars and students, trade unions, women’s and religious organizations, environmental groups, and others, hailing from rich and poor countries alike

• believed that free-trade, market-driven corporate globalization had:

  • • lowered labor standards

    • fostered ecological degradation

    • prevented poor countries from protecting themselves against financial speculators

    • ignored local cultures

    • disregarded human rights

    • enhanced global inequality, while favoring the interests of large corporations and the rich countries

• late 1999 -- in Seattle at a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) tens of thousands of protesters—academics, activists, farmers, labor union leaders from all over the world—descended on Seattle in what became a violent, chaotic, and much-publicized protest.

• 2001 -- alternative globalization activists created the World Social Forum, an annual gathering to coordinate strategy, exchange ideas, and share experiences, under the slogan “Another world is possible.”