Chinese Internet Censorship Proves Difficult

An anonymous reader writes "BBC reports that despite incredible efforts by the Chinese government, online dissent and distribution of censored information continues and even influences government policies."

Comments

Conflicting Values

[reclusivemonkey]

Does anybody know how much involvement the Chinese Government has with Red Flag? It seems to me that the principles of open source software sit uneasily with censorship.

China is _not_ communist

[rsilvergun]

They're a Fascist Dictatorship with Communist Rhetoric. Communism makes for great posters and propaganda when you're nearly starving and working 16 hrs/day. But given that people at large in China seem to have very little say in how "their" resources are spent (if they did, would they allow sweat shops to exist?), I don't see how you can call them Communist.

That said, I don't think Communism is a viable system. You can never get past that whole "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" thing. China didn't, Russia didn't and neither did Cuba. I'm a Socialist myself. Violent or at least forceful revolutions like Communism is usually associated with almost always end with a brutal, Fascist government. I better solution is for the poor and disenfranchised to control their population so that the value of their labor increases (kinda like what happened with the Black Plague but minus the Plague). As funny as it sounds, I think birth control is the best hope for mankind. Now if we can only get those pesky religious and cultural factors to go away so the poor will use it...

Re:China is _not_ communist

[leereyno]

The problem is that in a country like the US most of the poor and disenfranchised have no one to blame but themselves. Every child is afforded a free and public education. Every child has educational and economic opportunities that people in the third world would do almost anything to take advantage of. Why do you think the US is a beacon of hope an prosperity to the rest of the world? Even those nations that hate and resent us do so because we represent everything that they are not. Resentment is the sincerest form of flattery.

The US is a meritocracy. Not a perfect one of course but what flaws we have are not fatal ones. Prosperity can be had by anyone who is willing and able to work for it. Most adults who live in poverty are losers plain and simple. Worrying about their welfare and quality of life when they won't take responsibility for these things themselves is an exercise in stupidity. There is a reason why some people are well off and others are not, and that boils down to a fundamental difference in the quality of their character and the level of their abilities. Losers lose, winners win. Do anything you want to the system within which these two groups exist and it won't make a damned bit of difference. You can't help those who won't help themselves. Trying to monkey with the social machinery to favor those who can't or won't produce just makes things worse for everyone.

I agree with you that birth control is the best hope for mankind. If losers and idiots can be discouraged from creating more of themselves the long term benefits for humanity are nearly limitless. I can't agree with you about religion however. Nature abhors a vacuum and religion is a powerful civilizing and socializing force. It is not perfect, but at least it does not deny human nature. Most leftest ideology is based upon the idea that evil is the result of social conditions/injustice, and simple misunderstandings. Man's nature is seen as both inherently good and infinitely malleable. It is believed that man can be made into something better through education and other social endeavors. The truth is that human nature is not inherently good and neither is terribly changable. Any system that denies the truth about human nature will be the victim of it. Communism is only one of the more horrific examples of this fundamental truth.

I understand why you're a socialist. You want to make the world a better place. What you need to understand is that not everyone can be helped and those who can are best served by providing them with the opportunity to help themselves.

Lee

Re:What is Communist about China?

[kfg]

communism was a big flop.

Have you visited a monastary or a state sponsored public school lately?

Communism is alive and well and living amongst us.

You'll find very little Marxism though, as Marxism is an industrial theory, not a social one.

KFG

Re:American Technology is helping repress the Chin

[chenyu]

Not to be too harsh since your heart seems to be in the right place but.....

I think here GTE has helped free speech in China more than you have. A fiber system in and out of China which the government tries to censor is *far* better than no system at all. One reason that China is finding much harder to censor the internet than Cuba or North Korea is that there is so much traffic going back and forth that its impossible to monitor it all. Putting in fiber helps increase internet usage and makes it much harder for the government to censor it.

Something to keep in mind is that on the same weekend that Tiananmen happened, the Burmese government also shot a whole bunch of students. No one remembers or even knows about it, because there weren't a million television cameras in Burma that weekend.