Slashdot Mirror
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."
Ahh the great leap forward kinda sounds like the Chinese equivalent of the 90's tech bubble (although the tech bubble didn't have that whole widespread famine thing)
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
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.
Maybe they missed the one about Canada Arresting Bush?
Criticise China but be capable of listening to and considering criticism of your own country too.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
What's the Chinese word for proxy server? Probably 'jail time' if you mispronounce it.
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/01/opinion/01kristo f.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
China's Donkey Droppings
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
For the last century, the title of "most important place in the world" has belonged to the United States, but that role seems likely to shift in this century to China.
So what are China's new leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, really like? Are they visionaries who are presiding over the greatest explosion of wealth the world has ever known? Or are they ruthless thugs who persecute Christians, Falun Gong adherents, labor leaders and journalists in a desperate attempt to maintain their dictatorship?
There's some evidence for both propositions, and they are probably both true to some degree.
When Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen rose to the helm of the Communist Party two years ago, many Chinese hoped they would bring a new openness to a nation that is dynamic economically but stagnant intellectually. Instead, China has become more repressive.
The repression has now engulfed a member of The New York Times's family. Zhao Yan, a researcher for the Beijing bureau of The Times, has been detained by the authorities since September and is not allowed to communicate with his family or lawyers.
Mr. Zhao is accused of leaking state secrets, a very serious charge that could lead to a decade in prison. China's government may believe that he was behind the September scoop by The Times's Beijing bureau chief, Joseph Kahn, that China's former leader, Jiang Zemin, was about to retire from his last formal position.
While The Times's policy is, wisely, never to comment on the sources of articles, my own private digging indicates that Mr. Zhao was not the source for that scoop. He is innocent of everything except being a fine journalist who, before joining The Times, wrote important articles in the Chinese press about corruption.
(In fairness, sending journalists to prison for doing their job is not an exclusively Chinese phenomenon. Several American journalists - Jim Taricani of NBC, Judith Miller of this newspaper and Matthew Cooper of Time - may be sent to U.S. prisons in the next month or two for refusing to reveal their sources.)
Mr. Zhao's case is depressingly similar to that of another Chinese journalist, Jiang Weiping. He is serving a six-year sentence for "revealing state secrets," even though his real crime was exposing corruption.
"China has changed so much economically, but not politically," Jiang Weiping's wife, Li Yanling, told me. "It's a puzzle to me."
The authorities ordered Ms. Li to keep quiet about her husband's arrest, and detained her when she didn't. The couple's daughter, now 15, was traumatized at losing first her father and then her mother to the Chinese prison system. When Ms. Li was finally released, the daughter called her constantly from school to make sure that she had not been arrested again.
Mr. Zhao's arrest is just the latest in a broad crackdown in China. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 42 journalists are now in prison in China, more than in any other country.
"There was a period of openness, a period of hope, when the new leaders first came to power," said Jiao Guobiao, a journalism professor at Beijing University. "But now they've consolidated power, and everything has closed up again."
Mr. Jiao should know. He wrote an essay this year denouncing censorship, and it was immediately censored. Now the government has banned Mr. Jiao from teaching.
I've felt this cooling as well. I was planning to visit China this month, but the government has declined to give me a visa. It's the first time I've been refused, and the State Security Ministry may have worried that I would write a column about its unjust imprisonment of Mr. Zhao.
I love China, and I share its officials' distaste for those who harm it. That's why I'm angry that hard-liners in Beijing are presenting China to the world as repressive, fragile, tyra
Freedom starts with you.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I'm in China. Google News is working fine at the moment. I had never tried it from here before, so I can't verify whether or not it was ever blocked. BBC NEWS is, as always, blocked. BBC World News however, does work.
Dear Citizens of China,
If you click on any of those links, we'll know about it.
Love and Kisses,
Your beloved Government.
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.
