Slashdot Mirror
Taking My Freedom With Me to China?
Solo Han asks: "I'm considering a move to China next year, and while I have just as many problems as y'all do with the government, I still like the freedoms afforded me, especially when it comes to access of information. Chinese citizens, however, do not have the same freedoms, as we are constantly reminded here on slash-o-dot. Pr0n, mp3z, and games aside, what are the things that those of you in the Celestial Kingdom know you cannot access, and specifically, what are the websites, search engines, news sites, and other sites that are classed as potentially 'dangerous' material? This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it? What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?"
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Does that answer your question?
What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
Somehow I don't think it's wise to do such circumvention if you want to stay there short-term/long-term/permanently.
What would US officials think if a foreigner, who is planning to move to USA, talks about how stupid the whole security thing is, and asks for advice to get around it?
If USA can attack another country "Just Like That"(tm), I would consider Chinese's censorship a godsend given it's only imposed within its own country. If you decided to move there, respect its laws; if you don't agree with its laws, go somewhere else. You always have a choice.
At home I have unlimited access to the internet, but at work I can only access port 80, and I would never try to get around company's security policy because it's restricting my freedom to surf, although others might still try that.
And remember, when you get caught, it's going to be ugly no matter where you are.
So in my opinion, if you want to go into other's territory, make sure you find out what can and cannot be done there, and stick to the rules.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Have a good time!
WTF? Over?
This may be obvious to most people (I sure have missed obvious things in the past), but some background as to why you're thinking of moving to China might put your question into proper context.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Maybe you can access a proxy and view through it?
I think I'd rather get caught running drugs in Mexico and end up in a Mexican prison than attempt what you're suggesting and get caught.
I wish you luck, but do keep one thing in mind.
Be very cautious when tormenting a power-structure that has few qualms with making you vanish in the dead of night.
The Chinese government is not going to send you a polite subpoena and meet you in a clean courtroom some months down the road like the *AA where you will be given access to effective counsel and a more-or-less fair shake.
Instead, if they catch you circumventing the Great Firewall of China they may descend upon you in the night and drag you off to a dank prison for reeducation.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
> I'm considering a move to China next year.
Sorry, I stopped reading after that.. Good luck, you'll need it!
Must-not-watch TV!
No sir you are wrong. There is NO censorship here in China, none at all! Yes siree, everything is free and open. As we say here in Chi
You have a constitutionally protected right to be wrong, and I the right to ignore you.
...they don't care. Nearly all of this censorship is only aimed at chinese citizens, and then only those that happen to be a convenient PR target. Unless you start actively trying to overthrow the government or anything daft like that, they're not interested.
Unfortunately, you will likely get few responses from anyone in China, as Slashdot is a news site, and news sites are forbidden.
So basically your question is stating "I'm going to China and expect to be able to break their laws as I was fortunate enough to be born in a more free society."
Don't whine to the foreign media when you're jailed as a subversive influence.
Trolling is a art,
and if it's not, you're going to be making people living in china talk about restricted sites... which will probably be monitored by the chinese government since we're not over ssl, and great, you just made the chinese govt more suspicious of those people.
Do you really want to consider "getting around" the censorship. It's not like they're playing a game over there. They're not setting up challenges for the techno-elite to figure out how to access Slashdot from being the Great Firewall of China. It's not like "Gosh, I can use a proxy! I can tunnel... they'll find this very clever and I'll be able to do whatever I want."
You'll be breaking the law.
In China.
Are you a big fan of breaking the law in general? Are you a big fan of spending days, weeks, or years in a Chinese political prison? Do you like having your legs unbroken?
I would highly recommend against going to China with a plan of "Getting around" the censhorship. It's not just a technological hurdle to overcome, it's the law. And as a general policy, you don't want to be breaking the law in foreign countries. Their jails aren't as nice as ours.
--
RumorsDaily
What kind of problems? Did you sell military secrets to the Chinese?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
[..] what are the websites, search engines, news sites, and other sites that are classed as potentially 'dangerous' material?
Well, slashdot.org for one.
As an American, I'm not familiar with living under Communist rule, but I'm pretty sure that the penalties of trying to circumvent Chinese government-controlled limitations are probably more severe than those of the United States.
Same black-suited guys emerging from black vans. Where they take you and what they do to you/treat you is a whole, 'nother thing.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Why do you think China has some of the best hackers in the world? The "necessity is the mother ...." comes to mind.
Gimme that booze you little pumpkin pie hair cutted freak!
What you call censorship is relative depending on who you ask. But one thing I can guarantee you is that China's most expensive city (Shanghai) is way cheaper than a comparable US city.
Why don't you move to China and do all of those things while maintaining a blog of your adventure. Thus, if your blog suddenly disappears or is abandoned, then we will know for sure what happens in China when you do those things..
Try freenet .
Whoa! Did he just ask for people to openly admit what technologies they're using to bypass a strict government firewall? Granted on Slashdot you'll end up with a lot of theories, but actually phrasing you question in a way meant to try to get Chinese law breakers to not only admit that they're breaking the law but to also share the method being used to break the laws......the mind boggles.
I traded all my mod points for these magic beans.
To help fit in when you go to China, I suggest you participate in one of their native religions. This will help you get along great in your new home.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Is the danger of getting around the censors worth it? Do you have a family? How do you feel about going to a Chinese prison?
I do not know what the legal climate in China is but you may want to think about about it very carefully. What risk will you be putting yourself and or your family if you get caught? It could be as little as a polite warning or getting run over by a tank.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
pay no attention to the fact that i'm writing down all these techniques on bypassing our - i mean their security and finding ways to make our - i mean their censorship more difficult - i mean easy to get around. nevermind the fact that the people providing these services will all be dissapearing soon...
What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China
I'd tell you, but then they'd have to kill me.
-geekd
If you've got ssh and access to a server outside of china the rest should be pretty obvious...
I wonder if tor works from inside the great firewall of China. Any Chinese folks who've tried it and care to comment?
"This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it?"
If you're going to ask this, shouldn't also be wondering about the consequences if you do any of these things? Otherwise how will you make a reasonable judgement on whether it's worthwhile or not?
Here is a comprehensive list of sites banned in China: http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.ht ml
to the poster: You really think that asking that...here...will get you reasonable advice...that will still work in one year?
to the answerers: You really think that responding will help anybody? This is one of the few cases where security through obscurity is a very good option.
If you're still going to answer, make sure to Post Anonymously.
While I've never been to China and never directly experienced their security, I cannot speak on it. However I can speak a little about respecting other countries laws- and its not so much respecting it because you agree with it, but more respecting it because you will find yourself in a nice chinese prison if you don't. Simply put, while the US justice system has a lot of problems- its still a cake walk compared to many countries, things you may take for granted, i.e. right to a trial, right to an attorney, etc may not necessarily hold true in another country. In addition to that, its very american of us to goto other countries and expect the same standards. We do that a lot, but thats not really the point- overall I am just saying 'sure you could probably get around it, but we are also talking about a country with gross human rights violations so you must consider which is more important to you, sims 2 or your life'. Nevermind if you are religious or anything else.
I haven't tried this myself as I've never been in China, but I've heard that searches via elgooG would effectively bypass "the great firewall". Just a rumour for me though. Could anyone verify this?
Obviously some people break the rules, use outside proxies not yet blocked by the government, and get access to prohibited information. I've been there, three times. I know some of this. And I don't recommend it. If caught, and lucky, you'll just be thrown out of the country. It can be worse.
The question you should be asking yourself is: Just how much do I want to have a long, happy, and enjoyable time living in the PRC?
Why not try living like a real Chinese citizen for a few months just to see what it's like? Why else go, if you're only trying to live your Western-style life just in a new location?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Instead of moving to Mainland China, move to Taiwan?
If any Chinese citizens can post here to tell you how, then the Great Firewall isn't really a problem, is it?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Having lived there, well
a) hope you know chinese
b) public interenet, cds, etc. is OK, and there may be more there than is let on. Note: they banned this because it's already out.
c) there are proxies that will let you circumvent, but they will know you did that. It's a moving target game.
other notes
- self censorship challenges; Americans (I'm one) are loud and boisterous. Like to challenge boundarys and assumptions. That's not their culture and frowned upon.
Basically, it's going to be different, and depends entirely where you are in that vast ranging country.
It is also imposed outside of China's borders: upon Tibet.
I am concerned for your safet. I wouldn't recommend circumventing anything. When you live in a PoliceState (Communist or Fascist) a Western style prank like hacking will land you in prison for life. They will lock you in a room and throw away the room. If you want to read the news I recommend you move to a place with even a small bill of rights.
what are the things that those of you in the Celestial Kingdom know you cannot access, and specifically, what are the websites, search engines, news sites, and other sites that are classed as potentially 'dangerous' material?
If you even have to ask these questions, you're hopelessly naive, and will be eaten alive by the place to which you're headed. What, did you think that all that scary talk about being arrested and jailed for your opinions (or for even visiting web sites where you can read someone else's opinions) was just Republicans trying to make socialists look bad? It's real!
I'd be astounded if there's a single "legal" reader of this web site in China at all. Now, while it still lasts, you might consider moving to Taiwan.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Stay off Michael Sims' shitlist.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
They've gained the respect of being the largest bootleg and spammers in the world, and the censorship will give them some credit to a bright tech china. Or just a Japanese wannabes. All considered, it's needed.
I love it when someone tries to justify censorship. As in, "no need to make your mind up for yourself".
and dont use the people's explorer of internet. But i hear the chinese food there rocks (or as they call it there, 'food')
I recently spent the better part of a year living in Guangzhou followed by a few months in Chengdu. As for Porn, it was being sold on the streets. I found there to be no real enforcing of any of these "bans" the central government keeps talking about. The conry is actually very free on a day to day basis, as long as you don't bring religion or something similar into a School you're teaching at, you're ok
When you're in a foreign country, you're obliged to obey their rules. Accidentally violating some custom/rule and winding up in jail is one thing, but when you go to a country and violate their laws willfully and with premeditation there is no reason at all why the US should expend its diplomatic resources saving your sorry ass.
If you don't like their rules, don't move there.
I regard the government of China as being in a situation like Iraq and Afganistan; democracy won't work there. So, 'freedom of speech' is not a viable concept. The Chinese have to be careful about what they allow or chaos will result. Example, they were on a path to overpopulation until their government imposed some rules. I'm sure this will start a bitter debate, but I think the Chinese should not be interfered with, especially not the way we destabilized Iraq.
Best regards.
Just be sure to talk about Falun Gong wherever you go in China, and they'll love you.
a basic freebsd jailed server or UML server for $20 /month, log into text mode brower via ssh, assuming your using very slow connection. For broadband, could even run remote X11 brower via ssh -X
If this "other country" launches hundreds of unprovoked attacks against your peacekeepers (as Iraq did against UK and US) over several years, refusing to stop, then retaliating against it after a long period of warning is not "just like that".
Better luch next time
So the Chinese Army did not send in tanks to stop students protesting?
So those executions I saw where they had the people kneel and put a bullet in their brain never happened?
So there really is freedom of religion and speech in China?
So the Chinese government does not make huge amounts of money from prison labor?
And the Chinese did not lob missiles over an island full of people to keep them in line?
Just asking if these are all myths that I have seen on TV?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You know the saying "you can't fix a social problem with technological means"? Well, a government convinced that it deserves to survive by any means necessary, including censoring its citizens (and that's if they're lucky), might be the best example of a social problem. You don't fix that with anonymous proxies and l33t pr0n-over-ssl.
I'm not denying the importance of free speech, either in the absolute sense or as something important to bringing about the downfall of dictatorships; I'm saying that your assumptions about the utility of "getting around" the firewall are so very, very wrong. What good will your laptop do you when your door is kicked in at 3am by the police? Or when you're hauled before a judge, charged with crimes against the state, because you were looking at a non-approved news site? Why do you think that when They've got guns and police and armies and courts who will do what They want, that it's not that big a deal?
Carousel is a lie!
So that whole Tiananmen Square Massacre thing was just a hoax, right? And that kid who stood in front of the tank is alive and well and wasn't really disappeared? Gotcha.
You asked:
... Uhmm... Do YOU have any affiliation with the Chinese government? A spy perhaps? A bad one at that ;)
"... This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it? What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
So you're asking effectively how we would go about breaking the laws in China?
I'm actually reading your post from China right now, and I'm not entirely sure what you're asking:
Do you really want to ... play ... a game. Are you a big fan of ... the ... general? Are you a big fan of ... Chinese? Do you like ... your legs?
I would highly recommend ... going to China. Their jails are ... nice.
Leave a globally accessible server running in the western world, and run VNC on it. You can VNC into it and access all the the net you want.
What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
Since the IP this question was posted from belongs to the following net block I don't think I would like to help you con people into helping you catch them, dear Commerade Hu Yu Hai Ding.
Yours truly,
Wai Noh Ping (I think your firewall is blocking ICMP traffic)
Taking my freedom with me to jail
On how to take his limited Chinese freedom of information searching to Chinese prison.
Legal issues aside, what I would do is rent a box on the internet, and connect to it using openssh. Redirect whatever ports you need to your local machine and you have an encrypted tunnel.
You can circumvent, break and twist as many laws/rules (and other such stuff) as you want, and nobody would bother you.
99% chances are that you will survive with all these, 1% chances that you will be caught, but that would take another 10 years or so.
well first off...
*this message has been censored by the chinese government, have a good day*
That's all you need to remember.
Hope that helps, enjoy your trip!
"It'll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself." - Henry Rollins
I know someone in China who is from the U.S. He has been there for several years now. He has found that they censor a LOT of sites, many that don't really make sense to censor. So he uses proxy servers to get around this limitation. A lot of people over there do that. Supposedly its not a big deal.
BBC News - news.bbc.co.uk is blocked. As is Google.
8
But as reported last month in NewScientist, you can use elgooG - (an impressive perl script that reflects Google, results and cached pages) to get past the GFoC.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn276
http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/
It's also mentioned in the article that there's a relay server in China run by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society that can be used to test what gets in through the GFoC.
Taking My Freedom With Me to China?
Taking My Cocaine With Me to the US?
Taking Kiddy Porn With Me to England?
Taking Salman Rushdie With Me to Iran?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I could grumble about how all the legitimate stories I've submitted have all been rejected, but I won't.
I've got a solution for you!
Call your travel agent before it's too late and cancel your plane ticket.
You've offically had your right to travel abroad revoked because YOUR A JACKASS.
Unless your entering a country with the direct agenda of working towards overthrowing their government, I don't see how your question is even remotely legit.
Otherwise, I would expect that you'd just obey any local laws and ordances. If you issues with the laws, the best solution is not to go.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
How can the government know what traffic is flowing in an SSH tunnel going to the States or Europe or whatever? Or do they have restrictions against that too? Even if they do, as some other poster pointed out, they really don't care. This other poster was modded funny for some reason, I would call it insightful. They don't care what information foreigners get hold of/release, as long as they don't try to overthrow the government. So if you plan on doing that, I suggest you dig yourself a spider hole á la Saddam first :)
A simple unencrypted squid proxy. I live in China, and some sites are blocked (BBC News, Miami Herald, etc). I set up a proxy on a linux box in the USA, and I use it whenever I encounter a blocked site (hit F12-x in Opera to toggle).
It's also useful when there's simply a bad connection or slow speed. Often, I can't get a good connection to some site or other, and it's not blocked, I know it's up, but the crappy infrastructure here drops my packets. So, even if there were no Great Firewall, I'd still have my proxy handy. The Great Firewall isn't too concerned with English language websites. As far as I know, only Chinese and English language sites are blocked...any other nationalities get off scot-free.
And don't worry about getting clubbed in the head by the cops, or anything stupid like that. China is just like everywhere else...you mess with the bull, you get the horns. Hell, we smoke joints openly on the street. Nobody knows what it smells like. We went out on a lake, and the boatman asked, "why are you 6 people sharing one cigarette...you don't have enough money to afford cigarettes for everyone?"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I cant help but bite anyway.
there are perfectly legitimate reasons for moving to china for some period. I considered moving there myself for a year or two to study kung fu. Would that make me a traitor?
thats just unreasonable
ssh -L 3128:some-good.proxy.com:3128 some-ssh-host-outside-of-china
Set your proxy server to localhost.
Problem solved.
So let me get this straight: You want help circumventing the laws of a nation you intend to visit. And this isn't just any nation, but a nation where it's not unheard of for dissidents to be dealt with via a bullet to the head. I'm trying to figure out just what combination of arrogance, foolishness, and pr0n addiction made you even consider this.
When in Rome, do as the Romans. Or just stay the hell out of Rome.
1. Don't brag about how to circumvent the Great Firewall of China.
You can do it, you can talk about it in private, or semi publicly. But if you try to publish an article about it, you may get into trouble. But of course YMMD.
2. Keep your head down.
Try not to get involved into politics. Talking about it with friends is no big deal. Don't mix politics and foreign money, and avoid contacts with people disagree with the communism party and get money from foreign country, either goverments or some foundations.
Other than these rules, you will be fine, and you will find cheaper games, moives and musics. Did I mention Chinese food?
I think I would rather be gang raped in prison by a band of evil satan worshiping midgets than get caught breaking the law in China. Then again I was always kind of partial to the idea of midget prison gangs. ;)
Have a Linux box setup in the states and SSH from China to it. I am sure they have not stopped SSH though there firewall.
This is not that L33t really I am just a sad old man!
WORD OUT!
"The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose." - James Baldwin, American author
Go ahead and get around the pesky censorship thing - get caught, no lawyer, no rights, go to jail go straight to jail do not pass the embassy. Next, hope you don't need serious medical treatment fast. You don't have enough priviledge to get it. Hope you like working for the military because their general staff runs most of their large companies directly or indirectly. Nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there, need medical there, or piss off the authorities.
Our company has employees in China, and their work requires that they be able to access our corporate systems. So, they've got a VPN connection through the GFC, that VPN connection also includes unfiltered Internet access. From what I'm told by our Network Admin, unfiltered access is something of a status symbol over there.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
I've taken a few trips to P.R.C. since my wife is from there. I had a few problems trying to upload photos from a digital camera to a server back home (yes, I used disposable passwords). First I attempted to FTP the files directly to the server. I found that the FTP connection was dropped after transferring about 8k bytes. Next, I tried http put to my web server with a similar result. Finally I tried to send each picture as an e-mail attachment. This also failed. It seems that China does not want any unauthorized information going OUT of the country. I finally tried running an FTP server locally on the dynamic IP (163.net) and connecting to it from outside (after telnetting to my US based server). Amazingly enough it worked! Files can be moved out of China from an internal server but not from a client.
As far as free access to information goes, good luck. They seem to have several layers of control. The first layer is DNS. Just about any US based radio or TV domain name will not resolve. You might be able to get to the site if you can get the IP address (perhaps using a method similar to above). Many sites use the hostname in the http query to determine which site to serve, in these cases you're out of luck. There may be DNS and web proxies that you can use but these are fleeting.
--
Sigs are a waste of space
When you don't get any meaningful replies from inside China, you'll know that the answer is really "No freedom here, move along".
--
make install -not war
It was also interesting that my normally digital phone connection had a new icon I'd never seen, indicating that the connection was unencrypted. So my advice would be to find someone to host a VPN endpoint for you from the west, email, surf and Skype though it.
Posting anonymously so as not to jeapordise any future trips :-)
I hacked the Great Firewall!
When I went to China, I found that a few sites that I visit regularly, such as BBC News, were blocked, so I set up an SSH tunnel to a box back home running Squid, and did all my browsing through that. Worked fine.
I spent three months in Beijing in the early part of last year. And I did quite a bit of web surfing. I experienced very little problems. But I kept mainly to news sites and such. Supprsingly I find more sites blocked at work when in the States. All in all I would say you have little to worry about. P.S. Just don't got to MaoSucks.com
Just get an account with a hosting company located outside of China that has ssh access and use links to browse anything you want from there. mutt or pine could take care of the mail.
Alternatively you could use something like tor + ssh + port forwarding.
Most stuff isn't blocked anyway - I think it mostly to supress the falun gong and similar pro-democracy movements.
I think Solo Han may be chanelling Mao. You are basically asking people to explain how to circumvent their government's controls, when that government is known to do some rather painful things to those that subvert the government?
