It is my pleasure to announce a talk from Professor Merkel.
Helmut Merkel has many, many fancy activities done in his life.
And when I asked him what was most important, he said,
well, the first time was his examination
in a software engineering examination
with Hans Moyer some time ago.
He didn't say when exactly.
He is really a professional working
in the economics and business environment,
has worked for many companies.
I think his last apartment was, at that time,
a well-known kalstadt.
And he has done lots of the work there, good work.
But as you know, sometimes life is different.
These days, he's living since quite some time in Hong Kong.
And this is a challenge.
Whoever has visited Hong Kong a couple of times,
this is just impressive what happens at that town.
And, well, this is China since a couple of years.
And now, Professor Dr. Helmut Merkel
will tell us what the IT and the IT revolution
has done to the Chinese people and the Chinese society.
So I'm really proud and happy that he has come over
from Hong Kong and will now give the presentation.
Thanks you very much, Professor Merkel.
And thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I'm very proud to be here.
And I'm also very happy I am able to support your conference
because this conference is also something I was attending
many times in my professional life.
But let me make something clear.
I'm living in Hong Kong, but I'm not talking about Hong Kong.
Hong Kong and China is different.
I think you all know.
Even it's so close, and we can drive by train every day
to Shenzhen is not really Hong Kong is not really China.
What I try to figure out is really the change,
the revolutionary change during the last couple of years I was witnessing.
For me, it's very exciting to see how it happens,
with how much speed it happens, and what happens.
So what happens, I would like to show you.
I have chosen two major topics and one summary.
First, because this is an IT conference as well,
I would like to give you an impression about the IT industry in China,
especially the market development during the recent years,
and especially the internet development.
And then I also would, in my second topic,
I really would dive into this change of the internet in China,
and how internet changes the society.
And because we all hear and can read and can see censorship is a topic,
I, yes, will also address this area,
and I would like to differentiate so you can understand better what it really means.
So let me start.
Number one, a brief overview.
It's just headlines.
The software industry in China is very big already.
It's fast growing.
You saw last year, it's 35%.
In 2011, the whole volume will be about 150 billion US dollar, the whole market.
So it's already a big, big market.
The IC industry is the backbone,
and it is driven very much by the automotive industry,
by the airplane industry, aviation industry,
and by the telephone, telecommunication industry.
And I would like to show you some more figures.
You all know Lenovo is one of their biggest IT companies now.
IBM still plays a big role in China,
but they have their own structure,
and it's very impressive to see how fast it develops.
And then this next headline is old already.
On April 17th, China announced they have a completely developed new supercomputer.
It was on April 17th on rank five.
And now we heard yesterday an announcement that they have won number two now
in the world rank list, which is also very impressive.
And then I would like to show you how the internet developed.
But first, let's dive to the IC industry first,
because this is something we have to realize.
The whole market for IC products in 2007 was about US$260 billion,
and China was consuming 34% of this whole IC production in 2007.
You see how it develops during the last couple of years.
And the forecast for 2011 for the whole market worldwide is about US$400 billion,
and China will consume about 36%.
So it is really growing fast.
And if you see what they develop in the infrastructure, it is really amazing.
But we also can see the 34% today is about US$88 billion,
and only US$8 billion is local production.
It will extend in 2015 to about US$15 billion.
The government invests a lot of money in the stimulus package.
They have only for this period about US$30 billion only for investment in this area,
what we call local production.
But the whole market will be already US$144 billion.
So that means, the percentage-wise, the own local production is not really growing.
So it is only keeping up.
But if you compare with European figures, the whole European market is about US$28 billion.
We have a bit an idea what it really means, what is going on there.
And this map is legally published.
You can see down there is Lily Feng, industry research and statistics from semi-China.
It is really amazing if you have visited Suzhou close to Shanghai.
This is the location with the most factories today.
It is really a high-tech city meanwhile.
But also in other cities and even remote cities, the development is quite fast.
And this is the announcement on April 17th that this computer, the fifth biggest on the ranking list,
is out there is 3B.
This is the statistics.
And only in eight years, it was developing from what we see here, Godson 1 to Godson 3B.
And it was at that time on rank number five in your list.
And this announcement is yesterday or the day before yesterday that we have now the development nebula on rank two.