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.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Around about 12 months ago, plus or minus several months, I noticed a very sudden reduction in the number of pro-Arab articles in the English-language Google news for USA readers. There used to be heaps of articles from English-language newspapers in the Arab world (mostly translations), expressing the Arab points of view on the various modalities of massacring Arabs in the last couple of years. Does this indicate that Google "changed their algorithm" again? That's what they say whenever the general search changes drastically. I suspect that Google got a lot of comments from the vast right-wing conspiracy about the "anti-American" views in news articles about the wars. It's a pity, because now the Google news only contains pro-USA or very mild articles. Blood-curdling reports on US and Israeli military actions don't get linked any more.
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.
Sunny
Be my Friend
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.
(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.
When Google wants to operate in the US, it abides by US law. When Google wants to operate in China, it abides by Chinese law. And right now, Chinese law says no polical web content. Who are we to criticize how they live? I know plenty of people who have gone over there and they say that the people of China appear to be rather contect with their situation.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If you produced something intented to be fake, you should tell the readers that it is fake.
If you produced something intended to be incomplete, you should tell the readers that it is incomplete.
So, if it is censored, you should tell the people that it is censored. Or otherwise they will reasonabily believe that it is not......
Therefore, Google, please respect your users and tell them the truth.
http://www.ieaa.org/~adrian/
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.
I'm in China, and I can read a tons of news sites (yeah, including /., if that counts as news site!). There are some famous sites not accessible (e.g. BBC, except BBCi), sure, but most are ok, including:
...
- CBC
- Globe & Mail
- Radio Canada
- Le Figaro
- Le Monde
- CNN (garbage news anyway...)
- Liberation
- Le Devoir
- Washington Post
- New York Times
- The Economist
- Radio France
- Groklaw
-
- too many to list from my bookmarks
If I can access to so many news sources, I'm sure I have access to a pretty good range of perspectives on any issues.
I've never used google news, but if what google news is about is to index news from other sites, I don't think I would miss anything.
So, what's the big deal about this? Oh, and I have short-wave radio too, and I can listen to a shitload of stuffs out there.
Get your head out of that sand, and come to live in China for a while, and see if you miss anything here.
And another thing, there are a few underground proxies that allow you to get out without any filtering, if you really want. And yes, it works. I don't use it, because I don't need to.
*shrug* I Could of listed off all the countries as well, but it would seem like I was trying scoreboard by who went to the most countries. I can only assume when you mean living you never actually bothered to check into more about the country you were living in.
Full of shit? Hardly. UK for example, Stories about the royal family (eg. Charles gay incident) and Blair (eg. childs suicide bid) are routinely censored despite the tabloid nature of the press there.
Ireland censors stories too. For example electronic voting was cancelled in Ireland because it couldn't be proven to be reliable. What wasn't reported about (but mentioned in a dail hearing) was that the company that won the contract to supply the machines was an ex member of the current party in government who won the contract which was millions over expected cost, not the cheapest quote and the company only existed a few months after it was announced they were going to use the machines.
". The USA has the free-est press in the world, full stop."
Total BS, unless you mean free to lie. Just check out Media Matters to see how screwed up the US press is.Any press reporter asking the president a question he doesn't like and they won't be invited back or allowed ask a question again.
In some cases it even gets petty like Bush being interviewed by RTE who went on to tell RTE they would never be allowed interview Bush or anyone again because he was asked a question he couldn't answer.
"I repeat: PRISON."
I REPEAT *DIFFERENT WAYS*.
Just because you don't get thrown into prison doesn't mean you can't be screwed over in the US for reporting something that the administration or media don't want you to. The same applies for other countries as well.
The US is the only country I know where a News Channel can sue for the right to lie and win.
"literally millions of alternatives out there and at the end of the day you're welcome to start your own blog and report what you will."
Having alternatives doesn't mean that your press is free. Generally the alternatives you speak about are outside of the country in question. As for blogs, they are hardly media outlets. Certainly a place to start researching a story for yourself but I wouldn't put them that far above say Fox as reliable sources of information.
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.
Any day now, I'm sure that George Bush will announce our intention to invade China and liberate the people from their oppression, just like we did for Iraq. Then we will install a democratic government that...
What? They have a well armed military?
Nevermind.