I call Shenanagins, the question is either just troll BS, or the the guy asking it is too dumb to utilize the answers.
Face it, would anyone comming to the US really ask, in a public forum, how do I get around the US's stupid drug laws? (Please don't answer this, I'm trying to nurture a little faith in humanity)
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
I lived in Shanghai for 2 1/2 years, having returned about 4 years ago. I still return frequently as part of my job. The Chinese really don't care much what westerners do in China as long as you stay away from the Tibet issue, Falun gong and such things. I had dial up access and it appeared that foreigners and chinese went through different connections. I was never certain if I was being blocked or not. I could never get anything that was geocities. If you are going to connect rhruogh hotel DSL you will likely be blocked as the Cinses would be but there could be exceptions. I have never had my baggage checked going in or out of the country and I have come and gone many times. They know Westerners know the score and simply don't mess with them. I lived in a 30-something story apt building that was not set aside for westerners and I was stuck with Chinese television only. If you live with the laowai you can even have a sattelite dish. If you just go about your business you won't have any trouble. Just don't do things you obviously should not be doing. Magazines and such are censored as far as what you can buy locally. But you can bring in pretty much whatever you want. They just don't want the chinese to have access.
(This sig has been removed at the request of the patent holder for Sigs.)
Mod that guy up.
though I'm in the USA for the moment..
You probably will not notice a substantial abridgement of your freedoms when you get there. However, due to the developing nature of China, many processes are highly aggravating.
Sure, you cannot access porn online- as easily as in the USA. It is still there, and you can find it.
One thing that really has pissed me off was that I left my computer at home in the USA running a server registered with DynDNS- I'm guessing all the domains with DDNS are blocked by china. I justed wanted access to my own stuff at home, not to start an insurrection.
All I can say is, feel free to express yourself at the right time, but use discretion.
If you want access to all your files, buy a 1GB flashdrive and copy all your important stuff on to that. Buy 2 or 3 if you need, or take a laptop.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
A year ago, i was in Saudi Arabia, in Mecca. I met the manager of the hotel i was staying in, and we just became friends during my stay there. I told him i was looking for an internet cafe, and i wasn't able to find one anywhere. He was aware of only one in the whole city, which surprised me as Mecca is a big city, and it was pretty far from where we were. He mentioned that the connection was really slow, and that it's really a hasle to get there, so he invited me to use the only connection the hotel has, which was from his personal machine. :)
He explained that they weren't able to access certain international news sites, and that everything was monitored by the government. I tried the sites he requested, and I wasn't able to connect. So i decided to Remote Desktop to my office's server here in the US. I was able to connect, and from there, i accessed all the sites he wanted. It made him pretty happy, and from then, he allowed me to come in anytime and use his machine.
Moral of the Story: Have a machine outside the country (at a friend's house, or business) that you can access anytime, from anywhere. You can make that machine your internet gateway, and it will allow you to access almost any info you're looking for.
Anyone has a better solution?
if people are insufficiently informed on the matter and you have access to information that balances the view more, perhaps you'd like to share it with the rest of the class?
h ina.zhao/
a lot of people have a less than positive view of the chinese government, for good reason: it's autocratic and at times has zero qualms about flexing its power: witness what happened when zhao ziyang left power. for his remorse over the violence used in tiananmen square, he was placed under house arrest since 1989. this is the former head of state. don't believe me? look here: http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/01/16/c
ed
Hello, I know it is possible to circumvent the Chinese Firewall and such, but exactly how do you do it? Who is your contact in the Network Administration Administration? Do you discuss these issues with other people inside the firewall? What are their names and do you know where they live? No, I am just curious. I do not work for the glorious and envied government of PRC.
After reading what you have said, I feel you are just looking for a way to break the law. There is no other way to put it. Circumvent, avoid, being surreptitious, clandestine, stealthy. It does not matter. As other people have posted, do not do it. There is no "Please stop that" letter or email, if you piss off the wrong people, you will not be happy. My advice, with that mentality, do not move to China. Good luck either way.
ourney weaver
I suspect this guy's just yanking your chains.
Couldn't stand the weather
South Korea that is.
Highspeed internet access without borders.
And the food is great too.
if your pants fit well, it's not only because of the pants
Yeah, um, what's the "Celestial Kingdom"? China is "Jong-Guo" meaning "Middle Kingdom". I'm pretty sure even in Chinese, "Celestial Kingdom" refers to the afterlife.
Kind of interesting is that in Chinese, the United States is called "Mae-Guo" which means, "Beautiful Country". Pretty complimentary of them, eh?
> China, Cuba, Soviet era-Russia, etc. There aren't too many happy stories to be heard.
There's no need for hyperbole here. Offhand, I can think of friends from Soviet-era Ukraine and recent China whose childhood stories are fairly happy, so suggesting these countries were/are unremitting hellholes isn't useful - it just undermines your (very valid) point:
> kids were used to clear minefields. He wasn't lying- check Wikipedia
We live in a relatively safe and progressive country, but not all parts of the world are so gentle. Be careful.
(And work to preserve the freedoms we enjoy, as well as assisting others in obtaining them for themselves.)
The Christian Science Monitor, which is a non-partisan newspaper I like to read online sometimes, wrote an article about Tiananmen Square. How many students were killed, run over by tanks, and otherwise butchered? The answer: We don't know. In fact, evidence is starting to show that no students were killed in the square at all. When there's no foreign reporters around, and the government is the only one that's talking, it is indeed dramatic misportrayal of the facts that tends to take over. That said, estimates of fatalities outside the square range vary, but it was *after* the peaceful protest left the square.
Secondly, I listen to WMBI, which is decidedly right-leaning. Yet, on one of their programs, one of the church leaders in Bejing reported that the government was not stifling state-allowed religions... in fact, the government was very much hands-off. (As Christianity is the fastest-growing religion in China, it may not be coincedence.) It was a different voice from the now-familiar persecution of believers in China, although, once again, that type of persecution was reported to have gone on in the rural areas -- it just wasn't as widespread as most Americans would believe.
I very much appreciate these examples as a welcomed, different view into what China is actually like versus what everyone says it's like.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Still, Tiananmen is irrelevant in this case. If you, a foreigner, were found circumventing the Great Firewall of China or doing something else that's a serious crime under Chinese law, you wouldn't be secretly dragged to a re-education semi-auschwitz in the middle of the night. You'd probably just get deported and get a life-time ban to the country.
People watch too much TV and they're also ignorant. That explains why the parent was modded as 'insightful'.
I was in Shanghai last year, and had no problems with web surfing. There were no obvious restrictions/censorship (no more/less than what we get here at home) of sites. Nobody asked for ID before or after web surfing. Nobody baby-sat me while web surfing. I was in Hong Kong yesterday using FREE WIRELESS internet surfing in the airport. No obvious restrictions/censorship. Simply put, the amount of Chinese web-censorship is over rated - sure, it exists, but, then again there's just as much corporate sponsored censorship here. That stated, I wouldnt test my luck by repeatedly probing the edges of what sites were considered 'black listed'. It would be asking for trouble - sort of like peeing on a street corner here. You'll get away with it for awhile, but, sooner or later you'll piss someone off.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
Although I agree laws should be respected to some extent when you travel.
But polictical censorship need not be respected. Free speech is a fundamental human right.
I am happy to be living in one of the man freedom loving Democracies that that can say "This law is Stupid" or say "This leader is stupid" and not be silenced. And if our arguments are strong enough we gain support, and if our arguments are stupid we are ignored. And we choose better leaders and write better laws.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
1. Buy a cheap collocation server based in the US ($50-$100 per month).
2. Ask for an additional IP address (free).
2. Install OpenVPN on the server and your desktop (free).
3. Connect to your Chinese ISP and connect to your VPN.
All your outbound desktop traffic is now encrypted and passed through a UDP tunnel to your collocation server. The collocation server decrypts the traffic and passes it to the internet. Return traffic is re-encrypted and passed back to your desktop machine through the encrypted UDP tunnel. Looks just like traffic from corporate travelers connecting back to their home offices.
Extra bonus points for configuring your Linux firewall to encrypt all traffic from your home office and block any stray packets.
Yes *chinese* people are arrested... But I wasn't arrested for telling Chinese their policy on Taiwan was utter bullshit. Then again, I was not making a public spectacle.
I've lived in china, and though it is not quite a utopia, I'll be living there for a few years more.
Taiwan is cool too; Taipei is a happening place.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
We (rightly) put down rebellions within our borders(cf. the Civil War). They are terrorism. It doesn't matter how political they are; actually, being especially political means you are committing treason and not just causing destruction.
We execute lots of people. Why is it so important that they use cheap bullets rather than expensive injections?
You can't joke about killing the President, you can't say some things about Scientology...
US industry makes huge amounts of money from prison labor, with the blessing of the US gov't.
We dropped two nukes on two cities, something nobody else has done, to keep the rest of the WORLD in line; and have waged war since.
I love America, but are you sure you're not entertaining myths about where exactly the differences are? Or do the ends justify the means?
...in jail. That is because China takes the matter of foreigners flaunting Chinese law very seriously, even to the point that you will face harsher punishement than citizens. If arrested and tried, you will be charged for the cost of the trial, your stay in jail, et al, which could amount to hundreds if not thousands. And don't expect the US State Department to come galloping to your aid: You knew better.
Not really, the parent was using wikipedia as an sole authoritative source. He responded well enough to that.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Before it gets /.'ed... here is a little more information about the project that spawned this list:
"The authors are studying Internet filtering in countries worldwide, including restrictions on Web access in China. There is no master list of blocked sites that we (or, from what we can tell, anyone else) can access. Rather, we test "twenty questions" style, asking about individual URLs, whether based upon a domain name or an IP address.
To date, we have obtained lists of sites to check via web directories, search engines, and other automated data-extraction systems. To help broaden the list of pages tested and to provide the general public a means of finding out whether particular pages of interest are filtered, we have created the form below, which will run a realtime query via our methods. We consider this approach an experiment in "open research"; we are as yet uncertain whether sites submitted and tested using this system will in fact broaden our pool of tested sites, but we will analyze submissions and publish results when available."
Proxy services, many are free.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
But, why on Earth any one would spill their guts here is beyond me. If someone has a specific personal methodology that works, the quickest way to fuck it up is to talk about it.
Luke, help me take this mask off
If you're moving to a new country I do not think that breaking their laws is a good way to get started. If you are going to move to China then you have no right to complain about the laws. We'll leave that to those born there. If you beleive that a country's policy on *insert problem here* are wrong then you have a choice... you can either suck it up and go by their rules or you can go to another country. Stop thinking that because you dont like thier system you can ignore it. Next thing you know they'll come over here and start thinking they can censure our newspapers.
Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776:
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
An ex-gf of mine is over there going to school, and I asked her this very question, and she said she hadn't noticed any difference. Now she's not really nerdy or anything, but we talk on AIM sometimes and I've tested it by saying anti-communist things and such, but no secret police have arrested her yet.
in bed.
In many countries, the government also restricts access to some things, but it's very narrow and with at least some attempt at justifications (whether you agree with the justification or not). In fact, off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of that is really off-limits in the west is kiddie-porn (though Nazi stuff is also nearly as taboo in some parts of Europe).
Forget the details and look at the big picture: you're getting yourself into a situation where there is no social contract. The Chinese government doesn't feel the need to justify anything and is simply unaccountable to its people. The list of what is restricted can change, and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it. You can try technical workarounds, but you'll live in fear of being discovered.
Nothing is worth that.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Freedom is not an incompatable world view.
Democracy is not an incompatable world view.
Human rights are not an incompatable world view.
Equality under the law is not an incompatable world view.
All of these are basic rights for all human beings. The fact that the Communist government of China has refused to recognize them is not due to "an incompatable world view," its due to a small nomenklatura of Communist elites denying these rights to their people. The ideas themselves are no more alien to China than they were alien to Japan in 1945.
- Crow T. Trollbot
You are wrong, sir, I can indeed waste my day away reading slashdot in china.
Many news sites in English are not blocked...yet, who knows.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Isn't this like asking how you can get easy access in the USA to 14-year-old pr0n or Al-Quaeda meeting sites? It's possible, I'm sure, but you're going to be buying a new front door sometime in your future.
I would really recommend using your own laptop with full file system encryption. And I generally agree with other posters about that old saw: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
I got tell you first of all slashdot.org is not banned in China.
.Additionally , the situation of game and mp3 sites are not that bad.
In fact , most of the english websites is not banned in China, except playboy-type sites.Sometimes you may face inconvinence but don't worry to much you will soon get used to it.
For news sites , I think the only one still banned is news.google.com
As long as you move to China not for political purpose , you can use the internet as you like
VE RI
TAS
It's probably not too hard to get around it from in there. Of course, the consequences might be a little harsher than you'd like.
And yet it is probably not too different from our government(s) blocking sites that *it* thinks is unsuitable for *us*.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this happens more than we'd like to know.
I've kinda done that. I used to work for Motorola. They have a
corporate firewall that blocks bad content, and possibly keeps notes
on what bad content individuals ask for. I learned to avoid those
sites.
For e-mail I always ssh into my basement server and use mutt. At
Motorola we weren't allowed to ssh out, so I parked an ssh server on
port 443 (the secure web port) and did my ssh on port 443. (Because
Motorola has a user/password routine for getting out, that part was
actually kinda complicated on the client end, but China probably isn't
so nasty.)
Note, China might insist upon your going through their
man-in-the-middle with all encrypted traffic.
I also don't keep e-mail on my notebook, it is all on my server.
For surfing forbidden web sites I would suggest something that
wouldn't attract attention with a lot of encrypted traffic, such as
the text-only browser lynx.
Mostly I would keep my nose clean and not do things they don't like.
Remember, doing fancy cryptography on your local hard disk can easily
backfire. Say the secret police grab you, place you notebook in front
of you, and ask you to type the encryption key. What are you going to
do?
As a foreigner I would try to act like a foreigner, access the
internet as a foreigner would, only be as crafty as a foreigner would
be. I would also be a geeky foreigner, I would try to buy more with
that. Were I doing anything vaguely political while visiting China I
would try extra hard to stay clean in their eyes--no ssh software, no
way.
-kb
i have 3 domains that don't have anything whatsoever objectionable to the chinese government, however i am told by friends they cannot be reached from china, probably because the folks i am hosting them with are also hosting something objectionable.
tips for travel in china:
take few clothes and only one nasty old pair of shoes, and buy shoes and clothes there. (note this may not be a great plan if you are particularly large)
a cyber cafe is a door that is ajar through which one can see a computer.
everything is delicious
have fun!
You usually cannot bribe your way out of trouble here--any attempt to do so will likely land you in a great deal more trouble. You can buy influence (campaign contributions, public policy ads), but for the most part you can't buy judges or police.
...the Firewall circumvents YOU!
Bad jokes aside, as is the common practice in communist countries, you as a rich(?) foreigner are more privileged than Zhoe Average. At hotels, for example, you can have CNN and other 'dangerous' news sources, possibly even non-blocked internet, too. Not sure how this works when you're an individual, though.
The guy asked a specific question and probably knew the risks. You don't need to inform him of how despicable he is. He asked how to get around it, not what are the moral and ethical implications of said subject. That is his decision to make. i say give him the information, let him make the decision to break the laws of that country.
Think encryption, or secure tunneling. I would set up a server here connect to it through secure tunneling and have it as your web source sending the requested uncensored internet data to you through the secure tunnel. Learn how to do it and i am sure it would be possible.
You do know there are such things as shades of gray?
Your post is 100% correct, and so was the parent's, but you are not refuting anything he said.
The quickest way to become an atheist is to study the Bible thoroughly.
...you will be rewarded by being able to purchase almost any piece of software known to man for around $3. Any movie for about $1, and game for about $3.
There are malls there that are huge, and hold nothing but pirated software. Also, they copy EVERYthing, even entire cars. Honda in fact hired them for some parts manufacturing because they copied theirs so well for a much lower cost. If you can't beat them... They even introduced a complete copy of a "GM" car before GM even announced it. They are absolute masters at copying everything, manufacturing those copies, and even industrial espioniage. And the speed at which they do it is amazing.
It's a bootleg economy. Enjoy it I say!
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
It seems to me very few of you have actually been to China or even understand how the system there works. For the same reason why Europeans think we're a country of hicks driving around in a pickup with shotguns who elected a idiot to office is why you think the Chinese is some sort of omni-present superpower that oversees all of the minute details of its citizens' lives and takes sadistic pleasure in torture. You're taking in media hype and a fear of the unknown. China has its share of problems: freedom of speech and freedom of religion come to mind. These are serious issues that need to be addressed but that doesn't mean everytime you commit a crime in China you will be sent into "reeducation." That also doesn't mean if you use a proxy to surf the web that they're going to break your thumbs. The Chinese government are too busy with the same serious issues that the US is dealing with to be bothered by these minor offenses.
While it may sound like the Chinese police force operate a Gestapo-like regime but that's far from the truth. Believe or not, China has laws and 99% of the time, they are followed. They also have lawyers that will free an innocent man. Some people vision of a totalitarian society governed by "The Party" are just too far fetched. Do they honestly think that the police operate on whatever laws they please and the people live in constant fear? I'll tell you from actually lived in China that it is hardly the case. People are way too reoccupied w/ making money to give a shit. Just remember the same media that is telling you to be afraid of China is the same one that ran the special on 20/20 about the wide-spread dangers of drier lint fires and the world-wide SARS epedemic.
SOCKS Host: Localhost
Port: 8080
So now all connections go Firefox->localhost:8080->[remote-host]->www
All access (e.g. apache logs) will show things coming from [remote-host]. The connection between your localbox and [remote-host] will be encrypted using ssh.
-Jeff
Looks like Def-Con's famous game made it to /. cause I just found him! Great article Agent Smith!
I cant beleave someone would use slashdot to dig up ways to get around the Chinese Web Security, Shame on you!
And they change daily. When I was there for a few months last summer, all British news sites (BBC, Guardian, etc.) were blocked. Google groups are blocked. The SF Chronicle would be up and down depending on the day, as would Yahoo news. In general, web access is completely problematic. Earlier posters are correct - unless you are trying to do something to educate the masses, you'll be fine. They aren't after knowledgeable individuals or foreigners, they want to make sure it's not easy to join an emerging movement. Even if they were, it would only result in a bribe unless you were to be made into an example. By the way, China is lovely. The people are very sweet and warm. If you can, learn some Mandarin or Cantonese before you get there.
So sourceforge is banned? No wonder RedFlag Linux is taking so long...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How pretentious and hypocritical.
chances are the answer would be, "censorship? What censorship?"
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
Genocide?
Ethnic cleansing?
Urban renewal?
I was living in central China (Zhengzhou) for 10 months. Chinese people, and the Chinese government are actually really laid back, especially when it comes to foreigners. Unless you are actively trying to incite some kind of social unrest, they will treat you extremely well.
;)
The only thing I ever had accessing on the net was Google's cache.
On the plus side, I paid $7 USD per month for a nearly 2Mbit dsl. Bittorrent all day long without fear of MPAA/RIAA. Maybe you could set up a supernova repacement while you're there?
First, how does anyone know who you really are? You could be gathering info on people here or learning how people circumvent things to bypass controls and tighten the noose harder.
Second, if you are heading that way, would you really jeopardize your own safety by posting to a public forum?
Third, and last, what s the reward for turning in someone who would fink on their peers or try to subvert the country? I could win this one either way! The bottom line, exercise more caution and discretion for your and your family's protection.
Dictatorships are what they are and I have seen many executed because of lesser infractions.
Semper BS-us! He has a wife you know...
lol, this is hilarious
So there really is freedom of religion and speech in China?
So the Chinese government does not make huge amounts of money from prison labor?
And the Chinese did not lob missiles over an island full of people to keep them in line?
Just asking if these are all myths that I have seen on TV?
Now there's definitely not a 1:1 match on any of those, but it makes you think about the "shades of gray" argument....
Remember the kind in '94 that was caned in Singapore for Chewing Gum (or was it Vandalism..) and President Clinton had to ask the gov't to lesson the penalty....
/." *WHACK*
Caning is real... hope you've got thick pants.
