Global Voices » Marta Cooper

United Kingdom: Making Sense of the London Riots

Marta Cooper — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:16:12 +0000

Communities across London woke up to a wave of destruction on Tuesday morning, following another night of anarchic rioting and looting. At least 560 people have been arrested and over 100 charged since rioting began on Saturday, August 6, 2011. In the most recent developments, the violence has seen its first fatality, as a man shot in Croydon on Monday night died after being admitted to hospital.

It has also been confirmed that Mark Duggan, the man whose death last Thursday sparked the riots, did not open fire on police before he was shot - as police first claimed - but did draw a weapon. A post-mortem revealed that he died from a single gunshot wound to the chest.

Earlier today, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that 16,000 police officers will be deployed in London tonight — up from 6,000 yesterday — in an attempt to control new outbreaks of violence. With the capital's resources stretched, reinforcement police are being brought in from around the country. Shops across the capital have also been ordered to close early and board up their storefronts.

Damaged window of Primark store in Peckham, south London. By J@ck!' on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Explosive footage of the violence has spread online relentlessly through the day. Images circulated of looters stealing anything possible — from footwear to rice – setting properties ablaze; of crowds clashing with police; residents fleeing danger; rioters being chased; and also of a leaflet found in Dalston, east London, advising rioters how to avoid identification.

This disturbing YouTube video also shows an injured youth being helped from the ground and subsequently robbed by a group of young men in London (exact location unknown).

A shopkeeper in Peckham shared her experiences of Monday night's violence on Londonist.com:

As shopkeepers who live above their shop we felt in equal measures relieved that we were there to keep an eye on things, and terrified – for if they had broken into the shop what, precisely, could we have done about it? There came a point where I was standing behind our shop shutters, in the dark, with looters just one metre away. I questioned whether our shutters would hold. I prayed they’d move on. I hoped they wouldn’t spot me, skulking there, transfixed. I started shaking a little bit. To see such utter contempt and rage so close, on the snarling-yet-gleeful faces of the perpetrators, makes you question what it is that makes up a human being.

On the Going Undergound blog, Annie Mole wrote that last night's looting made her feel “ashamed to be a Londoner”:

I have no solutions. I have only shock, horror and a slight edge of fear. I have no idea when this inexplicable behaviour will stop. I have no idea how it could have happened in the first place. This is a London that could possibly be changed forever.

More comforting news came in the form of a mass clean-up operation in the capital this morning. Aided by social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to organise volunteers and share information, communities across London mobilised to clean debris.

The scenes have been ones of solidarity: this afternoon, volunteers raised their brooms in unison at one clean-up in Clapham Junction, south London. In Peckham, locals stuck post-it notes to a boarded-up Poundland shop descrbing what they love about their neighbourhood.

In between the two extremes of discord and morale, the country now finds itself trying to make sense of the events, which have highlighted deep tensions in the relationship between political leaders, the police and the communities they aim to serve.

While condemnation of the violence has been widespread, many say they are unsurprised at its occurrence, arguing that social exclusion, disenfranchisement and tensions between police and communities in the riot areas had been at the boiling point for decades. On the Huffington Post, Lola Adesioye argues that racial tensions are at the core of this exclusion:

The underlying issues - in particular a sense that black Britons are routinely ill treated by the establishment, the police especially - still have not been resolved. Tensions between black youth and the police in the inner cities have not dissipated. On the contrary, suspicions are endemic. Black leadership is desperately lacking, and the country refuses to tackle these major challenges in any substantive way.

Another blogger, journalist Doug Saunders disagrees with the notion that racial tension gave way to this week's violence:

Tottenham was the site of the terrible Broadwater Farm riot of 1985, which also began with a protest over a police shooting – but that was another London, deeply divided along racial lines, with a furious and socially excluded Caribbean community battling an all-white and explicitly racist police force. This week, by contrast, both the rioters and the police are multicoloured.

For British writer Kenan Malik, this week's protestors lack a concrete political motive, unlike those of the 1980s:

Those [1980s] riots were a direct challenge to oppressive policing and to mass unemployment. They threatened the social fabric of Britain’s inner cities and forced the government to rethink its mechanisms of social control. Today’s riots may have made the Metropolitan police look inept, revealed politicians as out of touch and brought mayhem to some parts of London, Liverpool and Birmingham. But there is little sense that they pose a challenge to social order.

