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Strategy Videogame Upsets Chinese, Gets Banned
An anonymous reader writes "China's State News Agency, Xinhua reports that China's Ministry of Culture has banned a computer game for 'distorting history and damaging China's sovereignty and territorial integrity'. Paradox's PC strategy game 'Hearts of Iron', was accused of distorting historical facts in describing Manchuria, West Xinjiang, and Tibet as independent sovereign countries in the maps of the game. 'All these severely distort historical facts and violate China's gaming and Internet service regulations,' the Ministry's Game Products Censorship Committee said. 'The game should be immediately prohibited.' [via China Digital]"
Unfortunately, I don't have good hard figures on the death toll from China's genocide in Tibet (as opposed to the genocide committed against ethnic Chinese during the great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, estimates for which range between 30-60 million), and Rummel doesn't have an seperate index entry for Tibet in Death by Goverment. Here's a protest poster that claims 1.2 million Tibetans have died as the results of China's occupation. We probably won't know the real number until (like the Soviet Union) after China is liberated from Communism at some future date.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
When will we see a real democracy emerge from the ruins of this wretched shell of a communist regime? Do you still think you will see 1 billion more people free in your lifetime? Will it be a bloody revolution or a revolution of roses?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Now that's one way to break into China market, I wouldn't be surprised if this game becomes a big underground hit there.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
So the Chinese government is censoring free speech? Do you support that, or not?
Everytime you go to Walmart, Target, and other "Made in China" clearing houses, you are supporting China, and placing another fatal blow to locally owned American small business.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
But it is inaccurate. This is communst dogma at it's height and it's an ego trip about geopgraphy. Tibet had been a long-standing independent tributary to imperial China and was not a true part of China until the reds forced it into becoming a secular province in the 50s and kidnapped their second highest religious leader. And at the time of the Tibetan takeover, let's remember that the Republic of China was internationally recognized as China, not the People's Republic of China until the 70s. It's completely inaccurate to leave Manchuria out as a separate entity (sovereignty is up in the air though) because Japan occupied most of northeastern China and did in fact set up the puppet state of The Empire of Manchuria. So I can't see how you got a +5 insightful by not knowing any of the history that the evil communist Chinese government are supposedly trying to rewrite.
The concept of a nation-state was very new to Central and South Asia at the time Tibet was invaded. To classify it as part of China would be wrong yes, but to classify it as a sovereign nation in the modern sense of the word would be wrong too. Perhaps 'kingdom' would be a better word. While I agree that Tibet deserves greater autonomy due to it's unique historical, cultural, and religous background, do be aware that you are imposing on the situation your own cultural assumptions about what dictates a nation.
one commentator put it "Imagine if the Nazis upon invading France had pulled down every church except Norte Dame, and burned and looted every museum except the Louvre. That's what China did in Tibet."
He forgot "forcibly sterilized", "imprisoned & tortured clergy", etc. but I guess the guy didn't have a spare half hour to extend his analogy. The Chinese gov't = teh suck. Evil, hypocritical old men. Thank god they're our allies (mostly).
Freedom: "I won't!"
Well, Taiwan WAS a Japanese colony in 1936, (following the 1894 Sino-Japanese war Taiwan was ceded to the Japanese) and Tibet WAS independent till 1959 when China invaded it.
You are missing the point. Leftists regimes really think that they have the right to dictate history and the "official version" of facts. The ChiComs really love to cry about the Rape of Nanking but seem to forget that Maoists murdered millions of their own people too.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Nice to see they are keeping up on their censorship of games. They're in good company, what with Wolfenstein still being illegal in Germany.
If you use your real name, it won't be long until China will require you to go through a military background check to get a visa to visit. Believe me, it happened to me.
The source of China's claim to Tibet is actually pretty bizarre. During the nomad/warrior phase of Tibet's history, they exacted as tribute, an Chinese imperial princess. Later, when Tibet was less formidable,this became a source of imperial claims by China of Tibet. This was subsequently picked up by the Communists in the modern era.
This is just another example of how a tenuous claim gets respect just by being repeated long enough. However, as an American I'm hardly in a position to criticize China, since a lot of our property was stolen from our Indians through treaty violations.
The real reason for Tibet to become autonomous would be that most of the people born there want independence.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I was in the US Army in West Germany in '85 guarding the East German border. Some German friends brought over Risk and we played a little. They explained to us that due to sensitivity about their Nazi past, in German Risk you don't 'conquer' the world, you 'liberate' it. My friends at the time indicated that this was a matter of German law, but I don't know if that was true or not. At the time I thought it was funny, but now I don't think I'd find such a law to be very funny anymore.
