Slashdot Mirror
China Tightens Rules For Educational BBSs
An anonymous reader writes "China is tightening control over online BBS run by colleges and universities. Educational institutions in China have received direct orders from the Chinese Ministry of Education requiring their BBSs to take actions including access limitation and registering users by their real identities, as well as strict content censorship. The admin team of the BBS of Nanjing University has refused to obey the order and has been dismissed."
Oppressive country oppresses.
It seems these days that when I read about China censorship, it's merely a continuation of policies that have existed for years.
What's remarkable to me is that the admin group refused and was merely dismissed. A couple decades ago, I'd expect them to be jailed at the least.
This cannot come as a shock to any one who even casually follow the Chineese record on free speach.
Tragic, tragic, really..
Well, I'm off to but cheap clothes and electronics!
It really took guts for them to stand up to this, and I wonder if there will be fallout for them the rest of the world will never hear. It says they were merely dismissed, but can you trust that infomation?
How can you possibly control the actions of billions of people? It just seems all so silly and 20th-century.
With the net on everything from watches to cell phones and jackets, and the myriad of procols available (especially with tunneling) it just seems like closing the door after the horses got out.
Validated identities are required for anybody in a school in order to protect our children from those who might attempt to infiltrate our schools and victimize them. Content "censorship" is nothing more than ensuring they're not exposed to content that they're not ready for. Hell, I'm an adult who likes b00bies, and I was kinda grossed out by Janet's.
Oh, wait, this is China we're talking about. The totalitarian state. Umm, censorship is bad, mmkay?
> The admin team of the BBS of Nanjing University has refused to obey the order and has been dismissed.
"miss". So that's how they're spelling "appear" these days. Man, these kids and their SMS/TXT speak.
Either /.'d or executed.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
The Communist Party should be glad that there are still people who care about politics, even if they have "wrong" ideas. Unlike many of their fellow citizens and party members, who only care about getting rich.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Just have 500,000,000 of them watch the other 500,000,000 of them. (And vice versa).
Done and done.
I'm a big tall mofo.
China have been addressing the "problem" of the internet for a while now, beginning with the block of adult sites and now the censorship of their own countries' sites.
I guess they are learning from the 80's, when the startings of the internet helped demolish stalinism from Eastern Europe. They know they need to control the content people view to avoid letting their control on power drop.
Business Voyeur
The admin team of the BBS of Nanjing University has refused to obey the order and has been dismissed.
Now THAT is bravery!
China is a country that will incarcerate your for not thinking what you're supposed to. China is a country that will put a bullet in the back of your head and sell your organs to the highest bidder. These people should be revered. They have true bravery.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
to become an economic powerhouse (well it is one now), it has a lot of growing pains to face in this century. no doubt they are going to become a superpower, but they have a lot of issues that are going to hold them back. once the people start to get some freedoms, it is going to be hard to stop them from wanting them all.
right now they are benifiting from cheap labor, what is going to happen when the people decide they want more for what they do? add on the social issues as well and they are in for turbulent times before they are a viable threat to america.
Seeing all the sarcasm, no one is surprised at China's actions in this matter, nor do they really expect different. However, while I don't condone this action and in fact abhor it, don't be surprised if kids born in the US 10 years from now don't have a RFID chip popped in under their skin right after the APGAR test. It will be justified under any number of reasons, security, health monitoring, etc
Kudos to the team for standing up and saying no, that takes guts
Now go buy your cheap goods at Walmart
In my PUBLIC high school, they censora crap load of webpages, ie(slashdot, most wikipedia topics, and duh the porn and game site) Whats the difference between PUBLIC schools doing it and China doing it?
The killing was done on the streets around Tiananmen Square after the protestors were driven out of the square. The Chinese depend on this error when they claim that no killing happened.
Funny you should mention that incident, because it presented an easy solution for one of China's biggest problems. (Sorry for getting OT here)
China had effected scrict financial penalties for having more than one child sometine last century. Unfortunately, the typical agricultural sector family unit survives by having cheap labor, in the form of extra children. However, in order not to incur legal penalties, these families often hide those extra kids. As these kids grew up, it quickly became apparent that these kids had no identity, and without identity, they wouldn't be able to find work or acquire government benefits. The PRC refused to ackowledge their existence.