So this is really impressive, no doubt, but just shows with how much energy and with how much really ambition the country is going forward in development.
Let's dive into the internet.
This map you can also download is free from CNN IC, China.
And you can really enlarge it into all details.
You can see the trunk size.
You can see the volume.
You can see every country and everything.
So the latest figure in January this year published is officially 384 million user now in China, online user.
But it does not mean China is a huge country, as we all know.
It does not mean it is just equally dispersed.
It is not.
We can see the red areas here on the map.
These are the developed provinces.
This is where industry takes place.
This is where infrastructure is developed.
And in these red zones, all together, about 28% of all users, all others, all over the country.
And here are the figures again.
I use a lot of text in my slides, but I think it is also a documentary.
It is also a documentation.
So even if I don't dive into every sentence, you can have later really the whole text.
This is also officially a copy from the statistics, which is published every half year in China about the development of the internet.
So in 2009, and this is also an amazing number, 83% of the users access internet at home.
Shows really also the purpose of use, and this is really impressive.
And then we also see the most important applications is online music, is online news, 80% and search engines.
We'll tap this subject later when we talk about Google.
So search engines is 73%, and what's coming up now, and you can see the figure is 80% increase for online payment.
There are online portals today in China, huge online portals for all together.
In China, UnionPay has published now in May, this figures came out, nearly 200 million credit cards.
They have 1 billion debit cards published all together.
And these four internet payment platforms allow really everybody to pay with a debit card or PayPal all over the world.
Even not really 100% of all countries, but in many, many countries, also in Germany, Chinese people can use their debit cards.
So this is really a very impressive development.
So online payment is one of the infrastructural gaps of the last years, also logistics in the last years.
But we can really say in the red zones, in the red country zones, in the red provinces, this gap is really closed and absolutely comparable with what we have in the Western countries as well.
So online trade, and this is a very good, how to say, comparison with what we do here, has reached 248 billion yuan, which is about 27, 28 billion US.
In Germany, the so-called e-commerce and also distant selling catalogue business is about 40 billion.
Also compared with the whole business in China in 2009 is already more than half.
And we guess that this forecast is true in 2013.
Ladies, they will make about 100 billion, 110 billion euro already in this area, which is significant.
This is their biggest company.
Alibaba.com is an engagement of Yahoo, as you all know.
The quarterly numbers just published, the net profit is 330 million yuan, which is about 33 million euro or 36 million US.
So it's a very big company in this e-commerce field.
And then we all can read Taobao, it's the biggest online portal, which also belongs to Alibaba.com, just made a joint venture with Yahoo Japan.
And Baidu, this is Google, the search engine of China, Baidu did a joint venture with Rakuten, a Japanese online shopping mall, which is also very successful.
So we can really say China's commercial online players are ready to expand outside China, and this is what's going to happen right now.
They have everything, they have their online platforms, they have the payment platforms, and they have the logistics in all these countries.
So it's really amazing.
Let's come to the next subject, the use of the internet in China.
This is a portal, which is, I'm definitely sure if you are not a Chinese, you don't know qq.com, but I can tell you qq.com is one of the most visited portals.
It is online games, it is also news, it's trend information, it's also selling.
And if you look at the statistics, I use Alexa here, you can see in China, it's, wait a moment, in China, it is on rank number 10, and worldwide, it is ranked 48, Google is clearly ranked number one.
So you have an idea what it really means, that means 384 million people are using that regularly, and this is exactly what happens.
The other one is Baidu, and you can also already see from the lookalike, it looks like Google, and it has the same function, it is a searching engine.
So it is in China, clearly ranked number one, you can see here, worldwide it is ranked number seven, it's again the number of users behind, which make this happen.
Another one, yoka.com, a very important portal for young people, for women, it's a trend portal, it's all the brands, what you wear tomorrow, you can see there,
and what you buy tomorrow, you see also there. So it is a very important, very important portal for the economy, and QQ for sure has one of the biggest ranks, but this also has in China, ranked 121.
To give you a comparable number, the company Otto, is a very familiar German brand in distance selling, and e-commerce in Germany has ranked 900 something in Germany, comparable.
So 121 rank in China means really something. This is the world rank, this is about the rank, what Otto has only in Germany.
