Information

Fire damage is seen at the Changfeng Hospital in Beijing on 19 April 2023, after a fire broke out a day earlier. (Greg Baker/AFP)

Beijing hospital fire: Social media silence shows tightening public opinion space in China

A major fire at a hospital in Beijing was shocking, not so much because of its severity, but because of the blanket silence that lasted some seven or eight hours after the event. Zaobao’s associate editor Han Yong Hong explores the media control and crisis management following the incident.
Teachers are seen behind a laptop during a workshop on ChatGPT organised by the School Media Service (SEM) of the Public education of the Swiss canton of Geneva, on 1 February 2023. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP)

ChatGPT could be partners in education if we overcome these challenges

Academics Wong Lung Hsiang and Looi Chee Kit note that information and AI literacies are or will become essential for anyone living in the IT era. One must possess both literacies to responsibly and constructively produce and disseminate information, as well as to understand and appraise the functions and limitations of AI tools, and the challenges they pose.
Patients lie on beds in the emergency department of a hospital, amid the Covid-19 outbreak in Shanghai, China, 4 January 2023. (Reuters)

Are the Chinese facing a crisis of confidence in the government?

As the Chinese authorities ease Covid-19 controls and infections increase, hearsays about symptoms, treatments and folk remedies are widespread. Lianhe Zaobao correspondent Chen Jing looks at why people fall for these baseless rumours and remain wary of the government’s responses.
A Long March 7Y4 rocket carrying the Tianzhou 3 cargo ship launches from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre in China's southern Hainan province, on a mission to deliver supplies to China's Tiangong space station on 20 September 2021. (STR/AFP)

The complex impact of China’s military-civil fusion in space

With China's accelerated efforts to become a great space power, including opening up its space sector to private firms, Western developed countries worry that China's military-civil fusion (MCF) strategy may see technology developed in the commercial sector being used to boost China's military space power in the future. Are these fears justified? Japanese academic Masaaki Yatsuzuka looks into the issue.
CASA, an advocacy organisation for Latino and immigrant people and other immigrant advocacy groups, rally outside the White House in Lafayette Park, to demand that the Biden administration take action on citizenship for all on 26 May 2021 in Washington, DC. (Mandel Ngan/AFP)

Chinese academic: Developing nations must be wary of internet platform companies and their capital

Qiao Xinsheng points out that one should not have any expectations about the globalisation of the job market. In the internet economy era, even though internet platform companies facilitate capital’s global search for talent, this has not improved labour’s freedom of movement in search of better job opportunities. Cheap labour will continue to be exploited through the long arms of overseas capital. Not only that, with these companies' technology-enabled capabilities to collect massive amounts of data, national security will be a concern.
A man uses his phone outside Beijing Railway Station in Beijing on 19 August 2020. (Noel Celis/AFP)

Can the Great Firewall of China ever be overcome?

A Chinese app called Tuber barely had time to take root before it was yanked out of existence. It apparently gave Chinese netizens a way across the Great Firewall of China to foreign websites. In practice, those who jumped to try the app noted that it was not as revolutionary as touted to be, yet this could be a glimmer of things to come. With netizens becoming more discerning and information flows increasingly hard to stem anyway, Yang Danxu muses that a lighter touch may be the way to go.
A Tesla China-made Model 3 vehicle owner sits inside a car during a delivery event at Tesla's Shanghai factory in China, 7 January 2020. (Aly Song/File Photo/Reuters)

Are smart cars really smart? Ways not to be held hostage by apps and tech

Chinese academic Zhang Tiankan looks at Tesla’s recent network outage incident in September and remembers a similar one suffered by Chinese consumers in May this year — a no-response "smart" car or a "missing" one on your connected car app is no fun at all. Zhang says while technology is useful, we must be aware that over-reliance can leave us vulnerable to malfunctions or prone to disparaging those who have yet to embrace the digital age.
A man walks past a billboard showing an advertisement for a smartphone. (Athit Perawongmetha/REUTERS)

Internetisation of life and the new social divide

In the Internet Age, the great divide is not between the haves and the have-nots, but the weak-willed who succumb easily to online advertising and those who are above lowly distractions. The former will end up paying the price of a free Internet.
Fact or fake? Faux information seems to make sense but really does not. (iStock)

The death of quality information

In this information age, it is all too easy for good quality information to be drowned out by insignificant noise. Yin Ruizhi argues that one needs to be able to recognise faux knowledge produced by fake public intellectuals. How do we do that?