Hello.
A few weeks back the Economist magazine came out with GDP growth predictions for 2010. China was right in there at 8.5% to 9% growth for 2010, many even consider that conservative at certain sectors of the Chinese economy seem over-heated, namely housing and the stock market. I wouldn't be at all surprised if China cracked double digit figures this year, but that would depend more on the recovery of the rich world.
But what interested me most about the list was who China's competitors are in the race for the title of fastest growing country - by GDP - in the world.
First on the list was Qatar which is set to grow at 24.5% this year. That's an unbelievable number, funded mainly on natural gas but still remarkable. I don't know much about Qatar, I've never been, but I know they are close to completing the largest natural gas processing plant in the world; which is also the largest man made structure in the world. Would be a great shoot no doubt, I love construction and infrastructure photography.
Second and third on the list are Turkmenistan (11% growth) and Azerbaijan (9% growth). I visited Turkmenistan once on a three day transit visa and I can honestly say that I've never been to a more crazy place. Everyone is dirt poor and there are golden statues everywhere of their former leader who was nicknamed Turkmenbashi, or the father of all Turkmen. Turkmenistan has had a government change, since I bused my way across the country in 2003, and it seems they are opening up and developing their massive natural gas reserves. China just signed a massive pipeline deal a few weeks back. Whether any of that money filters down in to education and healthcare is a different story, it's most likely bound for Switzerland. Azerbaijan on the other hand is much less of a pariah state but suffers from much of the same cronyism. I also traveled through Baku in 2003 and found the city to be absolutely lovely, fantastic people and some stunning old architecture; but the Soviet hangover is very much in the foreground and dodgy border officials, alcoholism and violent crime still haunt Baku. It's also great that they son o the former president took over in his death, I mean, who wouldn't want to control the country's massive oil and gas reserves.
China placed forth at a perky 9%. Almost nobody talks about Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan but all the media limelight is saved for China. In the recent month they've jailed a human rights activist and put to death a British citizen; but in Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan that kind of stuff happens weekly. Bad bank loans are mostly likely going to start showing up on the balance sheets of Chinese banks in the coming months; being made to lend to dodgy people with no collateral must be an incredibly liberating feeling for a Chinese banking executive. Did someone say "State Induced Bubble"? I read something the other day that indicated that 40% of the money lent out by Chinese banks in 2009 ended up in the Stock Market and the Property Market. Sound investments, and is anyone surprised that the government has kept the tap running?
In fifth place is Uzbekistan (8% growth), in sixth is Congo-Brazzaville (7.8% growth), in seventh is Angola (7%), in eight place is Ethiopia (7% growth) and in ninth place is India (7% growth), and rounding off the top ten is newly healing Sri Lanka (6.5% growth).
I guess I am pretty surprised at how many dodgy countries are growing. I felt I was always part of the majority, believing that places like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan would never amount to much; and as the elite of their countries siphon off the spoils of their countries natural resources that is more and more likely to be true. To my knowledge India is the only true Democracy on the list. Sri Lanka was a complete surprise and Angola is the top ten's biggest oil producer. Of the entire list of top ten growth countries for 2010, one might say that China has the most balanced economy. Interesting list.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Friday, February 26, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: Artist Lecture @ Arta Gallery in Toronto
Hello.
Event Coming next week. See below:
March 3, 2010 at 7:00PM
ARTIST LECTURE: CHINESE TURKESTAN by Ryan Pyle
A lecture by award winning documentary photographer Ryan Pyle. Ryan Pyle has been visiting China’s western Xinjiang province regularly since 2001. Formerly known as Chinese Turkestan, this vast expanse of deserts and mountains has seemingly always been at a crossroads between cultures and time. For centuries, criminals, holy men, and traders tramped across the region; and it was out of this tradition that the Silk Road was established. Ryan has just returned to Toronto from a recent series of trips and is commencing a series of lectures on the fast paced development, and rapid loss of cultural heritage, in the region.
“The culture is vanishing before my eyes”, Ryan says, “each time I return something is missing: a market, an old shop full of blacksmiths, a local mosque”.
This talk is a continuation of, and an update to, Ryan's standing-room-only talk given at the Dylan Ellis Gallery in 2009.
(www.ryanpyle.com)
Address is:
Arta Gallery
suite 102, Building 9, 55 Mill St.
Toronto, On M5A 3C4
CANADA
http://www.artagallery.ca
Our telephone:
+1-416-364-2782
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Ryan Pyle Blog: Foreign Policy Magazine - Golf Obsession in China
Hello.
Dan Washburn and I recently had a lovely slide show in Foreign Policy Magazine. You can find it online HERE.
LINK: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/24/chinas_golf_obsession
Shanghai-based writer Dan Washburn and photographer Ryan Pyle teamed up earlier this year for a Financial Times Weekend Magazine cover story about Mission Hills Hainan. For more information about the development of golf in China, visit Washburn's Par for China site.
By: Dan Washburn
The future of golf has shifted to a most unlikely place: China, where statistically 0 percent of the population plays, where up until the mid-1980s the sport was banned by the communists for being too bourgeois, and where the construction of new courses is still technically illegal. It has been said about China, however, that while nothing is allowed there, everything is possible. So even during its supposed moratorium on golf course construction, China has managed to emerge as the only country in the world in the midst of a "golf boom": Hundreds, some say thousands, of courses are expected to open in the next several years.
The epicenter of this growth is China's tropical island province of Hainan, not long ago a lawless place with an economy built largely on smuggling, prostitution, and unchecked property speculation. Beijing is now determined to transform Hainan into a tourist paradise, with golf expected to play a major role (so much so that many joke Hainan is now a "special golf development zone" where mainland restrictions don't apply). While between 100 and 300 courses are expected to be built here, the most mysterious project -- and by far the most audacious -- is the latest offering from Hong Kong's Mission Hills Group, already owners of a 12-course resort in southern China's Guangdong province. Its Hainan club, when completed, will be the world's largest, with some 22 courses covering an area nearly 1.5 times the size of Manhattan. But the highly secretive Mission Hills development, a behemoth undertaking that displaced thousands of villagers, is also the most controversial, so controversial that it required a code name: Project 791.
With the central government guaranteeing a "top international tourism destination" by 2020, Hainan's destiny appears predetermined. No one disputes the poor province's many infrastructure needs, but the prospect of another decade of furious growth has some on the island concerned for its already fragile ecology and centuries-old ways of rural life.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: Forced Evictions & Beatings
Hello.
This is an a story that happens entirely too often, but it doesn't always have a chance to make the news. Apparently, according to the New York Times, thugs were sent in to "remove by force" residents, many of which are artists, that were set to be evicted from their homes in northern Beijing. After getting beaten up they were all arrested in an attempt, the following day, to march in to central Beijing in protest. Once again, dignity is stamped on in the face of development. The full article is below, but first a bit of commentary.
In China, money talks. And it never matters which side of the money question you are on. For example, decades ago artists were lured out of the city center to the remote sections of northern Beijing to create "Artist Villages". These villages were the breeding grounds in the 1980s for many of China's most successful and influential artists as the rent was cheap and there was a lot of collective creativity and collaboration. But more importantly the artists were given long term leases (money talking), some up to 30 years, on their properties and some invested huge amounts to create their dream studios and galleries. To anyone that has been out there, and I have been several times to several of the more remote artist districts, the region has been transformed by the artists. Now, however, the money is talking again.
The Government loves to sell land; especially in the midst of insane property valuations. The Government owns the land, and apparently property rights, leases, contract rights and legal rights don't mean a damn thing. So if the government can offload a huge parcel of land to a property developer for a large sum of money, whether people are still living there or not, they'll do it in a heartbeat. Development, and revenue creation, at all costs.