TW
The Chinese government is "EVIL" but ti's effective. They are also mostly "Fair". If you follow their rules. You tend to live a normal happy life. If you do not they kill you. Thus, 1 million tibetains had the notiosn of fighting back. They are dead. The rest mostly shut up. Asian cultures aren't as arrogant and stubborn as Islamic/ Arabic cultures. They'd rather subsist under a tyrant then die under a freedom fighter.
Thats why chinese tend not to have too much internal strife. I know I'm chinese and I visit frequently and have a large part of my family there. There are many things that go on that are un fair oppresive and such, but the Gov does try to keep order for the normal folk. For a large number of the population, life isn't bad.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Heh. Perhaps you haven't had the pleasure of reading George Orwell's 1984, in which Orwell vividly describes the state of the world in a future he feared. In 1984, the government rewrites history on a daily basis. This could be something small, like modifying what Big Brother said about an individual some months ago. Or it could be something big, like convincing the world that one country had always been their ally, while another had always been their enemy; especially when the opposite had been true the day before.
This might seem crazy when you read it in a book, but these things happen all the time in real life, even here in the United States. For example, the ACLU, the so-called American Civil Liberties Union, is currently pursuing legal action against the County of Los Angeles because that county's seal includes a small image of a Christian cross, symbolizing the Mission that was the first settlement in the area. This is a form of rewriting history, as is the removal of Paul Revere from children's history books, to be replaced with some female who apparently did something similar, to be "politically correct." Yes, this has already been done in many schools.
When China decides that it doesn't like certain things, it will talk about them as if they did not exist. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire education system there teaches people things that are wrong, so when the Chinese people hear something like this, they think it's the truth, and that Tibet was never owned by anybody else.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
I don't know about Xinjiang, but in the game Manchukuo starts as a puppet of Japan. I think the Japanese player can even order their soldiers around.
So, while on the map they have a border,and their own flag, they are not really an independant nation. China doesn't really have a legitimate complaint about that.
You do realize that, fundamentally, there's no difference between the censorship in the US and China, right?
The basic pattern is to threaten people where they hurt in the given context. In China, the natural lever is inprisonment. In the US, it's money. The use of the lever can be direct ro indirect, but the principle stays the same.
Also, the effect of purporting a lie as the official truth is the same, whether the government does that directly or private corporations do it for the government. If you have no access to an alternate opinion, "freedom of speech" is a moot point, as you had been trained to accept the "one truth" without blinking. And even if, after you've been indoctrinated with the official truth, you hear someone voicing a different oppinion, you're more likely to consider that person mad - after all, everyone knows what the "truth" is.
This is the line China is taking now - repeat something strong enough and for long enough and it will become truth.
Free speech is worthless by itself. You need at least an open-minded education to be able to begin and understand/use it.
Scenario 1: The US bombs a gathering of rebels. The rebels claim it was a "wedding party" (everyone has guns at wedding parties, right?). US and foreign journalists pick up conflicting reports.
Scenario 2: The US bombs a wedding party. US spokesmen claim it was a gathering of rebels (everyone has guns at wedding parties, right?). US and foreign journalists pick up conflicting reports.
Now, I won't say which I think is more likely. Are the rebels lying, or did the US make a mistake?
(Most of the rest of your criticisms are dead on. This particular one just irks me.)
Human/Ranger/Zangband
They'd rather subsist under a tyrant then die under a freedom fighter.
I used to work with a number of Chinese scientists who'd come to the US for grad school. Some of them clearly intended to stay here as long as possible, but others were more nationalistic. I asked one student (who had pictures of Zhou Enlai and the aftermath of the Naking massacre on his desk) why obviously intelligent people like him continued to put up with the Communists. He said it was because the situation in China kept improving: they now have some form of capitalism, better technology, continuing superpower status, and so on. And as you suggest, as long as you follow the rules you'll do pretty well. He said that if things got worse, they might be more inclined to want a change of government, but right now nobody wanted to rock the boat. I guess if your parents lived through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, modern China must seem pretty terrific.
I've heard similar claims made about the US, although they're usually made by people who think we're not communist enough.
Who's the bigger patriot? A man who volunteered to go to war, went overseas, saw first hand combat, killed the enemy and was injured three times, who decided that the war he fought in was not accomplishing anything and needed to be stopped before more people died needlessly?
Or a man who joined the reserves, asked not to be sent overseas, and spent the war skipping out on his duty?
Not supporting an arbitrary war doesn't make you a pacifist. We're telling our troops that they are fighting to protect America's freedom. If the war proves to have no net positive effect, directly or indirectly, on our freedom, and indeed devolves into wholesale slaughter with no gains, what're you supposed to do? Keep fighting and trying to win a war nobody believes in? Or back out in shame?