Then, one day, the whole Tiananmen Square incident came about, and the PRC realized they could kill two birds with one stone. Rallying and arming as many "black children" [literal translation] as they could find on short notice, the PRC made a deal: "Kill one student protestor, and you may take possession of his identity. We will then cover the rest of your tuition and housing." After the bloodbath was over, all the "black children" were now legitimate, and since all students were accounted for, "no one" had really died. To this day, China can logistically claim there were no casualties in the incident. And what of the victim's families? They got a letter from school saying that their kids were striking off on their own and didn't want to see them again.
China's very good at understating a lot of facts. (I should know - I still have relatives there.)
Solomon Kevin Chang
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Isn't this a bit like telling high schoolers that they can't drink or smoke? I feel the best way to stop something is not to highlight it. In this case proxies will allow anon usage anywhere...even /.!
CB
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
really is there a difference?
in the end, nothing gets done.
in the US, Voters are morons and/or kool-aid drinkers and vote what they are told to vote.
in china you just can't vote.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
In order to understand why these things happen, you need to find out how people of China think. Using Western standards for benchmarking civil rights of China is not a smart idea because not everybody agrees with these standards.
I worked with an exchange student from China a while ago. She was a nice girl, but she could never get the freedom of speech (expression/religion) thing. Whenever we talked about civil rights in China, she pointed out to all the porn, violence, drug use and other negative aspects of life that Americans could see on TV and everywhere else. I could not argue with her. She was raised in a differet atmosphere and that was a big issue between the two of us. She hated many things about the United States and one of them was freedom to say whatever you wanted. Three years of schooling here did not change her one bit.
Now, I know that one person does not represent the whole country, but this experience gave me some insights on why peoeple may not like the Western way of life.
While many people were killed in those protests (about the same percentage of protesters as were killed at Kent State, but far more total protesters and deaths), there are no reports that I have ever come across as to people being "run over" by tanks. In general, people there died from being shot. There's this common notion that tanks were running over people because of the famous footage of a man standing up to a tank; however, he wasn't run over (and in fact, stood his ground for over half an hour, before jumping up *on* the tank to talk to the driver, and then being pulled away by others into the crowd). To this day, nobody knows who that man was; he was initially identified as Wang Weilin, but documents suggest that this name is wrong.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
in the US, Voters are morons and/or kool-aid drinkers and vote what they are told to vote
You elitist asshole. Go fuck yourself. FYI, Europe is starting to think that the Bush policy for spreading democrocy is the CORRECT method. No other president in the past 20 years has accomplished so much...err will as long as things continue to stay on track in the middle east.
Life is not for the lazy.
What's next? The "Thought Police" will go after their students because they are showing too much expressions in front of the telescreens? Regardless how fast Chinese economy is developing, imho, a significent amount of Chinese people have been de-humanized. I don't want to elaborate too much because it hurts too much.
Maybe GWB should lecture the Communist China on the value of freedom of speech and religion. Oh wait!, if he does that, they might not finance our collossal deficit. Better let them be as brutal as they want to their own, as long as they keep loaning the U.S. money.
If I had my way the U.S. would only recognize ONE China. The one whose government is in Taipei.
Sorry, but in china they dont belive that "free speech" is a right of the people.
So its not a 'record', its more of a difference in opinion.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This kind of oppression is nothing compared to the persecution of good people that's going on there:a ses/death_list.html
http://clearwisdom.net/emh/special_column/death_c
But what is Falun Gong? Click here(video) or here(website)
You need to read some Chinese history, I'm afraid. The way Chinese society and government is structured isn't all that different than what it was during the huge stretch of Imperial times.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Is China getting softer? My understanding is that such audacity would have earned those people bullets in the backs of their brains...
[o]_O
- The chat rooms operated by the Tsinghua University have been closed down for non-students and, obviously, students require to indentify themselves.
- NO BBS has been asked to get identification from its users. No BBS have been asked to censor themselves (at least not in a new development and not in the context of this article)
- Only Tsinghua University has been asked to get identification from its students to access its chatrooms. No other university has been asked to do this (in the context of this article, of course).