So we can really say the 3 million websites in China are a really important platform, it's news, it's blocks, it's advertising, it's search engines, it's trends and everything, and people use it every day.
And we also saw earlier 80% of the users use everything from their home office or from their living room or whatever.
So what else do people do with the internet? And I think this is something we really have to dive into a bit.
But once again, to make it clear, these red zones are really the zones with all the big conglomerates. We have Beijing area here, we have Shanghai here, we have Guangzhou in the south, Hong Kong is here exactly, so it's really only a small portion.
The most, only here in this area, we have about 800 million people living and the remaining 500 are dispersed in the rest of the country.
So clearly when we talk about internet in China, we have to talk about censorship. And I identified three areas of censorship and I would really like to make this clear and point it out what happens there.
We have number one, so-called prohibited content, restricted technology. That means clearly the Chinese government does not allow at all, pornography for example is absolutely forbidden, there is no way, the liberal way how the society in the west handles is nothing which is accepted, it's completely forbidden.
And the Chinese government also uses technology and restriction of technology to make sure that they really control all the development. I'll give you some examples later.
But secondly, we have a bloggers culture in China which is really increasingly important and I will show you later what the purpose is and for me the reason why this bloggers culture developed like it developed is simply because Chinese people do not like their public governmental controlled press.
That means the newspapers, they all know what we read there is governmental driven, so they go really to alternative platform and this is all the blocks, all the news which you can read there and it works like a newspaper.
The more often you click and use, it really goes up in the rank and if it's clicked by hundreds of thousands of people it is on the highest rank so you can really see what people click and you can read what's going on, so the information there is very fast.
And I have a third area identified, I call it official adoption of the internet in China and this is also something we should really be aware, it's very interesting to combine everything.
So we have simply a red light logic there, we have red lights for everything what is forbidden in China and is not wanted, is absolutely forbidden, is restricted and if you live there you can only accept because there is no choice.
Then we have this blockers culture which is yellow, it is sometimes loud, sometimes it is not wanted and sometimes it's wanted and then we have the green color for the official adoption and I give you also examples for this part so it's very interesting to understand.
What I saw, this development happened only within a few years, exactly started with the Tibet crisis before the Olympic Games, before that we already have blocks, we already had these developments but not so intensive and not so really clear, we can see it now after that is a very sharp picture, very clear picture.
So I'll give you examples, this is the official catalogue of the 22 subjects which are absolutely forbidden and you can see for example here adopt an ironic or mocking tone in describing natural disasters, accidents, terrorist incidents, wars or disasters and then again and then display sexual content and so on.
This is the most often repeating line, sexual content and so on, so this is strictly forbidden, no way and I tell you what, if you use internet here, I don't know how often you click this kind of content, it's something you can live without.
So I don't like to say everybody can live without because everyone is individual but I think most of the people accept in China that this is strictly forbidden and I never heard earlier some criticism about that.
So this is the official site, you have it in your documentary, you can go back later here to review in detail, there's also examples behind, so it's very clear. So here is the red light, definitely red light for everything.
Then we have technology, restricted technologies, this is news which came out on May 20th just recently telling Financial Times reported that government cracked down online mapping, I can tell you I cannot confirm, I was in Shanghai last Friday, I used my Google Maps on my Blackberry, I could use it without any restriction,
I cannot confirm. So I don't know, maybe it's in some areas, maybe in military restricted areas but not in Shanghai, I could use it.
Then we have this headline, Google challenge to China over censorship, I think really nobody knows exactly what's behind Google when they entered China years ago, they accepted all those rules.
And we all know also there's lots of cases after 9-11 in the United States, if you key in keywords in Google which are close to content which could be terrorism like it was also filtered and also selected, so I don't really understand what exactly came up
and why Google then really stressed, they changed to Hong Kong and I can also try that, if I'm in Beijing and Shanghai, I can still access Google, I was reading these days in the German newspaper, you cannot, I can read, I am using public telephone lines or public wireless LAN, I can access Google still, it is now through Hong Kong but I still can access.
Baidu shares chump after Google announces to leave China, yes sure, this is the competitor and this is the one who gains directly some advantages out of that.
Then we read Chinese censors cut off Twitter hotmail in Flickr on June 2nd, this will happen again now in few days because 4th of June is Tiananmen memory date and then this will happen again, definitely because all mass incidents are suspicious and therefore they will take action before, clearly.