So this artist village has been sold off to a big property developer who wants to raze the whole place and put up more non-desrcript high rise apartments. The problem is the land is inhabited. And instead of paying people compensation to move, the government and their developer buddies often like to use force and intimidation - and why not when you can get away with a media black out and no legal action against you. The problem is, and this is why the foreign media has an important role in China, is that this kind of heavy handed behavior is exactly what many of Beijing's elite officials don't want outsiders to see. They don't want people in the west, who are keen to invest in China, to see that China is still a country of thugs and money hungry developers that don't mind whacking a few skulls to move things along quickly.
In many parts of the country, even in Beijing and Shanghai, business rules are still defined by a system of "village rules". This country has a lot of problems that it doesn't seem to be ready to address; one specifically being that government officials have little or no respect for the rights of the people they are supposed to be working for, that being the average Chinese inhabitant; I wouldn't dare use a term like citizen, as that would imply a certain level of respect and rights. Government leaders need to remember that their sole role in life is not to great wealth for themselves. Holding a position in government is about serving the people, not beating them with pipes so you can get a big bonus from a property developer. China has 1.3 billion people, and they deserve a high level of service. Is that need being met? I'll leave it up to you to decide. But the corruption that exists in China at every level, and this case wreaks of property developer and local official collaboration, is a prime example of how impossible it is to draw the line between where big business stops and the government begins. And the little man will always get stomped out.
I worked on a story about this with TIME magazine back a few years ago where Bamboo farmers lost their land to a bunch of government officials who wanted to build a hotel and karaoke bar on their land. The same thing happened, no notice. No compensation. No settlement. Just sticks, pipes and beatings. The only difference was that the story I worked on was in a remote part of Jiangsu province. Today it is in Beijing. Scary times. Full story is below.
Time Magazine Story: China's Fighting Farmers
Copywrite: New York Times
LINK to Original Story: LINK
_________________________________
February 24, 2010
Beijing Police Beat Artists Protesting Evictions
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — Nearly two dozen artists protesting the forced demolition of their homes and studios marched through the ceremonial heart of the capital before the police intervened and prevented them from reaching Tiananmen Square, the artists said Tuesday.
The protesters said they decided to take to the streets on Monday hours after scores of masked men swinging iron rods swarmed over their community on the northern edge of the city, which has been resisting redevelopment.
Wu Yuren, 39, a photographer and installation artist who was among those who were attacked, said six artists were sent to the hospital with minor injuries. He said the attackers, about 100 men wearing white face masks, had been sent by developers who wanted to clear the area for a large-scale residential project.
“They didn’t say a single word,” Mr. Wu said. “They just started beating us.” The police, he added, did not arrive for an hour and then sat in their patrol car until the attackers fled.
Another of those beaten, Satoshi Iwama, said he received five stitches after a blow to the head.
Although protests against forced evictions have become increasingly common in China, the aggrieved rarely succeed in venting their complaints on Chang’an Avenue, the heavily policed artery that passes in front of the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and Zhongnanhai, the residential compound of China’s top leaders.
Ai Weiwei, an artist and dissident who joined the demonstration, sent out a spate of Twitter messages detailing the march, which he said made it only about 500 yards before the police intervened.
“It was instinctive,” he said of the decision to protest. “We made a lot of noise, and I think we had a big impact.”
It is unclear whether the protest will force any action against the masked attackers or alter the course of development that threatens at least 10 clusters of studios where artists live and work on the fringes of the city. The clusters, called “artist villages,” house as many as 1,000 painters, sculptors and performance artists.
For two adjacent art districts that were the scene of the early morning protest, known as Zheng Yang and 008, it may be too late. In November, the developer cut off electricity and water, and most of the buildings have already been destroyed.
Xiao Ge, a curator who helped organize a roving performance last month to draw attention to the evictions, said the developers gave most tenants a week to move out.
Many artists are furious because they were lured to the villages with long-term leases — some for nearly 20 years — and encouraged to invest their life savings in renovations. Gao Qiang, a furniture designer who moved to Zheng Yang last August, said he spent almost $12,000 to fix up his studio after he was given a three-year lease. Although he is angry that he will lose most of his investment, he and other artists say they are most concerned about bullying from developers and, at best, the apathy from the authorities.
“It is not an issue of money, it is an issue of dignity,” said Mr. Gao, 38. He added that on Tuesday, the police told the artists that they would provide better security and try to reconnect severed utilities.
The police declined to comment.
The fight over the future of Beijing’s artist villages coincides with soaring real estate values and ugly scuffles over land expropriation, several of which have led to the suicides of those facing eviction. Widely publicized in the media, the suicides have helped prompt the government to consider modifying the nation’s urban redevelopment regulations.
Even if the proposed reforms, which would provide market-rate compensation for property owners and outlaw coercive evictions, are adopted, it is unlikely that they will help Beijing’s artists. Many artists live in officially designated rural areas, which are not covered by the measures.
Berenice Angremy, who has been a curator and art consultant in Beijing for the past eight years, said the repeated dislocations had been devastating to artists, both financially and psychologically.
“The government is trying to make Beijing a great cultural city, but without artists, it’s not going to happen,” she said.
_________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
This is an a story that happens entirely too often, but it doesn't always have a chance to make the news. Apparently, according to the New York Times, thugs were sent in to "remove by force" residents, many of which are artists, that were set to be evicted from their homes in northern Beijing. After getting beaten up they were all arrested in an attempt, the following day, to march in to central Beijing in protest. Once again, dignity is stamped on in the face of development. The full article is below, but first a bit of commentary.
In China, money talks. And it never matters which side of the money question you are on. For example, decades ago artists were lured out of the city center to the remote sections of northern Beijing to create "Artist Villages". These villages were the breeding grounds in the 1980s for many of China's most successful and influential artists as the rent was cheap and there was a lot of collective creativity and collaboration. But more importantly the artists were given long term leases (money talking), some up to 30 years, on their properties and some invested huge amounts to create their dream studios and galleries. To anyone that has been out there, and I have been several times to several of the more remote artist districts, the region has been transformed by the artists. Now, however, the money is talking again.
The Government loves to sell land; especially in the midst of insane property valuations. The Government owns the land, and apparently property rights, leases, contract rights and legal rights don't mean a damn thing. So if the government can offload a huge parcel of land to a property developer for a large sum of money, whether people are still living there or not, they'll do it in a heartbeat. Development, and revenue creation, at all costs.
So this artist village has been sold off to a big property developer who wants to raze the whole place and put up more non-desrcript high rise apartments. The problem is the land is inhabited. And instead of paying people compensation to move, the government and their developer buddies often like to use force and intimidation - and why not when you can get away with a media black out and no legal action against you. The problem is, and this is why the foreign media has an important role in China, is that this kind of heavy handed behavior is exactly what many of Beijing's elite officials don't want outsiders to see. They don't want people in the west, who are keen to invest in China, to see that China is still a country of thugs and money hungry developers that don't mind whacking a few skulls to move things along quickly.
In many parts of the country, even in Beijing and Shanghai, business rules are still defined by a system of "village rules". This country has a lot of problems that it doesn't seem to be ready to address; one specifically being that government officials have little or no respect for the rights of the people they are supposed to be working for, that being the average Chinese inhabitant; I wouldn't dare use a term like citizen, as that would imply a certain level of respect and rights. Government leaders need to remember that their sole role in life is not to great wealth for themselves. Holding a position in government is about serving the people, not beating them with pipes so you can get a big bonus from a property developer. China has 1.3 billion people, and they deserve a high level of service. Is that need being met? I'll leave it up to you to decide. But the corruption that exists in China at every level, and this case wreaks of property developer and local official collaboration, is a prime example of how impossible it is to draw the line between where big business stops and the government begins. And the little man will always get stomped out.
I worked on a story about this with TIME magazine back a few years ago where Bamboo farmers lost their land to a bunch of government officials who wanted to build a hotel and karaoke bar on their land. The same thing happened, no notice. No compensation. No settlement. Just sticks, pipes and beatings. The only difference was that the story I worked on was in a remote part of Jiangsu province. Today it is in Beijing. Scary times. Full story is below.
