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China Blocking Access to Google News Site
loconet writes "BBC and Reuters are reporting that China is blocking access to the Web site Google News according to media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. The organisation also accused Google of being complicit by filtering its Chinese-language site." From Reuters' version of the story: "The Paris-based group said the government had been blocking Google's English-language news Web site for about 10 days, after the company launched a Chinese-language version that removed politically sensitive reports."
I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed in Google making a "local" version of their news feeder for China. It's not local news, it's censored news. That doesn't sound like the Google I know and love.
- dshaw
China is a sovereign nation. I don't think you'd hear the end of it if you suggested that Americans be required to have their votes counted in the open.
Leave China alone and pay attention to the problems in your own country.
Criticise China but be capable of listening to and considering criticism of your own country too.
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The BBC article says that "the site does not filter news results to remove politically sensitive information." I wonder what exactly gets through. I've heard that certain American political sites (nationalreview.com, democraticunderground.com) are not filtered in China--I don't know if that's true, but it suggests an alternative strategy for finding interesting information.
I find it hard to believe that they could censor *everything*, unless they set the default to 'banned' and allowed sites on a case-by-case basis. But even that's hard--a seemingly innocuous site could suddenly have "objectionable" content one day.
I find it highly dubious that this was marked flamebait when it's merely explaining a reference from the headline! I would make far unkinder comparisons than holding the GLF to the dot com bubble.
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
I know people who are both perfectly reasonable and intelligent, but having grown up in China, know nothing about Tiamanmen. They also claim that Tibet was never invaded; it had always been a part of China. Some are even willing to confess that they formerly hated anything Japanese (including people) due to the nature of the propaganda in its schools. Of course, I'm not saying that everyone who comes out of China's education system is like this, but surely an environment which fosters these views is is bad enough?
China's economy is growing fast; soon it will be too bit for anyone to speak out against its sensitive policies without major fear of reprisals. If something isn't done now, it may never be.
Evil isn't just a philosophical construct, nor is it a metaphor, it exists.
There is very little that we can do about this other than refuse to do business with Chinese companies, which is nearly impossible unless you want to go live in a mud hut someplace.
When someone lies, they're wrong, and obscuring information is just another form of lying.
Hopefully one day freedom will come to China, but not today.
Actually it is North Korea that the world needs to focus its attention on. The sooner Kim Jong il is removed from power the better. As bad as Saddam was, he's a frelling nobel peace prize winner compared to Kim. A very special place in the fires of hades is even now being prepared for his punk ass.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Collaboration with an evil is as good as being evil. Sorry Google. Perhaps we could add an additional meaning to the phrase "to google?" Activities like talking endlessly about how good you are, and then silently supporting the worlds largest oppressive regime would fall into that category. It is almost like bad science fiction. There is no excuse for enabling oppression. I don't care about markets. This gives the average Chinese citizen the impression that the rest of the world (e.g. google) supports their intellectual imprisonment. Conversely, having a site like google firewalled would underline the level of their oppression.
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Method a: we refuse to deal with china. China remains a thid world country with no middle class, few trade partners, and a growing population of pissed off peasants. They have rockets, missiles, nuclear bombs - and then they revert to civil war. And unlike those poissant countries we're been meddling in for decades, "liberation" is not an option here, lest we lose NYC and LA in giant red clouds. Meanwhile we lose completely Japan, Taiwan, and dozens of other trade partners who now find themselves in the middle of a war zone.
Method b: we make china a trade partner, export as much of our culture as we can, and china becomes a nation of the fastest rising middle class in the world. Even if it's only a 30% middle class that's still more middle class citizens than there are people in the entire US. They pick the best of these new influences, and evolve their own governance through peaceful means - lest they face sanctions and risk losing all that new wealth and comfort.
Which way do you think is better for world stability?
China's affairs are their own. Everyone dies - even dynasties. Let them take the best from western culture and evolve their own ideals about liberty and freedom.
The fascination some Americans have with thinking Slashdot is a strictly American phenomenon is telling...
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Remember the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia? 2 people died. The Chinese at American universities staged their, first ever, clamorous demonstrations against the USA.
As for the rape of Tibet, the Chinese are stone cold silent. There is not even a peep out of them. Indeed, even the Chinese in Taiwan province support integrating Tibet into "One China".