- New rules have been passed which, according to TFA, 'will hold chat room operators liable for any "objectionable content" on their sites.' So it must be speaking of keeping "objectional content" away from websites of chatrooms or some online forums. And this need not be political content but just things like porn. But keep in mind that TFA is full of opinion [like calling the move an effort "to limit the exchange of ideas on the Internet" and "the Communist Party's Propaganda Department". And it states opinions as facts including it in the same sentences as facts instead of stating it separately. Like "China's most popular online chat room, hosted by Beijing's Tsinghua University, has been closed to non-students to limit the exchange of ideas on the Internet" and "the Communist Party's Propaganda Department has increased its monitoring of cyberspace for subversive trends, the report said." (emphasis mine)] so it's hard to distinguish what is fact and what is opinion. TFA continues to say that " As a result, Weblog portals have discouraged their users from discussing political or sensitive topics." But it's just the editors' opinion and it doesn't have any recent developments to back it up. (Maybe just the old complaints)
- TFA also says the Ministry of Education has ' issued a circular on strengthening "political thought" at universities'. Again, you can't tell what is fact and what is the editors' opinion.
- Nowhere does the article mention anything about the "dismissal of the admin team of Nanjing Univesity". This might be another article not linked in summary or this might be just a lie by the poster.
The summary is just one big lie trying to make China look bad, written by someone who hates China. (And it groups a lot of stories together) And even TFA is not very unbiased. Proof that Slashdot has no journalistic integrity or ethics and occasionally spews out complete lies.I'll only be able to browse approved Chinese sites on that new Lenovo laptop.
One correction: They said no killing in Tiananmen Square which is true. They admitted killing somewhere else. I don't see anything wrong. BTW, US never say killing Iraq civilians is error since dead Iraqi are all terriosts and never say sorry on killing allies since those were all their mistakes. Tell me what is right in this world.
China already had two revolutions in the last century- first to overthrow the last imperial dynasty, and second, the communist revolution. The communist were able to seize control in 1949 largely because Mao was able to harness the discontent with Chiang Kai Shek's dictatorial government.
Another thing many westerners do not understand is the politcal apathy of many of china's intelligentsia. The people know they do not have control, so they put it out of their minds. Concerning censorship- that is a legacy of china's conservative, confucian culture. They have been conservative for a very long time, and traditions like that die hard. The majority of people there have no desire to view what they censor, like porn or what have you.
Just to qualify what I've said, I've lived in china, and I speak mandarin.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
sed 's/[Ee]ducational\ [Ii]nstitution/peer-to-peer\ network/g; s/China/America/g; s/Chinese\ Ministry\ of\ Education/RIAA/g; s/BBS/administrator/g; s/Nanjing/Louisiana\ State/g'
... and suddenly this is a very familiar story...
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Canada has rabid hate speech laws and you can get into big trouble if you speak out.
Canada has rabid slander and lible laws and you can get into big trouble if you speak out.
It's all on the grey scale, China -> Canada -> US
China has improved dramatically over the last few decades and I'm holding out hope that Canada will improve someday too.
FYI, Europe is starting to think that the Bush policy for spreading democrocy is the CORRECT method.
Got a source for that? Doesn't chime with the polls I've seen.
sig
2. re-read 1, then de-flame.
3. Of course, commenting with out knowledge is often a lie.
4. Might be, then again, if you had read it you might be able to tell some truth here.
5. Again BBS does NOT equal chat-room.
6. Fabrication, unless rebutter is close to the team how can he know.
and the last line, well I can see there is some truth there.
But seriously folks, those chinese BBS's act the way slashdot can, (and does at it's best). Raising needless FUD with the lies in the summary is not going to enlighten anyone.
Actually men in that case was refering to women as well. It was refering to the race of man.