China's great firewall, this is also something we read, spreads overseas, this is also what happened, so we can still continue with lots of news about these restrictions, for example in Xinjiang region after riots, the internet was completely shut down for now 18 months, it came back 2 weeks ago on Sunday, so they really used this internet as a technology,
to stop communication and make sure that it is more restricted and more controlled, so again red light for these areas.
Then I enter into the blockers culture, culture of discoveries and it started, I mentioned already, with the teabag crisis, you see these pictures, people demonstrating, the red flag there and then you see here all the thousands of people, by the way is a kafu store in China, this happened when kafu announced a shop before the Olympic games,
they will not support the Olympic games, within hours we had millions of SMS protesting against this decision of kafu and we had millions of emails asking for participation to really to stop kafu to do what they announced, so this was one of the first incidents we could watch,
where the internet and the SMS, the mobile telephones were used to activate thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of people, so it continues, this is now yellow, nobody stepped into that, the government did not stop, did not block, did not delete anything, everything was open.
Then another case, this is during the Sichuan earthquake, this guy is a high official in the Sichuan area and he was screening all the time, whenever he was taking a photo of him during the earthquake, he was screening, so lots of blockers start to publish his photo and they really condemn his expression and so on,
so it's just an example, thousands of people also picked up this news and showed that this guy should not grin, and then another story, a teacher was sacked because he was running away from his school during the earthquake, so this was reported later and he was in public discuss, did he ride or can I understand, he should not do that and this kind,
so again it's yellow, nobody was stopping them, there were also stories about officials took blankets or took tents away, so even the photos of these people were in the internet, so this was during the earthquake,
and then the next story during the Cannes movie festival Sharon Stone was asked by a journalist, how do you commend the Sichuan earthquake, she replied, well if you don't behave well, bad things can happen, so she said this sentence and within minutes this news was on the stations and within hours the whole China netizens protested against that,
the reaction of the war was they cancelled the contract within 24 hours with her and they apologized to the Chinese people and said sorry, Sharon Stone, I don't know why she apologized now recently, a couple of weeks ago, it was in an interview for the first time, she tried to explain why she said that,
but she was also a victim of this new behavior in the netizens world and again nobody stopped it, it was supported, then this is a very famous example, this guy is a high official, a blocker took this photo with this watch and his cigarettes
and then if you analyze the photo, it is a cigarette of this brand, costs about 200 renminbi, more than 20 euro per pack and the watch he is wearing is a Rolex, so the photo was published and the blogger said on Zuhu.com why this official can afford a Rolex watch and can afford so expensive cigarettes, the party investigation confirmed corruption
and he was sentenced within a few months for 12 years, so this is something which can happen and it happens every day, even Xinhua, the official newspaper, they have a homepage meanwhile where they follow up with all these corruption cases which are from public, so yellow, nobody steps into that.
Even churches are not sure anymore, they have also the fear that they are discovered by people in the internet who show their cases, this guy is also very famous, he had a mistress and it was published and some of his private life came out and he was also sentenced for 15 years because of the corruption.
Then this looks like a nice holiday trip, yes it is a nice holiday trip, the agenda, the schedule was published also in the internet on Zuhu.com and it was an official delegation, government delegation to Egypt, so after this was published, the government immediately sacked the officials and they had to pay back
the whole money and they also were dismissed from their job, again it is obviously officially wanted, so this guy is the Lord Mayor of Shenzhen
and this is a comment we can see now in the news, the internet has become a top concern for mainland officials who are increasingly being scrutinised by the public, a government adviser said.
But if you think now that somebody there are steps into that and is blocking these blocks, it is not true, not at all, it is supported officially, you can see that.
So we can see from here, and this is what Mr Yasheng Huang said, China may not have free speech but it has freer speech because the internet has provided a platform for Chinese citizens to communicate with each other and the communication can include criticism of the government.
I was talking with a friend this morning in China and he said, oh what happened with you Mr Schroeder?
I said, well he was criticised and he did not like to be criticised, he said, oh what a pity, if everybody steps back here who is criticised, we would not have anybody in government here.
So this is really something which is normal meanwhile, so again it is yellow.
