China Blocks Typepad, Prompts Weblog Blackout

dcm writes "As U.S. Ambassador Richard Williamson prepares to introduce a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Commission to censure the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) government for increasing 'repression of its people using the Internet, democratic dialogue, religious expression,' the regime continues to block discourse.On Friday, China began blocking access to Typepad, a paid weblog hosting service in San Mateo, California. The communist regime previously blocked access to BlogSpot, Blogger's free hosting site. Yan Sham-Shackleton filed a report on the Glutter weblog, mentioning China is '...now using blocking software to stop information from leaking into the county via personal sites, an increasingly vibrant China Internet community, and a place where users are slipping in banned information. Some sites in the blogging community are turning black in protest of this event while others are reporting the incident.'"

Comments

Holding Back The Inevitable

[ackthpt]

Block the web or not, information still floods into the PRC and it's like the dutch boy trying to hold back the north sea with his finger. Newspapers and magazines flourish which the CCP have been hard pressed to stop. It's like swatting flies with a hammer.

Q: Why are the chinese communists so afraid of free exchange of ideas and criticism?
A: They're afraid they'll have to give up power and find real jobs.

It's not the security of the country tyrants desire, it's their own security. It's unfair to call them leaders.

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[RadGeekAuburn]

Because, as Plato pointed out over 2000 years ago, democracy is a dangerous thing. The populace can be taken advantage of - note the cultural revolution was supported by the majority when millions were killed, so was the Russian revolution which supported Lenin's oppression and later Stalin's.

This seems like an odd tack to take in the argument--since neither China during the Cultural Revolution nor the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin had substantive democratic institutions. In point of fact, Lenin and Stalin and Mao each in their time took deliberate actions (such as the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the dismantling of the Workers' Opposition, the creation of the secret police and the gulag, and, well, the Cultural Revolution) to crush local democratic power, concentrate power in the hands of party bosses, and create a totalitarian environment in which people do not dare to express dissent for fear of hearing a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

(In such an environment, by the way, it also seems to me to be rather tendentious, to say the least, to claim to have any clear knowledge of what people thought about the rulers -- since part of the purpose of the totalitarian apparatus was to keep people from honestly saying what they though about things.)

I thoroughly recommend you read some of the descriptions of the power struggles in post-Revolutionary Russia, such as Emma Goldman's My Disillusionment in Russia or The Workers' Opposition.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[Chibi Merrow]

a stable government requires a way to overthrow the leaders with a fair election.

And a fail safe for when "fair elections" aren't, as well.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[spood]

Communism does not preclude fair election. Communism is just socialism in the extreme. There are plenty of contemporary democratic socialist countries. At the same time, democracy (traditionally the "enemy" of communism due to Cold War propaganda) is not immune to corruption, either. It wouldn't be hard to argue that the "politician for sale" lobby problem is not evidence of corruption in the United States.

The problem with "pure" communism (the reason why it doesn't pan out in reality) is that it doesn't provide personal incentives to produce - all production is seized and redistributed by the state. Similarly, there are incentives only to demonsrate need in order to obtain an undue portion of the redistribution. Under such a system, the dishonest are rewarded by not having to work according to ability and obtaining more than fair share of "need". The honest are punished.

Even the U.S. has adopted many socialist programs (Medicare, Social Security, welfare, public education), but it's difficult to determine where the balance between socialism and pure capitalism lies. Allowing the market free rein implies that there is no such thing as a public good, which is difficult to argue.

The more power in the central government, the more corruption, no matter what form of government it is. This is one of the reasons our founding fathers intended to limit the power of the fed, a lesson that not even the current Republican party seems to have taken to heart.

Freenet?

[Eberlin]

I suppose someone could just ban any and all downloads of Freenet-related software so that's not going to solve anything. For anyone who ever said the mantra "Information Wants To Be Free" -- THIS is what it is meant to be.

Government-sanctioned censorship isn't anything new, though. We try to protect children with things like CIPA and the like. We've got watchdogs all over that won't allow us (folks in the US) to hear foul language over public airwaves, are looking to restrain violent video games, and in general trying to police what we do.

I'm not saying we're communistic, by any means. Just saying that censorship is censorship. Not as extreme, but the seeds are there.

In the end, it unfortunately comes down to "censorship is only bad when they're censoring something I believe in."

Oh, bitter irony

[WarPresident]

As U.S. Ambassador Richard Williamson prepares to introduce a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Commission to censure the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) government for increasing 'repression of its people using the Internet

Somewhat ironic given that U.S. companies are profiting by selling censorship software to China. And of course, the U.S. requiring (or trying to require) libraries to censor the Internet, for the children, of course.

Why not the WTO instead of ONU?

[neves]

Just other day the WTO said that USA had to allow on line gambling. China has just joined the WTO. Typepad is an for profit company, why not they also can't make WTO force them to allow access to Typepad? At least this shitty globalization would give a little help to free speech. At least by now USA and Britain aren't trying to make WTO become irrelevant as they did with ONU.

Would information really cause a change?

[metroid composite]

A coworker of mine in a largely undergrad programming group, student at the University of British Columbia, was from China and fully convinced that her government was downright awesome, way better than the Canadian government, and that the reports on human rights violations I talked about were just western propaganda. Come to think of it, I've never been to Tibet, I suppose she could be right ...theoretically....

That's not really the point, however. The point is, everyone claiming that information = insta-revolution well...I seriously doubt it. A lot of people left Hong Kong before PRC took it over...and then moved back when they saw that PRC didn't really change the system at all, and things were peaceful.

Seriously, they didn't really keep out outside information before; that fully explains the Tiananmen Square protests, as people knew that Communist leaderships everywere were falling appart so they wanted to try in China too. If people wanted a protest/revolution it would happen; I honestly don't think they do, and I don't think the internet will change that, blocked or unblocked.

Give me a break.

[Rostin]

I don't know which is more mind-boggling - the fact that this was seriously posed as a question or the fact that it was modded insightful.

Kindly go to a strip club, get HBO, google for "nipple", or buy a magazine in a brown wrapper ALL LEGALLY and THEN tell me how terrible the US is just because most people who live here think it might be smart to not allow nudity during the Superbowl.

Re:Not surprising

[4of12]

the gap is closing from the US side,

It's occurred to me, too, that the government/corporate system of the United States and of China are a lot closer in practice than people might think.

Yes, in China you get these weird laws where "slander of the state" and "revealing state secrets" put people in jail for expressing dissent.

But, in the US, if you criticize a business, eg, make disparaging comments about the healthiness of eating beef or provide a web link to a DeCSS site, you can get slammed with heavy legal action.

In China, the government powers have become corrupt as they hand out valuable contracts to cronies and have tolerated cheating bosses not paying their workers.

In the US, the government powers have become corrupt as they accept money from special interests to craft legislation favorable to those interests. Substantial growth in non-unionized workforce has meant stagnation in wage growth for blue collar workers in the US.

Government policies are not far apart between the US and China; corporate influence will tend to drive them even closer together.

Re:Please help us

[iminplaya]

As long as China supplies lots of cheap labor and plays ball with the world's corporations nobody's going to impose anything on them. The world's governments could care less about human rights and all that. They just want cheap stuff and big profits.