Go ahead and break their laws... you'll be on the 6pm News here in the states... with your pants around your ankles..
*WHACK* "I just wanted to read
I have. It really opened my eyes to the freedoms we enjoy versus the freedoms they enjoy.
I have family in Shanghai (huge city), Xi'an (pretty big city), BaoJi City (Medium-sized city), and a small villiage nearby. I have travelled to all of these places and stayed wih my relatives. As a native-born American, I was thoroughly impressed with the freedom that they enjoy.
Many Chinese never even come in contact with a Policeman. Judges and government officials (my cousin is a Provincial (read: State) Supreme Court Judge, and her husband is a high-ranking government official, BTW) live like common "folk," and people do and say almost anything they want. My nephews all play Counterstrike on-line against their classmates, and they all surf the internet. You have to understand that Chinese people are just not into Pr0n and such things like we (Americans) are. So, for them, not having access to Pr0n just isn't a big deal.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Go see for yourself.
Oh, and the one baby thing is only enforced in the big cities. Again, don't take my word for it. Most of my family in the smaller areas have several children.
you will have all the freedom you want if you are going to Hong Kong and Mocow. You probably wont go into any trouble unless you are starting a campaign against the Chinese government. By then, you would not have to worry. The local will be angry enough and start their own compaign against you anyway. While some of the people may not have much love to the current government, Chinese, other than Taiwan, are very supportive for a united China. As for China itself, it is relative free nowaday. You can ever talk about politic and religious as long as you are not trying to spread your idea. The problem is the law is much stricter. There may be a time they want to enforce those laws and you will be get into trouble. By the way, do not expect US can get you out. In certain situation, the Chinese are expecting their government to act tough. If you are bringing Bible or such, just bring a copy for your own use. There were people who bought Bible to undergroud church and were put in prsion.
" We (rightly) put down rebellions within our borders(cf. the Civil War). They are terrorism. It doesn't matter how political they are; actually, being especially political means you are committing treason and not just causing destruction."
Okay. So a bunch of people sitting around "Saying that they want a democratic system is terrorism? Even going back to the US civil war you are saying that it is the same as shelling a military base?
The US does execute a good number of people for murder after a trial and usually many appeals, not for protesting. There are also people protesting those executions trying to change the system. I do not see any protests in China over capital punishment.
You can not threaten the President that is correct. You can not threaten anyone but you will not be shot or likely convicted unless you do it in a very public way. You will never go to jail for saying anything about Scientology you may get dragged into a civil suit but not jail time.
Yes 60 years ago the US dropped two nukes on to cities of a enemy that tortured and killed millions and had attacked the US. Not to mention that they had already used Chemical and Bio weapons themselves on Chinese citizens.
I am pretty sure that I am not entertaining too many myths. I mean really even Kent State which was a terrible act does not hold a candle to the actions of the Chinese government. At least in the US people can comment on that act and say that it was wrong. That freedom is not available in China.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
For education purposes, the PRC uses the pinyin romanization system.
I'm not familiar with your spellings of chinese words, maybe they are wade-giles.
Anywho, china is zhong guo, USA is mei guo, England is ying guo, Japan is ri ben(which whimsically can be translated as "fuck one's self"), South Korea is han guo, France is fa guo.
Many of the chinese people i met hold america in high esteem. Thank you, Backstreet Boys.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
I can't believe that the poster is serious about moving to China of all places to enjoy more freedoms.
Good luck pleading your "rights" when you get caught reading a website you're not supposed to, or even receiving anything resembling due process.
You may take your freedoms to China, but they will promptly be stripped from you at the door.
There is a very strong anti-Chinese movement within the US, in particular, that tends to dramatically misportray the way things are there.
/. are examples.
There's also a very strong anti-USA movement within the US that tends to dramatically misportray the way things are there.
Many of the posts on
What was her crime? He wanted to mail copies of publicly available news articles to her husband residing in the USA. The articles dealt with the plight of women in Chinese society. She is serving an 8 year prison sentence, starting in 2000.
Is anyone angered by this incident? I was infuriated when I received the documents from AI. Visiting China may be "safe" for foreigners, but should we not express our moral outrage by boycotting China and its products?
When I was there in September, SSHing to my shell account worked just fine. Tunnel through that, and you'll be fine.
If you're going to do human rights work there, that it's probably best to do one illegal thing at a time. So, don't look at porn when your issue is Falun Gong. And likewise, don't look at Falun Gong sites if your issue is porn.
If you're just on vacation, consider spending your time seeing the sites rather than surfing the net. It'll be there when you get home.
Ignore all the idiots on this site who tell you to obey unjust laws.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
So the US government isn't unlawfully detaining thousands oin Cuba without a trial? So that whole Iran-Contra thing was just a myth cooked up by the media? So is it really ok to show an exposed boobie on national tv? So that whole Waco thing is just dust under the carpet? What about the US government's constant intervention in South American politics. Weren't we the ones that supplied Saddam with WMD in the first place? Wasn't this the government that beat black protesters in the 60s? What about how we dealt with Cuba in the past? Just asking if these are all myths that I have seen on TV? My point is, governments are flawed, you'd be hard pressed to find a large nation of 100+ million that haven't done something stupid or illegal. But to use those examples to equate the entire country or government and its everyday affairs as evil is short-sighted and ignorant. America is still the most free country in the world but you wouldn't believe me if you only looked at the bullet points above.
Is still remembered and mourned in the US. Tiannamen Square is a "non-event" in China.
We (rightly) put down rebellions within our borders(cf. the Civil War). They are terrorism. It doesn't matter how political they are; actually, being especially political means you are committing treason and not just causing destruction.
The civil war was 150 years ago. Today, when there are protestors, we let them have at it, and mostly just watch until the destruction is over. If the police overstep their roles or break the law they put on trial, fined, or fired.
We execute lots of people. Why is it so important that they use cheap bullets rather than expensive injections?
We execute a relative few. In the whole country somewhere between 200 and 300 people per year. The average stay on death row is between 5 and 10 years. The average death row inmate has had between 3 and 5 lawyers. The average death row inmmate has been in court and in front of a judge at least 6 times. None of these things is true about China. It has nothing to do with the cost of the bullet. It has everything to do with the process. China hems and haws about even disclosing how many people it executes. There is no presumption of innocence. There is no right to appeal. No right to seek a pardon.
You can't joke about killing the President
You can in fact joke about killing the President. You cannot enter into a conspiracy to kill the President (or anyone). You cannot solicit people to kill the the President (or anyone). You cannot ask that another person should kill a person. If you do make statemnets amount about the President and killing him you likely will get investigated by the Secret Service to determine if you have entered into a plot to kill the President. If you haven't then nothing happens. You can say anything about Scientology. You cannot republish copyright protected documents without permission. If you do, you may be sued and/or receive a letter from an attorney
We dropped two nukes on two cities, something nobody else has done, to keep the rest of the WORLD in line; and have waged war since.
No, we dropped two nukes for the explict purpose of defeating Japan. Even after the first they did not surrender. Hence the second. We showed restrainant when others would have shown known. After World War II we had the most powerful military in the history of the world. We had the most power economy in the history of the world. Our economic engine was producing war time goods at a rate that all the nations of the world combined could not match our power. We could have dominated the world, and who would have opposed us? The peasantry of China? The ruins that once were great nations in Europe? The decimated demoralized Soviets? In 1945 we could have rolled over the world, dominating and taking anything we wanted. There were no limits to the power we could project. Europe, Africa, Asia - even China would be fall to their knees in realization of American power. Yet we did not puruse that course. We rebuilt Germany. We brought democracy to Japan. We liberated and left France. We helped our sworn enemies. We established a home land in the middle east for the Jews out of compassion and remorse for a crime we did not commit.
I love America. And I've spent my life loving America. I'll never deny our collective mistakes but I will certainly not equate them to the routine barbary that is found so often and with such foulness across the world. America has its many problems. America is flawed, and growing more so. But it will be a cold day in hell when you can equte America with communist China.
The fact remains that the Bill of Rights - even in its decaying form - offers more protection, more glorious freedom, more liberty than most people of the world dare to aspire to obtain.
Don't forget Slavery, the KKK, Prohibition, the War On Drugs and McCarthyism
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
To stomp out violent protest, or terrorist acts is fine, every government has to deal with that forcefully.
To silence nonviolent people who simply dissagree with the way things are and argue for change is a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
I'm sure your commie asses are going to claim the USA does the same thing. To prove you wrong I say the following
George Bush has the diplomatic skills of a mentally retarded badger, and His daughers are way hot and I hope they show up in Playboy Magazine!!.
I have every confidence I will still be alive and free tomorrow despite just saying that stuff.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
According to whom? I presume that's why Mainland China and Taiwan have different names for the island? Although it is true that most Taiwanese want reunification with the mainland Chinese people; many families have members living in both locations.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Guess you don't want to ever have more than 1 kid, without state sponsorship, eh? Trying to work around their measures to keep freedoms from happening, can ultimately result in your imprisonment or worse....
We (rightly) put down rebellions within our borders(cf. the Civil War). They are terrorism. It doesn't matter how political they are; actually, being especially political means you are committing treason and not just causing destruction.
Are you equating nonviolent protest with terrorism?
Was president Davis or General Lee charged with treason? Or are you making a bad comparison?
We execute lots of people. Why is it so important that they use cheap bullets rather than expensive injections?
We execute people for high crimes, not for having ideas with which we do not agree.
You can't joke about killing the President, you can't say some things about Scientology...
Yes you can. Just be prepared for bogus lawsuits or social pressures as a result of being investigated.
US industry makes huge amounts of money from prison labor, with the blessing of the US gov't.
Most prison labor is limited to government contracts. Care to elaborate which industry is making money from these lost contracts?
I think the point your post misses most, is that everyone has a right to speak freely and hold what ideas they will. This is not some wonder granted by a sheet of paper in a vault in Washington D.C. It is a natural right owned by all human beings, innate, or if you prefer endowed by their creator.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
+3 Insightful? Have you really READ the post? Or did it only sound good when you "read" it diagonally without thinking? Other replies to the parent (obviously an AC troll) have already pointed out his BS...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Of course, with the right connections you will have the freedom to pirate as many copies of Windows XP as you want - what's there to complain about?
1 297106X/qid=1106863068/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-100 7484-7830549?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)
But: Looking a for a good answer to the original question: How easy is it and to what extent are the internet and more generally freedom of press restrictions, evaded in China.
A good analogy is "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/08
which is a book about how and by whom the restictions in Iran are evaded by those who the regime in Iran has tried to crush, and probably by sterner measures than those employed in China.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I'm trying hard not to flame anyone in particular, so bear with me...
I am embarrassed by the majority of the responses to this post. I understand that there will be a few "Chinese prison" jokes as well as a few "follow the rules or go somewhere else" posts, but I think it is sad that nearly every single response to this guy's questions falls along these lines.
It is perfectly legitimate to enquire about ways to circumvent an oppresive government. It's part of the set of freedoms that we should all be demanding, especially if they are not afforded by said government. It's also perfectly legitimate to give such information, FIPO, of course.
It's perfectly depressing to read a bunch of sardonic "best of luck to ya in a Chinese jail" comments. I can only suspect that the vast majority of these are uninformed. How many of these posters can actually speak to the conditions of Chinese prisons or the fairness of the Chinese legal process? I'd wager a lot of them couldn't even have an informed discussion about such conditions in their own countries. What's certainly true is that no one who made such a comment backed it up with any facts whatsoever.
I question the likelyhood that trying to circumvent the so-called Great Firewall is going to get this guy into any real trouble. I could be wrong, but a gorvernment with 1 billion plus citizens would seem to have bigger fish to fry (or at least a million or so eqaully large fish, so what are the odds). He's not asking Slashdot how to use technology to shoplift; he's asking Slashdot how to use technology to read Slashdot.
So, how about we cut the juvenile crap and answer this guy's question?
My other
AC said: Ah! Wonderful ad hominem--and, of course, it leaves the actually issue totally undressed. If you have nothing to respond with, why waste the bandwidth?
My reply: Ah! Wonderful ad hominem--and, of course, it leaves the actual issue totally unadressed. If you have nothing to respond with, why waste the bandwidth?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Rent a virtual server outside China, eg. Germany. You can get those at $10 a month w. eg. Debian. Install Apache with above modules and you're set.
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
Wouldn't it be the RED Screen Of Death in China? :-) I hear it's a special localization by MS.
--- Ban humanity.
Any attempt in bypassing the Great Firewall of China will result in sudden cerebral hemorphage induced by a bullet in the back of the head.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Business as usual on planet earth.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
How-To (Score 1)
by SumYungGai (1234567890) on Thursday January 27, @29:78AM (#0000000000)
Hi Solo Han,
you ask an interesting question. It's not always easy to break the law here in China, and most people don't try because there is the danger of severe treatment if you get caught. The government takes this kind of thing very seriously, and has been known to make "examples" of people. Or not, if they just want the person gone. But anyway, how I get my porn and anti-communist news is basically that I use a satellite phone to dial into foreign dial-up services. It's not really fast, but as long as the government doesn't know about my sat phone, it works great.
//end sarcasm
I'm surprised this story even got posted. I mean, come on, even if we were talking about oh say, england instead of china, your asking how to break the law... majorly. Shouldn't this discussion be conducted on IRC in some "dark alley"? More to the point, shouldn't the real topic (if any) have been "W007! China it teh suck! let's laugh at their firewall! h4wh4wh4w... google firewall piercing.." (p.s. I am not 'elite')
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
I suggest that you setup an encrypted VPN with openvpn.net on a host in a (more) free country. And then tunnel one or more IPs to china. You tunnel EVERYTHING, all traffic..
As I got one myself I know it works well. But I got it because my ISP refuses to give me 32 IPs with my own reverse, all ports open. And I dont want them to know what files I xfer over BitTorrent or other P2P.
One that comes to mind immediately is to stay on this side of the firewall.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Of course, considering that she's your ex, you may just be wanting that to happen ;)
Yet, on one of their programs, one of the church leaders in Bejing reported that the government was not stifling state-allowed religions
How about state-disallowed religions?
The Christian Science Monitor, which is a non-partisan newspaper I like to read online sometimes, wrote an article about Tiananmen Square. How many students were killed, run over by tanks, and otherwise butchered? The answer: We don't know. In fact, evidence is starting to show that no students were killed in the square at all. When there's no foreign reporters around, and the government is the only one that's talking, it is indeed dramatic misportrayal of the facts that tends to take over. That said, estimates of fatalities outside the square range vary, but it was *after* the peaceful protest left the square.
Wait, so the Chinese killed the protesters AFTER they dispersed from the square, and that's somehow better?
I've seen photographs of Chinese protesters turned into paste underneath the tracks of PLA tanks. Was that dramatic misportrayal?
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
The over-rated post it is referring to is misinformed.
Mod parent UP! That was damn good. Here, here!
I have yet to see a privacy, filtering, large firewall that has been able to prevent "our freedoms" without compromise.
With the advent of so many online anti-privacy resources such as anonymous cloaking (the-cloak.com), tunnelling connections to a another unfiltered location and all the other tricks like masquerading URL's and what have you, I do not believe that the IT literate people of china would be truly prevented from doing as they please.
If i have said it once, i have said it a thousand times - no "protection" can be 100% secure whilst being 100% functional.
I would worry more about physical security from Chinese Forces if you are truly wanting to push the imposed limits.
I somehow didn't expect slashdotters to give up their slashdot that easily. I'd think there are a lot of you who aren't following their own laws to the letter. Copyright laws, for example, and do you all stop for a red traffic light? I'm afraid I've broken quite a few laws. Some because it was more convenient to, others because I simply disagree.
The analogy is flawed though, the risk of being caught for the laws I break is zero. The risks in china seem to be unpredictable , which isn't very promising. But I cannot find any information on how they treat non-chinese. I would expect them to be mild, especially if you're not involved in political activities but reading slashdot. Maybe it's an idea not to encrypt your traffic but use a plain proxyserver. That way they can see you're just accessing slashdot and not organising a coup.
Of course it's nice of you to worry about him doing illigal stuff in a country like China. But I don't understand that there're are no practical answers being modded up. Only the warnings that say he should adapt to the situation there. Everyone here probably objects strongly to the Chinese censorship, but nobody seems to we willing to take the risk to 'protest' against it. The risk might be very real indeed, but then again, I'd bet laws like these aren't quite the same for foreigners. Maybe someone could enlighten us about the risks involved? Are there any example cases?
One easy thing you can do is install this cgi proxy script on some host you know isn't yet banned. Then when you need to surf the web from an internet kiosk or similarly restrictive environment, access all the banned sites by way of that script.
Or in situations where you have full control of the machine, ssh to a known host on the other side of the firewall and do your surfing from there.
I play Nerd-Folk!
The Christian Science Monitor, which is a non-partisan newspaper I like to read online sometimes
Off-topic, I know... Anyway,
The Christian Science Monitor is published by a church called Christian Science, which can be categorized under "New Religious Movements". I wouldn't quote a source like that, because I don't know about their values, what they believe in and their agendas. And just because you say that it's non-partisan doesn't make it so. It may be, or it may not be.
China rounds up, beats mourners for deposed leader Zhao Well, aside from getting the crap kicked out of you for mourning a leader that was viewed weak on college students (1989) I'm sure it's lovely...
Ask that guy (Michael something?) who got caned in singapore for vandalism if being an american helped to save his brutalized backside.
hmmmm...How about DAVID DUKE?
This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it? What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
Bear in mind that any breach of the law in China will likely land you in a dingy prison cell for 10 years while they get around to hearing the case, followed by your 10 minute trial (guilty verdict for subversion already stamped and ready to go), and finishing with your 10 years of hard labor in one of their people's work camps. I suggested that you stay here in the United States unless you were born in China and still have family there. I don't know about you, but the only way that I would want to see China is in uniform looking through a gun sight.
"I'm considering a move to China next year..." Wait a minute...is this voluntary? Or forced? Why on God's green earth would anyone want to do that? Don't you see people desperately trying to come in THIS DIRECTION? DUDE, YOU'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, TURN AROUND!!!! Seriously, if you know what you are getting yourself into, what makes you think they won't kill you if they catch you trying to get around the law? That's a dangerous thing...hence why you shouldn't go there to begin with...
Chinese markets are great places to get knocked off games, music and DVDs. Even legit music CDs are very cheap in China - I was there in November and picked up some Beatles CDs for $4 each.
As for pr0n - get yourself a nice Chinese girlfriend for chrissakes! You'll probably be seen as an impressive catch...
Have fun!
I was in China recently, and I used GPRS devices (a Blackberry and a P800, but a PC with a GPRS modem would also work) to read external sites. GPRS establishes a GTP tunnel to an "APN" in the home network, so it bypasses intervening firewalls. It would be an expensive way of doing all your Internet access, but if you just want to pick up uncensored news it would be workable. ou would need to find a mobile phone company with a roaming agreement in China - I used Vodafone, but I think most companies would be ok.
If i wasn't so anal i'd say this guy was a spy or working for an intelligencia in China.... if he was that smart he'd already know the answer!!!
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
zing
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Is that question being asked by a citizen of a country, which prohibits its citizens from going to certain places (Cuba), or buying items from these places? Same country that imprisons people indefinitely in these same places (Cuba: Guantanamo) without trial, pretending that somehow this place is out of its jurisdiction?
I think it's also the same country that spreads democracy by using it's military force, while being unable to count votes in its own presidential elections...
Careful: propaganda goes hand in hand with restrictions of freedom. Both exist in the US and it is naive to think otherwise. Don't think you're free just because you live in the US.
If you value your freedom as much as you suggest, I'd leave the civil disobedience to the people of China.
Unless you are really trying to make some point, and are willing to risk dealing with the Chinese government, I suggest not circumventing their filters. They don't look too kindly upon people opposing them.
If you're really freaked out about it, run all your web/internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a proxy server outside china's borders, and run your firefox web browser and putty (or whatever you use for ssh) off an encrypted USB drive. Set it up so your history and cookies are also saved to the USB drive instead of on the home folder on your computer.