This is the latest campaign and then I stop with my examples, after all those corruption cases the party recommended the top officials to publish their income, their income tax and their private property.
And this is now really a storm in the internet, the netizens, they come out of the screen here and they throw off their clothes and say, look I am naked, show me what you have and this guy here has girls obviously under his coat and a lot of money.
So this is the discussion which is right now going on and I tell you I think this initiative is even stronger as what we saw before.
You can also go to this link and you can at least try with Google translation what the article is telling but it is really amazing how this blocking scene overtakes power every day more and more, so clearly yellow to green.
These people meanwhile Han Han and I Y Y, they are really I would say very brave people because they tell in public what they think and they often are very straight.
I Y Y was involved in an incident, he was also beaten by police, he flew out in Germany, had a surgery here and now he is back in Beijing and I really can say these people are really brave what they do.
They dare to communicate their opinion openly, also this lady but hundreds more is only a few of them, they are very very famous.
Again it is yellow, nobody really dares to block off.
So let's come to the overall conclusion, this picture looks for sure very ridiculous for you.
The Chinese people because of the language synonyms they often use pictures to explain something and this picture stands clearly for censorship.
The crab, here the word, everything what happens in China politics today since Kung Fu Zi is under harmony.
So the word for harmony is exactly the same, a different pronunciation for river crab.
So therefore this river crab stands for this official censorship under harmony.
So then the three watches this crab wears sounds like the so called three representatives concept of former leader Jiang Zemin and this three representatives also sounds like wearing three watches.
So river crab and wearing three watches has the same meaning then as really censorship, it's not coincidentally that this is a Rolex.
So the officials wearing Rolex who sends them.
Then clearly this river crab is very famous all over because it is really the satirical political charge icon for the river crab society.
This horse is also very famous meanwhile is a grass mat horse in English, is a horse which is living in the Mongolian steppes.
And for the Chinese people you can read that, I don't translate what it means, it's a very vulgar expression and you could never key it in, in the internet it would immediately be censored.
Immediately but a similar sound is this one means also this river crab, so the meaning of this river crab is this grass mat horse becomes a symbol for the Chinese netizens which tells we know how to bypass to get around censorship.
So the green dam which was a danger for a while was also a fear of the people and Ai Weiwei, he really also personally protested and we all know the Chinese government did not dare to implement this green dam.
This was the first victory of all the public against the plan of the government to implement this green dam policy.
Coming on a higher level talking about censorship, these are all the countries today which do have censorship, strong censorship but if we say there is no censorship is the exception.
It does not necessarily mean the internet is free and Bernard Cushner, the French Foreign Minister, he said it very very clear just recently in an international newspaper he explained clearly because of extremists, resistance and all those incidents.
We have to take into account that the internet is used against the order, the public order therefore the states have to do something for sure but I find the Chinese way quite interesting and this is really now the proof that officially the internet is adopted by the party and by the government.
So you can see here Hu Jintao made after the Sichuan and after the Olympic Games, he was for two hours about in the internet, he was answering questions from blockers, he was even seen in video you could directly click on and he sat here promising at the end to read the messages carefully in the video.
In the future and if he cannot read himself, somebody else will do it for him. So telling people I know what's going on, I will keep track and this is the official recognition in China that the internet became the most important feedback platform for politics.
So all this happens within only a few years, started with the Olympic Games, Sichuan earthquake until now but the development is really tremendous and now the light is really on this part on the green.
So this is Mr Wen, he also just recently a couple of months ago took 20 public questions and I tell you we also have taboo subjects in Germany, you cannot talk about certain subjects in public, you will immediately run into a lot of criticism but he really replied and answered those questions openly without any restriction.
Clearly, very clearly and this also shows that there is a new quality now also in this communication. No need to read this text, the only important sentence and this explains later why the adoption of the internet is progressing so fast.
This is Houtzintao, after the Congress in April, he was giving a speech about the party discipline, about also the discipline of the delegates and so on and he said resolutely fight all corrupt acts and take actions to push forward, under corruption and clean governance.
And this is clearly the reason why they started campaigns already. This is a magazine comparable with Newsweek or comparable with Fortune in China and the last volume in December was talking only about the storm of the internet against corruption, what happened in 2009.
