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

They got greedy...

[EulerX07]

From the article :

"Filters are used to screen out items containing certain pornographic or politically sensitive terms"

See, if they had stopped at stifling free expression and political opinion exchange they would have been allright. They went after porn, and in technology, porn ALWAYS win. An army of horny men will find a way through their defenses like a knife through hot butter.

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.

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.

Re:Any Slashdot readers helping out?

[Texas Rose on Lava L]

We can help each other. We host the political dissent websites and they host the mp3s.

Hacktivismo

[rjelks]

The Hacktivismo group has been writing software to help the Chinese and others that are being censored. I was very interested when I heard about the "Six/Four" protocal that they were writing for anonymous browsing. Has anyone heard any news on the development of this or any other projects like it. (I'm aware of freenet) Anyway, here is their project page. They're an interesting group that seems to be pushing for free distribution of information.

Bad stuff

[The Bungi]

If you want to get an idea on just how bad it is over there in terms of filtering, check out this article about a 2002 study by the Hardvard Law. There are about 19,000 sites listed there. Pretty much anything that has to do with the US and other western governments, "smut", anything even remotely related to Taiwan and so on.

Having lived there

[Tristan7]

I lived in China for six months last year teaching English at a University. What I found particularly amazing, was that the culture has taught people not to question things. Even my PhD students largely accepted whatever was told to them. So even though there may have been forums online for them to learn about political dissent, most wouldn't particularly have been interested (a few seemed more aware than most, but only a very few).
Add to this the location of these forums. Online. China does have internet cafes in the larger areas, but the bulk of the country is too poor to even go into them, let alone find their way to some hidden forum.

I'm all for more individual freedoms in China, but I think most westerners really don't have a clue about how our cultural upbringing has affected us, and how their culture has affected them.

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.

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...