Slashdot Mirror
China Bans Game Recognizing Taiwan Independence
OhioJoe writes "MSNBC is reporting that China has banned a soccer game that depicts Taiwan as independent. Violators are threatened with $1200 fines. From the article: "The game, 'Soccer Manager 2005', contained content that harmed China's sovereignty and territorial integrity and violated Chinese law, the Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday."
"China Bans X" or something similar.
Thanks.
"People's" Republic indeed...
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
The Falun Gong Tigers...
What's the harm in a game that has Taiwan listed as a country? Nobody's going to say "hey, Taiwan's independent! Kill China!" because it's listed in one lousy game.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
Great Britain has banned all references to the "United States" and insists that any software produced in "the colonies" or elsewhere reflect this view.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
...you can make some pathetic attempt to hold 'em back in the virtual world.
Seriously, what's next? Banning references to an independent Tibe- >>
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
...UK doesn't ban a soccer game that shows England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as separate entities...
is it any wonder every factory owner want to built there - no pesky problems with free thinking laborers, just govt controlled menial units toiling away for emporer and Wal Mart.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This is still a country with a Communist government (modified, granted, but still not democratic) who has never recognized the independence of Taiwan, who
blocks its citizens from portions of the internet at the national level, and brutally rolled over demonstrators in Tienaman (sp) square. What do you think they would go?
The worst part of the whole thing is that China is a capitalist's dream, cheap labor, who have no chance to redress grievances. No wonder we can't compete.
To those who say that economic capitalism leads to democracy, we'll just have to wait and see. I'm not holding my breath.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
You are assuming that the Chinese government allows its citizens to access this site.
I would think that if they had any power to do so, slashdot would *definately* be one of the sites they would block. Way too many opinions that conflict with the official CN views.
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, ty
This is not an isolated case. Back when Windows 95 was released, Microsoft had problems in India because the timezone worldmap (when setting date & time) wouldn't highlight Kashmir as part of India. To deal with that problem, they just removed country highlighting for good.
They'll probably just release an updated version of the game without Taiwan and move along.
Today the United States announced that they, too, are banning "Soccer Management 2005" on the grounds that it recognizes Canada as a separate country, when it is *obviously* just part of the United States.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
(Disclaimer: This is not a troll, I really think it's on-topic, and worth discussion)
Please remind why America is not at war with China? My knowledge on this subject is limited, but my checklist (based on the precedent set by the "justifications" for the war on Iraq) suggests that they should be:
(X) Totalitarian government
(X) Autocracy government
(X) Possesses Weapons of Mass Destruction
(X) No human rights
(X) Unstable, Irresponsible leadership
(X) Inhumane treatment of its people
(X) Government oppression and censorship
If these are the valid reasons, could someone please explain why America is not at war with China?
then can we lobby to ban anything that depicts Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson as talented?
Difficult to take a government seriously when they complain that a video game damages their sovereignty.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I work for a publishing house in Germany. Whenever we are going to produce a book with maps, which may include Taiwan, we can not print it in China. The Chinese government insists on Taiwan beeing printed in the same colours and font size as provinces of Mainland China. They take a tough line in order to not erode their position in this conflict.
Now, if one can not produce material like that for export, how can one dare to sell this on the Chinese domestic market?
Sigh. Only in America would someone reference a fictional TV show as a source of information on something like this.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Regardless of the state of Taiwan's independence, it looks like that the game is indeed geographically incorrect. Hong Kong and Macau are both officially part of China. This would be similar to a game depicting Texas as its own country.
There is a lot of ignorance here about the difference between the Chinese and Western ways of defining, and thus changing, reality.
If a Western government banned a game or a particular statement, it would be a move against that particular game or statement. When the Chinese government does it, it's one tiny part of the general full-time business of defining the version of reality they want to be percieved (and which is percieved) as the canonical Chinese one.
China is a large country, containing large areas which were not China until quite recently and still have major anti-Chinese native populations, and large areas whose interests conflict with each other and with Beijing's interests. The Chinese machine -- 'leadership' is the wrong word because it is a culture-wide effort -- has therefore always worked hard to promote a unified pro-Chinese vision in which the answer to the questions 'Should we not be part of China? Can China do bad?' is an automatic, instinctive 'no', so automatic that the question cannot really be asked at all.
If you want to get a feel for this, try reading XinHua in parallel with your other news sources. At first you will note differences here and there but over time you will come to see two different, parallel world histories going on; the XinHua one and the 'real' one.
