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

[skraps]

If this is anything like their censoring of the regular web search, then it's not as bad as you think.

For the chinese web search, they remove listings that are unreachable from China. China's internet is filtered, regardless of anything Google does. Google simply saved the chinese users' time by hiding the links to content that they can't access anyway.

Chinese Citizens: What Your Government Is Hiding

[Nova Express]

Dear Citizens of China, Since your communist government is blocking access to Google, and assuming that you can read Slashdot, here are a few web pages that your government would probably prefer you not read:

• Here's a page which talks about Jasper becker's book Hungry Ghosts, which covers how farm collectivization during Mao's "Great Leap Forward" resulted in the death of some 30-60 million of your countrymen.
• Here's a page which discusses the genocide rsulting from China's invasion of Tibet, where "over 17 percent of the Tibetan people killed, and 6,000 monasteries ruined."
• Finally, here's a page discussing the practice of Falun Gong. Now I'm personally not a believer in Falun Gong, but since I live in a nation blessed with freedom of religion, and since your government would rather execute people rather than let them practice it, perhaps you should find out for yourself what it is they so desperately don't want you to hear.
• Finally, here's the profile of a true Chinese hero.

Freedom starts with you.

Am in China - Google News is working

[augnober]

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.

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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: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.