America is still the most free country in the world
I'm from Paraguay, and I can tell you that there is much more freedom there than in the US (having lived in both). Its also more corrupt, and its law enforcement is not nearly as good, but there is still more freedom. If you want freedom, go to any third world country, I'm sure they (with a few exceptions) are more free than the US.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
it really irritates me how people can have such uninformed opinions and still get modded up
OK, so I get my information from journalists, who interview the families (that are willing to talk) of people who are arrested and jailed for doing things like running web sites, or even just posting information and doing research on other web sites.
I've seen a lot of responses to my post that sound more or less like, "It's not so bad - if you're a foreigner, you'll be fine!" There should be no exception, whatsoever, to who can go look at a web site. If China truly lightened up on its routine assumptions that visiting academics were spies and up to no good they'd start getting a lot more visitors. Personally, I'd love to soak up some ancient Chinese history first hand. I've got real problems, though, endorsing (by visiting) a country that so capriciously firewalls information from its citizens. That sort of dictatorial news management can't be confused with anything other than direct oppression of freedom of speech. Of course, it would be bad enough if it were just the firewalling - but forcing cyber cafes to close, or arresting people that run information systems - it's right out of Soviet Russia, or fascist Europe 50 years ago.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Unless the information he wants to get to is anti-chinese-government, I don't think they will give him any trouble as he's a foreigner. Most of the information blocked is of this sort anyway.
With that said, trying to circumvent censorship isn't worth the risk. Whenever you're abroad it's a bad idea to engage in criminal activity.
read a history book
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
We execute people for high crimes, not for having ideas with which we do not agree.
Did the Waco/Koresh incident involve a high crime?
Just as the people have the right to speak their opinions, the president is still one of the people and also enjoys this right.
To stand on
However idiots who do not respect that he shares the same rights try to enter an event uninvited, shout to drown him out, and not leave when asked are violating his rights.
But we are still really tolerant of these people and let go within a few hours.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
You are subject to Chinese law (unless you have diplomatic immunity). Show a little respect and common sense, and obey the prevailing laws.
That you're American makes little difference -- in China, you're subject to Chinese law.
Do quite the opposite of a Boycott. Right now the Chinese is caught in a catch-22. They want to maintain their totalirian control over society yet desire more then anything the Almighty Dollar. However, our economy REQUIRES financial freedom. You think those that become millionaires from paupers in China won't demand more and more control over the government? It's Happening but it's happening slowly. I'm personally cautiously optimistic about China. Yet, I woouldn't consider moving anytime soon.
China, OR freedom of information. I'm sorry :(
Ok, I think you're being just a *tad* bit paranoid. Without even having to going to the logistical issues, I'll solve this with math. Let's say the average Chinese makes 15 minutes in phone calls a day. That about 1.11% of the day spent on the phone. With a population of 1.3billion, that equates to about 325,000,000 hours of phone time. Assuming each eavesdroppers listens in for 10 hours a day (Hey, the Chinese work hard to oppress their people!) that's 32,500,000 people working for the Ministry of Information. In otherwords, the entire nation of Canada would have to work for the Chinese government to make sure people aren't talking about overthrowing the nation...
Sex, drugs and rock and roll. They shoot people for using drugs, and sex can be dangerous as well if it results in pregnancy.
I notice a lot of people are saying to forward all traffic through an ssh tunnel. That's all well and good, and would probably conceal whatever you're doing on the net, but is it legal? I know in some other countries encryption is considered illegal; does anyone know what the legal status of encryption in China is?
I recommend you buy some chinese-made clothing when you get there, to help you blend-in with the local populace. They will instantly overlook your blond hair and 6-foot height, and think you're a long-lost cousin, and invite you to marry their daughter.
... and you just put the sole of your foot on his face (showing the sole of your shoe to someone is a grave insult in Islamic countries).
On a serious note, it's their country, and they're their laws. Obey them or bad things happen, just like anywhere else in the world. You have some limited immunity because you're a westerner, but that only goes so far, so don't push your luck.
A better question to ask would have been: "Does China have any laws or customs that a westerner would inadvertently run afoul of?"
A good example would be one from Turkey: You do not stomp on a rolling coin to prevent it from getting away. You see, it has Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's image on it (founder of modern Turkey), and the law forbids defacing his image
Chip H.
Lets check these 'facts':
So the Chinese Army did not send in tanks to stop students protesting?
- The US Govt has used the army against its own population. Check the protests in the 60's. The US regularly uses its army both overtly (iraq, grenada) and covertly (cambodia, iran, south america) against other countries.
So those executions I saw where they had the people kneel and put a bullet in their brain never happened?
- The US executes a truck-load of people. In fact, this is a problem highlighted by both Amnesty International and the US Supreme Court.
So there really is freedom of religion and speech in China?
- Freedom on religion and speech? No problem (as long as you are not a muslim). Yes, I will conceded that on this point, the US does provide significantly more freedoms.
And the Chinese did not lob missiles over an island full of people to keep them in line?
- The US government regularly lobs missiles into cities and towns (iraq, afghanistan). Dont be fooled into thinking these 'smart bombs' are really that smart - 17,000 iraqis can't be wrong (but they are dead).
- TV does propogate myths in both directions - dont believe everything your overlords tell you.
As you said there is not a one to one mach for any of them.
Look at the posts.
The first one is critical of the reduction of US civil liberties after 9/11. Okay so this is the same as sending in tanks to stop protesters? Plus it is "critical" of government policy! Try that in China.
The next one has this line in it "Ross, a convicted serial murderer who has admitted killing eight women in the 1980s, says he wants to waive his appeals and die". How is this even close to killing someone for protesting? How long has his case been going through the system? How many checks and balances? I want to see the my nation stop capital punishment. If I was Chinese could I say that on a public forum?
Your next link is critical of reductions in personal freedom since 9/11. Notice that it is critical of them plus no of the examples of abuses are running students over with tanks for protesting.
You next one on freedom of speech totally a none issue. A company stopped hosting a website. Not the government but a private company. Get a new hosting company. For all we know they did not pay there bill.
The link on making money on prisoners. This is critical of some local cities for seeing prisons as a source of jobs. You know construction, catering, and staff. Not using prisoners for slave labor. No shade here.
Finally the last link. Again it is critical of US policy. It talks about problems the US is having gathering information in Afghanistan. From you link "The experiences of Shamsulrachman, the villager in Sawai, suggest differences in treatment. He says marines searched his house recently and found nothing. But when they discovered a shell casing outside of a neighbor's house that he says dated from the Soviet era, they told him they were going to arrest him. He says the Marines were civil,"
I do not see any match here.
Your last link... Could you have a page like that in China?
The original post was that China is not as bad as you think and the media over states the problems.
Of course the US is not perfect, no country is. Where are you on the whole safer and free? Your post pretty much proves my point.
Is the US perfect? You do not think so? Lets talk about it. Let's try and improve things. Hey we could try and let others know about the things we feel need changing.
Is China perfect..... Let's just say that it is. The is for the best.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I think this topic would serve that purpose quite well...
It's been many many years since I've been to China. Last time I was there was 1992 and the internet was an unknown thing. But I do have an idea or two. There's pesky filtering software at my college that makes it a pain in the butt to have "freedom." So I set up a webserver off campus and put a proxy on it. If a normal proxy server doesn't work, you can try using a cgi proxy script and access it using https. A cheap solution is spending $100/year on a virtual server. That works for me, but maybe a country of 1 billion people is a bit more sophisticated than a university of 5000 people.
Overall China got some pretty black marks on their "internal affairs" record but then again USA got some pretty bad remarks on their foreign policy record too*. Please not that I'm not exusing those bad things that are happening in China, just pointing out that if you look at it with those big history glasses it might not look as bad as you are implying. Just as those "bad things" in US foreign policy don't negate the fact that USA has been an overall postitive factor in the last 100+ years**.
*Iran, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iraq, Guantanamo etc.
**That might have changed under Bush though..
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Ah yes, Japan... A bastion of human rights and equality.
Technically Japan is a free democracy. But human rights? Equality? They are given lip service at best.
Don't believe me? Ask the two Kurdish Turks just deported even though the UN had declared them refugees.
Or perhaps the nurse who was denied a promotion because she does not have Japanese citizenship. She was BORN in Japan! She *only* speaks Japanese! Her mother was Japanese, her father Korean, and this is the source of her problem. At the time she was born having a Japanese mother did *not* get you Japanese citizenship. (Having a Japanese father would have though.) So her passport says "Korea", and thus she is denied a promotion. The kicker? This decision was just *upheld* by the Japanese Supreme Court!
Yep, Japan... A bastion of human rights and equality.
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
And put the world out of your misery.
I've never said anything like that on Slashdot before... But, the simple truth is that anyone who believes what you just said is my enemy and the enemy of every human that lives now or ever will live.
Stonewolf
I had a simple solution to all the filtering/monitoring that went on there. I have a colocated server (replace with a linux box on a cable modem if necessary) which I SSH'd to and tunnelled. Although you could port forward anything you wanted, if you run windows you can just use PuTTY. It has a nice feature they call "dynamic" port forwarding. It just sets up a local socks proxy which tunnels through the SSH session. Just set your applications to use it as a proxy...I could use IE, Kazaa, etc. I could get at anything I wanted, and they couldn't snoop.
Never forget any of them. Talk about them that is how Prohibition and McCartyism where ended. Slavery that took a war over 100 years ago. The KKK can't blame that on the goverment. War On Drugs. Debate it. The difference is you can debate them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Remote Desktop.
Where in China are you moving; because if your moving to hong-kong, it's not going to be very different then the most amazingly crowded part of lets say new york, save;
1- it will be more crowded
2- Everyone will speak chinese first, english second
3-The average height will be 5'6"
4-When you board the subway, a man or woman with a large 'gladiator' style prodd will force you into the train during rush hour traffic.
Outside of hong-kong the firewall might be more of an issue; but I woulden't circumvent it if I were you, as other's have pointed out; if you have a fundamental problem with the rights affoarded to you by a country you plan to move to; perhaps you should reconsider the move?
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
I've actually never tried it before, but I've read about a tool called triangle boy that utilizes third-party freedom-of-speech advocate servers that allow you to redirect url requests. I recall a company called safeweb develops this tool. I heard about this about three years ago though, so I'm not sure whether it still works.
"So the Chinese Army did not send in tanks to stop students protesting?"
Yup...kinda like GWB put protesters in 'free speech zones' miles from where their protest could have any impact whatsoever, and like the police where instructed to harshly break up any protests the past couple of years.
"So those executions I saw where they had the people kneel and put a bullet in their brain never happened?"
Yup, they did: but then again, not only does the US also have the deathpenalty, but one could very well argue that theirs is a more humane alternative to torturing people for the rest of their lives in Guantanamo Bay.
"So there really is freedom of religion and speech in China?"
Pretty much: the only religion banned is Falun Gong; christians, budhists etc etc etc have free reign. But don't go sp[eaking revolution, or you'll get a visit which looks pretty much like how the Secret Service shows up on your doorstep if you say something derogetory about the US Prez.
"So the Chinese government does not make huge amounts of money from prison labor?"
Nah...they make a bit of money, but not gopbs of cash...manual labour just doesn't bring in the bacan like high-tech. Just look at the income american prisons get from their manual labour, which operates under pretty much the same policy. And if you want to see the darker side of it, go look at what happens in Texan jails.
"And the Chinese did not lob missiles over an island full of people to keep them in line?"
Didn't hit Taiowan, just let 'em know who has the big guns. Kinda exactly unlike what the US is doing in the middle east: the US is bombing the hell out of shit, creating a massive deathcount, destabalising a country and the whole region...and that's somehow better than just launching a missile and not hitting anything?
"Just asking if these are all myths that I have seen on TV?"
No...but there is this saying about casting stones and sin, and another one about beams of wood and splinters in your own or someone else's eyes.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I thought exactly the same thing. And I am machiavellian when it comes to defense. I read an article by a high ranking "Chinese Guy" (VP or something) denouncing the war in Iraq as folly. The writer has a great deal of polish, and this unseats the harmless intro. Is it cultural or random or clever? I think it is highly proable that it is culture, as most Americans have a not so rounded education. I live here - I can say that. The walk among us.
Stuff that matters.
Aw, that sucks... 3 minutes late, and you don't get the extra "Funny" point... c'mon Mods... boost a brother up... he's just as funny, just a little, uh, slow. :)
Well..
;-)
I have a friend who lives in Beijing (married to an American she met there, she is working as some sort of intern for a German company) since 2001 or 2002.
They didn't have problems with the government and have good relations with their neighbours.
Another couple travelled on their own through China for a month,also no problems (in theory, they had to report where they were staying that night, but never did or it was taken care of by the hotels).
They were welcomed everywhere they went, although mostly because of curiosity as they went to some places were they were the only tourists and the first blonde people there
Another friend and his-now-wife lived in China for about one or two years, no problems there (and he is a geek/CS student who wrote his final thesis there, surely used ssh a lot to log into the university network (and for sourceforge access)).
And: they didn't live somewhere in a tourist area,they rented a flat via a Chinese estate agent, they took private language lessions, dance courses, she worked in a hospital (-> interested i skills..) there yaddayadda
Both of them even appeared on TV (gameshow&some sort of propaganda news documentation "the foreigner visits our family");-)
Mind you:
I am well aware about the human rights violations in China, but I am also quite sure that you can lead a normal life there without fear.
Sure, you better don't start demos there or hand out "fuck the system"-flyers, but..
Believe it or not freedom is just like any other natural resources. Its supply is limited. When there are 1.3 billion people who all want the same resource, you have to pay a much higher price for it.
An ex-gf of mine is over there going to school, and I asked her this very question, and she said she hadn't noticed any difference. Now she's not really nerdy or anything, but we talk on AIM sometimes and I've tested it by saying anti-communist things and such, but no secret police have arrested her yet.
Don't lose hope my friend. Persistence will pay off. Keep on saying those anti-communist things and you'll get her arrested yet!
I am NOT a hick, anyway.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Don't go to China unless you can do without your precious freedoms. Only thouroughly anti-social perverts need them.
Well said.
"So the Chinese Army did not send in tanks to stop students protesting?"
Yup...kinda like GWB put protesters in 'free speech zones' miles from where their protest could have any impact whatsoever, and like the police where instructed to harshly break up any protests the past couple of years."
Kind of like???? Are you out of your cotton picking mind!!!!! Getting run over by a tank or arrested and executed is kind of like being told where to stand? That is just insane!!!!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Whoa. The American Civil War was neither a rebellion nor "terrorism". Nor was it justified. In fact a group of states said "Hey, remember when we joined up in this Union we only did so with the understanding that we're a loose Union of sovereign states who can leave this Union at any time. Well, we're going to exercise that right now." Lincoln said, "I'm altering the agreement, Pray I don't alter it further" and illegally attacked the seceding States to prevent them from leaving. It's only considered "justified" because the North won. Lincoln was entirely in the wrong legally and engaged in some very morally questionable practices to achieve his ends.
Also keep in mind that when a USA citizen breaks the rules in many countries it is often treated as SPYING, which can make put you in the position of being a pawn in some political game you're completely unaware of. The host country can decide to put on a "show trial" and/or jail you to try and trade you for one of their spies sitting in one of our jails.
There are allot of battles being fought around the World by and against the USA that our citizens are completely unaware of. Example: we have troops in over 100 countries around the World.
Famous last words for many USA citizens when caught doing something wrong on foreign soil are "you can't do this to me I'm an American". Allot of these people are rotting in prisons that make ours look like 5 star hotels.
Do yourself a favor and stay in the USA unless you plan to play by the host country's rules 100%, and to keep your mouth shut about any of those rules you think are wrong.
Stayed in Shanghai for an internship until last October. ... but sometimes they do!
.... didn't see one in Shanghai. Found one in Beijing at a railway station --> take a laptop and get DSL (it's cheap).
Most annyoing thing were mail servers: Have a GMail account, which wasn't accessible most of the time. Same with Google-Groups: Sometimes they just don't work.
This does not happen the whole time though: Most of the time they don't work
Same with my private mail server in Germany.
Didn't have problems with news sites though.
As well: Finding an Internet-Cafe is really, really hard
"When in Rome, do like the Romans"
Not that it's legal, but a VPN is about your only foolproof way of doing so.
The other option is just live with it.
Or...
go with offline methods:
Have a buddy in the US send you a CD-R of pr0n every month. Or video about how to make a car bomb... or whatever else gets you off.
There not going through your mail.
Other than that, I'd say respect the law. If you don't like their laws, don't visit them.
"When in Rome, do like the Romans"
Witness our current shining success in Iraq.
There are very few things you can shove down a person's throat without making them angry. You might gratefully accept chocolate if I offered it to you, but I bet you'd struggle like mad if I tried to shove it down your throat.
The analogy goes farther than you expect.
Some good info from eformo. The comment deserves better than a score of one.
Btw, is anyone else annoyed by the flippant tone of the question?
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
That's absolutely the opposite of the truth. Specific articles are not blocked (with the exception of the local version of Google News, which just doesn't list them), but the Google Cache is banned. BBC News was still inaccessible as of the last time I was there (July), but most other major English language news sources are available.
To be honest, the Great Firewall is more of a nuisance than a threat. It's really only sites relating to FLG and Taiwan independence that they stop you from getting at - the only time you're likely to run into it is when you have to open a PDF file instead of using Google's 'view as HTML' option.
In otherwords, the entire nation of Canada would have to work for the Chinese government to make sure people aren't talking about overthrowing the nation...
I KNEW the Canadians were behind this!!
"And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling Canadians!"
, wanting to figure out how people bypass the firewall, this is exactly what I'd post on /.
I'd also be asking on Usenet and IRC channels.
it leaves the actually issue totally undressed
The issue screams: "Get out of here! I'm changing!"
I'm not really sure why you used an adverb...
It shouldn't be too hard to set up your own tunnelling server at a home computer, or have a friend do it. It would actually be a very interesting project to develope some sort of P2P proxy server system, one that was so massively distributed it couldn't be shut down without shutting down the web entirely. What does the rest of /. think?
"This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it? What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?"
Is it? Sounds like: hi, I work for Cisco (don't they do the Great Firewall?) or the Chinese government. "Will you show me how it gets circumvented so I can (a) arrest people and (b) block those holes."
According to this backgrounder, it seems like China lives up to the hype: http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific /bg1806.cfm
BTW, whatever happened to TriangleBoy? And how is it different from Tor or Peek a Booty or Anonymizer?
Dude, you're seriously out of touch with modern US politics. Since when did your 1940's US engaged in a Preemptive War Of Self Defense? I can only hope someday our administration is tried for war crimes.
Here's the link: http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific /bg1806.cfm
I would slightly disagree; I would characterize "agreement" as a class of things that can almost never be successfully forced on a person.
To see this, consider the thousands of examples Slashdot serves up for our enjoyment: flame wars.
How often does insulting and berating someone elicit their agreement on the topic of discussion? Pretty damn rarely. How often does polite and inoffensive language cause a person to say "good point" or give some other indication of agreement? Less often than it should, but still vastly more often than flaming.
Consider how much less likely you'd be to agree---and not just to placate him---with someone flaming you if he gunned down your child halfway through his flame. How positively do you think you'd receive his arguments then?
You can't use force to make someone to adopt your beliefs and values; the most you're likely to accomplish is the opposite. Sadly, those who realize this are rarely those who try it.
"How can I circumvent the laws of the country where I'll be living?" If you do, and if you're caught (and you're likely to be -- surveillance is widespread) you will pay a penalty. The Peoples' Republic does as it will, and impassioned pleas from your embassy might keep you from hard labor in the Chinese version of a gulag, but they probably wouldn't keep you from a period of re-education inside a Chinese jail cell before you're kicked out of the country as a persona non grata.
On the other hand, if you don't feel you are entitled to special privileges, and obey the same laws as the locals you'll probably get along swimmingly.
I won't make any guesses in regards to your nationality, but when you're traveling abroad, you do *not* take the laws of your country with you. For your information the laws of the country you are visiting supercede those of your country of citizenship. If you go on a spree, there's nothing to keep you from being tried twice for your crimes, once in the Peoples' Republic and again in your home country.
My advice, if you're already planning on breaking the law, don't go.
-Joe G.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
The Government of Tibet in Exile: http://www.tibet.com/
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Democracy is a basic right for all human beings? Human rights are a basic right?