But the true effect is only achieved when the whole dialectic of discussion at all levels, not just of government-controlled news sources, assumes the artificial reality, and this effect has been achieved brilliantly -- although lately they have been resorting to extreme nationalism to keep it up. The abuse of foreign soccer teams, the constant rehearsing of Japanese, British and French crimes in schools, the scholarly books on how Tibet and Goguryeo (google it, I don't know the right romanization though) and this and that bit of India have been stolen away by evil foreign interests but have been returned to China by the force of truth and sincerity -- it's all part of one absolutely brilliant concerted effort of which the banning of this game is a tiny, tiny, tiny, part.
I think the creation of not merely a new Chinese history but a whole Chinese reality, basically in 5 short decades, is probably the greatest cultural achievement of the previous century.
Or not.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Difficult to take a poster seriously when his sig contains a link to a pyramid scheme.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
China, wake up! You are being ruled by a pack of brutal psychopaths that only care about their own pampered asses! Overthrow them and their corrupt government. You are many and they are few, only fear can keep you from the freedom to do, read, and think whatever you wish. Only the dictators that rule your contry are keeping you from taking you rightful place as one of the world's great nations! Remeber Tiananmen!
That should pretty much put an end to slashdot's Chinese readership. If a revolution starts in China tomorow, I get credit for starting it!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Wasn't IBM pre-loading this game on all of their PCs?
mbbac
(X) Possesses Weapons of Mass Destruction
(X) Possesses 200 Million Man Army
(X) Possesses Cheap/Slave Labor
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
a Communist government (modified, granted, but still not democratic)
Would you PLEASE, for the love of all that is good and holy, learn the freakin' difference between "communist" and "totalitarian".
A country can be communist AND totalitarian, but that doesn't make those two things interchangeable.
The worst part of the whole thing is that China is a capitalist's dream, cheap labor, who have no chance to redress grievances. No wonder we can't compete.
To those who say that economic capitalism leads to democracy, we'll just have to wait and see. I'm not holding my breath.
See, China is moving away from communism, but not from totalitarianism. You've noticed that capitalism doesn't magically bring about the end of totalitarian states: Please adjust your vocabulary accordingly.
You can't take the sky from me...
Which hostility is that?
The Taiwanese aren't hostile towards China, though they are threatened by it.
Many of the city folk came over from the mainland with Chang Kai Shek in the late '40s, and don't like the government on the other side of the straights. Many of the earlier immigrants resented the newcomers, particularly since they behaved like bandit warlords in their first few years on Taiwan. There's a new generation running the show now, and most of those old strains are gone.
The Taiwanese seem to be slowly realising that culture and nationality are separable; thus the independence movement. Someday, maybe, they'll have that same epiphany about culture and nationality and race. The Mainlander government still doesn't distinguish between culture, race and nationality. More to the point, they need an external enemy on which to focus their populace's hatred and discontent. Separatists in Taiwan serve that purpose wonderfully.
A friend of mine who teaches in a military college in Taiwan says that the tensions between the two countries will die out with the passing of the current old guard, in about 20 years. I guess that assumes that they don't go to war in the mean time.
As for the other side of the straights, I'm sure that the people believe whatever they hear on their radio and TV. If their government believes that they need to channel some public dis-satisfaction into a harmless-to-the-government direction, the people of the Mainland will hate the Taiwanese for a few weeks. The rest of the time, if they think about Taiwan at all, they're probably scheming how to get across the straights and blend in.
See what I've been reading.
At least half of that statement could describe most governments of the world. Which half is left to the reader to decide.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Sorry for my bad English... For some of you guys joking about this news here, China is not your home country, so you don't have to stand in my side. But please repect me and other people from China visiting this website, as some words are harmful. I have my relatives in Taiwan, I love them and vice versa. Just like they always want to come back to my big family, we also want Taiwan come back to China. If the independent of Taiwan really happens, it will hurt a lot of people just like me deeply. And for sure China government will not allow that. I am sure there are a lot of Taiwan people don't think in this way, and I think this is essentially because of the education and promotions they have been receiving since they were born. Some of you might say it is possible I have been receiving the opposite education and promotions since I was born for insisting Taiwan is part of China. So I might incorrect for what I am saying. But I am sure one thing on which I am correct, which is that, people from wherever they come from should get along with each other peacefully and friendly, instead of attacking each other by words and weapons. I love China, so I love Taiwan.
This kind of stupid nationalism effects Free Software too.
Herbert Xu, a Debian Developer and maintainer of the Debian Linux Kernel package, resigned from Debian in May 2004 due to a dispute over the use of a Taiwanese flag.
Resignation on debian-boot with references to context
start of thread on debian-devel
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Sorry, wrong. Practically every country in the world gets everything they know about the US from fictional TV programs. They see an episode of Cops or The Bachelor and then they think we are a brutal police state where everybody gets married on TV shows.
