Slashdot Mirror
SMS, SARS, And Censorship
angkor writes with a link to this article about "How SMS messaging in China forced the government to acknowledge the 'fatal flu in Guangdong.' And the steps the Chinese government is taking to make sure it does not happen again."
..we'll see encrypted SMS? On the other hand, if it's not already, it'll probably soon be a criminal offense to send any encrypted messages over there as well..
mov ax, 4c00h
int 21h
Guess who one of our major customers was ... the Chinese Government!
Luckily it never got off the ground...
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
"The Great Firewall of China" is China's most spectacular cover-up? What? That doesn't even remotely compare to when 62 dams in China failed in the course of one night. No news of these dams collapsing came out of China until years later despite the fact that this huge catastrophe caused at least 20,000 deaths (some estimate as high as 230,000 but really nobody knows) and over 1,000,000 survivors became homeless or famine-struck as a result of the floods.
in the San Gabriel Valley... someone began circulating an email stating that several cases had been found locally and named specific restaurants and markets that had been closed.
The first time I read it I thought it was a hoax, but then a friend who worked at a local hospital called me and told me they were distributing it as a general alert at the hospital.
I ended up going to the Police Department, scared, to find out. Turns out the email was a fraud, and that the PD had been recieving 500 calls a day about it. The establishments mentioned had seen a decrease in business of 50% as a result of some A-HOLE playing a joke. This is similar to what happened in China, I think. I would applaud if they caught the originator and put them in prison.
SECOND EMAIL.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
The German magazine "Telepolis" (from Heise.de) has an interesting article about SARS in the USA.
The same is happening in China. Various news agencies are not reporting actual news worthy events in China, as it would get them kicked out. There is a tremendous market in China. CNN would rather skip the truth than report what is actually happening.
The biggest human rights abuses occurr in China. Millions die in accidents there every year that you never hear about. Local communist organizations still kill people routinely.
Economic reforms have occurred in a vacuun. Without political reform, all of this investment and wealth will be for nothing. The leaders of China still believe they are communist. The local communist groups still kill people and oppress the rest. People are still disappeared for talking to reporters who want to report what is really going on.
China is a nation that murders its citizens. It denies the most basic of human rights. It is still ruled by incompetent men like Jiang Zimen. China is a disgrace to the world community.
I would use my real name, but I am afraid for my fiance's family, who still live in China.
As a matter of fact, yes, it is.
Authoritarian regimes are strong, but brittle. In an environment characterized by slow technological change, they can last indefinitely, because the tools used to control the proles change slowly enough that leaders can keep up with them.
Rapid technological change upsets that balance. Such change is typically driven by technology - witness the printing press, the rise of the "freethinkers", and the eventual topplings of the monarchies of Europe and Russia. (And the despots that took their place - Robespierre in France, Lenin in Russia, and so on.)
Authoritarian regimes typically rely on controlling the means of communication in order to maintain power. Technologically-driven change in the area of communications is one of the most threatening things an authoritarian regime.
If the Communist Party lies about SARS, then maybe... *gasp*, they lied about the day the dam broke in my village. I've gotta call my brother who was 1000 miles away with the army when it happened and ask him if the Party told him his village's dam was the only one that broke that night. And my cousin who works in Hong Kong now, I remember him laughing when I first told him it was only our dam, maybe now I know why he laughed. And my grandfather back in my old village who remembers the times before the Party.
When nobody believes the Party ("Pravda and Izvestia - There is no truth in Pravda, and there is no news in Izvestia"), the regime shatters.
> Seems like if a goverment wants to gain trust and credibility, they should flat-out tell the truth sometimes.
Any government's first duty is to perpetuate itself; "building trust and credibility" is a useful goal (from the government's point of view) only insofar as it enables the government to perpetuate itself and/or increase its power over its subjects.
Telling the truth through the various Party news outlets doesn't serve the goal of keeping the Party in power, because the forms of media that can be controlled aren't set up to deliver truth.
And the forms of media that can't be controlled... well, one day you're talking about SARS, and the next day you're talking about what life was like without the Party.
And that, if you're a Party official, is a fate far worse than the deaths of a few million of your subjects.