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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 ..."
We all know that China's news institutions (government controlled) will soon be ignored. The Chinese government won't always be able to restrict their users from reading information from the BBC, CNN, and other institutions.
China's GOV has to face the music. They can't and won't control what their people see on the internet--at least not forever. As more and more people there use the internet, those people will find ways to express their views.
I think it's really interesting that China has spent so much time and effort trying to protect its citizens from ideas from outside without realising that ideas that come from inside are just as dangerous. People who talk to each other cannot be fooled by propaganda, as the article mentions -- a mining disaster which killed 81 people was initially supressed, but when word about it spread on the 'net anyway the official newspapers ended up reporting on it.
The logical conclusion of this is that the much-protested firewall that China has put around itself will be of no help at all in supressing dissent, as long as chat rooms and even e-mail exist.
sorry this got long (and scatterbrained)
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
I'm Polish and I've lived under communism most of my life. My girlfriend is Chinese I also work with several Chinese who are here in the UK for a few years studying
before going back.
I absolutely agree but the fact that the government stops the people from seeing the bad news makes people want it more. In the US no one wants to know what evil acts
are done on their behalf.
The worst thing of all is some other people in this thread who without thinking will state that the media always tells the trough. There is no point even trying to tell them
otherwise because its all loony talk to them. Lizard men and all that.
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More people are killed by reckless drivers who think they have the skill/technology/brains to drive at unsafe speeds, than by murder.
Nothing gets on my nerves more than some yahoo in a way-to-big SUV tailgating me at 80MPH simply because he has no f-ing clue about such concepts as reaction time or stopping distance.
Of course, when his unnecessary and reckless conduct causes my death it is an "accident," while a woman who shoots her abusive husband dead in his sleep is considered a "murderer"
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A history teacher I once took some courses from in High School (Military History and US History) subscribed to an interesting theory; The fall of Russian Communism resulted from McDonalds.
If this theory is meant to be taken literally, then it is an insult to the Russian people. They aren't that stupid, nor ignorant, at least those that I know in Moscow and StPetersburg. Even many years before the fall of Russian Communism many Russians were well aware about the world outside Russia and the failings of their political system. To say that Russian Communism fell because of McDonalds is such as gross simplification of what happened that it is meaningless.
In China, it seems as though a similar evolution is occuring; The alter-ego of Soviet Commuism, Chinese Communism, is being exposed to it's antithesis. Russian Communism focused, as I understand, mainly on supression and communitization of materialism, but was then faced with the holy grail of materialism, McDonalds.
First off you can't suppress something and spread it throughout the community at the same time.
Second, Chinese Communism split from what was Soviet Communism back in the 1950s as China pissed off the USSR by declaring that they were going to Do It Their Way.
Nowadays calling the Chinese government Communist is a joke. A joke perpetuated primarily for the benefit of the old party members who still wield control. They have even whipped up an excuse that allows self-proclaimed capitalists to join the Chinese Communist Party! The best explanation of China's current policy is this:
The CCP leaders are riding in a taxicab, ahead is a fork in the road with one path leading to Communism and one to Capitalism. The driver asks: Which way should I go? After a brief discussion, the leaders tell the driver to signal a turn to Communism, but to actually turn towards Capitalism.
The CCP wants to keep control over information, but the party isn't stupid. There is just an ongoing high level conflict on government policy, the Internet is just one of the controls being exploited by each side.
I tried out Freenet recently, and if there were any political dissidents using it, it wasn't apparent. The single biggest application of Freenet seems to be child pornography.
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Actually the term Capitalism is Marxist in origin and originally refered to an economic system in which control of the means of production are controlled by means of control of capital.
In Das Kapital Marx wrote about capitalism almost all the time, the bits about the communist system to replace it are little more than an afterthought in comparison. What is somewhat hillarious for European readers is the way that many of Marx's arguments have since been adopted by the right as a defense of capitalism. This is not suprising since Marx was one of the first economists to really explain how capitalism worked and he was not completely against it. What he wanted was a means of harnessing the productivity of capitalism with a social settlement that did not mean that 95% of the population lived in dire poverty. However since Marx is not a politically correct figure to praise the good ideas that Marx had are usually ascribed to Adam Smith.
The political system we live in today is neither capitalist, nor socialist by 19th century definitions. This is something that should have really upset the Marxist idealogues since acording to the theory that is not meant to happen.
Capital is far more broadly distributed than ever before and access to capital is no longer restricted to a tiny class of plutocrats. The type of capitalism that Marx wrote about is practically dead.
Apart that is from in countries like China where control of capital and control of the state are both restricted to a tiny governing elite.
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This is so true. I used to hold the ignorant view of China until I went there for a vacation earlier this year.
Mind you, I didn't ventured into the really small villages (pop less than 1000) and rural areas, but I could tell things are a lot different that what I used to perceive it as.
I was in a fishing village in souther China with no paved roads, but they had buses with VCD videos playing. And in the same area were more Internet cafe than I'd image people could use. Sure enough when I went in there were half a dozen kids, no more than 12 years old, playing network games.
I spent 2 hours in there checking email and reading news. I certainly didn't feel like anything was being blocked. They had 128bit I.E. browser so I was able to do my banking too.
I could go on forever. Bottom line is that people should stop making ignorant comments about China unless they've been there.
I actually wonder if he really believed that. Although he tries very hard to persuade people that the revolution is at hand he also said that philosophers have analysed the world in many ways, the real task is to change it.
I think that Marx's prophecy of a revolution should be considered in the same light as 1984, not primarily prophecy but instead a means of effecting change. Victorian Britain was scared of revolution above all else, revolution meant the horrors of the French reign of terror and the Bonapartist attempt to establish dictatorship across Europe.
Victorian society did change, they may have changed in part because Marx's prophecy meant that liberal reformers were listened to and the elites accepted gradual change rather than risk revolution.
What he didnt count on was publicly held stock, wide spread education, and that the investment of the extremely wealthy would make the whole country more wealthy.
I think that Marx's ideas reached their sell by date long before we got to the point where the middle class was the majority of the population and most people owned stock. Certainly after WWI with the Bolshevick coup the forces of reactionism are doing their utmost to reform social conditions before the revolution sweeps them away.
Incidentally, the term 'Bolshevick revolution' is a misnomer, actually the Tzar was removed from power in a relatively peaceful revolution led by the Menchevicks who tried to establish a liberal democratic state. The mistake they made was not announcing an end to the war which is what gave Lenin and Stalin an opportunity. The proletariat cared more about ending the war than the promise of a democratic society.
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