Time Magazine Story: China's Fighting Farmers
Copywrite: New York Times
LINK to Original Story: LINK
_________________________________
February 24, 2010
Beijing Police Beat Artists Protesting Evictions
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — Nearly two dozen artists protesting the forced demolition of their homes and studios marched through the ceremonial heart of the capital before the police intervened and prevented them from reaching Tiananmen Square, the artists said Tuesday.
The protesters said they decided to take to the streets on Monday hours after scores of masked men swinging iron rods swarmed over their community on the northern edge of the city, which has been resisting redevelopment.
Wu Yuren, 39, a photographer and installation artist who was among those who were attacked, said six artists were sent to the hospital with minor injuries. He said the attackers, about 100 men wearing white face masks, had been sent by developers who wanted to clear the area for a large-scale residential project.
“They didn’t say a single word,” Mr. Wu said. “They just started beating us.” The police, he added, did not arrive for an hour and then sat in their patrol car until the attackers fled.
Another of those beaten, Satoshi Iwama, said he received five stitches after a blow to the head.
Although protests against forced evictions have become increasingly common in China, the aggrieved rarely succeed in venting their complaints on Chang’an Avenue, the heavily policed artery that passes in front of the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and Zhongnanhai, the residential compound of China’s top leaders.
Ai Weiwei, an artist and dissident who joined the demonstration, sent out a spate of Twitter messages detailing the march, which he said made it only about 500 yards before the police intervened.
“It was instinctive,” he said of the decision to protest. “We made a lot of noise, and I think we had a big impact.”
It is unclear whether the protest will force any action against the masked attackers or alter the course of development that threatens at least 10 clusters of studios where artists live and work on the fringes of the city. The clusters, called “artist villages,” house as many as 1,000 painters, sculptors and performance artists.
For two adjacent art districts that were the scene of the early morning protest, known as Zheng Yang and 008, it may be too late. In November, the developer cut off electricity and water, and most of the buildings have already been destroyed.
Xiao Ge, a curator who helped organize a roving performance last month to draw attention to the evictions, said the developers gave most tenants a week to move out.
Many artists are furious because they were lured to the villages with long-term leases — some for nearly 20 years — and encouraged to invest their life savings in renovations. Gao Qiang, a furniture designer who moved to Zheng Yang last August, said he spent almost $12,000 to fix up his studio after he was given a three-year lease. Although he is angry that he will lose most of his investment, he and other artists say they are most concerned about bullying from developers and, at best, the apathy from the authorities.
“It is not an issue of money, it is an issue of dignity,” said Mr. Gao, 38. He added that on Tuesday, the police told the artists that they would provide better security and try to reconnect severed utilities.
The police declined to comment.
The fight over the future of Beijing’s artist villages coincides with soaring real estate values and ugly scuffles over land expropriation, several of which have led to the suicides of those facing eviction. Widely publicized in the media, the suicides have helped prompt the government to consider modifying the nation’s urban redevelopment regulations.
Even if the proposed reforms, which would provide market-rate compensation for property owners and outlaw coercive evictions, are adopted, it is unlikely that they will help Beijing’s artists. Many artists live in officially designated rural areas, which are not covered by the measures.
Berenice Angremy, who has been a curator and art consultant in Beijing for the past eight years, said the repeated dislocations had been devastating to artists, both financially and psychologically.
“The government is trying to make Beijing a great cultural city, but without artists, it’s not going to happen,” she said.
_________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Friday, February 19, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: Cyber Attacks
Hello.
According to a New York Times article today, the cyber attacks that Google reported in January came from two computer science schools in China. A computer scientist professor from one of the schools believes that it could be just a patriotic "nerd", or a bored student, interested in testing his/her hacking skills by trying to crack western websites. But the attacks or hacks that focus on the email accounts of human rights activists leads one to believe there is something much darker going on. The original story is below.
Just a note on this. The Chinese government has an ever-growing dangerous habit of allowing criminal behavior happen as long as it is projected at "foreigners" or non-Chinese entities. These cyber attacks seem to fit that bill. Other behavior that falls in line with this trend were the incredible anti-Japanese protests that shook cities throughout China in May 2005. At that time many university students took to the streets, smashing Chinese owned stores selling Japanese products and attacking the Japanese consulate in Shanghai and embassy in Beijing. Behavior that was condoned and allowed to occur for, in many people's views, for far too long. But what happens on the day that Chinese government ministries are hacked? What happens when bank account details of government officials are leaked to the media, along with the business interests of themselves and their family members? What happens when thousands of student take to the streets and instead of screaming anti-Japanese slogans they are looking for a second party to cheer for?
Just because the behavior is directed at others today, doesn't mean it won't ever be directed at The Party. Tides can change pretty quick in our modern age. Dangerous behavior is dangerous behavior, no matter who it is focused at.
Original Story LINK:
Copywrite: New York Times
_______________________________________
February 19, 2010
Two Chinese Schools Said to Be Tied to Online Attacks
By JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID BARBOZA
SAN FRANCISCO — A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.
They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.
Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.
If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.
Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.
The revelations were shared by the contractor at a meeting of computer security specialists.
The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, according to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry.
Jiaotong has one of China’s top computer science programs. Just a few weeks ago its students won an international computer programming competition organized by I.B.M. — the “Battle of the Brains” — beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities.
Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.
Within the computer security industry and the Obama administration, analysts differ over how to interpret the finding that the intrusions appear to come from schools instead of Chinese military installations or government agencies. Some analysts have privately circulated a document asserting that the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. But other computer industry executives and former government officials said it was possible that the schools were cover for a “false flag” intelligence operation being run by a third country. Some have also speculated that the hacking could be a giant example of criminal industrial espionage, aimed at stealing intellectual property from American technology firms.
Independent researchers who monitor Chinese information warfare caution that the Chinese have adopted a highly distributed approach to online espionage, making it almost impossible to prove where an attack originated.
“We have to understand that they have a different model for computer network exploit operations,” said James C. Mulvenon, a Chinese military specialist and a director at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. Rather than tightly compartmentalizing online espionage within agencies as the United States does, he said, the Chinese government often involves volunteer “patriotic hackers” to support its policies.
Spokesmen for the Chinese schools said they had not heard that American investigators had traced the Google attacks to their campuses.
If it is true, “We’ll alert related departments and start our own investigation,” said Liu Yuxiang, head of the propaganda department of the party committee at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.
But when asked about the possibility, a leading professor in Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering said in a telephone interview: “I’m not surprised. Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal.” The professor, who teaches Web security, asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
“I believe there’s two kinds of situations,” the professor continued. “One is it’s a completely individual act of wrongdoing, done by one or two geek students in the school who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills learned from the school, since the sources in the school and network are so limited. Or it could be that one of the university’s I.P. addresses was hijacked by others, which frequently happens.”
At Lanxiang Vocational, officials said they had not heard about any possible link to the school and declined to say if a Ukrainian professor taught computer science there.
A man named Mr. Shao, who said he was dean of the computer science department at Lanxiang but refused to give his first name, said, “I think it’s impossible for our students to hack Google or other U.S. companies because they are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level. Also, because our school adopts close management, outsiders cannot easily come into our school.”
Mr. Shao acknowledged that every year four or five students from his computer science department were recruited into the military.
Google’s decision to step forward and challenge China over the intrusions has created a highly sensitive issue for the United States government. Shortly after the company went public with its accusations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting that the country’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.
A report on Chinese online warfare prepared for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission in October 2009 by Northrop Grumman identified six regions in China with military efforts to engage in such attacks. Jinan, site of the vocational school, was one of the regions.
Executives at Google have said little about the intrusions and would not comment for this article. But the company has contacted computer security specialists to confirm what has been reported by other targeted companies: access to the companies’ servers was gained by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser.
Forensic analysis is yielding new details of how the intruders took advantage of the flaw to gain access to internal corporate servers. They did this by using a clever technique — called man-in-the-mailbox — to exploit the natural trust shared by people who work together in organizations.
After taking over one computer, intruders insert into an e-mail conversation a message containing a digital attachment carrying malware that is highly likely to be opened by the second victim. The attached malware makes it possible for the intruders to take over the target computer.