Incidentally, in the past 40 years, how many generals won the presidency? How many lawyers? Are you claiming we wouldn't vote for Washington or Lincoln anymore just because they weren't governors?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
What? Do you have cites to back up that claim?
Maybe you mean something like in exchanging diplomats?
I think that Tibet was a very secluded area that rarely allowed any outsiders in. The last thing they would have wanted was to exchange diplomats or have foreign embassies present. So from that point of view, you might be technically correct, but only technically correct.
But in fact, Tibet was recognized as an independent country. If a mountaineer wanted permission to climb Everest from the north, he needed Tibet's permission, not China's. And that permission was not often given.
China's claim to Tibet, as far as I understand, is that a Chinese baby was taken to Tibet to become the Dalai Lama at one point.
Okay, I'll play the deconstructionism game. "2 + 2 = 4". Is this objective or subjective truth? If the latter, what's the opposing truth? Or is this sum just a piece of propaganda which has been perpetrated over the course of millennia?
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
while i don't know about the case against LA county, don't be stupid and compare the ACLU to Big Brother.
in 1984, Big Brother is the government. the ACLU is an organization comprised of people who don't want the government to trample civil liberties.
say what you want about the goals and the methodologies of the ACLU, but that's a huge distinction.
as for paul revere, your argument exactly supports his removal and the reinsertion of "some woman who apparently did something similar": if he didn't do what we've always taught and someone else did, it is improper historical revisionism that deleted her and credited him.
london is drowning and i live by river
I agree with this sentiment. However i'd like to add a caveat. We are all aware of how history is re-written and adjusted by the powers in charge, and this may well be more of that. However, on the flip side it is not in the public's best interest to have fact distorted via a public medium. (which i have no idea of what is historical fact in this dispute).
For instance, there continue to be groups who claim the holocaust never happened. This opinion may be censored by a government, and the mere cat it is censored does not make it true.
I suppose the moral here is caveat emptor, watch out who you are buying your truth from.
1. Isn't that the same reasoning behing the Iraqi tortures? "... but when Sadam ruled them, they were tortured even harder!"
And actually, no, it is not all good. But I'm waiting for postings about the continuous lies of the U.S. goverment. About the entire fraud that is their foreign policy, supporting a country such as Israel which kills and destroys with U.S. payed and manufactured weapons while claiming to be a neutral referee in the conflict.
The fact that the US goverment brings down goverments and destroys entire countries for weapons of mass destruction while they know Israel has 'em in huge amounts.
The fact that although this war was about the so called proven connection between Sadam and Bin Laden, about weapons of mass destruction, about liberating them from torture and about giving the people a real democracy. Now, they're dead silent about the connection, about the weapons, they are torturing them theirselves and their goverment is selected by the US and has bonds with the FBI and CIA.
The US is building the Forth Reich and aparantly, other then the Arabs nobody seems to care.
2. Changing history? To point of the post was the banning of a video game. Not the changing of history. And actually, showing fictional movies which constantly charactarize a certain race of people as being evil to the bone, does actually influence people. It's just a certain form of more subtle (or even hidden) propaganda. The reason those Arabs were tortured has everything to do with the fact that Arabs countries are being stamped as "the axis of all evil".
Furthermore, it is not just fictional movies, but also movies which are supposed to have a historical base. Changing that historical base in your nations advantage is actually making your people believe a distorted history (or even just plain lies).
And furthermore, it's your good right to think I'm stupid, but imho it does show your lack of actual counterarguments.
Nevermind, I just figured it out. "Manchukuo" is the Chinese word for Japan-occupied Manchuria, written in the old romanization system (Wade-Giles?). The modern spelling (pinyin) would be "manzhouguo." Isn't Chinese romanization confusing?
China: We don't like the rest of the world, so we'll ignore them.
US: We don't like the rest of the world, so we'll bomb them.
If you wish to follow that line of "property ownership", the US bought much of the land claimed by Mexico from the French. Now if you'd said "around a third" then I'd agree.
OTOH, what gave either the French or the Mexican govt. the right to claim that land? In the case of the French it wasn't even adverse possession, merely that somebody marked it out on a map and claimed it. (I don't think that the French even knew that the Russians were claiming the same land.)
Now if the Mexican govt. were considered successors in interest to the Aztecs then they could properly claim land up as far as New England... but typically aboriginal claimants were given the short shrift, when they were lucky.