Anyways, back to topic, there's not much you can really make up about Chinese brutality and censorship because chances are they've done most all of it. Alas, the US just makes a better target for these totalitarian and ignorance jokes than China, regardless of reality.
However, this game has a number of errors. I quote from the article:Get real. Macau and Hong Kong are not independent countries, and Tibet hasn't been one for fifty years. The only country there that has some international standing is Taiwan, and that's by virtue of the United States assistance. This game is another case of designers that didn't bother to check their facts, or were intentionally trying to piss of the People's Republic of China. If China wouldn't ban it based on Taiwan, your damned right they'd ban it based on Tibet, and probably just laugh at the notion of an independent Macau. I am certainly not endorsing the actions of China, and regard the invasion of Tibet as a travesty, but sometimes people have to respect political realities.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Well I am Chinese though I was not raised in China. Most Chinese I know from the mainland support the reunification with Taiwan. According to Taiwanese, about half of Taiwanese support China and half don't. It's rather funny as there is one Taiwanese here who does support China and the other doesn't and they hate each other's guts. The other funniest moment in the Taiwan debate was in a Chinese forum where I saw someone from the mainland accuse the Taiwanese of being a "Han traitor" (I thought that no-one used that term anymore outside of period dramas. Then again I know mainland Chinese still read classical poems).
Westerners really don't understand the Chinese mentality. Chinese thinking is cyclical and long-term. As the famous line in Three Kingdoms goes,
"Domains under heaven, after a long period of union, tends to divide; after a long period of division, tends to unite." Division and reunification are important elements of how Chinese believe the world works. Many Chinese don't see the current situation in terms of the present, they take the long-term view which for Chinese is that the Han Chinese on Taiwan will eventully be reunited with China because that's how it has always worked in the past. It is true that many times splinter kingdoms of Han Chinese have broken off and were reunited by military force. Anyway, the point is the Chinese on the mainland think that reunification is inevitable. It might not happen soon but it will happen. This puts a cramp on negotiations as you can imagine. The most important thing to remember is that Chinese often see present events as filtered through thousands of years of Chinese imperial history.
The second thing is that to Chinese division is seen as bad and unification is good. (I suspect this comes from the misery of multiple civil wars). Hence there are strong elements of "using force for their (the Taiwanese) own good". There is a strong belief amognst mainland Chinese that the reunification of Taiwan with China will actually *benefit* the Taiwanese because the horrible division will be healed and the Han Chinese can act together as one unit to take on the world stronger than ever, together. They will cite China's growing economic and military power as signs of how the Taiwanese will benefit with joining with China. There is a belief that most Taiwanese support reunification and it is interference of a few mischief makers and US interference that is stopping the masses in Taiwan from joing with China. They take me aside and tell me that patriots in Taiwan are stealing technology secrets and passing them to China as a sign of their loyalty. A similar but different attitude can be seen in regards to places like Tibet. It is believed that before the Chinese takeover, the people of Tibet where barbaric savages living horrible miserable little lives where they are starving and oppressed. Now the Chinese government is taking over, the wonders of Chinese civilisation is being brought to them and they are now becoming educated civilised people who are capable of living in the modern world and are much happier than they were before.
Now before you laugh at this, please compare the Chinese attitude to the US attitude to Iraq.
As for Tiannamen. Many Chinese believe that the government was right in doing what they did. The students were threatening to bring down the government and hence in the interests of stability the government had to act to ensure that the country remained intact. The students were no more than a filthy band of rebels who were trying to take power as has happened many times in Chinese history. It's sad that the Chinese government had to use force but really the students' brought it on themselves.
There is really very little support for Communism BTW. Most of the support is based on (1) Nationalism (2) Paranoia towards the west derived from Western colonialism in the 19th century (3) Traditional Chinese political values and Confucian principles and (4) Desire for a stable government for peace and prosperity. I sense very little desire for democracy and freedom. As I have been asked, "What will democracy do for us?"
Allow me to state what should be obvious: in the U.S. we don't ban games/books/movies that depict the Confederacy. Can you understand why that is significant?
It is kind emotional unacceptable to claim Taiwan an independent country. My grandfather resisted Japanese invasion when he was young. Several of his brothers died during that war. My roommate's grandfather was born in Taiwan, fought with Japanese in Taiwan during the 1930's and 1940's. At last, we got Taiwan back after we beat the Japanese in WWII. And now some of the Taiwan politicians claim they are Japanese and claim Taiwan an independent country. It's outrageous.
We Chinese are peace people. We don't have too much ambitious. We enjoy our food and tea. But we don't like Japanese grab our land, or some "want to be Japanese".
I am not a communist, I don't like communism, we Chinese people don't talk about it much anymore, though US government classify China as a communism country. But I love my country, my nation, just as you guys love yours. I won't allow my country broken. We won't, just like US won't allow the southern separate from the Union, and Canada won't allow Quebec claim independence.