John Markoff reported from San Francisco and David Barboza from Shanghai. Bao Beibei and Chen Xiaoduan in Shanghai contributed research.
_______________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
According to a New York Times article today, the cyber attacks that Google reported in January came from two computer science schools in China. A computer scientist professor from one of the schools believes that it could be just a patriotic "nerd", or a bored student, interested in testing his/her hacking skills by trying to crack western websites. But the attacks or hacks that focus on the email accounts of human rights activists leads one to believe there is something much darker going on. The original story is below.
Just a note on this. The Chinese government has an ever-growing dangerous habit of allowing criminal behavior happen as long as it is projected at "foreigners" or non-Chinese entities. These cyber attacks seem to fit that bill. Other behavior that falls in line with this trend were the incredible anti-Japanese protests that shook cities throughout China in May 2005. At that time many university students took to the streets, smashing Chinese owned stores selling Japanese products and attacking the Japanese consulate in Shanghai and embassy in Beijing. Behavior that was condoned and allowed to occur for, in many people's views, for far too long. But what happens on the day that Chinese government ministries are hacked? What happens when bank account details of government officials are leaked to the media, along with the business interests of themselves and their family members? What happens when thousands of student take to the streets and instead of screaming anti-Japanese slogans they are looking for a second party to cheer for?
Just because the behavior is directed at others today, doesn't mean it won't ever be directed at The Party. Tides can change pretty quick in our modern age. Dangerous behavior is dangerous behavior, no matter who it is focused at.
Original Story LINK:
Copywrite: New York Times
_______________________________________
February 19, 2010
Two Chinese Schools Said to Be Tied to Online Attacks
By JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID BARBOZA
SAN FRANCISCO — A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.
They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.
Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.
If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.
Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.
The revelations were shared by the contractor at a meeting of computer security specialists.
The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, according to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry.
Jiaotong has one of China’s top computer science programs. Just a few weeks ago its students won an international computer programming competition organized by I.B.M. — the “Battle of the Brains” — beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities.
Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.
Within the computer security industry and the Obama administration, analysts differ over how to interpret the finding that the intrusions appear to come from schools instead of Chinese military installations or government agencies. Some analysts have privately circulated a document asserting that the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. But other computer industry executives and former government officials said it was possible that the schools were cover for a “false flag” intelligence operation being run by a third country. Some have also speculated that the hacking could be a giant example of criminal industrial espionage, aimed at stealing intellectual property from American technology firms.
Independent researchers who monitor Chinese information warfare caution that the Chinese have adopted a highly distributed approach to online espionage, making it almost impossible to prove where an attack originated.
“We have to understand that they have a different model for computer network exploit operations,” said James C. Mulvenon, a Chinese military specialist and a director at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. Rather than tightly compartmentalizing online espionage within agencies as the United States does, he said, the Chinese government often involves volunteer “patriotic hackers” to support its policies.
Spokesmen for the Chinese schools said they had not heard that American investigators had traced the Google attacks to their campuses.
If it is true, “We’ll alert related departments and start our own investigation,” said Liu Yuxiang, head of the propaganda department of the party committee at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.
But when asked about the possibility, a leading professor in Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering said in a telephone interview: “I’m not surprised. Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal.” The professor, who teaches Web security, asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
“I believe there’s two kinds of situations,” the professor continued. “One is it’s a completely individual act of wrongdoing, done by one or two geek students in the school who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills learned from the school, since the sources in the school and network are so limited. Or it could be that one of the university’s I.P. addresses was hijacked by others, which frequently happens.”
At Lanxiang Vocational, officials said they had not heard about any possible link to the school and declined to say if a Ukrainian professor taught computer science there.
A man named Mr. Shao, who said he was dean of the computer science department at Lanxiang but refused to give his first name, said, “I think it’s impossible for our students to hack Google or other U.S. companies because they are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level. Also, because our school adopts close management, outsiders cannot easily come into our school.”
Mr. Shao acknowledged that every year four or five students from his computer science department were recruited into the military.
Google’s decision to step forward and challenge China over the intrusions has created a highly sensitive issue for the United States government. Shortly after the company went public with its accusations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting that the country’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.
A report on Chinese online warfare prepared for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission in October 2009 by Northrop Grumman identified six regions in China with military efforts to engage in such attacks. Jinan, site of the vocational school, was one of the regions.
Executives at Google have said little about the intrusions and would not comment for this article. But the company has contacted computer security specialists to confirm what has been reported by other targeted companies: access to the companies’ servers was gained by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser.
Forensic analysis is yielding new details of how the intruders took advantage of the flaw to gain access to internal corporate servers. They did this by using a clever technique — called man-in-the-mailbox — to exploit the natural trust shared by people who work together in organizations.
After taking over one computer, intruders insert into an e-mail conversation a message containing a digital attachment carrying malware that is highly likely to be opened by the second victim. The attached malware makes it possible for the intruders to take over the target computer.
John Markoff reported from San Francisco and David Barboza from Shanghai. Bao Beibei and Chen Xiaoduan in Shanghai contributed research.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: BBC.com Wine in China
Hello.
I've put together a few stories about Wine in China over the last few years and today the BBC ran a small series of the work. See below.
The Chinese can drink with the best of them, a fact to which western beer producers have known for decades. But apart from local "rice wines" and beer, a taste for fine wine is building slowly, and both customers and investors are answering the call. As the New York Times stated back in 2008, China could, within a decade, become the "next Chile"; a destination for affordable and quality wine production. As wages rise and more and more Chinese look to acquire the fixings of the the upper class and those associated with a luxurious lifestyle, they will consume finer wines, many of which could be home grown in the future. While much of the landscape of wine growing in China is government run through State Owned Enterprises, there has been an opening for foreign investors and joint ventures. The landscape is littered by privately owned and funded wineries; and among them one of the industry leaders is the Hong Kong based Grace Vineyards who run and operate a handful of vineyards in China; but whose largest operation is the one I visited in Shanxi province.
My production of this work was a truely remarkable experience. The grape vineyards in Shanxi were well maintained and well tended to, the harvasting season was exciting and full of rich visual moments. I think what's important about Grace Vineyards is that they've full embraced the local community, which was obviously a stated goal by the government when considering this type of foreign investment in the region. The Vineyard works with local farmers for maintaining and harvesting, the grape pickers, and women sorted grapes are all hired from nearby villages and towns. It's not only providing an income and training for those involved but it's laying the foundations for future generations of wine development in the region. I wonder what Italian red wine tasted like after only the fifth year in production? That's where much of China is today in production.
In Shanghai there is a real focus on consumption and education. And this is where foreign brands dominate, as schools and importers are setting up shop in an effort to educate the upper reaches of society on the wines of the world. Will China's wine drinking masses follow suit? That's anyone's guess. Is there room for the wine industry to grow? Absolutely, but much of the initial growth is because the industry has started from scratch. Sustainable development will only come in time. Many are watching to see if this industry takes shape to become a global player. Only time will tell. Ryan Pyle - Shanghai, China.
Click here for the BBC LINK.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Monday, February 15, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: Managing Your Own Archive
Hello.
I just had this new blog posted on the Livebooks Resolve Blog. Please see below or click to visit actual posting.
LINK: Managing Your Own Archive
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Managing Your Own Archive
By: Ryan Pyle (Link: www.ryanpyle.com)
Date: November 6, 2009
I signed up with my very first company that offered an “archive hosting” service five years ago. At that time, my idea of what that meant was vague at best. Would they sell my pictures or just provide storage and display? Would the web system be user friendly? Would I need to buy a complicated manual? Did I need to hire an assistant for this?
Today archive hosting companies typically provide storage space, online galleries, search and client features, a user-friendly back-end management system, FTP, downloading, and hundreds of other functions that are incredibly useful if properly understood. All of this is usually bundled into a package that might cost roughly USD 50 per month. For a photographer like me, who is constantly moving, I find the service indispensable.