He added:

It’s precisely because of disenfranchisement, social exclusion and wasted lives that these are not ‘protests’ in any meaningful sense, but a mixture of incoherent rage, gang thuggery and teenage mayhem.

Youth worker Symeon Brown opined:

@symeonbrown: It is true these young people do not have a manifesto but if their actions are not political then clearly we need a new word for ‘political'.

Many, including the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, predicted that the government's controversial austerity measures were a recipe for political and social unrest.

Writing at Brand Republic, Hugh Salmon said:

[The Coalition] have failed to look back over their shoulders and consider the people the cuts affect.

And, because they don’t understand people, and have no feeling for how human beings behave, they have failed to realise that if you cut jobs and, at the same time, you cut benefits then you create the tinderbox for the fires we have seen on our streets this week.

Demotix have photo galleries of the aftermath of looting incidents, while the Guardian's Data Blog has mapped verified riots across the country, as well as key facts and figures. Freelance journalist Neal Mann (@fieldproducer) has also compiled a list on Twitter of London-based reporters covering the events.

Sylwia Presley (@PresleySylwia) contributed to the writing of this post.

China: editorial on 2008 earthquake blacked out

Marta Cooper — Sat, 14 May 2011 07:17:02 +0000

China Media Project has translated an editorial from liberal newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily commemorating the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The piece, which featured references to detained artist Ai Weiwei, who had attempted to investigate the deaths of children and collapse of school buildings in the disaster, was removed from the newspaper's website [update] before reappearing the next day.

China: Facebook's PR strategy

Marta Cooper — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:43:13 +0000

Bill Bishop at DigiCha and Imagethief's Will Moss ruminate on Facebook's PR strategy as speculation grows over the social networking site's possible entry into the Chinese market.

China: Recent Scandals Show Ongoing Battle for Food Safety

Marta Cooper — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 06:02:39 +0000

A slew of food scandals have occurred in China in recent weeks, highlighting the country's ongoing challenge with maintaining levels of food safety.

Most recently, a report on broadcaster CCTV2 revealed that a Shanghai producer of steamed buns (mantou) used dye and excessive amounts of artificial sweetener in the product, and relabelled for sale buns that had already expired and been returned from local supermarkets. Wang Longxing, director of the Shanghai Food Safety Office, has since apologised for the scandal, insisting that supermarkets should also bear some responsibility for failing to check the quality of the buns before selling them.

Poisonous milk, meat, rice, and then?

Also this month, three children have died and 35 others have been hospitalised in the northwestern province of Gansu, after drinking what officials suspect was milk tainted with nitrite, an industrial salt. Chinese state media followed up with news from police that two suspects had intentionally poisoned the milk out of anger against the farmer who had produced it.

In March, pork from a subsidiary of China’s largest meat processor, Shuanghui Group in Henan, was found to contain an illegal additive, clenbuterol, used to produce lean meat. Authorities in the province responded by taking 72 people associated with producing, using or selling the additive into custody, closing 16 pig farms and seizing 134 tonnes of pork products. China's Ministry of Agriculture also pledged that the government would launch a one-year crackdown on the use of illegal additives in pig feed.

Rice is the major food source in China. Photo by Flickr user Herr_Bert (CC BY-SA 2.0)

China's rice sector has also faced controversy, with various reports highlighting that as much as 10% of the country's rice is tainted with heavy metals. In southern China in particular, toxins have been discharged with sewage by mining operations and made their way into rice paddies. A recent expose by Caixin magazine revealed:

Much of the toxic rice is consumed by farm families who can't afford the “clean” rice sold in markets. But some rice laced with heavy metals also slips through safety checks and is sold on the general market, experts say, sometimes to consumers in China's wealthiest cities.

Unsolved melamine milk scandal

Such potentially fatal episodes are not new. Perhaps the most notable scandal came in 2008, when six children died and nearly 300,000 fell ill from powdered milk laced with melamine. An industrial chemical, when added to watered-down milk it can boost readings of protein levels, but also causes kidney stones in infants. The episode prompted Chinese authorities to tighten the regulation of food safety, with the country's first Food Safety Law taking effect in June 2009. (Incidentally, China's top legislator yesterday called for a more in-depth and comprehensive enforcement of the legislation).

Responding to the scandal was Zhao Lianhai (@zhaolianhai), whose son fell ill from the tainted milk. He set up a website for other affected parents to exchange details on how to sue the companies involved, and was in 2010 sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “disturbing social order” as a result of his activism. He was released on medical parole in December of the same year.