There is always culture difference between portions of a country, but this doesn't mean the country should be broke into parts.
As the presidency of Taiwan, Jacky Chan said my words, "the biggest joke in the world."
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
You were probably accessing the site through the network of a foreign company. Internet access for foreign companies is more expensive but much less censored. I've noticed huge differences in the accessibility of sites dependong on what network I'm on.
I've been unable to pull up the English version for the past two weeks whereever I've tried. It either redirects to the Chinese version or just fails.
And just a note, Taiwan isn't an official soccer time. It's not a member of FIFA (the governing soccer body). Even Palestine is a member.
"You don't hear about this kinda stuff happening in the US." If you work for company that does business with China that you hear this kind of stuff all the time. Just writing "Taiwan" in the Country of Origin or the country on an invoice and your liable to get smacked if reported.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As an aside, I went to China for a week over the summer and got to talk with college students at Tianjin, about 2 hours south of Beijing. The students there, 22, 21, they've never heard of the massacre at the square. Not only that, but they don't believe it happened, and are quite certain that if it did happen, their government would have told them.
Funny how everyone who claims that "the (American) Civil War was about more than just slavery" seems to forget that the only reason that the Southern states were interested in protecting States' Rights so zealously was because they were trying to protect the institution of slavery.
Back in the 1780's, the slave and "free" states were roughly evenly divided. But by the 1850's, the slave states were significantly outnumbered by the states that had banned slavery. The southern states were demanding a limited federal government to prevent the growing anti-slavery movement from enforcing a ban on slavery anywhere in the country (both in the slave states themselves and in the non-state territories).
The immediate cause of the American Civil War was the election of Abraham Lincoln, who ran on a platform of (among other things) banning slavery in all non-state territories and preventing any new states from permitting slavery. At the time, he did not advocate abolishing slavery in the southern states where it already existed.
And so, once the fighting broke out, the immediate goals of the war were focusing on the issue of States' Rights versus federal authority. It was only after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued two and a half years later that the issue of slavery was once again brought to the fore.
Please note that I do recognize that many people who fly the Confederate battle flag (which is not the same as Confederate national flag that was known as the "Stars and Bars") today are not necessarily advocating slavery or racism, but rather some nebulous ideal of the Southern way of life. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, save for two points: (1) the Southern way of life at the time of the Civil War was largely supported by slavery and relied on forced labor, and (2) the vast majority of people today view the Confederate battle flag as a symbol representing a government which fought for the continuance of slavery. (For another good example of a symbol where a modern interpretation has completely overwhelmed previous meanings, read an article about the swastika.) Therefore, although I realize that the Confederate battle flag represents more than slavery and racism for some people, I generally disapprove of its use because of the much more common interpretation of today's society.
As long as you speak the Chinese language and you write using Han characters, and you benefitted from when Jiang Jie Shi ran with the entire treasury of China over to Taiwan, you ARE Chinese.
It is disgusting to see you try to justify the Japanese invasion of many Asian countries by saying they didn't destroy your country. Isn't it bad enough that your country was invaded? Isn't it bad enough that the Taiwanese government was turned into a puppet? Have you no respect for your culture?
As long as the Taiwan elite claim Chinese traditional art, Chinese traditional calligraphy, and the entire former treasury of China pre-1949, Taiwan IS part of China.
Taiwan was an under-developed island of farmers before the Mainland Chinese came; now with the help of Jiang Jie Shi delivering the entire treasury of mainland China in 1949, you're a leading economic power.
Just to top it off, keep in mind that over HALF of the Taiwan populace supports re-unification. The Taiwanese constitution itself has the goal of reunification with the Mainland in it.
"And now we realize that half the people that came over weren't even educated or skilled in anything. "
This is total BS and you know it. Taiwan was unimaginaly poor and backwards before the KMT crossed over in '49; now it's an economic and technological powerhouse. I'd like to have seen that happen without the KMT and the hundreds of millions it brought over in gold and silver from the coffers of the Mainland Chinese people.
fish and pipes
I'd call that proportional overuse of force.
Comparing proportion is a bad metric. A few jackass yahoo National Guardsmen with itchy trigger fingers can kill 4 people in seconds without consent from their immediate superiors. Killing 3000 people takes planning and significant leadership coordination.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
They have no law, no language, no history, no art. Taiwan has established a strong economy of its own, without (and despite of) China. Taiwan has its own law, heritage, native language and native people. Your statement is like saying Australians have no law, language, history or art!!! (me being Aussie..) Australia has over 3000 words unique to our vocabulary. We have indigineous people (unfortunately), art and history. Would you argue that Australia is nothing without England?