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The Great Firewall Of China
iKev writes: "Today's Globe and Mail has an
interesting story
on China's attempt to restrict Internet content available to its citizens. It seems that The New York Times is on the list of 'politically sensitive' sites, but all other U.S. papers are not. ... Porn, however, is free for all 1.3 billion people to view. Go figure. I wonder what kind of setup they have running this firewall."
"Firewall" is the wrong term for blocking political content, but the pun's too good to resist I guess. If anyone has details on the software, please post your comments below or
emailme.
I've ALWAYS thought this idea would sell well, worldwide. Actual high-quality news content, delivered by sexy supermodels, interspliced with varying degrees/types of steamy/porn content to keep the viewers' attention. Porn News Network -- I can see the station break now:
"PNN -- with more hot girl-on-girl action than any other major news network...."
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You don't seem to know your history very well. In the early times of China, there was great turmoil and strife and - yes - anarchy. Much like the hyperinflation in the Weimar days convinced Germans to give the Bundesbank a stranglehold on their economy, the Chinese, at least traditionally, fear anarchy above all else. Hence the dynastic system, which led to long-lasting, powerful governments. And now, the "evil reds," who are not communist at all but simply totalitarian, are free to exert as much control as they desire. It's a cultural thing. Certainly as recent events have shown this does not apply to everyone in China, but the popular support for "anything but anarchy" is still very strong. Whether this is changing and how fast requires telling by someone a bit closer to Chinese culture than I.
You cannot apply your own values and experiences to others and expect them to work. The Chinese people have never been governed by anything even resembling democracy. Never. For that matter, neither had the Russians, and look what difficulties they're having with it. You (assuming you live in Western Europe, the US, Oz, etc.) have something like 2500 years of off-and-on democratic heritage of some kind or other. The Greek republican governments, the aristocrat-democracies of Europe, and the post-revolutionary American and French governments have provided plenty of fodder for your inclinations. But these are culturally insignificant to many people, including the Chinese. There is no certain inevitable victory for the forces of democracy in China. Maybe it'll happen, maybe not. Predicting the future is hard. But everyone needs to get this "inevitable triumph of the forces of democracy" out of their heads, because it just ain't so.
Lets face it. The Chinese government is many things. Repressive and Brutal come to mind. However they are not hypocritical. They insist on blocking "politically dangerous" information from coming into the country or being distributed widely.
All they have done is move that policy online. Why should they even think about blocking porn ? It has precisely 0 effect on politics if you leave it alone. It's just people looking at pictures and reading pointless stories. If they tried to block porn *that* would become a political issue and one more battle to fight against their own people.
Contrast that which the US where you have legislators trying to impose unworkable censorship on adults in public libraries. Forcing a library to install a piece of software that will essentially block a random list of sites is stupid. When that list includes the whole "geocities.com" domain you are way over into the "you little citizens shouldn't talk to each other" territory.
At least in my country the politicians don't even bother to try. They only keep the onenforced and unenforceable laws against porn, buggy and prostitution as one more way to prosecute rapists and child molesters.
I.e. It's a lot easier to prove he was taking pictures of the little girls privates than that he touched her.
Which of the three is worse is a tough call to make. However China killing it's citizens for trivial things paints them as the worst of this bad lot.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Of course, this story was posted at 5AM China time. :)
I live in Beijing, and the Firewall blocks:
1. Many western news sites (not just the NYT!) - this includes (from my experience) the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The San Jose Mercury, The Washington Post, and the Australian newspaper that reported on the French suspicions about Windows a while back. Exceptions: The Seattle Times, USA Today, MSNBC, the Globe and Mail, and the BBC.
2. Probably the entire *.gov and *.mil domains - I've never been successful in getting to anything inside those domains. On the other hand, this isn't really surprising.
3. Xoom, Geocities, Fortunecity, Mindspring, AOL user pages - anyplace that has a large number of user pages gets blocked.
4. NOT proxies or anonymizer services (as mentioned in the article). However, even major ones like Anonymizer and Proxymate aren't blocked, so they probably won't start blocking these unless they become a major problem.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that most people here really care enough to go around the Great Firewall and read the NYT (making money is much more important to most of them). But if proxies started becoming popular and getting blocked, I'd appreciate it if someone could point me towards a few backup proxies.
I'm a little surprised by them not blocking porn, since they do try (well, make token efforts) to keep foreign hardcopy pornography from being brought in (I believe).
I hate to burst your buble, but Taiwan has only been a democracy for four years 2000 will only be there second presidential election. There isn't a lot of precedent there.
But it completely refutes the claim of cultural affinity for totalitarian rule.
Also, a lot of the major candidates in that race are talking about a 'reunification' china of some sort.
You've being naive. Talk of reunification is intended to placate China, which is currently making beligerent noises. The Taiwanese people elected the independent minded Lee Teng Hui, and even his simple statment that relations with China would be on a "state to state" basis outraged China.
It's a cultural thing.... The Chinese people have never been governed by anything even resembling democracy. Never.
You're an idiot and a bigot hiding under the guise of an elightened speaker. It's not a cultural thing.
There exist strong Chinese democracies - i.e. Taiwan. The fact the Communists currently rule China is an outcome of history rather than any cultural affinity for totalitarianism - the Communists were most succesful at organizing the people and repelling the Japanese invaders during the war, and they naturally assumed leadership after the war.
China has had a long history of good government - the dynastic system persisted for so long because it was highly successful; China was one of the cultural capitals of the world before civilisation even arose in many parts of the West, and was intellectually freer than most of the world. Success led to stagnation of the system perhaps, but the long run of the dynasties was due to its success, not because the Chinese people have no love of freedom.
Just imagine being in the US Gov't.'s shoes:
You represent a country that claims to be for freedom and whatnot, and your main beef with the Chinese gov't. is that they censor what you don't want censored and they don't censor what you do want censored!
Now, your challenge as a Patriotic Puritan Bureaucrat is to convince a hostile nation (i.e. one that doesn't always kowtow to the Inherent Might-Makes-Right Moral Superiority of Uncle Sam) that censoring some things is wrong, while censoring other things is somehow acceptable or even commendable!
Frankly, I don't see how we can convince other nations to embrace liberty until we drop our masks of pretension and hypocrisy and embrace it ourselves.
--
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.