Today the main player in this game seems to be Photoshelter. After transferring my archive to their servers a year ago, I can say with some level of confidence that they provide a superior service, strong customer support, and a huge variety of functions (without trying to do too much, the most important thing in my opinion).
So how exactly do I manage my own archive? When I complete shoots for newspapers, magazines, and corporate clients, I upload the images to my archive, so that I can FTP the images to clients, share the work with friends and family using social media, public light-boxes, as well as display work to potential new clients, and allow regular clients to search for stock images to license. That might sound like a lot of work -- and it is. But make no mistake, this hard work pays dividends.
I particularly find the online archive a useful tool when working on longer-term stories or projects, because as work is completed it can be uploaded and shared for client or peer review. For example I recently photographed the construction of one of Shanghai's tallest buildings. The building owners wanted to see a monthly edit from my shoots, a sort of progress report, as we went. During the more than two years the project lasted, I was able to bring them up to speed with new imagery, as well as service the download needs of their staff in Shanghai and Japan. My archive created a seamless delivery system -- no more burning disks, no more Fedex. The online, hosted, and managed archive is here to stay.
A close friend of mine challenged my position on archive hosting by insisting that my agency should take care of all that “back-end” work for me. A lovely idea, but full-service agencies are pretty much a thing of the past. (In my experience anyway; if I'm missing some full-service agencies still out there, please let me know.) The new trend seems to be the fully functioning, independent photographer who manages his or her own pictures. Although my photographic work is represented by Corbis, they are far from a full-service agency. They don’t have an assignment division and rely on photographers to upload on their own. They don’t scan film, they don’t do captioning and key-wording, and they edit as they see fit. And all of this is actually a good thing, because it allows them to focus on the most important part of the process, selling my images.
Of course, that means a lot of the work agencies used to do is now the photographer's responsibility. While that may be a negative for some, it’s a positive for me, because I get to control the quality, layout, and organization of my own work, and then share it anyway I like. It allows me to have a closer relationship with my editors and -- for a young photographer like me who sometimes feels overwhelmed with a rapidly changing industry -- this offers a very rare sense of control. Plus I can link to my archive just about everywhere, post public light-boxes online using social media, and fully integrate my Photoshelter archive with my liveBooks website, in the hope that editors and image buyers can find what they are looking for with ease.
On a final note, in my particular situation, having an archive based in the U.S. is a crucial part of my business plan. Because I live behind The Great Fire Wall of China, FTP-ing work out of the country is a nightmare, so it’s best that I only have to do it once. Once I upload to my archive, it’s an easy click of the button to share work with multiple clients. Plus I never have to worry about missing a deadline because it takes 14 minutes to upload one image to a server outside of China!
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Friday, February 12, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: The Asian Institute
Hello.
I'm very honored today to write that I've been granted an Affiliate status at the University of Toronto's Asian Institute. The Asian Institute has over 100 scholars in it's membership, both visiting and UofT based, and several non-academic members which are called Affiliates. The latter is the category I fall in to.
All of this came about when I started returning to the University of Toronto a few years back to guest lecture in my old "Modern China" course. From those lectures I was invited to speak last year at a conference on Political Change in China at the Asian Institute and it went over well. Hopefully this Affiliate status will mean that I'll have a place to call home in the academic community as I continue to try and branch out and share my knowledge of China and my experiences beyond photography.
The Asian Institutes Mission statement is basically that it has become home to all things Asian. On their website they indicated:
The Asian Institute at the Munk Centre, University of Toronto, is home to over one hundred affiliated scholars researching and teaching on Asia. Our community of scholars spans a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Our regional breadth covers the entire Asian continent. The principal mission of the Asian Institute is to provide the intellectual core for cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and teaching on Asia.
As an affiliate member of the Asian Institute I'll hopefully be able to return to the University of Toronto and share my experience, lecture and exchange ideas and observations with other China watchers. It's a wonderful opportunity and I'm keen to make a return to the Asian Institute in March this year. I'll keep this space updated with lecture announcements or any other new information.
My Asian Institute Bio
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
I'm very honored today to write that I've been granted an Affiliate status at the University of Toronto's Asian Institute. The Asian Institute has over 100 scholars in it's membership, both visiting and UofT based, and several non-academic members which are called Affiliates. The latter is the category I fall in to.
All of this came about when I started returning to the University of Toronto a few years back to guest lecture in my old "Modern China" course. From those lectures I was invited to speak last year at a conference on Political Change in China at the Asian Institute and it went over well. Hopefully this Affiliate status will mean that I'll have a place to call home in the academic community as I continue to try and branch out and share my knowledge of China and my experiences beyond photography.
The Asian Institutes Mission statement is basically that it has become home to all things Asian. On their website they indicated:
The Asian Institute at the Munk Centre, University of Toronto, is home to over one hundred affiliated scholars researching and teaching on Asia. Our community of scholars spans a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Our regional breadth covers the entire Asian continent. The principal mission of the Asian Institute is to provide the intellectual core for cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and teaching on Asia.
As an affiliate member of the Asian Institute I'll hopefully be able to return to the University of Toronto and share my experience, lecture and exchange ideas and observations with other China watchers. It's a wonderful opportunity and I'm keen to make a return to the Asian Institute in March this year. I'll keep this space updated with lecture announcements or any other new information.
My Asian Institute Bio
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: Google Gives Us Hope
Hello.
Ai Wei Wei is a man who isn't afraid to speak his mind. He was once praised by the Chinese central government, for helping design the famed Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium, and not long afterwards was being beat up in a hotel room in Chengdu by a bunch of thugs as he wanted to learn more about the collapsed schools during the Sichuan Earthquake.
For who ever thinks that Ai Wei Wei might be a careless activist, think again. He is very careful with his words and his articles/options are always very well written and very well thought out. Which is why I feel anytime he is published in the English language media it's important to read his words and debate his point of view; as is common in any open society where the freedom of speech and of ideas are protected.
Pay special attention to his last paragraph. It's a stunner.
Original Story LINK
Copywrite Wall Street Journal
___________________________________
Google Gives Us Hope
If China can remain powerful though it limits freedom of speech, what kind of monster will it become?
By AI WEIWEI
China may have become the second-biggest economy in the world, but its political system remains stuck in the early 20th century. Even as Chinese people's horizons are broadening, the government clings to a one-party ideology that is hostile to personal freedom. Technology is making possible greater expression and political participation, but that has only prompted the authorities to work harder to stifle these impulses.
All this makes Google's decision to stop censoring to protect its China operations especially significant. First, it is encouraging for the Chinese people to see that a leading Internet company recognizes that censorship is a violation of basic human rights and values. Such controls damage the core ethos underpinning the Internet.
To stand up and speak out in a society in which those values are under constant attack requires courage and deserves moral support. Politicians and enterprises should not trade those basic rights for profits, because any short-term deal will only lead to long-term losses.
In several cases the judicial system has used information from an accused person's email as evidence of attempting to overthrow the government. This is a clear case showing how an authoritarian state can use technology not to benefit social life and improve political participation, but rather to violate the privacy of individuals and control their thinking, communication and expression.
From last October, I found that two of my Gmail accounts were being hacked by unknown intruders, and my Gmail messages were being automatically transferred to an unknown address. Other activists have reported the same intrusions to their Gmail accounts.
Most discouraging to those of us who are fighting for increased freedom is the tendency for developed nations to lower the bar to please China. They make excuses not to concern themselves with violations of human rights. To espouse universal values and then blind oneself to China's active hostility to those values is irresponsible and naïve.
When American officials come to China with a pretty smile and the soft tone of a so-called "friendly gesture," this only tells us how fragile and vulnerable these moral standards can be. It makes the people still in the struggle feel disappointed.
In recent months China has tightened its censorship over every medium, from the Internet to the mainstream media to instant messaging over mobile phones. This is the mark of a government that has lost confidence in its own ideology and is nervous about its power to control its own people. Stopping the free exchange of information ultimately hampers economic growth and opportunity, which is the Chinese government's main claim to legitimacy. The question then is how a state based on limiting information flows and freedom of speech can remain powerful. And if it can, what kind of monster it will become.