Getting back to the censorship issue, Google generally acquiesces to the policies of Beijing. The majority of Google's employees are former or current H-1B employees. Many of them are Chinese and, hence, support the policies of Beijing.
Google management caring about human rights? Yeah. Right. The management does not even care about the plight of unemployed Americans and hired H-1Bs, left and right, when American engineers were unemployed during the 2001-2003 recession in Silicon Valley. The only ethics that Google understands is the kind spelled with a dollar sign: ethic$.
Speaking as someone who's been working here for a bit, I have to say two things.
First, all this shit about the Chinese Government being the evilest thing on earth is nuts. The government here manages to keep social order such that people can get up and go to work everyday, and such that an increasing number of this generation of children have a shot at the kind of economy we like to talk about in the USA; work like a dog and get yourself a better life. Sure there's a ton of people (80% of 1.3 billion) who are farmers and will never see this. Do you think a liberal democracy based on egalitarian ideals could just be stuck onto a society like this where so many people are completely uneducated? The current government is doing the right thing; focusing on decreasing the population to a level that the economy can comfortably support (keep in mind China has very VERY little in the way of natural resources). Granted there are massive problems here, particularly institutionalized corruption of the beauracracy, but you could do a lot worse. China is a police state? The US is MUCH more heavily policed, although if you DO manage to catch the attention of the real Chinese police they WILL shoot you in the head. Nothing ever shows up in the Chinese media that's critical of the government? SO what?! Nothing ever shows up on the USA's useless fucking media that hasn't been approved by the station's marketing department. Besides, you think Chinese people here don't know what's going on? Christ, of COURSE they know they're not getting the whole story. You think these people are stupid?
Which brings me to Google. Given that these days China is hardly Nazi Germany (or Stalinist Russia or even Maoist China), saying that making censorship concessions with the PRC government. is tantamount to an act of evil is just dumb. You have the choice of not giving the Chinese people access to an information retrieval tool that will further entrench the Internet in their lives as a useful (and possibly eventually liberating) tool OR you can just do what you can. I'll take the second one any day. Look, nothing is going to piss the Chinese off worse than a hairy fucking big nosed foreignor walking in and tellin' the way it is about free speech. That's just a dumb idea.
I've lived in several countries outside of the US (including China), and I'll be the first to admit that a lot of what the US government does I disagree with. But your post reeks of bigotry--and the fact that it's bigotry within a post flaming another group of people for their own bigotry makes it smell far more awful.
Do us all a favor and grow up. If there is to be an end to all the excriment that exists in the world that we all seem to unanimously agree upon, let us stop flinging our own, shall we?
China's censorship and Google's response have nothing to do with Fox news or any American media outlet. Our media has many problems, which definately need to be addressed, but you're being over dramatic to say the least. I hate how this stuff gets modded up.
I'm sure you're very bright. Why don't you use your brain to come up with ways of solving these problems? The inability to do so will leave you in the same quagmire of ignorance and "cluelessness" that the very people you're attacking are supposedly in.
I can assert that you care nothing about fixing the problem because if you did you would have thought about how your average American would respond to your post. Clearly, the average American would just get defensive and forget about what you have to say--which is, I think, exactly what you would do if I did the same thing to you.
Must be the education system over there.
P.S. I'm currently suffering from heavy jet lag, so I apologize for any incoherence or if it seems to harsh. You're probably not such a bad guy. Heck, if I were in the neighborhood, I'd buy you a brew at the pub. But what makes me so mad is that I agree that Americans are being largely deceived and intentionally kept ignorant, and I find it both sad and disheartening. I want to change it. You don't seem to want to--and because you both set really high standards for other groups of people to meet, and yet feel comfortable shooting your mouth at them in a very uninformed and bigoted fashion, you seem to me (who has lived in Central America, Europe, USA, and China) to be every bit as bad as the "Americans" you're so rabidly attacking.
I've heard enough rednecks and their "those two-bit good-for-nothing ignor'nt back-stabbing $nationality_of_choice" tripe.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
By the way, if we could get some Chinese citizens to come over here and correct the problems in our government, that'd be great. I'd love for them to fix our political problems if they could.
The general idea behind that quote is that you shouldn't help fix someone else's problems very if you're in worse shape. You don't seriously think that the US is in worse shape than China on the freedom front, do you?