In a recent YouTube clip in which he calls for the release of detained artist Ai Weiwei and other victims of China's recent crackdown on potential dissent, Zhao alludes to the 2008 scandal:

It seems that many children have been unable to receive timely treatment, including some children whose cases have become more serious. Local governments, and relevant departments included, have simply turned their backs. We hope first of all from a humanitarian viewpoint, from the most basic consideration of our children, that some practical things be urgently done. I’m sure that all parents will have an attitude of tolerance in looking at the tragedies that befell each of our families. In this age of hours, we can withstand a measure of grievance. But we hope that all of the ills we bear can bring more goodness for this country of ours, creating a better social environment for those who come after us. In that society, all of our generations will live in security.

Netizens' comments

ChinaGeeks last week selected and translated a handful of netizens' recent comments on Sina Weibo [zh], China's domestic version of Twitter. Among them:

Take the people from the [relevant] government department out and shoot them. Why is it always the media that discovers this stuff first?

Any food may have something added to it, so why aren’t the higher-level leaders nervous? They think that of course the common people must eat from the same special, environmentally protected stock that they do […] what high-level official has been investigated or forced to resign? The common people are forced to determine for themselves whether even basic foods and drinks are poisoned or not. Leaders of the food safety [department], have you no sense of shame? If those food inspection officials who shirked their duty aren’t executed, the problem of contaminated food will never disappear.

There’s no big scandal here, don’t be alarmist. Isn’t this just inserting some dye for color? Isn’t it just putting expired mantou back to work? What is that, it’s no big deal… As a great Chinese citizen, as the descendants of Yan Di and Huang Di, as the Chinese who have successfully made it to this point, you’re not even willing to eat this, and you’re not ashamed?

China itself is a society of mutual poisoning, a society of mutual pain-infliction. You add some [poison] to the milk, I put sweet additives into expired mantou, he puts additives into the food he feeds his pigs, oil, crab, rice, duck eggs… even if the milk manufacturers don’t drink milk, they eat mantou. Even if the mantou makers don’t eat mantou, they eat pork. Even if the pork farmers don’t eat pork, they drink milk. In the end, we’re just hurting ourselves. The nation is in peril, inviting ridicule and shame.

Blogger Jiangminct, meanwhile, responded to the discovery of mercury in Coilia Ecetenes Jordan, a rare and expensive fresh water fish in the Yangtze river. Fish dealers had injected mercury [zh] to increase the weight of the fish and make it look fresher.

我们的老百姓啊，祖国的花朵啊，你们能够吃到染色馒头、过期馒头、重金属米粉，那也是你们的幸运，毕竟这些东西不会吃死人，看你们长期吃，也没有拉肚子、长癌症，还是生龙活虎的，就是证据。你们就别嚷嚷了，感谢那个生产染色馒头的老板吧，他已经很仁慈了，没有让你们吃水银，只是让你们吃了一点点色素而已，他的良心大大的好。[…]

今天我不打算评论有关部门和所有监督部门，这个话题让人很累，说了还是一样，再过几天某地又会冒出某食品有问题的新闻。至于为什么，只可意会，不可言传，你们都懂的。总之，相信谁也不如相信自己。在这个神奇的国家，我们的食品没有最毒，只有更毒。

Our people, flowers of our motherland, you are lucky to have dyed bun, heavy metal rice, at least they would not take away your lives. See, after all these years, you don't have cancer, no diarrhea. Your body is still in good shape. This is proof. Don't you complain, you should be thankful to the dyed bun manufacturers, they are so kind not to add mercury, just a little bid of chemical dye. They are people with a very good conscience. […]

I don't want to comment on the role of food monitoring department, this is such a tiring subject. There is no use commenting, news about food security keeps popping up. Why? The reason cannot be spelled out, but I am sure you know. In a nutshell, you cannot believe in anyone except yourself. In this amazing country, we don't have the most poisonous food, but always the more poisonous one.

Western and expat bloggers have largely remained unsurprised, but wonder for how long such scandals will continue before effective government regulation is enforced.

Chinese quote translated by Oiwan Lam.

China: “the person I most admire has the surname Liu.”

Marta Cooper — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 03:58:40 +0000

Danwei has translated a range of Chinese microbloggers' tweets and posts celebrating their heroes. Those mentioned are all surnamed Liu, and share similar traits with Liu Xiaobo, this year's imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Brazil: President Lula defends WikiLeaks' Assange

Marta Cooper — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:14:55 +0000

Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva (Lula) has this week criticised [pt] the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, condemning the Brazilian press for not having defended the Australian activist. Lula said [pt, en], “the boy was arrested and I'm not seeing any protest against [the curtailment of] freedom of expression.”