Mr. Ai is a Beijing-based artist and activist.
___________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Ai Wei Wei is a man who isn't afraid to speak his mind. He was once praised by the Chinese central government, for helping design the famed Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium, and not long afterwards was being beat up in a hotel room in Chengdu by a bunch of thugs as he wanted to learn more about the collapsed schools during the Sichuan Earthquake.
For who ever thinks that Ai Wei Wei might be a careless activist, think again. He is very careful with his words and his articles/options are always very well written and very well thought out. Which is why I feel anytime he is published in the English language media it's important to read his words and debate his point of view; as is common in any open society where the freedom of speech and of ideas are protected.
Pay special attention to his last paragraph. It's a stunner.
Original Story LINK
Copywrite Wall Street Journal
___________________________________
Google Gives Us Hope
If China can remain powerful though it limits freedom of speech, what kind of monster will it become?
By AI WEIWEI
China may have become the second-biggest economy in the world, but its political system remains stuck in the early 20th century. Even as Chinese people's horizons are broadening, the government clings to a one-party ideology that is hostile to personal freedom. Technology is making possible greater expression and political participation, but that has only prompted the authorities to work harder to stifle these impulses.
All this makes Google's decision to stop censoring to protect its China operations especially significant. First, it is encouraging for the Chinese people to see that a leading Internet company recognizes that censorship is a violation of basic human rights and values. Such controls damage the core ethos underpinning the Internet.
To stand up and speak out in a society in which those values are under constant attack requires courage and deserves moral support. Politicians and enterprises should not trade those basic rights for profits, because any short-term deal will only lead to long-term losses.
In several cases the judicial system has used information from an accused person's email as evidence of attempting to overthrow the government. This is a clear case showing how an authoritarian state can use technology not to benefit social life and improve political participation, but rather to violate the privacy of individuals and control their thinking, communication and expression.
From last October, I found that two of my Gmail accounts were being hacked by unknown intruders, and my Gmail messages were being automatically transferred to an unknown address. Other activists have reported the same intrusions to their Gmail accounts.
Most discouraging to those of us who are fighting for increased freedom is the tendency for developed nations to lower the bar to please China. They make excuses not to concern themselves with violations of human rights. To espouse universal values and then blind oneself to China's active hostility to those values is irresponsible and naïve.
When American officials come to China with a pretty smile and the soft tone of a so-called "friendly gesture," this only tells us how fragile and vulnerable these moral standards can be. It makes the people still in the struggle feel disappointed.
In recent months China has tightened its censorship over every medium, from the Internet to the mainstream media to instant messaging over mobile phones. This is the mark of a government that has lost confidence in its own ideology and is nervous about its power to control its own people. Stopping the free exchange of information ultimately hampers economic growth and opportunity, which is the Chinese government's main claim to legitimacy. The question then is how a state based on limiting information flows and freedom of speech can remain powerful. And if it can, what kind of monster it will become.
Mr. Ai is a Beijing-based artist and activist.
___________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Ryan Pyle Blog: Uzbek Photographer Jailed
Hello.
Well, most of us photographers out there know that things can be tough, really tough. But few of us ever are at risk from our home governments for documenting the lives of our common citizens.
Umida Akhmedova has been sentenced to jail for three years for showing her common countrymen as being backwards and poor. Yes, this is a shocking judgement; and one that only shows the true backwards way of thinking that exists within the government itself. Painful. Original story is below:
Copywrite BBC.com
Original LINK
___________________________
Uzbek photographer found guilty
A prominent photographer and film-maker in Uzbekistan has been found guilty of slandering the nation through her work.
Umida Akhmedova had been facing up to three years in prison for a series of photos and a film portraying people in Uzbekistan as backward and poor.
But after announcing the guilty verdict, the judge said the photographer would automatically be pardoned under an amnesty.
Ms Akhmedova said she would still appeal against the conviction.
Her work, funded by the Swiss embassy in Tashkent, focused on women's rights.
Last month the Uzbek government decided to prosecute the photographer for an album of work, published in 2007, depicting rural life scenes in Uzbekistan, and for a documentary film.
The film, The Burden of Virginity, focused on the experiences of young women immediately before and after marriage.
But a panel of experts appointed by the government ruled that her work would damage Uzbekistan's spiritual values.
'Aesthetic demands'
An exhausted-looking Ms Akhmedova, 54, had pleaded not guilty to all charges.
"I feel bad. I am a creative person, and sitting in this courtroom like a criminal is very unpleasant," she told AFP.
"I feel like I am the one being slandered," she added.
Ms Akhmedova put the blame for the trial not on the government, but on the expert panel it had convened to analyse her work.
The panel concluded in its report that the "photo album does not conform to aesthetic demands", a throwback to Soviet jargon, and that it would damage the country's "spiritual values".
Activists say the government uses its courts to silence critical voices.
'Chilling precedent'
The government denies the accusations and defends its tough policing policies as necessary to combat Islamist groups.
The trial sets a chilling precedent for artists, said Surat Ikramov, head of the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders of Uzbekistan.
Analysts said Uzbekistan believes it can afford to ignore criticism of its handling of domestic issues given its strategic location on the northern border of Afghanistan.
It had been trying to repair ties with the United States and the European Union damaged by its brutal handling of an uprising in the city of Andizhan in 2005.
___________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Well, most of us photographers out there know that things can be tough, really tough. But few of us ever are at risk from our home governments for documenting the lives of our common citizens.
Umida Akhmedova has been sentenced to jail for three years for showing her common countrymen as being backwards and poor. Yes, this is a shocking judgement; and one that only shows the true backwards way of thinking that exists within the government itself. Painful. Original story is below:
Copywrite BBC.com
Original LINK
___________________________
Uzbek photographer found guilty
A prominent photographer and film-maker in Uzbekistan has been found guilty of slandering the nation through her work.
Umida Akhmedova had been facing up to three years in prison for a series of photos and a film portraying people in Uzbekistan as backward and poor.
But after announcing the guilty verdict, the judge said the photographer would automatically be pardoned under an amnesty.
Ms Akhmedova said she would still appeal against the conviction.
Her work, funded by the Swiss embassy in Tashkent, focused on women's rights.
Last month the Uzbek government decided to prosecute the photographer for an album of work, published in 2007, depicting rural life scenes in Uzbekistan, and for a documentary film.
The film, The Burden of Virginity, focused on the experiences of young women immediately before and after marriage.
But a panel of experts appointed by the government ruled that her work would damage Uzbekistan's spiritual values.
'Aesthetic demands'
An exhausted-looking Ms Akhmedova, 54, had pleaded not guilty to all charges.
"I feel bad. I am a creative person, and sitting in this courtroom like a criminal is very unpleasant," she told AFP.
"I feel like I am the one being slandered," she added.
Ms Akhmedova put the blame for the trial not on the government, but on the expert panel it had convened to analyse her work.
The panel concluded in its report that the "photo album does not conform to aesthetic demands", a throwback to Soviet jargon, and that it would damage the country's "spiritual values".
Activists say the government uses its courts to silence critical voices.
'Chilling precedent'
The government denies the accusations and defends its tough policing policies as necessary to combat Islamist groups.
The trial sets a chilling precedent for artists, said Surat Ikramov, head of the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders of Uzbekistan.
Analysts said Uzbekistan believes it can afford to ignore criticism of its handling of domestic issues given its strategic location on the northern border of Afghanistan.
It had been trying to repair ties with the United States and the European Union damaged by its brutal handling of an uprising in the city of Andizhan in 2005.
___________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Friday, February 05, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: 2009 Earnings Report
Hello.
This is yet another blog in a series of looking back on 2009. Bare with me. Today's topic is income. How much money did I make in 2009? And how much of a hit did I take because of the financial crisis?
Well, I have decided to approach this sensitive topic today because almost nobody in this industry talks about how much they make, or how yearly income can drastically swing from one year to the next. Without giving actual hard numbers I'll attempt to fill you in a bit on my finances.