The last war protest we had that someone died in due to protest was Vietnam, and that was a matter of a few nervous national guardsman with guns and a lot of violent protesters with stones than willfully running people over with tanks. Further, I can say "George W. Bush was given Hitler's Brain in a ceremony performed by Nazi-Satanic brain surgeons" without getting a knock on my door tomorrow.
Keep things in perspective.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
(I emailed this comment to the author. My slashdot Login is Shaneh0, I'm posting as A.C because after writing the author I wanted to share it with you)
... Al queada links? How many of you think most of the world support your actions?"
I modded your comment down, "-1 Overrated."
I did this because I think your post is every bit as ignorant as you claim we are.
"China may not have googlenews, but how many subbed Chinese new stations do you have in America?"
While we don't pick up any Chinese TV networks, Google News does sample Chinese news sources--which, from what I've seen, are about as reliable as Pravda--sometimes even linked as the top story. So it's ironic that you argue our ignorance to the Chinese press. I wouldn't have the world Xihuana (sp?) in my vocabulary if that were true, and I'm certainly not the only one.
'Is it not America that closed down reporting of Iraq from stations like al jazeera"
The fact is, we are AT WAR with Iraq. Like it or not, it's true. Part of war is controlling propaganda, and it's been that way for a long time. I disagree with the war in Iraq but now that we're involved, I support doing what it takes to win.
"China has the great Firewall. - You have Fox."
EXACTLY! We have Fox, and CNN and NPR and CSPAN and Countless others, including ultra-independent bloggers who would probably be arrested in China.
"How many Americans still think Saddam had an active WMD program?
Honestly, I'd say that at LEAST a majority of Americans knows the truth about these things. Contrary to YOUR ignorant belief, most Americans are NOT un-educated or un-informed about domestic and world issues.
I didn't personally vote for Bush (either time) but I do know many people who did. Bush supporters aren't ignorant to his mistakes, or the state of affairs in Iraq, or the worlds opinion of America. They just felt he would be the better president.
If you think America on its worst day is ANYTHING CLOSE to as bad as China on its best, you've completely lost perspective on reality. China rolls over it's own citizens with tanks when they dissent. The government is filthy rich while it's citizens are starving to death in record numbers each year.
There is no due process, no civil liberties and no hope of reform.
America has her share of problems, far too numerous to list here. But you go around the world to Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America and you ask them if they'd rather live in China or in the United States.
and it's still crap. If your argument holds, i.e. that anything a business does is OK so long as it's good for shareholder value, then the stock market is inheriently evil, because it's always more profitable to abuse people than to be a good guy (nice guys don't finish last, but they don't come in first either).
This is were responsible governments step in to mitigate the evil, and where the American gov't steps in to encourage it.
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Have you heard of a little nation - sorry, CHINESE TERRITORY - called Tibet?
I think they'd want to be broken off of China, considering that they're not Chinese.
See the Ukraine.
I sell stuff on ebay. I had a guy from El Salvador win a bid on a hard drive I was selling. He has an "arrangement" with a shipper in Florida to get around the barriers, but otherwise that hard drive that cost him fifty bucks would end up damn close to 200 bucks by the time UPS (or the post office - they're both ridiculously priced) got their money and the tarrifs were covered. Unless I'm willing to get in a car and drive to El Salvador, the barriers to individual trade there are massive. Even sending shit to Canada is a pain in the butt - NAFTA only seems to really apply to the corporations (how surprising).
I'm a middle age child of the middle class - the very last gasp of the baby boomers. And it has never, ever, been my aspiration to spend a third of my life whittling away the hours in a fucking factory. I'm definitely not rich, don't care to be, yet even I can see how free(er) international trade would benefit me personally.
Why is it "globalisation" (a bad thing) when we're talking about trade, money and jobs, but "a revolution" (ie a good thing) when we're talking about the communications tools that have, in large part, facilitated that "globalisation?"
The problem isn't "globalisation" - it's an increasingly topheavy economic strata. And anything that enables individuals to subvert the oppressive upper economic layers (like americans selling used crap to el salvador, and salvadorians exploiting unoffical importation backdoors) helps us all.
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Suggestion for you: save up a few dollars and travel the world a bit. You will see how absolutely and completely not grounded in reality your post is.
At the risk of stating what is blatantly obvious to everybody else:
Every government is held together by force, because force is the fundamental tool and first prerequisite of government. If government were voluntary, it wouldn't be government at all -- it would be free enterprise, and it wouldn't posess the right to initiate force. Don't be fooled into thinking that the voting process removes the element of force from government.
