Slashdot Mirror
Is China's Control of the Internet Slipping?
Garp writes "According to the BBC news site the Chinese governments grip on the internet is slipping. Ever since they allowed use of the internet, the Chinese have been monitoring the information that has been flowing (jokingly referred to as the great fire-wall of china), in an attempt to ensure 'bad' philosophies don't infect their people. However, the internet is having a much more profound affect, out of the control of the government ..."
what? the government does not control the media at all, dumbass. America is the only country that seems to have this right.
Most people would think that the terrorist attacks were in fact evil and the media is reflecting that. Most people I talk to say we should nuke afganistan anyways, and the media also reflects that sentiment. You must not be from the US, I cant imagine anyone from here would make such an ignorant post.
Heh: wait till the Chinese find out about FoxNews! Finally, a fair and balanced news program!
Or maybe FoxNews is already allowed in China, thanks to Murdoch's sniveling love of pleasing dictators to get his projects on the cable lines.
The problem with a communist state is that there is a conflict of ideas between stability and progress. I have studied this quite a bit wrt the Soviet Union.
In order for a society to progress technologically, it has to have free speach of some sort. The more free speech it has, the more ideas get shared and the more technology can advance. That's why the "information revolution" is, for the most part, self-propogating.
However, in a closed society such as the Soviet Union and China, there is a certain level of control that the government needs to keep on speech otherwise the populace will talk about how they don't like their situation in life.
The contradiction is like a business who needs techies to make the IT infrastructure work but doesn't necessarily want to let them out of the basement for fear that they'll scare away the customers and the salespeople.
The end result is that these 2 conflicting ideas make a government seem bipolar. If you look at the Soviet leadership, there was a pattern of alternating conservative (ie, pro control) and liberal (ie, free speech) leaders. There's a joke that the way you can tell which leader is which is by their hair...bushy or bald
Lenin-liberal (ok, debatable, but between the revolution and his death, very relaxed) bald
Stalin- arch-conservative, very bushy hair
Khruschev-liberal (that's why he went on a "leave of absense for health reasons" when the pendulum swung the other way) bald as a baby's bottom
Brezhnev-conservative, had hair like Elvis
Andropov-liberal, didn't live too long, bald
Gromiko-conservative, didn't live too long, hairy
Gorbachev-liberal, started glasnost and perestrojka, balding with red-wine stain
Yeltsin-conservative in a different way, manipulated privatization to make him and his friends rich, hairy
Putin-the only guy maybe to break the trend. seems to be conservative, but has "thinning" hair. Of couse, there is no more Soviet Union, so....
Alot of this contradiction can be seen in the way that Soviet scientists were treated. For example, as long as they held to the party line, they were given all the priviledges that they could ask for. Once they started to dissent, they were imprisoned and did the same work but at a gulag.
For a good example of this, I recommend Solzhenitsyn's The Inner Circle or some of the biographies of Sakharov.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.