Why? Because the UN said so? If we actually hold these rights sacred we should start actually enforcing them here, in our country, before we go out and try to tell others what to do, or force them to do things.
Human rights are violated in prisons and by our government every day, we are condemned by Amnesty international, just as China is condemned, we were founded by violating the natural rights of the native peoples. Democracy? We don't have democracy for the people in Wash DC... we don't have democracy in general, we are governed by tyrants, who care for the corporations, not the people.
Freedom? Tell a man in jail for planting a seed that he is free, tell that to those who wish to merely go from one place to another and are harassed or stopped at roadblocks and sometimes beaten by the police.
Equality? A rich man is more equal than any poor man, a white man is more equal than a black woman, the disparity between salaries for the genders is far from equal...
How long have we been this great and free nation? How long has it been since black and white men were gunned down, lynched, burned, for trying to be free?
We are a great and free nation, maybe more so than all others, but you seem to be deluded into thinking that we have found the one true answer, and that we can tell everyone else to fuck off and get with the program.
China has been around for thousands of years... I wonder if it is such an evil thing for a nation to be held together at the expense of a few rights that we in this nation have been propagandized into thinking are as important as the air we breathe.
Ultimately China lives, it survives, people will live, die, be governed, and be happy in China. Babies will be born and our race will live on. Certainly it would satisfy our moral indignation if they were more like us, but they are not like us... they live their own way for now, a tree who's roots are confined can still branch out into the sky like any other tree.
Today. Blame the boogieman media if you want. I can't imagine being beaten or imprisoned for visiting the Clinton Library here in America. The PARTY decides who you may or may not revere. Beating is an effective method of "reeducation".
I have to say that every time I've been back to China, I've encountered absolutely nothing in terms of enforcement of laws regarding security, information, freedom, religion, porn, blah blah blah. The real problem is the latency of the connection from China to the US. It is absolutely horrible.
I was recently in Shanghai visiting family and took a lot of photos and would upload them to Flickr through the Flickr Uploader software. Typically, I would have to try 3 or 4 times to get them uploaded because the connection would keep timing out. Same thing for accessing my bank account, my credit card, and so on. Incredibly slow because of the latency even though I was on a 1.5Mbps/256Kbps DSL line. I also had no trouble getting to major US newspapers like the NYTimes and CNN, and no trouble getting to porn sites in the US. Mind you, this is all on a connection provided by, and available only through China Telecom, a corporation that is state-owned and operated (They own and operate all phone communications in China I believe).
So for those people who are moving to US and are deathly afraid of loss of such freedoms, don't be, as others have said, as long as you're not trying to raise a ruckus, no one's gonna give a damn. Though being guarded about your opinions in front of people in high positions of power maybe a worthwhile tactic. I would guarantee you, in most places, people will eye your skin color and then think about how to make money off of you first before they worry about if you're gonna try to spread the evils of western-style thinking. What you should be most concerned about is the difference in manner and attitudes of Chinese people.
help a poor college grad get a free Mac Mini
Assuming you're on a Linux machine, do PPP over SSH. Plenty of people will say it's slow, but I've been using it very successfully for several months on high speed connections (> 2Mb/s). The only time I've had problems is when the connection goes down, but hey, that's the problem. :)
:)
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
/etc/ppp/options on either the server or the client.
;
/dev/pty$d\n";
/sbin/route delete $localip"; /usr/sbin/pppd passive\"";
/dev/tty$d defaultroute local proxyarp ktune";
I found this script somewhere on the 'net, and made adjustments. It's not perfect, but it works for me, so I have no grand plans for making more changes.
You'll need to have SSH keys set up between where you are, and a server on a 'friendly' network. This will route *ALL* of your traffic, over SSH, through the remote host. Nothing you do will be seen. It'll all be encrypted SSH traffic. I use a different port for SSH, so it's not even recognized as SSH traffic. For all they know, it could be music streaming or something.
--- begin rc.firewall (for the server)
#!/bin/tcsh
# not all of this is necessary. Play with it a bit.
#!/bin/tcsh
# A simple rc.firewall to start NAT.
echo 1 >
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -F INPUT
iptables -F OUTPUT
iptables -F FORWARD
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o ppp+ -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp+ -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
--- end rc.firewall
--- begin ppptunnel.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# there should be no
#
$localip="1.2.3.4"; # first ip on net
$localmask="255.255.255.0"; # 16 ips
$remoteip="1.2.3.5"; # other end of link
$ssh="/usr/bin/ssh";
$pppd="/usr/sbin/pppd"
$sshuser="my_vpn_user"; # The remote user, who has SSH keys set up.
$sshhost="1.2.3.4";
foreach $maj ("p".."s") { # adjust this to the ptys you have
foreach $min ("0".."9", "a".."f") {
print "Trying $maj$min\n";
&tryopen("$maj$min");
}
}
die "Couldn't alloc pty\n";
sub tryopen
{
local($d)=@_;
if (open(PTY, "+>/dev/pty$d")) {
print "Opened
$pid=fork;
defined($pid) || die "can't fork";
if ($pid) { #parent
print "Parent...\n";
open(STDIN, "<&PTY") || die "reopen stdin";
open(STDOUT, ">&PTY") || die "reopen stout";
close PTY;
print STDERR "running on tty$d; ssh=$$, pppd=$pid\n";
#system $ssh, "-vt", "-l$sshuser", "vpn", "sudo
#-f -x -t
$c = "$ssh -tx -l$sshuser $sshhost \"sudo
print STDERR "Executing $c\n";
exec "$c";
die "exec $ssh: $!";
} else { #child
print "Child...\n";
close PTY;
sleep 5;
print "Modifying routes\n";
$old_def_route = `route -n | grep ^0.0.0.0 | cut -c 17- | cut -f 1 -d ' '`;
chop ($old_def_route);
$c = "route add -host $sshhost gw $old_def_route";
print "Route: $c\n";
system("$c");
$c = "route del default gw $old_def_route";
print "Route: $c\n";
system("$c");
print "starting pppd\n";
$c = "$pppd
# exec $pppd, "/dev/tty$d", "defaultroute", "local", "debug", \
# "netmask", "$localmask", "$localip:$remoteip";
exec "$c";
die "exec $pppd: $!";
}
}
}
print "Switching default route back to it's original\n";
$c = "route add default gw $old_def_route netmask 0.0.0.0 metric 1";
system("$c");
--- end ppptunnel.pl
If the link comes up, you'll see a ppp0 device on your machine (not the server). Do some traceroutes to verify you
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I lived for a year in china in 2003, the only sites I ever had a problem accessing were bbc news, and googles cache. Also, anonymizing proxy sites such as megaproxy are all blocked. Using any other proxy won't work either. Still had no problems with any american news sites, any pr0n or anything else. China's quite a cool place to live if you're a foreigner, but the authorities don't like you talking about sex, religion or politics, which is kind of difficult really. Still, I'd highly recommend going, it's a completely different lifestyle. And unless you're going to Beijing or Shanghai, you'll probably have to get used to being stared at.
I call bullshit on your statement about dropping tha tomic bomb on Japan. Japan had already attempted to surrender to Moscow weeks before Hiroshima. The Americans hamstringed that attempt. We dropped the bomb on Japan specifically because we wanted to ensure that the Japanese surrendered to the United States, instead of the Soviets. Don't forget that just months earlier we were learning how Europe was being divided up. We didn't want another East Germany at the helm of one of the most titanic war machines ever built.
the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were one of the greatest massacres in the history of the world, and the United States has to live up to that fact. Although most historians agree that we did it to stop the Soviets, I doubt that popular opinion will ever coincide with this until all the WWII vets are dead and gone.
If you doubt me, read "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and The Architecture of an American Myth." by Gar Alperovitz. Read a scholarly article on the question here: http://www.progressive.org/zinn0800.htm (admittedly, Zinn is not the best authority to speak of, but his article can stand as the general opinion of US historians)
This book is a scholarly work that is corroborated by scores of historians, not some dimestore reaction book. Before you go spouting off trash about the murder of tens of thousands of civilians, you better know your facts.
It's hard to defend morally, and it's hard to stomache, but forcing people out from the yoke of a tyrant doesn't work - the best you can do is convince them that they want to get out from under that yoke.
Dont listen to what half the the anti-communist conservatives and media say about China. Yes its true human rights are trampled when in the states interest...BUT and that was a big but for a reason, the Chinese have a totally different attitude about policing their citizens than American police. As a criminal justice instructor I am very interested in these difference.
In china the situation is much different, their saying is "its only illegal if you get caught" Which has a deeper meaning than many understand...many times the police are not looking to arrest people for petty matters, they are more interested in social order...or as they refer to it "harmony". However this cultural view of harmony represents tome things we consider unpleasant. But the upshot is that unless the government is interested at that point in time in cracking down on something...it is usually just ignored...for example it is illegal to manufacture or distribute bootleg cds and dvds, but when my girlfriend and her family were in china right when you get off the bus...and the government doesnt care. Many people go to banned websites, download illegal things, hell half the banned games in china can be bought off a store shelf! The point is remember when those cybercafes got busted, that was a crackdown. Chinese policing usually let things go for a while then crackdown to show it is illegal...then let it go again...remember they have limited resources and are more interested in maintaining their fragile power structure than concerning themselves with if your watching porn...which you can totally get in china, easily..as well as hookers but both technically illegal.
That wouldnt happen in america,
In many ways american police are much more facist than chinese police, in that if you are breaking a rule they will arrest you. If it were illegal to sell pornography in america, no stores sell it..but it is illegal in china but still sold out in the open in many places..DWI check points are a perfect example...people who are over an arbirtrary legal limit but still in control of their vehicles get the same punishment as those who are swerving all over the road because they cant handle their liquor. This over emphasis on enforcing every rule is due a great deal to the colletion of fines, which police departments in America use to fund themselves...ever notice why they go after drug dealer so aggressivley but if you aparment gets burglarized they dont even dust for prints?
it is NOT "insightful" to say that "news sites are forbidden" in China.
its just plain false.
and stupid.
Take nothing: Assume nothing, go naked, go native - make sure you learn to speak and write Chinese too
well my advice is short and sweet. A little expensive though. Get your own dedicated server here in the good old USA. Install PPP tunneling on it. This is easy. Make sure it goes through an SSH tunnel. Set that up as a NAT server. Then mess with your routing tables a little. Once you do that you can connect to the internet through you American gateway. Cool, eh? The alternate route. Uses less bandwidth but you can only use it with Apps that have proxy compatibility. Get your good ol' 100% Americano servero running linux up. It has to have SSHD and Squid. Make a tunnel from localhost to squid on the remote server. Just use localhost as the proxy. AES-768 is the encryption i reccomend. The last route is get a computer here. VNC into it over an SSH tunnel. TightVNC has this nice-nifty feature built it. Wanna hear from you soon. Get that wiki up and running now!
You will be fine in China and will be treated much better than any local would. The biggest form of censorship on the net is directed at groups the Gov't views as "anti China".
They are still persecuting, torturing and killing innocent people. The most severely being Falun Gong practitioners who have been persecuted since 1999 for following the principles of Truth, Compassion and Tolerance.
Sometimes pictures speak louder than words. Below are links to pictures of Falun Dafa practitioners that have been beaten, raped, shocked with electrical batons, etc.
Warning: Most of the pictures are graphic
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/hosp30jul01_4_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/2002-7-23-11.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/more/images/wang_bin_torture_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/11810_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/chao_2_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/torture3_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/m2_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/lixin_foot290401_3_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/lixin_foot290401_3_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/lixin_foot290401_2_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/helene26nov01_2_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/2003-1-2-songxu.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/evil_scene/images/2002-7-11-violent-polic e-2.jpg
For more information on Falun Dafa I recommend: www.falundafa.org.
For more information on the persecution, I recommend: www.faluninfo.net.
For more information about the lawsuits filed, by Falun Dafa practitioners around the world, against the perpetrators of this persecution, I recommend:
http://www.bjtj.org/
http://www.grand trial.org/
Th
I was in China this summer; my i-net connections couldn't resolve www.muohio.edu to 134.53.7.10 but if you typed in 134.53.7.10 it would bring up the page. So I happened to remember our pair of DNS servers were 134.53.253.1 and .5 and just edited my tcp/ip settings - it works to get to every site, including www.ChinaIsABunchOfPinkoCommiesAndLookHowThatFucke dRussiaDemocracy IsSoMuchBetterChinaDie.com.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
Lol... then where would they find the one to mod up?
You are right to question the bias of any source. In this case, CS Monitor is generally accepted to be the best source for unbiased news in this country. Whatever values and agendas the Church itself may have don't seem to bleed over into their newspaper.
Lack of creativity is no excuse for not having a
The government of the Native Nations... in exile in their own land: http://www.aimovement.org/
That list is woefully misleading. Yeah, the censorship in China is amazing and its wrong, but the sheer length of that list (25,064 URLs when I checked) tells you something about Chinese censorship. But the list is padded with many duplications.
:) Playboy variations are duplicated over 700 times. Amnesty International, over 200 times. CNN almost 500. The list goes on and on, literally :)
I quickly came up with 7,375 unique URLs, not counting things like variations in case.
Google along is duplicated over 5,000 times
RP
Chemical weapons include such nasties as Mustard Gas, VX, and other blood and nerve agents.
Also, I doubt very seriously that Iraq approached us, and said "Hey, we'd like to make some biological weapons so we can really stick it to the Iranians, with whom we are at war. Waddya say?"
The CDC wouldn't have been involved if the request wasn't made under the guise of medical research. If we hadn't provided it, they could have gotten it from any number of other sources.
I'm not saying we never sold them chemical weapons, or the makings thereof... Just that these aren't them.
Not everything is as sinister as you think it is.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Then what would the response be to the routine barbarity apparent in the horrific sancations on Cuba? What about the "economic pressure" on Iraq that the UNICEF study concluded took 500,000 lives? The disgrace in our support of attacks on civilian targets Nicaruagua? What about the inhumanity inherent in installing Sadaam Hussien as a ruler? The utter GENOCIDE of the indiginous people of the United States?
Saying "But Virginia, we are better than them!" is real, real easy when you only pick a few of the lightest examples we have to offer and compare them to the worst that somewhere else has to offer.
And look at some of the parent's own answers; It's a ready fact that the massive economic sanctions that the U.S. helped inpose in the wake of WW1 were more than a little bit responsibile for creating the conditions that allowed hitler to take power. That compassionate gift to the Jews dispossed an entire region of innocent people, and condemned them to the hell of being a stateless people, without rights, jobs, or prospects for the future. Good for the U.S! As for the comments about the death penalty... is your arguement really that our subjective criteria (That are often wrong - the Death Row DNA project has proved that dozens of times.) are better than China's? Perhaps in quantity, but it's still utter barbarism.
American blindness is almost...sad...to watch in action.
Fight for something better: www.socialistalternative.org
Awesome, simply awesome post!
Live web cams
*DISCLAIMER* I am not a historian, but a few things bother me about this post since I tend to study this time frame.
We could have dominated the world, and who would have opposed us?
Quite a few people. I agree the America was most generous and possibly the most moral country that once ever existed (until maybe the 21st century), but...
The peasantry of China?
They opposed 2 million Japanese troops since 1927 with nothing but militias. The Chinese handed us our rears in Korean War
The decimated demoralized Soviets?
Stalin dictated the post war terms directly through Molotov to the Allies. The Allies agreed to every term! The Soviets had almost 10,000,000 troops in the field with more factories and tanks than us to boot and millions of readily available free slave labor (German Pow's, Ukranian Freedom Fighters, and Russian dissidents in gulags... not to mention the Soviet People themselves). The Red Army was inefficient, but it was far from being defeated. They would scoff at the poor quality of US tanks that the Americans sent them as aid and nick named them coffins compared to super IS-2 tanks that could knock out Tiger tanks with ease much less a thinly armored Sherman tank. He mostly lacked a Navy and Atomic bombs. Had he not died in 53, it was speculated he was gearing up for a war with the US.
Once the Soviets had the bomb in 1947, America did not have that option to dominate the world even if they wanted to. That's only two years. Mind you that General MacArthur bemoaned on the state of the military by the Korean War.
Great as America was, it's military might was not really as great then as it was and is since the 1970's as it was tested in the Vietnam war. Of course the prevailing thought at the time was that there was no need for a standing army since the US could defend itself with the Bomb.
Not to say America has great freedoms, but neither was it a lone super power until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.
However China is slowly catching up...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
We established a home land in the middle east for the Jews out of compassion and remorse for a crime we did not commit.
Actually, what we did is basically break down the door to the home of some muslims and say "here you go Stein, this is your new home".
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
cs monitor is highly regarded as one of the best unbiased newspapers in the nation. pretty weird to be published by a religious movement that is known to be more than just a little nutty, but apparently they are well able to separate religion and politics from their journalism.
it's not just him who says it's non partisan. it's widely accepted by journalistic experts.
These are the Americans who voted for Bush, who can't see the problems with the Patriot Act or the war on Iraq,
Bush or Kerry or Clinton or Gore or whoever...it's not the nature of a candidate or party to erode freedoms. It's the nature of government to erode freedoms. It's been this way since the dawn of history.
Whoever we elect may be great for a year or so...but give 'em time. This really isn't a partisan or politicial issue.
IMHO, once we got addicted to the 'free' cash of entitlements, we pretty much ensured that people would be too distracted to care about freedom. Americans these days don't think about free-DOM as much as 'free' prescription medicine, 'free' retirement, 'free' education....etc. Don't believe me? Compare the upcoming brouhaha over social security to the debate over patriot act renewal. See which one people care about more.
You actually can have freedom shoved down your throat, it just takes a whole hell of a lot more force then the US is willing to use these days. Case in point, look at Germany and Japan. These are both nations that were occupied by the US and now are thriving democracies.
For better or for worse, no one can stomach the formula that seemed to work so well on those nations. The real problem is that the first step in making both of those nations was to completely destroy them and blatently target the civilian populace. IE, wage total war on them and win. Whatever Iraq is, it is not an example of total war.
So, to keep going with the analogy, you might not like it if I shove chocolate down your throat, but you probably won't complain if I first beat the living piss out of you. After the beating you might decide that didn't like the beating, but the chocolate sure was yummie.
There is only one place in China that you enjoy the freedoms that your looking for -- Hong Kong.
Macau?
Taiwan?
The person that mod'd this informative obviously didn't bother to read the links [classic /.]
His analogy of "had the people kneel and put a bullet" link to a serial killer that killed 8 women in 1980's is absurd. This guy has had more appeals than a banana farm! It's not like we found him and executed him on the side of the road with the due process of law.
Live web cams
If your the mosad and a killer for the israeli secret police, then you can do what you like, brake the law, murder people and flee the country on fake passports and live like 007 but on the bad side.
Yes its true , the mosad has in the past killed innocents in Europe and often get away with it, though sometimes through thoughtlessness get caught but do little time.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You can in fact joke about killing the President
Actually, you can't joke about anything.
For example:
two Brazilian surfers were arrested in Miami's International Airport under terrorist charges. Mizael Cabral, born in Paraíba, and Daniel Correia, from Rio de Janeiro, spent a good amount of time in Uncle Sam's land working hard to save money so that they could start a surf board factory in João Pessoa. They bought as suction pump here that would make their job a lot easier, but something really weird happened in the airport while they were going back to Brazil. According to the American authorities, they were joking about having that suction pump (pump and bomb are the same word in brazilian portuguese). The man from Paraíba supposedly asked the inspector in the airport: "Haven' you found the bomb in the bag yet?" And the one from Rio would've said: "If you open up my bag, it will explode". In cuffs, the two men were taken to Miami's Jail under the charges of "false information about explosives, with malicious intentions, irresponsibility and disregard for the human lives safety". They can be sentenced up to five years in prison and they will have to pay US$ 250 thousand dollars each. They have been in jail for almost a month and the press has no access to them.
They are now back in Brazil, after plead guilty of terrorism! Deported.
There is no presumption of innocence. There is no right to appeal.
You got that right!
I shot the sheriff
He's a Narc. Well, a Chinese Narc. You get the idea.
