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."

Comments

Shame on Google

[dshaw858]

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

Re:Shame on Google

[krbvroc1]

Its pretty sad. It seems most businesses are willing to look the other way, deal with a communist regime, and even lobby for China--all in the name of 'getting a foot in the door of the largest growth market opportunity'. What I think these folks are missing is that China doesn't care. They'll use us for a time, but in the end they will control things internally the way they want.

Re:Shame on Google

[waynelorentz]

Repeat after me: "Google is a business."

It exists to make money for its shareholders. Just because it's an internet company doesn't mean it's allowed to just sit there and spend cash. It has to make some, too, as long as it acts within the law. A public company can't just tell its owners (shareholders) that it's going to turn its back on a billion-person market, unless that's what its shareholders want it to do. At this point, the shareholders appear to be more interested in the cash, so these are the decisions that are made.

Don't like it? Don't buy Google. Or even better, buy a few shares and voice your opinion at the next shareholder's meeting. That's, perhaps, the most effective way of showing your displeasure.

Re:Shame on Google

[superpulpsicle]

I am sorry but US hides news equally as much as China. All nations do it. Except it's easier to hide news among a population where sports pages are read more than frontpages.

U.S news are often delayed, sometimes you can go to ctv.ca (common canadian site) to get news first. Most of the time the news is selectively picked for the general public. Half the time, certain news are picked cause they generate better ratings.

Just remember, many foreign websites disclosed about the Iraq prisoner abuse first. The fact that U.S waited so long before they broadcasted this... shows that we are equally as selective as China.

Remove the log from thine own eye

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

On the contrary

[Chuck Chunder]

Criticise China but be capable of listening to and considering criticism of your own country too.

BBC article suggests a workaround

[leighton]

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.

Isolationism is powerlessness

[poptones]

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.

Re:Isolationism is powerlessness

[eclectro]

You do have a point. Some cultures for one reason or another are not ready to embrace American style democracy.

Look at the people of Iraq, and how they have embraced their liberation. It makes you wonder if they want to go back to days of Saddam.

And for those that criticize me and say that it's not the general population that is causing problems in Iraq, the fact is the general population is giving refuge to the insurgents, rather than chasing them out of their neighborhoods and mosques (where the US army is increasingly finding large caches of weapons). Or we wouldn't be having the second most marines killed in one month (November). Not to mention that the airwaves are filled with "let's hate America" programming.

There are over 1 billion people in China. If they all were to get mad at once they could overthrow the government in one breath.

The problem is the graft runs so deep that everybody looks the other way.

Sort of like here in the US.

Re:Isolationism is powerlessness

[jandersen]

Hey, wake up mate.

China is no longer just 'a third world country', and as opposed to USA they don't have a proven track record of aggression and meddling in other countries' affairs. America is already trying to shut out China, and has been for years, but the world is more and bigger than America, fortunately.

So in reality it is the other way round:

1. America continues to shut the rest of the world out and slides further down towards becoming a 'third world nation'.

or

2. Americans get their act together, open their eyes to their own failings and weaknesses, clean out the corruption, take away the ridiculous amount of power held by big business and religious extremists, and grow up to become a TRUE democracy.

No I don't believe you will be able to either.

Re:Evil isn't just a metaphor

[buss_error]

Evil isn't just a philosophical construct, nor is it a metaphor, it exists.

Evil is a value judgement. People make value judgements. Therefore Evil IS a philosophical construct.

Bush said "I looked into his [Putin's] Soul and found it good." Quite aside from the metaphysical bullshite, I didn't sign over my moral judgement to a politician. "Put not your trust in Kings" is more than just a catchy phrase. It's good advice.

Re:"Don't be evil."

[pnuema]

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.

In the world that I live in there is this thing called compromise. And Big-Picture world view. Principles and ideology are great, but in the real world they often get in the way of doing the right thing.

Any coward can die for what he believes in. It is easy to die. Its much harder to live and bear the burden of compromising your principles for what you know is a long term good. Trading with China is short-term bad, long-term probably a whole lot better than the alternative.

This is why idealists tend to be young. They aren't old enough to have had to compromise.

Google is smart enough to start small. You can't win if you don't play. Good for them.

Google is absolutely doing the right thing.

[pgaffney]

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.

Re:Google is absolutely doing the right thing.

[internic]

"The current government is doing the right thing...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."

The Chinese government is doing the right thing? Tell that to the families of the hundreds of people slaughered in the Tiananmen Square protests, not to mention the people dissapeared or otherwise imprisoned for doing little more that speaking their mind or speaking the truth. Look, you want to say engagement is a more productive policy than isolation, fine, that's a reasonable stance, but don't try to claim the Chinese government really isn't so bad. The Chinese government is still a brutal group of thugs that do unconscionable things to their own people regularly.

To say that the US is no better on human rights is firstly beside the point and secondly false. That the Chinese government's actions are immoral stands independantly of how bad the record of any other government is. Clearly if a black person in South Africa during apartheid were to say that the shooting of a protester in the USSR was bad, no one would say to him, "Oh, you have no place to talk because your country treats you like shit."

I certainly won't claim that the US has a perfect record on human rights or civil liberties. That's why I am very vocal on the subject and have been a member of the ACLU here in the US. The difference, however, is that I am free to say that and free to continue that fight. I can go out and spread that message and those that are convinced can vote to change the government's policies. None of that is true in China, which is one reason why it is false to say the US is no better. Both nations have much room to improve.

As I said, I think there is an argument to be made that engagment is more effective than isolation, but engagement does not have to mean endorsement. Engagement is only a rational method of prompting change if we use that relationship as leverage to continue to fight for those improvements.

"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."

First of all, we're talking about Google news here, which includes many stories from domestic and international press, some of which are very critical of government, media conglomerates, and corporations. It's true that if you look at TV news its all mostly harmless, but the whole reason this is a big deal is because the internet is a mechanism to largely circumvent those controls and get at all the information. That's precisely what makes it so vital. Secondly, there's a big difference between "Rupart Murdoc doesn't choose to spend his money to criticise X" (the case in the US) and "if I criticise X I can be thrown in prison for years" (the case in China).

Re:"Don't be evil."

[shirai]

The news is going to be censored whether or not Google decides to remove politically sensitive news or not. If they don't remove it, ALL of Google news is censored. If they remove part of, then yes, those parts will be censored.

But don't mix up the bad guys. The real bad guy here is the Chinese government, not Google.

I know this is unpopular with many Slashdot readers and often, these sorts of posts got modded as trolls, but why are corporations so quickly and easily linked to *evil* and get modded up? It's rare and hard to take the side that perhaps corporations aren't evil while still being profit motivated without being modded down. It seems to me that branding corporations as evil is somehow popular and, regrettably, posts like this are often unpopular.

Re:Stupid Americans...

[GreyWolf3000]

I'm currently posting this on a brief vacation to Baku, Azerbaijan. Do you know where that is (without looking at a map)?

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.

This is as ignorant as you claim we are

[Anonymous Coward]

(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)

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? ... Al queada links? How many of you think most of the world support your actions?"

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.

I've been hearing that excuse for years

[rsilvergun]

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.

Globalism

[poptones]

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.

Then appeasement is just plain dumb.

[zanderredux]

The argument in Method b suggests some kind of appeasement approach towards China: we do not irritate them and they will become fair player in the world scene, because once they attain a significant level of comfort (due to economic improvement), it will be harder for the Chinese not to play nicely given the risk of sanctions.

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.