And if you go into it and check who is the editors, who is involved, it's all very high party members which shows clearly this is a launched campaign. This is really a launch campaign, that means it is really clear, this is the name of the magazine Xiao Kang means modest life.
It is really clear that the party is doing everything to use the internet to control their own party, the remote branches out there in the whole country because nobody else can control the public. Nobody else can control the public and this is exactly what's going to happen.
We can discuss now about will they be able to stop it in a few years? I don't know. It is amazing what happened meanwhile and how much power those bloggers have and how much power the internet has in the public opinion.
So this is a sentence also recently set by a high official by repeatedly exposing inter-citizen corruption. The internet has become an effective tool in policing officials and this is the adoption of the internet by the party. Exactly.
So as a summary we can say there are areas in the internet with this huge internet platform we have in China, 384 million people. We have areas which are strictly censored, no way to get access to things which are under the opinion of the party, forbidden, it's restricted, you cannot access.
There are other areas which we have the yellow light which is accepted. Nobody steps really into that. It's all the public opinions about incidents which go on, the bloggers' opinions sometimes are blocked but in most cases you can read for days or even for weeks before they disappear.
And there is clearly an area which has a green light which is used by the party which is adopting what's going on to control the party. I think the party understood that the internet is a powerful tool to clean up the structures, to clean up the moral and to clean up the attitude and this is exactly what's going on.
This news we could read also on May 18th here, only this last sentence, the association launched its second recruitment drive Friday for volunteer web sensors to target corrupting content. So you can see that really here they are on the way even to higher volunteer people to check the internet, to go through it.
And deliver all those information to clear up the internet. So this is my last picture and it shows the weekend on 16th in an internet cafe in Urumqi, Urumqi Xinjiang. Xinjiang had no internet for 18 months because after the incidents there the government shut down the internet completely.
And this is an interview of an owner of a karaoke club. He said, our income almost doubled after the internet was cut. I said the manager called Chang at the Baian karaoke club in Urumqi, the regional capital, but our bookings dropped sharply over the weekend because the internet is back.
It seems like our good times are over. So even here in this area you can see it is impacting the whole life, not only private, also the public. And my forecast is China will have about 450 million users within the next year.
I'm quite sure in May next year or June next year when we update the figures we have 450 million users. So it's still increasing tremendously and the power of the internet, of this public power, becomes really something we should watch carefully.
And I really also look forward how the government will handle this power in the future. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Professor Merkel. Really impressive. We have still time for some questions. Are there any questions?
Whoever has some questions should go to the microphone. There's no one so far, so I will start. If you see the Chinese society, as you are very familiar with that, how is the behaviour of the society?
Is she accepting that this kind of pressure from the party is coming on? Is it just because they had it all time? Or do you see a movement in that?
Well, we could go back to history now, but it's a 5,000 years long history. It would take some time to explain. So if we just look into the society recently, I think Chinese people really respect their authorities and they respect the government and they respect people.
And I can also tell you from my personal experience, Hu Jintao, when they are really highly respected, but I can also say they are very good leaders in terms of content, in terms of statements, very clear, very direct.
And that's the reason why there is no question Chinese people accept the way, how they are managed. They know they are 1.3 billion people. You cannot manage easily. You have to take some control. They accept and they respect.
They are forces, no doubt. What we saw in Xinjiang and also in other areas, which try to destabilize the society, but I think what we saw in this area, the government will be very strict and very energetic to stop this.
What is, from your point of view, the difference to, for example, Russia? Do you have experience there?
I think it's a completely different process, not comparable at all. What we all experience as neighbors of Russia, when the revolution took place, the Iron Curtain came down, the society was destabilized within short time.
And what we experience now, it is rebuilt and it is restructured. And yes, also the internet plays a certain role, but by far not the role like in China.
In China, we never had such a destabilized situation. Deng Xiaopeng, after the Cultural Revolution, he opened the window and he opened China for me as one of the greatest political of the century.
But the country was with him and after him, never really in a destabilized situation, like Russia.
Thank you very much. Is there any more questions?
I have a question. You mentioned the example of our president, Kühler, and perhaps you have not heard or seen the attack which happened to him in the last two weeks.
I was reading that, yeah.
But I have the question. Would this really be possible in China? I mean, if the second important person of this country would be attacked by bloggers.
Yeah, most importantly, second important, I doubt this blogger's scenery looks to me like a public inquisition.