First of all, this year was tough. So far in my entire career the year of 2008 was the best year I've had with regards to income earned. In 2008 I earned about 20% more than I did in 2007. In 2009 I earned only about 60% of what I earned in 2008; meaning that I basically took a 40% hit on my income in 2009, mainly from the financial crisis. I got hit in several ways. Let me try to explain.
First, the numbers I am giving are income earned from photography only. Second, they include various forms of photography including fine art sales, corporate assignments, editorial assignments and stock. The biggest kicker this year was corporate work which makes up a sizable portion of my income, and that completely evaporated. Fortune 500 companies, many of which hired me in 2008, were nowhere to be found in 2009. The money spent on producing original work for annual reports and internal publications, at least for me, dropped almost 80% from 2008 levels. Editorial assignments were down as well, roughly 1/3 from 2008 levels. Stock sales were up around 10% but that is basically from 2 major commercial image sales, not a steady flow of purchases.
So here I am, in supposedly the greatest photography market outside a major war zone, and I'm getting clobbered. Losing 40% of your income in one 12 month stretch is brutal. It means that one has to cut back on living expenses and cut back on money spent re-investing in personal projects. Less travel and generally less film production. I would be surprised to see how other photographers faired. Did anyone out there make more money in 2009 than 2008?
I know that the bench-mark of our careers, and our art work, is not about dollar figures. But at the end of the day we need to be able to earn an income from our work, in order to live a fairly comfortable life and support our families - this is true in every walk of life, in every profession. Money matters. Sad but true.
If Ryan Pyle Photography was a publicly held company my stock price would have fallen like a stone, my bond status would be the equivalent of junk. It's a sobering thought. Here's hoping that in 2010 I can make a Steve Jobs like recovery and rejuvenate image sales, work on longer projects and win one of those ever-elusive grants that I keep constantly applying for. If any of that does happen, you can be sure to be the first to know.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
This is yet another blog in a series of looking back on 2009. Bare with me. Today's topic is income. How much money did I make in 2009? And how much of a hit did I take because of the financial crisis?
Well, I have decided to approach this sensitive topic today because almost nobody in this industry talks about how much they make, or how yearly income can drastically swing from one year to the next. Without giving actual hard numbers I'll attempt to fill you in a bit on my finances.
First of all, this year was tough. So far in my entire career the year of 2008 was the best year I've had with regards to income earned. In 2008 I earned about 20% more than I did in 2007. In 2009 I earned only about 60% of what I earned in 2008; meaning that I basically took a 40% hit on my income in 2009, mainly from the financial crisis. I got hit in several ways. Let me try to explain.
First, the numbers I am giving are income earned from photography only. Second, they include various forms of photography including fine art sales, corporate assignments, editorial assignments and stock. The biggest kicker this year was corporate work which makes up a sizable portion of my income, and that completely evaporated. Fortune 500 companies, many of which hired me in 2008, were nowhere to be found in 2009. The money spent on producing original work for annual reports and internal publications, at least for me, dropped almost 80% from 2008 levels. Editorial assignments were down as well, roughly 1/3 from 2008 levels. Stock sales were up around 10% but that is basically from 2 major commercial image sales, not a steady flow of purchases.
So here I am, in supposedly the greatest photography market outside a major war zone, and I'm getting clobbered. Losing 40% of your income in one 12 month stretch is brutal. It means that one has to cut back on living expenses and cut back on money spent re-investing in personal projects. Less travel and generally less film production. I would be surprised to see how other photographers faired. Did anyone out there make more money in 2009 than 2008?
I know that the bench-mark of our careers, and our art work, is not about dollar figures. But at the end of the day we need to be able to earn an income from our work, in order to live a fairly comfortable life and support our families - this is true in every walk of life, in every profession. Money matters. Sad but true.
If Ryan Pyle Photography was a publicly held company my stock price would have fallen like a stone, my bond status would be the equivalent of junk. It's a sobering thought. Here's hoping that in 2010 I can make a Steve Jobs like recovery and rejuvenate image sales, work on longer projects and win one of those ever-elusive grants that I keep constantly applying for. If any of that does happen, you can be sure to be the first to know.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: Melamine is Back
Hello.
I had a chance to work on a story about Melamine in 2007, I went to the heart of Shandong province in eastern China and visited a few factories that produce the chemical and sell it to food companies. The picture above is from that series. The caption is below.
Image Caption from 2007: A worker looks through the locked front doors at the Anying Bilogical Technology Company's factory near Xuzhou, China. Recently the Xuzhou Anying Biological Technology Company has come under fire for producing wheat gluten with a chemical Melamine in it that has been responsible for the deaths of dogs and cats in North America.
In an effort to destroy confidence at the highest possible levels, and strip away public opinion even further, it appears that the Melamine scandal from 2007-08 is creeping back in to news again.
When the Melamine chemical was introduced to the global food supply by the Chinese in 2007, it artificially increases the protein content in food products, there was global condemnation of all things Chinese. Dog food was tainted, as was powered baby milk. In the US, dogs started flopping over and dying. In China, babies started showing up at hospital emergency rooms with kidney stones.
In an effort to crack down on dodgy food, and prove to the world that China wasn't killing all things cuddly, the central government sweep in and supposedly cleaned up the mess. Well, according to this article below things aren't so rosy. The Melamine tainted products that poisoned two years ago were not all destroyed, they were stockpiled to be used again.
Victims receive no compensation and lawyers trying to unite victims and bring cases against the government get thrown in jail. If China wants to become a super power and have the respect of the global community, they are going to need to create a system of values and punishments that are in line with the rest of the world. This peasant, uneducated, mentality of making a quick buck while harming people's health dominates the countryside and much of the business community in this country. Consumers are not protected from the criminally responsible companies by the government, and then when they complain publicly they face the wrath of the government to keep quiet and save face. In other words consumers are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Sounds like a great way to increase domestic consumption, screwing the domestic consumer will only push more Chinese people to buy foreign made products for nothing more than the fear of massive medical bills.
Yes it is true. Throwing party officials, and business leaders, in jail is difficult. Opening up the legal system to be fair, independent, impartial and non-political is incredibly difficult. But every year China waits to make these reforms is another year of sick babies and dying dogs. All things cuddly are going to hell in a hand-basket.
Best lines in this article are the last two, which essentially read "This country needs accountable political reform, and fast".
Copywrite: South China Morning Post
___________________________
Melamine milk put back on the market
By: Fiona Tam
Updated on Feb 02, 2010
Mainland dairy producers have been using melamine-tainted milk powder seized more than a year ago in new products, prompting the authorities to launch a 10-day emergency crackdown.
Dairy products from at least five manufacturers - in Shanghai, Shaanxi, Shandong, Liaoning and Hebei - have been pulled from shelves after they recycled tainted milk powder, Xinhua reported.
Some cases were reportedly covered up by the authorities for more than eight months before the public was warned about the new danger.
Health Minister Dr Chen Zhu vowed at a weekend meeting that all toxic milk power stored in warehouses across the country would be seized and inspections stepped up to stop dairy companies recycling the toxic chemical.
"A few unscrupulous companies and individuals still put profit above conscience and neglect the public's health, even though [the government] has launched a high-pressure clampdown on food safety," Xinhua quoted a statement from the work conference as saying yesterday.
Beijing vowed to implement stricter safety measures in late 2008 after a toxic milk scandal saw nearly 300,000 children fall ill with kidney problems and stoked widespread public anger in the country and shock around the world.
Twenty-one people who made or sold melamine-tainted milk powder were convicted over that scandal. Two were executed. But the authorities failed to trace how dairy companies handled the millions of tonnes of recalled milk powder.
State media reported that many tonnes of the tainted powder were stored in warehouses and reused after the scandal died down.
Toxic milk powder reappeared in the market last year after the dairy industry rebounded and the supply of milk was not able to meet demand. The industry's output jumped 32 per cent last year, and nearly 80 per cent of dairy companies made profits.