The difference between force and voluntary association is the difference between government and everyone else. Government is the organization which holds the unique right to initiate force as a means to an end; anyone else who does so is a criminal. That is the only consistent, absolute, and universal way to define government. Always has been, and always will be. Notice I've said absolutely nothing about whether government is moral, practical, or efficient -- I've only provided the absolute definition of government.
The concept of "voluntary government" (and I put that in quotes because it cannot possibly exist) is primarily used by democratic governments as justification of their powers over the people. In reality, there is nothing voluntary about any government. If you don't comply, you will be threatened with deadly force, and if you fight in self-defense, you will face deadly force itself.
The bottom line is that the social contract theory is a logical impossibility. It states that citizens volunteer to submit to government rule. On first glance, this seems like a perfect way to justify anything government could possibly do. On closer inspection, you will find that the social contract theory claims the impossible.
Force and voluntary association are the only two possible modes of human interaction. Every single interaction you have with others throughout your life may be classified as either involuntary or voluntary association, but never both. Why? Because the two concepts are mutually exclusive and logically opposite -- a person cannot volunteer to be forced, just as you cannot force a person to volunteer. Otherwise, neither concept would have any meaning!
Either you initiate force as a means to an end, or you don't. Civilians don't; government and criminals do.
If I may abuse the parallel, wasn't exactly this what France did to Nazi Germany? I mean, France won WW1 and they pushed the Versailles Treatise down German throats. One of its provisions was to make sure Germany would not develop a military force. After a while, Hilter began to restructure German armed forces. France knew this was happening and could enforce the Versailles Treatise but decided to step back and just warn Hitler. That's appeasement -- trying to use a peaceful and submissive solution for a big problem and is still getting bigger. After a while, abuses were beginning to show up, but France thought if they just pointed the errors, eventually Hilter would stop with it. Nope.
So, lets see what would be a more realistic Method c (given the situation described in Method b): China actually becomes a huge, immense trade partner and begins to realize its own importance and start to push Chinese values into the world.
For example, the US has pushed democracy and freedom (with varying degrees of success) into other countries. China finds this unnecessary or obsolete and starts to preach that such liberties should be restrained.
Another Chinese value: attitude towards press. The US also find important important to have a free press -- a sine qua non condition for a working democracy. Since China determined that democracy actually hurts their commercial interests worldwide (see previous paragraph), China uses its influence to restrain press.
Let's get this straight: Method b is naive. If China gets the opportunity to use its newly found economic - and military - power to interfere in other countries to get away from the risk of being subject to sanctions mentioned in Method b, they will do. The US has been doing this since WW2, the argument to convince American opinion was that something - any perceived threat - from other countries could mess up with the American Way of Life. I also do not remember one single occasion when the US was threatened by an economic sanction.
The UK did it (defend its interests) during Industrial Revolution. France did this with Napoleon and his Continental Blockade. Heck, even Romans did it.
Expect China to protect firecely its Chinese Way of Life and to export it, eventually.
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Shouting out loud doesn't mean you are right I'm afraid.
No one argues the US has better freedom of expression than China, and I'm all for freedom of expression. However that doesn't entitle you or any US citizen the moral highground. I guess your opposite has a more balanced view and insight into the reality of press freedom.
Putting dissents into prison is a method that has limited effect and won't last. It can only silence the voice for a while, however, at the price of making the government more dissents than they can possibly make prisons to accommondate. That has been proven repeatedly in history. The CCP also knows it. They won't be doing this for long. As things have already changed so much, I have reason to expect the situation will continue to change to the better. Before criticising the political reality in China, please bare in mind that it used to be much much worse 20, or even 10 years ago and that China has only enjoyed growing freedom in its economy system for less than the length of Vietnam War. I'm not saying the CPP government should not be criticised, but it certainly takes a more balanced view to criticise them to the point.
On the other hand, in the US, the government may not have direct control over the media, but the money behind both the two parties certainly has the most sophisticated control of the press. The mass just lives happily with what they are fed with. Few is aware of the wrong doings of their government. Even less is concerned with what their mighty military power is used for. Most Americans just don't care what's happening in the world, they just obsessed with themselves, thanks to the side effect of US-style press freedom.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.