Jan, well, let me answer your first question first and then your comment.
Chinese journalists and also foreign journalists in China respect, never would dare to attack such a person so aggressively as what we saw here.
Why he was so touched at the end, well, I think no reason to discuss here.
I still, if you don't see in detail what happened, I think you cannot understand outside why somebody steps back from the highest position only because he's criticized.
Well, this is a very individual comment also. Clearly, in China, nobody would really break this zone of respect. Nobody would break in such a zone of the respect. Nobody would.
This bloggers, yes, this is clearly, I did not say you said it, but I confirm this power becomes kind of inquisition and this is the threat.
What we have in a democracy is power by the people, but organized in many steps. At the end, you can ask, is it not democracy?
After you cannot do any public project anymore because there's always somebody who is blocking it. This is another discussion, but here, this is the danger.
I really see that people can chase people. People can chase people. If somebody is not wanted, there was a case right now.
One of the bloggers, he was sentenced for a big amount of money for Chinese people for 20,000 US dollars because he was saying in the internet, a movie star died a couple of weeks ago or a month ago.
He said, this guy said, he was dying in a bed of a prostitute, a very, very vulgar sentence. He was now sentenced because there was his widow, she accused, and the public court now sentenced this person and he apologized.
If this happens every day, this becomes dangerous.
Please, take the mic.
You have emphasized prohibition of pornography, but you have in the list, and I've stressed it many, many times, but in the list that you have shown, number one and two were for free-thinking person was rather disturbing because the sentence was that if someone presents the ideas that are contrary to accepted views,
the view of political, historically accepted facts and so forth, how does it stand against the free examination of history, the inquiry into historical events and the nature of people who played the role in history?
If you cannot do that in a sense, and that's even more important from intellectual point of view than pornography.
Thank you very much for this point. I was choosing pornography because it is so clear. Everybody with a common sense would easily agree.
With this subject, it is really difficult. It is a kind of prohibition, as you said, not to dive into that.
On the other hand, what I can see through many years now, there is clearly also in the public, even in newspapers, public discussion about the achievements of Mao Zedong. Earlier, it was not possible.
Two years ago, on October 1st, the first time I saw that opposite on Tiananmen Square was a picture of Mao Zedong, the first time there was a picture of Sun Yat-sen facing exactly opposite of Mao Zedong.
This was the first time I saw that in public in China. So there is clearly a process on the way, which starts also to talk about this historical truth, whatever it is. We all know how difficult that is.
Also, the discussion with Taiwan, also with cultural issues. This is something you can find books about that. Books are printed. It is not such a subject like in Germany or in the US. History is something few people only consider or really dive into.
For me, it is a very important part of my life. I really like also to dive into that. I can see clearly that many years ago, there was a starting point, people exchanged and people also criticized. About Mao Zedong, you find many, many, many critical statements today, even in the internet. It is not any longer an untouchable person.
But still, it is number one and two on the list.
Okay. One more. Oh, yeah, please go ahead. Oh, sorry. Okay, thanks.
Well, most of the examples that you did give were rather, how do you say that, negative or depressing people, bloggers, they did take care that someone got 12 years of prison or 15 years of prison.
And when the internet was shut down, then the coronavirus did live between the internet and the coronavirus vanished. Also, positive things like children saved or new companies formed or something typically Chinese that came positively out of the internet.
I tried to do that in my first part to show you how prosperous the e-commerce development, the IT firms are. If you add the three sectors, I only showed the three sectors, it is more than 100 trillion business coming from the internet and coming from IT.
And this is clearly the positive impact on the economy. I tried to show that in the first part.
Are there typically IT companies that do it differently in China, a different way of doing it than we do it here in the West? Are there examples?
Many Western companies are in China having joint ventures and doing corporations. They, sure, clearly also adopt methods and technologies. This is what they did for years now from Western companies.
But there's also a big industry with small, medium-sized companies doing service. I cannot see, maybe it is not so structured as we like to show it, you know?
But this is really a very fast and very prospering service business growing.
Thanks.
Okay. If there's no more questions, then I want to thank you, Professor Merkel.
Thank you very much.
Very nice talk.
And all the insight you gave us about Chinese society and the impacts the internet has, thanks a lot.
Welcome.