One of the new cases came to light last month when the Shanghai Panda Dairy Company was closed and three executives arrested for adding the industrial chemical to watered-down milk to make it appear sufficiently rich in protein to pass mandatory quality tests. The city denied its food safety bureau tried to cover up the scandal but it took nearly a year for the investigation to be made public.
One of the other cases saw three people from a Shaanxi dairy manufacturer arrested in December for selling 5.25 tonnes of melamine-tainted milk powder to a Guangxi dairy company in September.
Elsewhere, ice cream made in Liaoning and Hebei provinces was found to contain illegally high traces of the toxic chemical, while a Shandong company intentionally laced a milk drink with melamine.
The return of the toxic milk has raised serious questions about Beijing's previous food safety crackdown. Guangxi mother Lan Juanxian, 23, said she had lost all confidence in mainland-made dairy products after her two-year-old son was diagnosed with kidney stones.
"There is very little individuals can do under a system that gives a new post to former top food safety official Li Changjiang, who was sacked over toxic milk, but jails rights activist Zhao Lianhai after he united melamine victims," Lan said.
Her family has stopped using all mainland-made dairy products. She has received neither the compensation nor free treatment for her son promised by the central government.
Copyright © 2010 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All right reserved
___________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: Photolife Magazine Spotlight
Hello.
Photolife magazine is the big photography industry magazine in Canada and this month I was in their spotlight as part of their "Focus on Canadians" section. While it is true, I am Canadian, I have never actually seen a copy of this magazine and only peeked at the online edition a few times. But the folks there are very nice and seem to have their finger on the pulse of not just Canadian photography but the international scene.
Anyways, very excited to have a little exposure and very glad they asked me to be included. Links below.
SPOTLIGHT LINK: Photolife Magazine Link
Photolife Newsletter: LINK
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Photolife magazine is the big photography industry magazine in Canada and this month I was in their spotlight as part of their "Focus on Canadians" section. While it is true, I am Canadian, I have never actually seen a copy of this magazine and only peeked at the online edition a few times. But the folks there are very nice and seem to have their finger on the pulse of not just Canadian photography but the international scene.
Anyways, very excited to have a little exposure and very glad they asked me to be included. Links below.
SPOTLIGHT LINK: Photolife Magazine Link
Photolife Newsletter: LINK
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: China Rejects Polluting Projects
Hello.
According to the Chinese government, you always have to state that when you offer up government statistics because they can never truly be taken as fact, the government rejected USD 27.9 billion of project proposals because they would increase pollution levels.
Now, what can we truly make of this? Window dressing or serious mind shift? And, if it is true and given the already polluted state of the Chinese landscape, how absolutely terrible must these projects of been to be cancelled by a government bent on economic growth and job creation? I shudder to think.
China is already the worlds' largest emitter of greenhouse gases and is also perhaps the world's most aggressive pursuer of greener forms of energy. A strange, but true, contradiction. China has reduced energy use per unite of DGP by 16 percent at the end of 2009, from baseline levels in 2005; and while that is impressive no one really knows what that means and how it'll influence quality of life.
In my opinion China will become a world leader in renewables and they will continue to be world leaders in R&D, and an important testing ground for everything from LED Lights to Solar, Wind, Biofuel and carbon capture. With no congress standing in the way the central government in China has a free hand to pursue their agenda to clean the country up with a free hand; and it'll be interesting to see, especially in secondary cities, how this improves quality of life.
I can tell you that for the last 8 or 9 years Shanghai has improved, in both air quality and bluer skies, every year. Now, I'm no government spokesman, but I really believe that. I live here, day in and day out. If I thought I was risking my life and things were getting worse I most likely wouldn't base myself in China. But I think the opposite. City life, especially in Shanghai and Beijing, is improving. The rest of the country is lagging far behind, and it'll be a great test to see how the government can help pull up the rest of the country, their political power and legitimacy will depend on this fact. More big, nasty, polluting projects will be cancelled in the future; but let's hope it makes a real difference.
Copywrite: Bloomberg
______________________________________
Bloomberg News, sent from my iPhone.
China Rejects $27.9 Billion of Polluting Projects
Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) -- China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, rejected 190.48 billion yuan ($27.9 billion) of project proposals last year because of concern they will worsen pollution, the environment agency said.
As many as 49 projects weren’t approved in 2009 as they failed to meet government requirements, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said on its Web site today.
China is bolstering efforts to reduce pollution and boost the use of cleaner forms of energy such as wind, solar and natural gas. The country plans to cut output of carbon dioxide gas per unit of gross domestic product by as much as 45 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, the State Council, or cabinet, said in November.
“The environment ministry will increase the investigation into projects in 2010 and make timely releases of the environment quality of major rivers and cities,” the ministry said in a separate report.
China is on course to meet a 2010 target of cutting energy use per unit of GDP, said Xie Zhenhua, the country’s top climate negotiator, said on Jan. 9.
The country has reduced energy use per unit of GDP by 16 percent at the end of 2009 from the base level in 2005, Xie, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, said then.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ying Wang in Beijing at ywang30@bloomberg.net
Find out more about Bloomberg for iPhone: http://m.bloomberg.com/iphone
______________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
According to the Chinese government, you always have to state that when you offer up government statistics because they can never truly be taken as fact, the government rejected USD 27.9 billion of project proposals because they would increase pollution levels.
Now, what can we truly make of this? Window dressing or serious mind shift? And, if it is true and given the already polluted state of the Chinese landscape, how absolutely terrible must these projects of been to be cancelled by a government bent on economic growth and job creation? I shudder to think.
China is already the worlds' largest emitter of greenhouse gases and is also perhaps the world's most aggressive pursuer of greener forms of energy. A strange, but true, contradiction. China has reduced energy use per unite of DGP by 16 percent at the end of 2009, from baseline levels in 2005; and while that is impressive no one really knows what that means and how it'll influence quality of life.
In my opinion China will become a world leader in renewables and they will continue to be world leaders in R&D, and an important testing ground for everything from LED Lights to Solar, Wind, Biofuel and carbon capture. With no congress standing in the way the central government in China has a free hand to pursue their agenda to clean the country up with a free hand; and it'll be interesting to see, especially in secondary cities, how this improves quality of life.
I can tell you that for the last 8 or 9 years Shanghai has improved, in both air quality and bluer skies, every year. Now, I'm no government spokesman, but I really believe that. I live here, day in and day out. If I thought I was risking my life and things were getting worse I most likely wouldn't base myself in China. But I think the opposite. City life, especially in Shanghai and Beijing, is improving. The rest of the country is lagging far behind, and it'll be a great test to see how the government can help pull up the rest of the country, their political power and legitimacy will depend on this fact. More big, nasty, polluting projects will be cancelled in the future; but let's hope it makes a real difference.
Copywrite: Bloomberg
______________________________________
Bloomberg News, sent from my iPhone.
China Rejects $27.9 Billion of Polluting Projects
Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) -- China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, rejected 190.48 billion yuan ($27.9 billion) of project proposals last year because of concern they will worsen pollution, the environment agency said.
As many as 49 projects weren’t approved in 2009 as they failed to meet government requirements, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said on its Web site today.
China is bolstering efforts to reduce pollution and boost the use of cleaner forms of energy such as wind, solar and natural gas. The country plans to cut output of carbon dioxide gas per unit of gross domestic product by as much as 45 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, the State Council, or cabinet, said in November.
“The environment ministry will increase the investigation into projects in 2010 and make timely releases of the environment quality of major rivers and cities,” the ministry said in a separate report.
China is on course to meet a 2010 target of cutting energy use per unit of GDP, said Xie Zhenhua, the country’s top climate negotiator, said on Jan. 9.
The country has reduced energy use per unit of GDP by 16 percent at the end of 2009 from the base level in 2005, Xie, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, said then.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ying Wang in Beijing at ywang30@bloomberg.net
Find out more about Bloomberg for iPhone: http://m.bloomberg.com/iphone
______________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
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