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Chinese Government Further Restricts Internet Cafes
bwhalen writes: "Once again, China is demonstrating how much they love their citizens to have open communication. They have closed/demanded restructuring of a few thousand Internet Cafes; here's the story." Previous stories on China make clear that the Chinese government and the Chinese citizenry don't see eye-to-eye on how this whole Internet thing should work.
And the maximum jail term, I believe, is 5 years.
In China, unelected government officials arbitrarily determine that they do not want their citizens having access to the free Internet. They thus shutdown the means of getting free access. No one protests since they risk a death sentence for doing so.
Several key differences here:
While the US is way out of line on the Dmitry issue, there is absolutely no comparison between China and the USA.
Your attempt at playing devil's advocate, while admirable, is a real stretch.
First of all, the article didn't say WHY the 2000 (out of 58000) Internet cafés had been shut down. For all we know, it could be because they used pirated software.
Give me a break. No one, not even the Chinese government, denies that they squelch speech. It's central to their idea of government. According to the article, the Shanghai daily says 59 cafes had operations suspended for "rectification and improvement". That's the standard line, which generally means some people will confess and renounce their past actions and beliefs, and the appropriate personnel will be employed to monitor them in the future (for their own good, of course).
Yeah? Well, the Echolon system and the NSA and CIA closely monitor *ALL* electronic traffic in search for buzzwords such as bomb, C4, Bill Clinton etc.
It's an entirely different thing-- I know, I've seen what it's like for an internet company to do business there. Want to set up a web service there? Maybe, say, a free home page service? Sure, no problem! All content must be saved to a staging server first, where censors check it before it goes live. People signing up for accounts must provide accurate information, so that in the event objectionable content is found, they can be tracked down for-- wait for it-- "rectification and improvement".
Could we get a little less US propaganda in the news and a little more of the ACTUAL facts. I'd like to know FACTS about why these Internet cafés were shut down. I don't doubt that it had to do with censorship but I didn't see any facts in the story.
We seem to find the story remarkable for different reasons. I'm surprised that they even bothered reporting it, in the midst of continued repression of various religious groups including Falun Gong, their new death squads (oh, sorry-- drug police), and continued restatement that they will not back off any of these oppressive measures-- which seem to all make them even more attractive to the WTO.
The only thing remotely interesting about this article is that some rather ill-informed politicians use the cafes as an example that China is opening up, that trade with them is working, that we should include them without any condemnation as a fabulous member of the world community. Well, there's one less example for them. But then, even that one was wearing thin in the face of thousands of people executed right before they were chosen to host the 2008 Olympics.
Don't get me wrong-- I'm not anti-China. I'm for all the people being unjustly detained for stating beliefs contradictory to the approved dogma. I'm for the hundreds of thousands of people relocated to make way for the 3 Gorges Damn, and the millions who will be killed if the damn (which is built on a fault line) breaks. It just seems clear to me, though, that if you are for the Chinese people, you have to be quite upset with their government right now. It's gone downhill since Tienenmien Square.
it's very different. Under US law it is illegal to call for the violent overthrow of the government. It is not illegal to call for elections or to say the the elections we've had are tainted. It is illegal to do those things in China. See the difference? Of course you do. You could see the difference before you even posted. So why did you post? troll? nitwit? who knows.
"Authorities closely monitor Web site content in search for buzzwords such as Taiwan, Tibet and the banned spiritual group Falun Gong, Web executives say." Yeah? Well, the Echolon system and the NSA and CIA closely monitor *ALL* electronic traffic in search for buzzwords such as bomb, C4, Bill Clinton etc.
Once again, here you can post messages about C4 or the Falun Gong (you just did) and not actually get arrested or tortured. The government may scan, but would be because it is looking for actual criminals committing actual crimes (as in part A above). There is no religion that you could write about here in the US that would get you sentenced and or tortured. But Falun Gong and Lamaism are two religions that will get you imprisoned in China. Too bad we don't have a law here against asking seemingly provocative but in reality inane questions: troll or not, you'd be going down. Oh well, we'll leave laws like that to the Chinese.
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This should be interesting to watch in the next few years.