Still, none of this conflicts with the claim that most of China was originally sovereign countries. In fact, that tended to happen periodicly even after the Emperors appeared. Under a weak emperor the country would fall apart, and the districts at the edges would go their own ways. Sometimes it would get so bad that even provinces close to Beiging would declare their independance. Then a rising Emperor would claim the old provinces, and reclaim them using some combination of diplomacy and military might. Most other countries don't have a long enough history of being the same country to show the same effects, but you can see it in action if you look carefully. (China has more definite borders than most countries. The mountains on two sides, the ocean on another, and a desert on the remaining one.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you check your history, Paul Revere wasn't very significant. The credit should have been given to William Dawes. But Longfellow thought that Paul Revere sounded better in his poem. (Or perhaps he got a good deal on some silverware, if he'd only include a plug? No evidence either way as far as I know.)
That being so, why not replace him by someone else of a group that has historically been slighted? Makes sense to me...as long as they don't go around suppressing Longfellow.
"On the 14th of April in '75
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year
Of the midnight ride of ????"
William Dawes just doesn't fit. What's the lady's name?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
See, that's just it - where's the objectivity here? Fox News is one outlet. One very, very conservative outlet. There are plenty of other outlets for more liberal news, but it seems as if a lot of people honestly believe that the voice (whatever voice that may be) that they agree with the least is somehow the only voice out there.
I'm not actually that big of a conservative myself, so let's flip this around - the right likes to use the phrase "the liberal media" fairly frequently. They're falling victim to the same myth you guys seem to be - a myopic assumption that the media that pushes their buttons and makes them angry is the only media that exists.
To reply, you confuse the issue of "Taiwanese Independence" with China having a claim on the island of Taiwan (Formosa, actually).
You may be correct in that China had control of the island only relatively recently (I doubt it, though), but this independence issue is a question of the political ties between China and Taiwan.
Not to say that the "native" Taiwanese are irrelevant, you have essentially a group of ethnic Chinese claiming that they're "Taiwanese" and that they have a separate culture from the Chinese which is obviously a load of bullshit spouted by these pro-independence politicians to confuse the lay people/voters.
I noticed that slashdot has a China fetish, pointing out the bullshit authoritarian information-control policies of the government or whatever, but what good does that do for this crowd? To make stupid, rather uninformed remarks about the situation? To make comments regarding the relative freedom of the Western World?
Perhaps it may be more instructive to examine how China, proper, has been moving towards modernization and is light-years different from the China of 1976. There is still much to improve, modernize, etc, but it's much better than what it was.
I would go on, but I'd rather sleep mothafuckas.
Having been to China, I find that many of the internet sites which are supposedly banned actually work just fine. (BBC Google etc.)
Google is redirected to a chinese google but google.ca (top 15 sites in the world) works just fine.
So either their censorship isn't working or we are getting flummoxed.
As for the native Taiwanese, there is a group called the Benshengren, who are more or less native. Then, there is a another group called Hakka that moved over about 700 years ago. After that, in the past 100 years, the mainlanders came over, particularly with the KMT.
As for comparing Chinese and Western freedoms, there is no comparison. I know fools like the previous poster go on about how bad it is in the west, but that's bullshit.
In mainland China, it is quite accepted to punish individuals families for collective punishment. The crimes of a a few will be punished with collective economic punishment. Sons are punished for the actions of fathers. Families are destroyed for their ancestor's hard work. Knowledge and truth is banned.
The Chinese who revolt are slaughtered. What the Japanese did to the Chinese is peanuts compared to the auto-genocide that Mao and company committed agains the Chinese, what Deng did in Tiananmen and elsewhere, or what goes on all over on a small scale today.
As for better than 1976, that's true and that's false. China has a much stronger military then it did 30 years ago. It is capable of reaking much more havok. The Chinese have proven their violence in the past.
In the past 60 years, they have been at war with Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, and South Korea. They have been in a quasi-war with Russia since Stalin died. The Chinese attack their Muslim population and are attempting to destroy them.
No, there is little good coming from China at present. The Chinese themselves are responsible for the situation as well. They are the ones threatening world peace over a small democracy several miles off their coast. The attitude is a willingness to destroy the happy people of Taiwan in exchange for the destruction of the siland is gladly accepted by the Communist leaders. The threat of the US Seventh Fleet, and American Ballistic Missiles, is all that defends the freedom loving people of Taiwan. Were it not for the nuclear weapons of the US, China would long ago have destroyed that freedom loving island.
There is no excuse for the fascist power that China has become. None. The excuse that they are improving is not true. There is no desire for change by the corrupt Communist leaders. A revolution is the only possibility of success and freedom for the people of the mainland.
No, the people of China deserve better than to be told, "Look at how much your government has changed." To say otherwise demeans their trials. Democracy and freedom are all peoples' unalienable rights, even if they live in a country of 1.3 billion.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.