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

CIPA (Childrens Internet Protection Act)

[stephenisu]

Reminds me of back when most of my friends in highscool had two floppy disks with them at all times. One to disable netnanny, one to put it back. Oh the good ol' days.

ChinaNet

[Txiasaeia]

if the chinese government really wants to censor the internet, maybe they should consider scrapping ISPs and build their own Intranet, one which has no access with the outside world -- non-compatible e-mail systems, incompatible HTML/XML markup, integrated browsers, etc. etc. Even looking at the above, I still don't think it's possible to block the outside world.

Maybe they should start working on propaganda - China rules and the rest of the world sucks. Non-Chinese news sources are fallacious and biased against China, that sort of thing. I've been kicking around the idea of fascism in our post-industrial world, but as yet I've not come up with an idea that would truly work. A closed media system is impossible to achieve, esp. in a country as large as China.

This is all, of course, for fun; the intellectual exercise is more interesting to me than applying my ideas to reality.

American Technology is helping repress the Chinese

[GomezAdams]

When I worked at GTE the company got the contract to lay the fiber optic cable around the border of China and put in the network centers that setup a ring around China. Total control of all the traffic in and out of the country, or so they hoped. A career limiting move came when I wrote Chuck Lee, CEO of GTE, and said we were helping the same Communist government that gave us Tianamen Square and would continue to repress the Chinese people using this technology. But Bean Counters only care about profit and damn the people that get get screwed over in the process.

As a side note, I knew a lad working near me from China who had been at Tianamen Square the day before and then the day after the massacre happened. When he saw what the army had done to their own people he went home, packed and left for Hong Kong and then to the US.

Censorship is only one way the Communists will use to stay in power and shooting another bunch of college kids can happen again.

Re:power to the people

[radish]

Agreed. I mean, what kind of "government of the people" would make it illegal to distribute information on, for instance, how to watch a movie?

Re:power to the people

[kfg]

In one sense you're right, but the definition of child porn varies wildly, even within a single legal structure.

So wildly that "child porn" has no real meaning. Hell, just "child" is a major issue of debate. And to the extent that it is universally illegal is due mostly to an American promotion, with the usual strong arm tactics, to create a universal condemnation, not due to any cultural aversion in and of itself.

Governments tend to do things for purely politica reasons, and right now, in the world scheme of things, it's politically advantageous to adopt certain tenets of American Puritanism.

Note that Japan has a long history of prostitution as not only a cultural norm, but in some respects a respected profession. Now it is illegal.

But not because the Japanese themselves really see anything innately wrong with it. It's politics.

KFG