... a meeting is being held about a new threat to the Chinese government. Not much is known about this person, but we do know his name.. Coward, Anonymous Coward.
Live web cams
To drive drunk in China, just do the same as you would in the States. Turn off your headlights so that the cops won't see you.
Vandalizing and defacing cars.
By and large they don't see that having a controlling government is a problem, because it makes the right decisions. That's the thought process. She had never seen that image of the student in front of the tank in Tiananmen square. Never. And she was happy they didn't show it in China, because it could reduce the stability of the country.
When you can understand and respect that reasoning without trying to change it, then you are ready to go into that culture.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
All of these are basic rights for all human beings.
That has been wishful thinking of the western countries since 1945. While many countries have made impressive advancements in the development of west-compatible institutions and economies, this doesn't necessarily mean they adopted our cultural and moral values too.
Formal acceptance of the UN's human rights charter is necessary to participate in the "civilized world", but there's no need to actually implement and enforce them.
Heck, even the U.S. violate human rights on a daily basis.
Your presence there will help prop up the existing repressive regime.
Instead, stay here and work to ensure that our own government doesn't become that repressive, or worse. They're well on their way and it's going to take a lot of effort to stop them. Making a buck or having an interesting cultural experience in China just isn't as important.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Sourceforge is on the list? But... but... Bill Gates told me that open source is communism. How can China be against communism?
> the nations of the world combined could not match our power.
Got a cite for that?
I'm not necessarily disputing anything you're claiming; however, neither is it at all clear that what you've said is actually true. In particular...
> There were no limits to the power we could project.
I think you're underestimating the remaining power of the other industrialized nations at the end of WWII. Even by D-Day, Britain had enough military might remaining to take responsibility for as much of the assault as the USA.
If you look at this link, for example, you'll see that while the USA was well-supplied with equipment, it was severely undermanned for dreams of world conquest. At the end of the war, there were about 1100 divisions available to the countries most involved, of which less than 10% were American. Moreover, this link suggests that the USA didn't enjoy such a dominant position in equipment after all; for example, the USSR was producing more tanks than the US by the end of the war.
Given the numbers and logistics involved, your assertion of the manifest ability of the USA to "roll over" the rest of the world seems...optimistic.
The peasantry of China?
They opposed 2 million Japanese troops since 1927 with nothing but militias.
Seems like you forgot about the Rape of Nanjing
Also, keep in mind that "opposed" simply means they fought them. Those living in Tibet "opposed" the Chinese military, for about 20 minutes...
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
This project could use some of the more excellent networking /. hackers.
n am e=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1
1 .php3
(I'm definitely out of my league here)
Wanna be really elite? Code for a cause that might just be your own quite soon.
http://www.peek-a-booty.org/pbhtml/modules.php?
Ref:
http://www.cultdeadcow.com/archives/00087
~hylas
I think it's important to note that China's government uses the censoring and the punishment of circumventing that censoring for different goals.
By censoring they try to keep the masses uninformed. Currently a bunch of websites is blocked and search engines are limited in their results. These messures can be avoided, but most users dont know how.
Cracks in the Great Firewall
Probing Chinese search engine filtering
In the punishing of circumventing these messures however, the government has simply found another excuse to put people who they don't like in jail. The people actualy being prosecuted for and convicted of these "crimes" are either members of the Falun Gong or the China Democracy Party.
List of People Detained for Internet-related Offences in China
With a bit of effort, you could probably enjoy everything the internet has to offer, logging in from China. And probably nothing will ever happen as a result. But when the authorities decide they don't like you they are going to hold it against you. Current sentences range upto 12 years or "unknown", while even capital punishment is a possibility.
would be carrying a rifle and fighting as part of an army to liberate the country from the bunch of gangsters currently running it.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
ABC, is that like.. OPP?!
(I'm a cracker)
I call bullshit on your statement about dropping tha tomic bomb on Japan
Pot. Kettle. Black. Things are far more complicated than you realize. You are as simplistic and misinformed as those you criticize. You only differ from them in terms of politics.
Japan had already attempted to surrender to Moscow weeks before Hiroshima
You seriously misrepresent things. Imperial Japan made an unofficial attempt to make peace with Russia. That was not a surrender to the Allies, it was an attempt to split the Allies, they were willing to continue fighting the US(1) but did not want the Russians to join in. Large segments of the government were not aware of the "feelers" to Russia, the military was not aware. The military would have instantly shot as a traitor anyone involved had they known. Hell, parts of the military staged a coup to prevent the Emporer's surrender orders from being broadcast. They wanted to separate the emporer from the "traitors and cowards" who were "deceiving" him. And that was after two atomic bombs(2).
the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were one of the greatest massacres in the history of the world
Actually conventional bombings from World War II inflicted greater casualties than the atomic bombings. Read up on Dresden for example. While you are at it read up on Nanking.
(1) Imperial Japan was willing to continue fighting the US in part because they were preparing both nuclear and biological attacks on the US. The had conducted extensive biological warfare research on Chinese prisoners, conducted field trial on Chinese villages, and were preparing to deliver biological agents to the US homeland via balloons and submarine launched aircraft. Perparations were also underway to deliver radiological material to the US homeland.
(2) I've seen Imperial Japanese Army training films showing soldiers training while covered in white sheets. The sheets were an attempt to reduce casualties from the flash of an atomic bomb.
No matter what the topic, it can always be turned into an Iraq bitchfest.
1s /\cc355 to 1nt3rn3t. M05t 0f t1m3 w3 c4n 5urf 4nd m4ny m4ny p3op13 th1|\/k w3 411 s3nD sp4m, but it 15 s1mply ju5t b1g li3.
cl1ck bel0w to f1nd out h0w b1g B1g it Is.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I'm writing this way too late to get modded high enough for anyone to see but maybe someone will see it and it'll help. The irony is that I'm so late in posting as I'm in China and just woke up this morning.
I was here briefly last summer and am now doing a semester abroad. China really is not that a bad of a place to be. It seems most of the replies are very negative or sarcastic about the security situation in China. In all seriousness, living here as a foreigner is not that bad. Sure you have to deal with weird, to the US, government regulations, but I don't feel as though I'm under an iron fist or anything. Just respect the culture and their customs/laws and you will have a great time.
Oh and if you take the time to learn even a bit of the language it can help immensely. I know I've run into many people who were much more cordial when I told them (in Chinese) that I was a student here learning the language.
Everyone has different experiences, especially if you are ABC or even look remotely Chinese. But instead of listening to a bunch of other people talk about it, just take a 2 week trip to China and see for yourself. I think more Americans need to get out and see the realities of the world (although my cynicism says that when the they do the average Americans will do something stupid, get into trouble, and then blame it not on themselves but on the country they are in)
They'll end up shooting you and sending the bill for the bullets to your parents. Don't go, don't fuck with draconian extremist nut case governments.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
this is true, but alas, most people in China don't have phoens. And if they only want to listen to the foreigners, it's much easier.
Wow! Nice boobies!!!
People of the west enjoy their current lot in life because at some point in their histories, they threw off the yoke of tyranny. Nobody gave it to them. They had to take it.
The people of oppressed cultures have to take some responsibility in securing their own futures.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Oops, forgot one comment ...
I doubt that popular opinion will ever coincide with this until all the WWII vets are dead and gone.
Again, things are not as simple as you believe. As time passes we learn that Imperial Japan's crimes are greater than originally believed. For example the biological research conducted on Chinese civilians. That only became common knowledge, well in the US, relatively recently. It was classified for many years because the US government made a deal with the Imperial Japanese war criminals who conducted the research. We traded their freedom for their knowledge. Their notes and other materials advanced our bio warfare program a decade or more. The Imperial Japanese researchers who used Chinese civilians as lab rats, actually I think they referred to them in reports as "logs", were free to pursue their normal lives after the war and become leaders in Japanese politics, medicine, and business.
The "Rights of Man" are a culturally defined idea.
Bullshit. Human rights are absolute and universal.
Any culture that doesn't respect them is evil and inferior, and the sooner said culture is changed or replaced, the better.
Gah...I hate moral relativists.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
I've lived there and seen it for myself.
/. :-) )
I lived for 4 months in Baoji and then for 2.5 years in Shanghai. My girlfriend lived for 2 years in Baoji working in University and Middle Schools and for 6 months in Beijing. So, I've seen and experienced probably more than you.
Living in China made me realize how much freedom we have in the west. Yes, many people speak quite openly about what they dislike. As do most people still believe Mao was the greatest person on earth (put some "70% good, 30% bad" in it to water it a bit down). But you realize how much freedom is missing when people criticize the government and keep looking over their shoulders if no strangers are listening. Can you imagine bashing Bush in Central Park in New York or bashing Blair in London and worrying that someone might hear it and get you into trouble? Privately and with foreigners they don't risk too much by being honest.
The worst thing about China in my experience is the utterly useless and terrible media (because of the extreme censorship) and the non-existing legal system. So, theoretically many people have rights. But when a street with its buildings gets completely destroyed outside the university (as happened in Baoji) to make room for a wider road, then theoretically all the shop owners and restaurant owners get compensated for losing their main source of income. But they don't and they don't even think about going to court because it's useless.
It's true about the police, but only because the police actually has little rights. The communist party is the ruler and they take care of things. But aside from that Chinese are in most cases very decent people (much more than in the west) because of peer pressure to not lose face for the family and other reasons.
Go there for a longer period of time and you'll see what the real deal is. Most people only go for some weeks or months and haven't even scratched the surface. The Chinese people are very good at making you believe things are great and only later you find out that things actually aren't great.
(Not often that I see the precious chicken (Baoji) mentioned on
WOW! This has to be the best and truest post I have EVER read on slashdot! Great job!
Yeah dude, read "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and The Architecture of an American Myth", (toke, toke, gurgle, gurgle) then watch Fahrenheit 911! (toke, toke, gurgle, gurgle) Then you'll see all the facts and the real deal and all! (toke, toke, gurgle, gurgle) Awe man, can't you see it? They're doing it man... It's all there, you can read it and see it... (toke, toke, gurgle, gurgle)
Solo Han writes: ...pr0n...
Suitable nickname you have...
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Spent a year and a half in China from '96-98. Loved it been back many times. Accessed pretty much anything I wanted through public web access. Even played online games though they lagged a bit. Now i understand they are rolling out broadband in Nanjing where I stayed. Never really had any bad experiences with government or police besides standing in line for visa issues. (the wait was shorter than it would have been here in the states at a similar govt agency though). Loved the food but avoided the meat. Good cheap beer. I loved the people so much I brought one home. Unless you are ABC you WILL be stared at from time to time. I avoided politics and would suggest same. Have a great time.
It's not 'American, born-Chinese', IT IS American-Born Chinese.
This term refers to someone who's family line comes from the region of the planet referred to as China, but is unfamiliar with the ways and customs of the Chinese culture and government.
This is a problem because they will not afford you the same courtesy they would an obviously "white" American due to his explainable ignorance of their ways and customs. An ABC gets no slack in China. They are expected to be aware of the way things are done, and if anything are treated worse due to their ignorance of what could be thought of as "their own culture".
Obviously this is a close minded viewpoint, but it does happen to ABC who visit China.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
Byrd? No wait. He's a modern day Dem.
But from a practical standpoint, without the occasional war to keep civillization ordered, the world would balkanize and we'd live in what would amount to a state of eternal war with all 20 of the countries within 5 miles of us. Right of war and nationalism keep things from being as bad as they could be, and thus they have my general support.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
"You mean like that Russian cracker who hacked the Adobe e-book format and even had the gaul to come to a conference here and talk about it. And wow did the slashdot community whine."
The problem the (predominantly American) Slashdot community had was that the Russian cracker guy had not actually broken a law, or done anything immoral.
No, we dropped two nukes for the explict purpose of defeating Japan. Even after the first they did not surrender. Hence the second.
Just to be clear, Japan didn't know what hit them and the US didn't exactly give enough time to for Japan to reassess the situation. Given the level of devastation, there was nobody left in Hiroshima to report to "higher command" about the destruction. Japan didn't have all the information to call a cease-fire let alone surrender, so the U.S. decided to drop another just 3 days later. At the time, with remote-communication fascilities most likely down, it would have taken at least that many days to get down and back from HQ (Tokyo) to give a damage assessment. Just look at the tsunami situation. It took days before people began to realize the level of carnage. And this is 50 years later!
Here's for hoping it'll never happen again. Which unfortunately even this many years later, is not a guarantee
-Q
To paraphrase an old joke about the USSR:
In China they have freedom of speech.
They have freedom of assembly.
They have freedom to criticize their government.
In America, we have freedom *after* speech, etc.
"This is China."
-- "The Diamond Age", Neal Stephenson
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
When we were as old as Communist China we were enslaving Africans and slaughtering Native Americans to the point of extinction.
That the concept of "rights" is a figment of a couple nutters in western history. I mean, had it been worded "a ruler should not overly restrict the actions of his followers, except when necessary", it would have gone over a little better in China. And been called "Taoism". As it is, it's worded as "Freedom and democracy are basic human rights" implying that the universe itself somehow favors these things, which is something... well, completely factually wrong. In fact, the entirety of Locke's "because I said so" philosophy is kind of ideally geared to simply annoy the hell out of whoever doesn't already share the guy's viewpoint... I'm not particularly suprised that the Chinese haven't jumped on the "natural rights of man" bandwagon.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Internet sucks, particularly outside of Beijing and Shanghai.
My best internet experience was in Suzhou, not Shanghai. In Shanghai I couldn't find a place to hook up my own laptop for a reasonable price. The best way to maintain internet freedom is to have a VPN or ssh accounts back here in the states. Tunnel through those.
Expect to be cold most of the time.
That's funny, it was warm and muggy when I was there.
The Chinese are very proud of Chinese herbal medicine.
This is true. Don't worry about taking your own medicine, however. The doctor we visited definitely knew what he was doing and laughed at the herbals that we had been given.
The key point that revisioners always "forget" to talk about is that the US did not drop a bomb on Japan. We droppoed TWO bombs.Japan not only did not want to "surrender" after we bombmed them, they absolutely REFUSED to surrender after we went and dropped a single nuclear bomb. It took a 2nd to convince the Emperor to over-throw the military junta ruling Japan and surrender.
We dropped the Two Bombs on Japan for ONE purpose: To end the war with the least number of american deaths. Yes, it also put the USSR on notice, that was a side benefit that could have been accomplished with a single bomb - the 2nd bomb pretty much disproves this foolish theory, to anyone who cares more about logic than about proving their personal pet theory.
Your "scholarly work" is a bunch of crap, and is NOT beleived to be true by any respected Historian.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In Shanghai at the moment, funnily enough my first couple of tries to access this discussion topic came up as HTTP500 errors ..spooky =O
now China has a legit reason to ban it.
Perhaps we should give Texas back to Mexico, since we killed all the mexicans living there and "stole" it. Or perhaps you should realize that war has nothing to do with right and wrong.
Changa hates change.
Also, keep in mind that "opposed" simply means they fought them.
Nanjing was an attrocity against an occupied city of civilians and not a major battle against Nationalist or Communist Chinese forces. Otherwise it wouldn't have been called "the rape".
Perhaps you should read up on the Sino-Japanese War. Sure Japan occupied a great deal of China... Well so did Germany occupy a great deal of Russia, but neither China nor Russia were totally defeated (Tibet is a poor example because they were defeated unconditioanlly). In most occupied territories of China the Japanese, had a hard time with resistance as well.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
put in wrong subject line gosh this is a bad day
You need to install it on a non-Chinese server. After that, you'll be able to access it so long as it's in a directory under public_html (you should password protect this directory so only you can use it). I paid $7.95 a month to a hosting company in New Jersey to use it (as part of a shared hosting package)... worked perfectly except for https sites, which it wisely doesn't allow because the link from the server running cgi-proxy to you isn't secured. I still use it today, actually, to read my personal email while I'm at work... you can access any port you want, so it's great for web email programs like Neomail, Horde, etc. that are blocked by firewalls.
I think you're talking about Beijing. In southern China it's winter, but for instance in Hong Kong today it's 19C. Never gets below 10C, and I expect I'll be back at the beach within a month. Beijing has a really shitty climate, hot and dusty in summer, freezing in winter. In HK it's pleasant most of the time except for the very humid monsoon (July-September), and of course typhoons. Just remerber that China is as big and varied as the US as it goes for climate, food, amd most other things. What applies in New York may not in Miami.
It depends: are you moving/traveling to former British China, or interior mainland China? Are you going to an economically strong, ethnically diverse region, or a poor farming area? If you go to either Hong Kong, or Shanghai, you will be fine. Buy a graphics card. Try to bring it back. Have fun. Heck, Hong Kong still sounds more English than Chinese in many parts.
The police are there to protect you, but also to protect the people. They don't want change. They are a very large country, and so they are naturally unstable. All we read about is them trying to maintain a hold on their country, and at the moment, despite all their problems, everyone gets fed. So as long as you don't threaten their stability, you will be fine. Shooting an Americain (especially if you are white or black), is a big no no. They do not want to trigger a new version of the sinking of the Lusitania. So mainly, worry not. If you are a woman, learn the word "pregnant". They will not arrest (on most occasions), and mainly treat civily a pregnant woman, despite law violation.
Thats about all I can say, from asking family and friends about their trips and for advice. I myself am planning a trip, even though my family history in China ended kinda violently... But hey, one cannot live in the past, right?
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
Just some food for though:
As this guy said in another post, it was completely unrealistic to assume that, after having all Hiroshima's telecommunications infrastructure destroyed by the bomb, the Japanese leaders would have a clear picture of what had happened in only three days. (Aug 9 to Aug 11, Nagasaki was bombed in the 12th). Again as Quanza said, fifty years later we had the Southeast Asia tsunami and three days later we still didn't have anything close to a clear picture of the magnitude of the catastrophe.
Another thing: The two atomic bombs used were completely different. (From Wikipedia):
Hiroshima's "Little Boy": 12-15 kt - gun type Uranium-235 fission bomb
Nagasaki's "Fat Man": 20-22 kt - implosion type Plutonium-239 fission bomb
One of the models (not sure which) was proven to work in the trials in New Mexico. Why did the US risk a mission using a different type of bomb? What were they trying to prove? From the scientific point of view, testing both kinds of bombs in urban areas is fascinating (in a creepy kind of way).
Does this mean that Nagasaki's bombing had a different goal other than getting Japan to surrender fast? No, it doesn't. Does it mean that maybe you should put the flag down for a second an begin to realize that what you have been told about your country for all your life may not be completely true, and that maybe it's also revisionist history? Definitely.
In practice the past four years, the Bush White House has assumed a much larger control of how his party governs itself in the House and Senate than previous presidents. Republicans are expected to support the President no matter what and independence is punished. Bush has had unprecedented say in, for example, who chairs the various committees. Note how quickly the wrath of the right came down upon Judiciary chair-to-be Arlen Specter when he said Bush shouldn't expect to get a rubber-stamp on his nominees.
Compare to this to Clinton's exercise in cat herding his first two years in office with a Democratic controlled House and Senate.
Speaking as a European I don't see why any American would find this a strange concept given the outcome of your last election.
Thank you. This is one of the best, most well thought out and delivered posts on the history of slashdot. I salute you.
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
At the risk of feeding the braying jackass... what law was broken by the administration?
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
There are some serious misunderstandings about China being voiced here -- even by people who have gone there. I can understand this. I spent seven years in China and saw many misunderstandings both by people who had just gotten there and by people who had lived there but never bothered to really immerse themselves in it.
China is a wonderful place. The people are nice. The culture is respect-worthy. The landscape is beautiful. The history is intoxicating.
Is there corruption, especially in the really rural areas? Yes. But if you understand the culture and the guanxi (relationships) system then you will have few problems. They ask for 15 RMB for something that is supposed to be free? Give it. Who cares? It's two bucks. Though usually, if you speak some chinese, you can demonstrate that you are a friend of the country and of its people and get around with no hassles.
As for the government's rejection of human rights -- things are relative. I don't approve of everything that the Chinese government does, but I also appreciate that there is an amount of ethnorelativism that needs to be engaged consciously. For instance, the UN definition of human rights includes a provision that allows everyone to live at a certain basic level -- something we know as welfare. But Americans wouldn't submit to that being a human right. Much of the world's declaration of human rights is not considered valid in the developing world because people see them as western-defined examples of human _needs_ -- something everyone accepts. (Read Azar. Human needs fit into three groups -- security (food, protection, water, etc), acceptance (for whatever group you identify with) and access to/participation in the institutions that allocate resources (markets or governments.)