Brazil: President today, blogger tomorrow

Marta Cooper — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 07:07:46 +0000

Outgoing Brazilian president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) was interviewed [pt] for the first time this week by a range of progressive bloggers, an event seen by many as a major step [pt] in the ongoing push for a more democratic media system [pt] in the country.

The two hour session was also streamed online, allowing bloggers to participate via webcam through microblogging site, Twitter.

A range of topics [pt] were covered, including political reform within Brazil, abortion, education, corruption, and the country's foreign policy.

Media reform was particularly high on the agenda, with Lula affirming,

Eu sou o resultado da liberdade de imprensa neste país. A maior censura que existe é acreditar que a mídia não pode ser criticada.

I am the result of freedom of the press in this country. The greatest censorship that exists is to believe that the media cannot be criticised.

He rallied against the spread of misinformation and called for a tighter regulation of Brazil's media industry. He criticised Brazil's mainstream press for arousing fear by exaggerating the extent to which the country would be affected by the global financial crisis, and for reporting false causes behind the TAM Airlines plane crash in 2007.

Brazil's mainstream media remains in the hands of few reigning families, chief among them being the Marinho family, which owns the country's major broadcasting network, Rede Globo [pt]. Historically in close association with the military dictatorship (1964-84), Globo has been well-poised to consolidate and exert its control in television, film, radio and print.

Newspapers have frequently come under fire for serving political interests, most recently in the country's presidential elections, during which current president-elect, Dilma Rousseff, was largely seen as having been the victim [pt] of a mainstream media massacre. Major dailies and magazines swooped into the runoff debate, capitalising on controversial issues, such as religion and abortion, which leave Brazil fiercely divided.

The outgoing president was quizzed over the proposals made at last year's first National Conference of Communication [pt]. The need for more extensive regulation, citizen participation and social control within mainstream media were among the proposals drafted at the conference, with Lula reassuring bloggers that they will be submitted to Brazil's Congress. He added that the debate was now in the hands of Dilma, who pledged greater press freedom in Brazil during her acceptance speech on 31st October.

President Lula chats to blogger Conceição Oliveira via Twitcam during his first interview with Brazilian bloggers. Image by Ricardo Stuckert/PR, from Blog do Planalto's Flickr photostream. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license.

For those who attended, the session signalled the opening a new channel of a more progressive communication between decision makers and non-mainstream media forces. One web user, participating via Twitcam, called the session “emotional” [pt]. Notable political blogger Rodrigo Vianna [pt], while reminding readers that “old” media would still remain, said,

Não sei se os leitores têm dimensão do que isso significa: quebrou-se o monopólio. Internautas puderam perguntar, via twitter. O mundo da comunicação se moveu. Foi simbólico o que vimos hoje.

I don't know if readers get the dimensions of what this means: the monopoly has broken. Via Twitter, Internet users could ask questions. The world of communication moved. What we saw today was symbolic.

Renato Rovai, editor of liberal current affairs magazine Revista Forum [pt], was equally positive [pt]:

Ela entra para a história da cobertura política brasileira.

It [the interview] entered the history of the coverage of Brazilian politics.

The very group of bloggers invited to attend was also significant, writes participant Leandro Fortes [pt]:

Esse mesmo grupo foi chamado por Serra, no auge da baixaria da campanha eleitoral, de representantes de “blogs sujos”, uma referência nervosa a um tipo de mídia que pegou o tucano, uma criatura artificialmente sustentada pela velha mídia corporativa, no contrapé. Nem Serra, nem ninguém na velha direita brasileira estavam preparados para o poder de reação, análise e crítica da blogosfera e das redes sociais. Matérias falsas, reportagens falaciosas, discursos hipócritas, obscurantismo religioso e a farsa da bolinha de papel, tudo, tudo foi desmontado em poucas horas dentro da internet. Chamar-nos de “sujos” nem de longe nos alcançou como ofensa, pelo contrário. Nós, os “sujos” fizemos a história dessa eleição. Serra e seus brucutus terceirizados sumiram no ralo virtual.