As for Internet access -- it is easy to come by. It isn't the fastest stuff in the world (esp. outside of the big cities) but the blocks are nominal. You can get around them as well. Some methods are mentioned in this thread.
You shouldn't worry about having your freedoms repressed. Just be sensitive. Just like you wouldn't walk around Saudi Arabia (as a woman) wearing a bikini top screaming "you should be allowed to do this too!" you don't walk around China doing things that aren't culturally acceptable. It is disrespectful. And in China respect means a lot.
So I hope you do it. The best seven years of my life (so far) were those spent in China. It was a mind-opening experience. If you have any questions you can email me. (Just make sure that you write a good subject line so I don't click "junk.") Take care! Oh, and don't listen to anyone who says China sucks or is oppressive. The experience of individuals can be awful anywhere. But statistically speaking the vast majority of Chinese and of foreigners live happily.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
We could have dominated the world, and who would have opposed us? The peasantry of China? The ruins that once were great nations in Europe? The decimated demoralized Soviets?
Remember the 2 wars that US fought in Asia after WW2? What was the outcome? Did US dominate Vietnam and Korea?
I read a great book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," by Richard Rhodes. My understanding is that the uranium bomb was theoretically proven by the test they called 'tickling the dragon's tail,' and they didn't feel the need to test it as they were much more certain it would work. Uranium had been the 'quarterback' for quite a while in the weapons program, so there was a lot of data on it. Plutonium and its use in a bomb was a different story, so it was tested here first, then deployed. If I remember correctly, the "Little Boy" was the only one of its type built; it seems it was obsolete before it even got used. There were two other 'Fat Man' types waiting in the wings, but luckily, the Japanese sensibly surrendered "unconditionally."
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
Economic pressure taking 500k lives -that's a damn shame. A damn shame that the pressure wasn't enough to cause the world to say, "ENOUGH, already, Saddam! Out of there! If you aren't going to cooperate, then you're GONE!" Of course, when we did just that, you goofballs just throw a hissy fit. I wish Clinton had had enough sack to do it, then it would have been a righteous - nay, religious - duty.
Socialist blindness is almost...hilarious...to watch in action.The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
in regards to the patriot act:
-metric
Heh, you're pretty funny, I like you.
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
Point taken, but "China's products" are the world's products.
---- I have nothing more to add.
Don't forget Spain, France, Portugal, Aztec, Navajo . . . (the list goes on)
There were a lot of nations killing nations in the Americas, even before Europeans joined.
Of course, that doesn't excuse anyone, individual or nation.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
I've been living in Shenzhen for more than 4 years and have found it is a great place to live and work, as a foreigner. The internet is slow, unreliable and censored, but you get used to it and eventually learn how to setup an illegal satellite dish to get your news fix. Living in China is not for everyone though. It is terribly overcrowded, polluted, and generally disgusting in many ways. Few foreigners can tollerate the extreme differences in the environment, so there are not that many of us here. It's a great place to do business though.
"Freedom is not an incompatable world view."
Freedom? Freedom from? Freedom to? None of these concepts are core to Chinese philosophy. You are not born free according to traditional Eastern philosophy; you are born into a complex web of social interaction and obligations.
"Democracy is not an incompatable world view."
Yeah it is.
Democracy is completely alien to the Chinese worldview; it only came through Canton/HK after the Western powers invaded in the 18th/19th centuries. Chinese philosophy, especially Confucius and Mencius, advocated human existence as simply a set of key relationships. There's no such thing as a formal developement of individualism in China; traditional Chinese philosophy views the basic unit of society as the family, not the person. Your obligations to society define your role; try reading up on it sometime. Collective good >> individual; has been so for the past 3000 years in China. Communism is not at all incompatible with Chinese tradition.
"Human rights are not an incompatable world view."
The concept of inalienable human rights is totally foreign to China. You are not born with rights in traditional Chinese society; you are born with obligations you parents, your family, and your (historically) Emporer.
"Equality under the law is not an incompatable world view."
This one is interesting. Chinese history is full of specific examples of law and philosophy that espouse DIFFERENT punishments for DIFFERENT classes of people; this has been the case since the existence of the Tang Code - the predominant legal system in ALL of ASIA. Japan's law system up until the Meiji era was based on this system. This system specfiically CODIFIED different punishments depending on if you were related to the Emperor, whether you were an official, or had money and could pay to have your punishments reduced.
This was not arbitrary and evil; it was based on specific philosophy from Confucious. the Confucian school of thought held that Junzi, or those educated elite, should not be held to the same laws as the peasants; moral law should guide them and terrestrial law should be limited to application to peasants.
Your view is purely that from a Western society; freedom, by it's very nature, cannot be forced down a society's throat - witness Iraq. You must have a tradition of open thought and philosophy to set the stage for democracy to even start. It's foolish to think you can export your 3 branches of government to China along with the Bill of Rights (or what's left of it after Patriot Act I) and expect everyone in the world to be jolly. China WILL become a democratic society, but expecting overnight change from a country with 4000+ years of contrary philosophy and traditions is naiive.
"So the Chinese Army did not send in tanks to stop students protesting?"
Very true and tragic; the students at Tian An Men truly were heroes. Nothing I can say about that. Hopefully one day those who ordered the massacre will be put on trial.
"So those executions I saw where they had the people kneel and put a bullet in their brain never happened?"
Injecting people with poison or frying them with high voltage isn't exactly humane either. America and China are in similar places when executing people.
"So there really is freedom of religion and speech in China?"
Westerners seem to single out Falun Gong; one of the big reasons the government has a problem with Falun Gong is because it advocates spiritual treatment over medical treatment. I agree their handling of it is wrong, but many in Chinese cities have died because they refused medical care and just meditated. The means are wrong, but I think it's also wrong to lie to poor rural peasants and tell them that they don't have to go to the hospital when they have life-threatening illnesses.
"So the Chinese government does not make huge amounts of money from prison labor?"
This is true. Conditions in Chinese jails are truly terrible. There've been stories circulating from the 1960's and 1970's that food was so scarce that inamtes began to kill fellow inmates and eat them. I can make no excuses about this.
"And the Chinese did not lob missiles over an island full of people to keep them in line?"
You mean the Taiwan problem. I agree lobbing missles over Taiwan is dumb and counter-productive. China, however, has a right to ensure it's territorial integrity. I believe in peaceful eventual reunification with Taiwan - BY the will of the people of Taiwan. The pro-independence movement in Taiwan is not a majority among the populace there. If Hawaii or Alaska tried to break away, the US government would do the same. In fact, the US just bombed another country for no reason than simple suspicions and neo-conservative politics. Interesting, huh?
"So the US government isn't unlawfully detaining thousands oin Cuba without a trial?"
No.Only about 500 are held there. I suggest you check the Amnesty International website. Oh, Sorry! I forgot.....you probably can't access that site from Communist China.
http://www.amnesty.org/
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
I have lived in Shanghai for 4 years (U.S. born, white male). Life in Shanghai is very easy. Its simply a very large city...other than that, there is nothing that a normal U.S. citizen would find "oppressive". If you are a person who is compelled to stand on street corners in the U.S. and stir up a riot over government policies, then neither the U.S. nor China are for you at the moment. But if you are a normal person who isn't interested in stirring a revolution, China is simply not an oppressive place. You can have small group and one-on-one conversations about anything you want (even politically sensitive issues). You can access almost any content you may desire over the net (some porn sites have been blocked...some chinese political content (in Madarin, so you couldn't read it anyway) has been blocked)...but google works as you would expect and most any business which requires internet access can be conducted fairly easily. Sure, doing things like extending your visa requires going to a gov building and waiting in line, but how often do you do this? Its not much different than going to a U.S. gov office. Other services are mostly private/free-enterprise and are very easily accessed; your largest barrier is language. As with almost any travel around the world, an open mind and a friendly smile will do lots to improve your experience. In terms of the Internet...it is very slow to access non-China servers. This is caused by two major issues: 1 - the "Great Firewall" and 2 - enormous amounts of local traffic (lots of it due to infected PCs). Best guess is that its item 2 that is the biggest problem with traffic, since the content filter isn't real-time (or so it would appear). MS's recent announcement to not continue to security patch unlicensed copies of Windows will no doubt add to this problem. As to other places besides Shanghai, well this is the top city China for westerners to do business so its the easiest...for anywhere else you can scale down your expectations on services from here; but freedom of expression, movement, etc...are all pretty smooth so long as your not here to stir up trouble. Good luck to you...
Please watch Red Corner before leaving to china.
~Aha~
Sounds like a thorough brainwashing to me
Disclaimer: I do not support Falun Gong's ideology; only its freedom to exist.this has been a facinating thread. Talking about China and comparing USA to China. I was born and raised in Eastern Europe and lived there untill I was 18 under what was called a "communist" regime. I ate enough bullshot there to last me a life time or so I thought. I have lived in USA for the last 21 years. I have seen both sides of the coin. Now I KNOW much better and i can smell bullshit from a mile away. USA is no btter or worse than ANY other country in the world. US citizens live in a fantasy world. The majority are ill eduicated and ill equiped to do anything but to consume and consume some more. Shurb used the word freedom 29 times in his speech. USA loves to use words such a s freedom and democracy. Please. The expression "Money talks and bullshit walks" describes USA perfectly. In USA you get as much freedom as you have money. No money no "freedom". It is as simple as that. You think USA doesn't censore its news? You think USA doesnt monitor its citizen's Internet access? You think there is no such thing as wage slavery in USA? Ask the "native Americans" who are spending their years in jail for fighting the USA government. They are the political prisoners in modern day USA. There is a conciderable number of them too. Remember Wounded knee? Maybe not. Bush will be spending billions of dollars for Iraq and Aphanistan, while there is hundreds of mentally ill people in the USA who will be spending a cold night on the street in USA tonight. Freedom? Freedom to do what? Consume more of the world's resources? I have asked Americans what exactly they can DO that i cannot do anywhere else and they were hard to give me an answer. Most often I was told to go back where I came from if I dont like it in "here" meaning USA. What a logical responce. USA is just another bully today. Maybe 200 years ago it did stand for something special but no more. I hope USA goes down as fast as possible. I hope the countries of the world unite against USA and fight it economically so USA will learn just how irrelevent it has become. Go China, go!
Here in the states, my wife only commits adultery *after* she gets stoned.
That is because our military is designed and organized to fight other large militaries. Even this war shows that our army is not properly equipped to fight guerillas as well as larger, more technologically advance armies. What good is a laser-guided bomb when you don't know where you drop it?
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
The sad part of all of this arguing is that we each think we are right. Ralph Wiley, who recently passed away, once wrote on Nolan Richardson being fired from the University of Arkansas under dubious circumstances. He wrote, "hey, just because you ain't racist doesn't mean Nolan didn't run into bigotry in Arkansas. Don't take it personal. It's not about whether or not your feelings are hurt." I do not consider myself racist, yet I am a fool to think that there are not people in America who look down upon and scorn people of a race unlike their own. There are Republicans who are racist, and there are Democrats who are racist. And, there a probably many people of both parties who are not racist. When someone accuses another person of racism, I should not defend that person just because I have some of the same beliefs as him (or same party affiliation). It is not an attack on me. Racism is a personal belief. Luckily, in America, it is not longer a public policy. Link to article: http://espn.go.com/page2/s/wiley/020306.html
Keep it real, innit
Task Mangler
Ehh, yes. I live in the US. I am a foreigner. I am constantly afraid I will be thrown out if I say something too negative about the government. I have been a foreigner in many countries, and this is the first time I am actually afraid of being deported. Hence, I shut up.
Un paio di scarpe, per favore!
During the election Bush blocked access to his website from other nations, I guess this is not specific to China.
Same thing in Japan. My friend, who spoke WAY BETTER Japanese than I was often asked if she was retarded because she couldn't read Japanese whereas people were always singing my praises. Of course, that actually points out that you really suck but that is another post...
I'm currently there. One thing to be aware of is different locations have different restrictions. Beijing and SHanghai will likely have the least restrictions, and hotels will probably have less restrictions than other ISPs. ISPs all seem to block slightly different material.
BBC News is still inaccessible.
Google News is inaccessible 95% of the time.
Small - Medium US newspapers are quite often blocked.
This past few days I couldn't access NYtimes or slashdot (maybe because of the dead ex-leader). China will cut access of during sensitive times like this. Yahoo news never seems to be affected though, so you could always get the AP stories.
But on the plus side, if you can read Chinese there are plenty of wonderful bittorent sites that have not been shut down. after the major BT closures I switched to Chinese sites and am still able to find everything I want. My time-shifted TV programs now have Chinese subtitles as an added bonus!!
For instance: http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:jo3aRe29uHsJ: slashdot.org/+slashdot&hl=en will be blocked by the firewall, but http://216.239.57.104/search?%71=cache:jo3aRe29uHs J:slashdot.org/+slashdot&hl=en will not. Congratulations, you've just successfully did a canonicalization exploit on their firewall! :)
Hopefully they won't figure this out and fix their firewall...
"Freedom [...] Democracy [...] Human rights [...] Equality under the law [...] All of these are basic rights for all human beings"
Oh, I agree. But perhaps the US should first practice what it preaches, because it is far from a shining example for these human rights. The US got democracy rather late compared to other nations, formal equality under the law was not achieved even only for African Americans until the 20th century (and still hasn't been achieved for others), the US government is getting more and more drive by religious fundamentalism, and the US record on freedom and human rights is pretty mixed (in many areas, including prison conditions, prison labor, health care, education, poverty, child mortality, etc.).
The US has been snatching people with no proof whatsoever - I believe in someone's guilt when they are declared guilty at a trial. Not because they were tortured for a couple of years with no charge,
But you are a foreigner. The Chinese are not foreigners in their own country, are they? Look at the demonstrations against Bush and Blair to see that it's no problem there.
Now look at the demonstrations in China against their government... (tiananmen)
Then you can understand why people look over their shoulders when they criticize their government publicly.
You are so naive. You actually think that we went into Iraq to liberate those people from their dictator? You actually think that we went in there to disarm Saddam Husein of his weapons of mass destruction? Do you think we actually thought he had WMD's? That's insane. Can you imagine how hated this war would be if instead of 2000 dead U.S. soldiers total we had 50,000 dead U.S. soldiers on the first day due to chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons used? If we actually thought he had them, it would have been tactically irresponsible for us to invade like that. Our government only told us that he had WMD's to sell it to us. If we acutally thought he had them, we would have bombed them from the sky instead of going in on the ground. Actually, that might not be true. We might have thought that he had them, but wouldn't really have them ready to deploy if we attacked quickly. And we probably organized our troops into smaller units to minimize the effectiveness of mass weapons against us.
Anyway. our military strategy is not based on right and wrong or human rights or spreading freedom. It is based on one thing: always keeping the United States in a good position in the world.
By the way, most Iraqi's didn't like their dictatorship and most people in China don't care if the government controls all the corporations as long as they can make money and buy cell phones, bootleg DVD's, and knock-off Louis Vuitton handbags.
My other first post is car post.
Well I am late to the party, but being chinese and all, I feel obliged to contribute my 2 cents.
There is a lot of talking about how circumstancing the Great Fire Wall is breaking chinese law and commie will put you in jail etc.
Well the situation is rather more complicated.
Rule of laws never really established in China's long history. It's rather "rule by law". Emperors enacted laws to govern the people, law is common people's enemy, law isn't there to ensure justice but to install order.
Even in mordern china, people don't respect law. Laws are often written by government agency in a hasty and rubber-stamped by a stooge congress, without much consultation of the people.
people get around law whenever they can and more often then not nobody cares. Piracy is supposedly illegal, prostitution is supposedly illegal, but in any city you can find DVDs for $1.00 and massage parlors on certain streets. everybody's driving like there is no traffic law. waiting lines are for suckers in theater or public trans tick counter. that's just for common people.
for big crooks and shady businesses, wining, dining and bribing are the grease the oil the wheel. business even MNCs look for preferential treatment 1st fair competition 2nd.
Unless you are in china with a mission to overthrow the government, getting around the Great FireWall is the last thing anyone would care.
petty crimes are expected, you almost can't live without commiting a few daily.
And of course you'll get no answer from the... he he he... "braying jackass".
I love it!
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
How did Crows post get modded at Troll and Flamebait? You can't mod down the TRUTH!!! Freedom is a humans born right!
Life is not for the lazy.
1. A wide support base filled with naive members given lots of good credos and compassionate spiritual laws to follow so that they seem altruistic and nourishing and all that good stuff while they spread their belief system.
2. When you get deeper into their literature, (and not even that much deeper), you discover that the higher end of the cult bases itself on the grafting of a 'Fulan', an energy being, onto one's own energy in return for 'special powers'. --Grafting an energy being into your own energy is fucking creepy, and I have never heard of any such case which is not parasitic in nature. It's just another energetic feeding arrangement designed to screw humans. It is all the more shocking in a place like China, where where everybody knows about energy and chi and doesn't dispute that reality. They know about demons and they know about energy vampirism. So what the hell? --A demon called by any other name is still a fucking demon. How dumb do you have to be to fall for basic re-wording and PR gloss?
And that's what it is. The Fulan Gong, like any cult worth its salt, has a very well orchestrated self-promotion and public relations arm. Like Israel, the Fulan Gong likes to make a very big deal about it's own persecution.
The fact of the matter is that there have been MANY spiritual groups which have been savaged by the government in China. --And many of them are far, far more legitimate than the Fulan Gong. I'm no fan of Facism, but the Fulan Gong is just another dangerous lie and it can go rot. I sympathize with the pains suffered by its ignorant followers; their stories really are tragic, but on the other hand. . . I really wish people would read and think for two minutes about the literature offered by a cult before joining it. Membership in any of the stupid religions to which most of this world belongs would be non-existent if people used their brains. Christianity, Judaism, Islam. . , they're all dumb and dangerous lies desgined to misdirect and bleed humans. --Witness the world today!
An interesting side-note. . . High level Scientologists are also into grafting energy beings directly onto its followers, but they're savy enough to conceal that fact and base their whole bullshit cult on secrets; you don't know what the heck you've really joined until you've been a (paying) member for fifteen years! Any spiritual group which as a policy keeps secrets from people making inquiries out of genuine interest should automatically be avoided.
Ignorance endangers. Knowledge protects.
-FL
American Born Chinese = Banana man.
The skin is yellow but when you peel it open it's while inside. No offense, I am a chinese too.
As a white American who enjoys his middle-class lifestyle, well, you're statement is quite correct. They didn't call the series of post American Civil War military campaigns "The Indian Wars" for nothing.
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.
I was fortunate enough to spend two weeks in China, and 3 days in HongKong, in 2001. I (a white US citizen) was there as a tourist. This had been my first trip overseas.
Beijing and Shanghai seemed like foreign countries compared to the body of the nation. HongKong (part of China now) felt a world away.
I can't speak on the tech side of things. My vacation gave me an opportunity to escape the net and I was grateful for it, really.
My personal experiences were great. The people were very friendly, from the elderly to children. I never once felt in danger or threatened. In fact, I found people to be more helpful and courteous than most Americans. Mind you, I was concerned that I'd accidentally do something to insult people, so I tried to watch and learn and not step on people's toes. I was overly worried. Don't act like the sterotypical American guffah, and you should be OK.
Many wanted to speak with me, I felt, because they wanted to practice their English. Our tourguide taught us only a few minor phrases. I tried to use them when possible, but there were few Chinese I'd met who I could not communicate directly with myself, in English.
People did seem to avoid discussion on events though, if we spoke in public. In private, people would open up. For instance, our tourguide would not discuss politics, religion, etc. while we we out and about. However, he made it a point to discuss these topics when the group had privacy.