This very same group was called by Serra, at the peak of the immoral election campaign, the voices of “sordid blogs”, making a nerve-racking reference to the type of media which caught the toucan [a term for Serra], an artificial creature supported by the old media, on the back foot. Neither Serra, nor anyone in the old Brazilian right-wing expected the power of reaction, analysis and criticism of the blogosphere and other social networks. Fake articles, fallacious reports, hypocritical discourses, religious obscurantism and the bolinha de papel farce were unveiled within a few hours on the Internet. We, the “sordids” made the history of this elecetion. Serra and his pre-historic outsourced friends disappeared in the virtual drain.

Participants were, however, quick to point out the session's failures. Vianna noted that pressing issues of human rights, land reform, justice and public health were not covered in enough detail, overshadowed instead by the discussion of communications. Also lamented was the absence of female bloggers, although Conceição Oliveira, of the blog Maria Fro [pt] (who also blog as Conceição Lemes at Vi o Mundo) [pt] participated via Twitcam.

Lula seemed convinced of the power of engaging with citizens through social media, promising he will blog and tweet in the future. Brazil has the second-highest amount of Twitter users in the world after the United States, and its Internet users straddle anywhere between 67 to 73 million. Social networking sites such as Orkut and, to a lesser extent, Facebook, also remain wildly popular.

Thiana Biondo contributed to this post.

Brazil: President Lula grants blogosphere first-ever interview

Marta Cooper — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:11:52 +0000

Outgoing Brazilian president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva will tomorrow (24th November) be interviewed [pt] for the first time by a range [pt] of progressive bloggers regarding Brazil's changing media system. Renato Rovai, editor of liberal current affairs magazine Revista Forum [pt], called the event a “celebration of informational diversity” [pt]. The interview will be streamed live from 9am (GMT -2).

China: bridge-blog posts original documentary of rural life

Marta Cooper — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 05:59:57 +0000

C. Custer, of bridge-blog ChinaGeeks, has posted his first original documentary of life in China's rural northeast. Plans are also underway for a second project, entitled Finding Home, which will look at the kidnapping and selling of children in the People's Republic.

China: thousands gather at site of Shanghai fire

Marta Cooper — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 04:47:38 +0000

Early reports coming in from Twitter say that thousands are gathering at the site of Monday's deadly fire in Shanghai that claimed 58 lives. Coverage in Chinese and English can be followed by using the hashtag #jiaozhoulu (the name of the road the building is located on).

Brazil: five days of cyber-activism to end violence against women

Marta Cooper — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 04:19:42 +0000

To mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (November 25th), a group of Brazilian feminist bloggers will take part in five days of cyber activism [pt]. Those involved will post interviews with activists and lawyers to raise awareness of causes, consequences and prevention of the practice. Meanwhile, online collectives have been set up on social networking sites Facebook and Orkut, and the hashtag #FimDaViolenciaContraMulher (an end to violence against women) has begun trending on Twitter.

Brazil: Black Awareness Day

Marta Cooper — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 11:38:55 +0000

To mark Brazil's annual Black Awareness Day (Dia da Consciência Negra), journalist and blogger Elaine Tavares explains [pt] why she is proud to be Afro-Brazilian. Meanwhile, celebrations and cultural events [pt] to commemorate the day in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador are in full swing.

Brazil: dreams of competing with China

Marta Cooper — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 09:03:14 +0000

Writer and analyst Bradley M. Gardner weighs in on billionaire entrepeneur Eike Batista's plan [pt] to bring Apple’s manufacturing process to Brazil. Gardner writes that Batista “wants his country to be China”, where Apple's products are currently manufactured. He adds that he “wouldn't put it past” Batista, the world's eighth-richest man, “to recreate Taiwan in the Amazon rainforest.”

Brazil: Dilma Rousseff and the ‘currency war'

Marta Cooper — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:13:36 +0000

Enéas de Souza, blogging at Sul21 [pt], examines how president-elect Dilma Rousseff will deal with the huge surge in Brazil's currency that has led Goldman Sachs to classify it as the most overvalued in the world.

China: Shanghai fire claims 53, local coverage criticised

Marta Cooper — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:29:41 +0000

53 lives were claimed and 43 others remain missing as a result of the tragic fire that ripped through a high-rise apartment block in Shanghai yesterday afternoon. The 28-storey building was undergoing renovations when welding sparks caused the scaffolding to catch fire, eventually spreading to the building itself. City blog Shanghaiist provided much of the breaking news, as well as survivor stories. Danwei also provided original reporting, while Shanghai Monthly has criticised local media coverage of the event.