Ah, another instance, which I suppose goes against what I'd said about speech earlier... My last night in Beijing, I wanted to see some of the nightlife of the city. After not being able to convince any in the group (we were beat down tired, and I was the youngin'...) to come out with me, I decided to brave the city alone. Perhaps not too brave (i WAS alone, 12000 miles from home,) I found the nearest bar to the hotel. Anyhews, NOONE in the establishment spoke English. It took me ~3 mins just to get the point across that I'd enjoy a beer. After getting about 1/2-way through it, a man who I can only surmise was the owner/manager wanted to apparently show me around. AFAICould tell, it was his residence as well. He was proud to show off his artworks, allowed me to play with this gorgeous ~15-string lute-thingy, etc. In short order, he moved a curtain from the wall which had behind it a door... painted as the American flag!!! Inside was a small shrine/prayer area, and I was able to please him just because I recognized and commented "Dali Lama" on the photo he had of him and the Dali Lama. I think those two words were the only ones said that both of us understood.
The point here being that people did not practice free speech, but seemed to let me in on their lives if some sort of privacy was available.
Economically, well... Being a student, I certainly wasn't fincancially well off, and I needed to do considerable budgeting to afford the trip. Total cost ended up being around $2000 US for all expenses, including airfare, trinkets bought, beer, etc. For that $2k over 2+ weeks, I felt like I was treated like a foreign dignatary or some such. We stayed at 4-star hotels (much better than hotels I've stayed at here in the states,) had all our whims looked after diligently, and ate like kings. I almost felt out of place (economic status) staying at "Hotel Beijing." After a week, we needed to ask our guide to stop ordering SO MUCH food for us, we were given enough to feed 4 people each. ( That's four voracious American people. )
Hong Kong was, well, it felt like a British china-town. Go figure. Its a special province, and even citizens need a passport to travel in and out. An interesting place, for sure, but I'd rather have spent my few days there as more time in Shanghai.
I suppose I'm not responding to the questions being asked by the poster, and instead just blabbing on telling stories here, so I'll wrap it up.
Great vacation, great people, great scenery, great accomodations, great food, great prices (haggle everywhere!!!). The freedom thing does need some work, but the people do seem to want it.
Here's hoping that your travels are as rewarding as mine were! =)
On the other hand, even if your favourite sites happen to be blocked, would it really be that bad? You will probably find a few thousand other interesting sites instead. The internet is bigger than my garden.
This is slashdot. People here do not want you to talk about freedom. Noticed how you got modded? I guess they just have an affinity for sadomasochism.
The fact remain however. You can NOT have peace without victory. That is an undeniable fact of life. Anyone who states otherwise does not understand human nature and/or psychology.
Life is not for the lazy.
So go, move to China. Better yet, move to N. Korea. But don't cry when your not allowed to post on slashdot from withen said countries.
Your brainwashed. Please for the love of humanity, seek psychological help. You are in dire need therapy.
Life is not for the lazy.
I wouldn't like to comment on freedom in China. I know very little about it. What I do know is in the West freedom is a misused concept, spouted like it was obvious what it meant.
Am I free because I am indocrinated with the ideologies that Western culture spouts? Am I free to because I fetishize consumerist culture? Maybe...
The trouble is I don't think so. If laws stopped me being indocrinated with false ideology, they wouldn't be bad, they would be doing there job - keeping me free.
I am not defending the Chinese administration, but I am offering a different side to the coin and I am saying we are not free in the West. We have been targeted from so many angles, ingrained with self-replicating and false ideologies, we don't know freeedom is.
The common belief is that money makes us free - our second home in the country makes us free. But no, money incarcerates us in a vicious cycle of production and consumption. Good luck China, I say... escape the free World's view on freedom. It has incarcerated us.
I look to India and China for the future of humanity, after all, it is the hope of one of the few ideologies that made any sense - Buddhism
If I remember the people in Waco where armed. They shot several ATF agents. And they set there own place on fire.
Was it botched? Yes. Where they executions? No.
And yes Waco did invole a high crime. They shot serveral ATF agents.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"The US Govt has used the army against its own population. Check the protests in the 60's"
This is not true. Here is a link about the shootings at Kent State.
A few highlights.
"May 2 Ohio National Guardsmen are sent to Kent State after the University's Army R.O.T.C. building is burned down."
Notice these are not federal troops but national guard units under state control.
"May 3 Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes personally appears on campus and promises to use "every force possible" to maintain order. Rhodes denounces the protesters as worse than brownshirts and vows to keep the Guard in Kent "until we get rid of them.""
The Governor not the federal goverment gave the orders.
"uly 23 Key portions of a secret Justice Department memo are disclosed by the Akron Beacon Journal. The memorandum describes the shootings as unnecessary and urges the Portage County Prosecutor to file criminal charges against six Guardsmen."
The federal goverment steps in.
It was a terrible thing but the differences are huge. The troops where not ordered to shoot. They paniced. The students had alread burnned down a building before this happened so the guardsman had a real fear to deal with.
And the fact that all this information is out in the open and is being questioned makes all the difference.
Here is the link if you want to check it out http://members.aol.com/nrbooks/chronol.htm
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Um, Mao was not in charge of China last time I checked. Dubya is. Let's stay on current events.
Which alternative reality are you posting from?
What on earth has ridden the guy who modded the parent Troll? It just points out the obvious!
Given the level of devastation, there was nobody left in Hiroshima to report to "higher command" about the destruction.
That's untrue. Check out the Wikipedia article on Hiroshima bombing. Cental command sent a pilot to Hiroshima within hours. He saw the complete destruction, landed, and radio'd back that the entire city was gone, wiped from earth. It was entirely clear within hours what had happened - not the specifics of what it was - but that America had a new weapon of unheard of power.
I never said anything about China. I don't condone what the Chinese government does or did.
I just pointed out that in this "free" country, I don't feel free at all!
Un paio di scarpe, per favore!
The standard for "cleanliness" there is different than in the US. Don't be shocked by what you see in the restrooms (as well as the slit toilets). Also, no matter how good it smells, do not eat anything from the street vendors. Most people I've met there are very, very interested in talking to a Westerner and were extremely polite.
whoops...meant to hit preview
Remove "China" and replace with "America" as well as switch "government" and "corporations" and it still rings true.
I have to appreciate how your reply to my argument was prediated on A. posting anonymously. B.pulling out one of my statements and sarcastically repeating it. C. Cursing. D. Insulting my character. E. Citing revenge as good reason for atrocities. F. Ballooning your self-worth up with no back (i.e. calling yourself a dragon), and G. Using a tired cliche to propose that I have been thoroughly beaten. Truly sir, your methods of discourse surely put mine to sad shame.
Your arguments, however, seem to be more predicated on a vilification of the Japanese as a race and nation ...
That is a pathetic attempt at playing the "racist" card. Normally the most heated of exchanges do not bother me but you crossed the line. I expect an apology for that one.
Note my use of "Imperial Japan" and "Imperial Japanese" throughout my posts. I do so to differentiate Imperial Japan of the 1930s and 40s from the Democratic Japan that followed. My vilification is of a government that was rightfully removed from the face of the earth nearly sixty years ago and its agents who committed war crimes beyond imagination. The only thing you could conceivably criticize is that I did not specify the 1930-40s timeframe. Imperial Japan's behavior in the First World War, and possibly the Russo-Japanese War but I could be mistaken, was "civilized" with respect to non-combatants and prisoners.
While I definitely agree with the R.E.S.P.E.C.T thread, I would like to see the answers to a couple questions raised here.
If you are going to change countries, you'd better plan to live by their rules. The US ain't perfect (or other 'free-er' countries), but you don't appreciate some of the perks until they're gone.
That said, I have dealings with a certain multinational company which has an affiliated company in China. I would like to better understand what their Chineese affiliate gets to see from their end, and what their life is like, particularly with regards to technology and freedom.
It appears China is not as it was 10 years ago, but much more open to change and modernization. What restrictions are imposed on Internet traffic? I am familiar with them modifying DNS queries.
I would rather not hear of circumvention techniques. I'm sure intelligent people can figure them out on their own, and smart ones probably don't do them.
Besides, if someone *does* circumvent the restrictions, let's not encourage the closing of the loopholes by writing about them. That doesn't help anyone.
Anyone care to (or have the knowledge) to detail the restrictions China imposes on the Information Superhighway?
No, we did not give Hussein any WMD (nuclear|biological). We armed him with standard gear (bad enough as it is) to help him achieve his goals.
...nothing. Nothing at all. These are not the WMDs you are looking for...
You confuse mortars, helicopters (and the like) with "weapons of mass destruction," which they are not.
Please keep in mind that our "search for WMD in Iraq" was recently abandoned, having turned up -nothing-. If we really armed Saddam with nuclear ICBMS (or nuclear anything), we ought to have found it by now, at least to justify our invasion to the UN. But
*waves hand dismissively*
I lived in Shanghai for about two years (2001-2003). While living there, my biggest tech problem with was the horribly slow and unstable internet connections. Hopefully they've fixed that by now.
As far as non-resolving DNS, connections being blocked and so-on, that does happen on occassion. What I did was set up an SSH tunnel to a squid proxy outside of the country. If I remember correctly, they block port 3128 going out, so the tunnel was more so that they wouldn't detect the proxying. Honestly, I don't even know if they checked. All my email going in and out of the country was through SSL/TLS encrypted connections to the servers, so that was pretty much safe. Unless you're going on behalf of a religious organization (or equivalent) though, that shouldn't really matter.
If you do go, enjoy it. I miss living there, myself. The most important thing as a foreigner is not protecting yourself from the government (cuz honestly, they don't really care what kind of information you're getting, unless you're overtly attempting to brainwash the local people with it). It's going there with an open mind. Don't be quick to judge the local people by your own standards. Don't apply your preconceived notions based on things you've heard in western media. Take time to understand where people come from and why they hold the mindsets that they do. If you do, your experiences will definitely be unforgettable.
The PATRIOT act passed because a majority in the House and Senate thought it was a good idea, and the President agreed.
Good idea how? Good for the country, or good for the political careers of politicians afraid to dissent from the GOP leadership? That majority does not tolerate dissent. It's "with us, or against us," remember?
one -- remember that there is progress. it is hard to see day to day but it is easy to see if you look back ten years. when i went to china for the first time in 92 it was a totally different place than it is now. hey -- they are having the first direct flights to taiwan in 55 years now!!
I lived next to Tibet. I've travelled to Xinjiang several times. Does the Chinese government treat the people there as they should be treated? No. Does that mean that every person's life is miserable? No. Some of my best friends in the world are Uighur.
The reality is that change takes time. If you want to help don't hate the Chinese -- support multi-track initiatives that will help support the establishment of the norms necessary for democracy to succeed sometime in the future. It is already happening in urban China. it will be a while before it gets to rural china and to the autonomous regions.
really man -- i'm not fighting you. i want equality for all people. i just want the slow and sure way. i don't bother hating; it's not worth the time.
www.cidcm.umd.edu -- if you want more info on multi-track stuff. And read that guy Azar -- needs-based government. it doesn't come from the top-down.
so that is how i'm acting. what are you doing?
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Damn man. You sure do make a lot of assumptions for someone who who is telling ME to get off of MY high horse.
First of all -- I am a very atypical "diplomatic brat." I went to a bilingual school whose mission it was to make _global_ citizens. I despised my fellow diplomatic community for all of the reasons you stated.
I can answer some of your questions though.
Why is China given MFN-like status? For two reasons, primarily because it is extremely financially benefitial to the U.S. and others and also because, unlike Iraq, it is moving in the direction of tolerance, openness, and individual freedom.
As for the Chinese people being collectively responsible for the actions of their government; that's just absurd. If that was true then the killings of arressor-nations civilians would be justifiable. It would mean that kidnapping and killing Americans in Iraq would be okay and that Israel's killing of Palestinian civilians would be okay. Unfortunately in the majority of the world's conflicts (which are almost all intra-state) defining the aggressor is very hard.
I don't defend what China does in Xinjiang. When I am in China I frequently have conversations with the Chinese people (both in Xinjiang and elsewhere) about what the government is doing to Xinjiang. I often parallel it with Israel's settlements in Palestine. Sometimes they react furiously, frequently they start to better sympathize with the Uighurs. I employ two techniques when I meet Chinese. Because I am fluent in Chinese I can convince most (who have never met Uighurs) that I am Uighur. If that doesn't work then I play the very useful card of convincing them that I am a zhongguotong (comrade of china.) Sometimes I mix them and get them to call me a zhongguotong before I "inform" them that I am Uighur. It gives my arguments a lot of credibility. I've done a lot more than talk -- but you don't seem very interested in considering me an equal so I won't even bother.
And don't call me American. When I moved back to the US in 1999 I hated it. The only way I could stand living here was to consider it a foreign nation. And as you know, since you are well traveled, you don't always approve of everything in the country you've visiting. But you find what there is to love and you focus on that. Like (I think) I said, I wouldn't run around Saudi Arabia disrespecting everyone because I didn't agree with what they believe.
Another note: I wrote this because there were some rediculously hostile towards China. If you tell someone that they should not go to China because you disagree with what the government does and you think that they're going to be thrown in jail then you're just stupid. And you're depriving them of a great experience.
And, for a finale, I'm not going to devalue your experience. I'm not going to tell you that your idea of China is warped by western stereotypes. I'm not going to insult you. I hope that is only a temporary difference between the two of us.
Americans say "no problem." I saw "no worries." I have no nationality.
And I use Ubuntu, too.
(oh yeah -- and why do you post as AC?)
feel free to email me -- or to AIM me (same as the beginning of my email)
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
I know google is banned, but according to a New Scienctist article, elgoog, the "backwards" google mirror, is not. I'm pretty sure you can access the caches through that, but the site is slow. And I don't think it can handle all of China trying to access it, though it's supposed to be quite popular.
Death to censorship.
avoid Ad hominem dude, try to stay on topic. Save the name calling for your schoolyard.
You need to resort to "letter of the law" arguments to obscure the facts coming out of Gitmo, Iraq/n and Afganistan right now? Isn't there anything in your so-emotional post for the "concept of freedom" that perhaps the US needs more help domestically than a tiny country (out of so many) needs to change regimes?
You were lied to man: no WMD, no link to Al Quaeda, no imminent threat. Soldiers are dying for a cause that doesn't exist. Are we safer now? No, actually we're worse off, by simply repeating the mistakes of the past. We are a bigger target, with more attackers, than when we started.
The current US administration is wildly out of bounds regarding the spirit of almost any law: human rights, foreign affairs, UN participation, separation of church and state, manipulation of the media, manipulation of national science opinions, and management of the environment. It's been a long long time since the 1940's guy. Party's over.
I believe you are forgetting that Confucian thought has always been a philosophy of the ruling elite. Other philosophies: Taoism and Buddhism have more universal appeal and are more compatible with western ideals of individuality. Buddhists are so individualistic they reject even the obligations of their own family.
To buy into the idea that Confucianism maps one to one with traditional Chinese culture or philosophy is to ignore the vast majority of Chinese people.
Well, yes, being that Bush was accused of 'war crimes,' I'd like to know what 'crimes' he is accused of committing. I'm funny like that - if a cop pulls me over and says he is arresting me, I'd like to know at some point what the charges are.
Such as? Come on, be specific: what facts (not complaints from terrorists who were there for fighting US forces, for which the penalty really should have been immediate, violent, explosive death - if we hadn't wanted information from these gumbas, it probably would have been) are coming out of these places that show that recently re-elected President Bush has been committing war crimes?
This in and of itself deserves a huge response; I'm just home from work and sleepy, so I'll give the short and sweet version. Hussein had 12 years to comply with the agreement he signed allowing inspectors to confirm his WMD program, the existence of which is not an issue of argument as it was admitted to by him at that time. He kicked the inspectors out time and again. He fired on US and British planes which were enforcing the no-fly zone. I think there is plenty of evidence that he shipped his WMD to Syria; now we see that North Korea has apparently purchased a complete nuclear warhead from *somewhere*, and I wonder when someone might purchase something the wacky Iraqi himself cooked up. But, to be blunt, the program was in existance, we said prove to us that it is dismantled, and he didn't. For 12 years. And he did that .. why exactly?
Link to al Qaeda - are you insane? Why do you think that? There are definate links to al Qaeda, including meetings in Europe between known al Qaeda bad boys and Hussein's bad boys. Were they having tea and crumpets (or more accurately, beer and strudel)? Imminent threat: I find this to be a silly argument anyways. If someone has spent 12 years obstructing all efforts to confirm he is not trying to cook up something with which to kill mass numbers of innocent people, I don't really think one should wait around till the bomb goes off before thinking 'imminent threat.' If a cop goes to arrest someone and the guy reaches for a gun, should the cop have to wait till it is in his hand before acting? The hammer back? The gun aimed? What is your standard of imminent threat? Silly.
What mistakes of the past? Killing people who would do us harm? How is that bad? Or do you mean the mistakes committed by Clinton for 8 years, ignoring the threat of al Qaeda?
Which would explain, of course, why we have been attacked so many times since the start of... oh, wait... We haven't been, have we? Or are you using the silly argument, "Every bomb we drop creates another terrorist"? Seeing as how the assholes who carried out 9/11 were never victims of US action, most of whom Saudi subjects educated in the west, I find this argument to be one of the more ironic, funny ones coming from the barking moonbat arena.
Which human rights are they violating? The right to commit or plan terrorist acts as an un-uniformed member of no army, then to claim bogus Geneva convention rights as a captured soldier? That kind of violation? Foreign affairs - what exactly are you referring to? The right of the US
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
One of my former coworkers was ABC. His sister and her also-ABC husband moved to Japan, doing some kind of high-tech management. The husband did ok, but the wife got tired of it really fast. It seems that even though she had a perfectly good college degree and was highly competent, and Japanese are used to Western women working and not acting Japanese, as an Asian she was expected to behave like a proper salaryman's wife even though she was Chinese, and being American-born she had no intention of putting up with that nonsense. She found a good job back in the States fairly quickly; it took her husband a bit longer, but he had the motivation that she was back here.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When I lived back east, I had a coworker whose grandparents had immigrated to the US from Japan. They were ethnic minorities, and she'd occasionally have people walk up to her assuming she was Chinese and start speaking Chinese at her, which wasn't useful (she'd do just fine in French, and knew a bit of kitchen Japanese from mom talking to grandma.) I assume ABCs have similar issues, unless they happen to speak the right dialects fluently.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The Shining Path revolutionaries were wacko Maoists who could support themselves quite well because of the US's well-organized program for funding world terrorism and domestic crime, i.e. providing muscle to drug-lords who exported cocaine to the US at many times the free-market price. Many years they were more competent at violence than the government armies, and certainly were able to stick around for decades longer than they could have without US aid.
Fujimori was somewhat like a crazier version of Ross Perot with less knowledge of economics - he did a bunch of things that were Not Stupid, which placed him well above average, used a lot of violence, including against many people who deserved it as well as people who didn't, staged a coup against his own government (I really had trouble following that one... but perhaps Bush/Cheney will show us how professionals do it), and was certainly not the best government the country could have had, but neither were his predecessors.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You should have just gone to sleep. You are way too childly antagonistic to really debate.
Seems like I took the wind out of your sails; nice response to my well thought out and executed el-smasho of your insipid argument. Typical liberal.
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
Flamebait, and Offtopic don't fit. And Overrated is such a catch-all.
Two things: #1 you know that communication network that was destroyed? Draw it on a map. Think about it. They knew it was done with a single attack, most probably a single bomb. The mere size of the communication blackout was enough of a warning.
#2 People moved. While the devastation was large, a man on a horse could travel across it from one one to another and get to another place with a working phone. Trust me, they had a reasonable idea of the physical destruction that the first bomb had.
Yes, it is true, they did not realize the magnitude - for example they had no idea about the radiation. But the Japanese military had a reasonable idea of the # of deaths and property destruction within 24 hours. They were not stupid, just arrogant.
Was the untested bomb done for testing purposes? Possibly. But like many people you are confusing reasons for making a specific choice as the reason for making the general decision. If I decide to buy a red sports car instead of a Station Wagon because I think it will attract more women, that does NOT mean I am buying the car to attract women. I bought the car because I need a vehicle to get to work - if I was married, I still would have bought a car - just a different one.
The decision to use a 2nd bomb was because Japan did not surrender after the first. The decision to use a different bomb instead of the same type was probably made for research reasons.
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