That's debateable, but it raises a good point. English could really use the following:
1) There's a lot of griping over the fact that "man" is the basis for "woman". The feminist solution of "womyn" is lousy, unless they consider themselves to be members of the humyn race (And "herstory" is just plain silly). It also neglects the confusion over whether "man" is meant in the male sense or in the general sense, etc. A much better solution is a few new words for male cases specifically. At the moment I can only think of three cases, all of which can be solved by substituting a new word or two to eliminate the bias. Here's my suggestions:
old m:f:either -> new m:f:either
man: WOman: man -> WAPman: WOman: man
men: WOmen: men -> WAPmen: WOmen: men
male: FEmale: - -> mel: fem: -
2)Gender-neutral pronouns so people aren't forced to pick one unnecessarily or use alkward him/her or he/she constructs, or abuse of the plural they/them:
male: he, him, his
female: she, her, hers
neither: it, it, its
any: ey, em, eir (Spivak pronouns)
Or we could just submit to the inevitable and officially make they/them both gender and number neutral.
3) The re-establishment of the words "man" and "men" as a general concept inclusive of both genders. That way we can still say "fireman" or "human" or "woman" without a lot of griping over sexism. And we can dump a lot of unnecessarily gendered words.
4) Adoption of gender-neutral titles: Ser instead of sir/madam.
I think I read somewhere that the word "man" in words like "fireman" actually comes from the latin "manus", meaning not a male but "hand". Makes sense. Actually, "jack" is used in a similar way for manual laborers.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
And no, I'm not passing on the idiot slashdot meme. The Soviet Union had one of the largest standing armies in the world AND a disarmed citizenry. When the population became completely fed up, none of that mattered any more; the government fell like a house of cards regardless. The same thing will happen in China and/or the US when the dissention reaches critical mass. As long as enough people have bread and circuses, however, they're willing to overlook little things like other people's rights.
Yes. And to note, this source is well...very liberal to put it bluntly.
5 90-2005Mar7.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14
Life is not for the lazy.
At least i dont post as AC. Your just a coward who dosent want to be modded down. Just because what i saw is not what people agree with dosent make it wrong.
I have seen their resignation letter. They resigned rather than got dismissed.
That's also my version of the fact.
All these are in Chinese and I don't have time to translate them (though Babelfish helps a little), and they are from BBSs, so they might not be all that accurate. Also, given current events I'm not sure that these links will continue to work.
I don't think it is dangerous in any way to post these links here, even if the government is as oppressive as you seem to think. Heck, I'm just helping you get the facts straight.
in last year, the average online number of smth.org is about 17000.
The answer to your question is yes. In general, the presidents who were fighting the cold war had the moral high ground.
Some fell, some stumbled, but in general, the West had the moral high ground.
You can't say that now.
The biggest problem that the Chinese authorities have with electronic communications is their need to know who is talking. The essential part of this story is the bit about "real identities," and it's also why these courageous sysadmins, at great risk to their own lives, drew the line at that point.
China has two different societies: the urbanized incipient middle class, and the unwashed rural masses. The former group is a bit smaller than the population of the US, while the latter group numbers about a billion or so.
The goal in respect to the countryside is to simply to starve the people while preventing a repeat of the Maoist Revolution. These people are controlled through corrupt, brutal (and somewhat unruly) local officials who make sure that nothing like modern communications technology ever becomes widely available. In essence, the rural population never really finds out what they are missing.
The people in the larger cities, however, are being fed on the dream of accession to a middle-class lifestyle, complete with cars and electronic gadgets. If all goes according to plan, this group will rapidly become a source of final demand about as big as the US currently is. And the key is to keep them from realizing that they could do far better still with some real freedom of speech. That's why nothing matters more to the authorities than being able to neutralize that small sliver of independent-thinking, dangerous people. And you can't make them disappear in the middle of the night unless you can positively identify them.
Well, little boy, if it's wrong, than it does make it wrong.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I am a Nanjing University alumni, the version of the story I heard from my schoolmates is that the admin team of Lily BBS (BBS of Nanjing University) planned a mass quit but was persuaded not to by the president of the university. A dozen of other university BBSs were affected as well. On the first day following this incident, many of the affected bulletin boards changed their splash screens to express the students' dissatisfactions. In particular, the soccer board of the BBS of Tsinghua University has changed their splash to the Chinese character "CAO" -- meaning "F*CK" in English. The access limitations were mainly targeting users logging on from outside China, meaning that Chinese students in the U.S. can no longer access these BBSs now, but there's no more limitation than before for people inside mainland China. Also, registering users by their real identities have been a practice by most university BBSs since a long long time ago.
BTW, I really hate people saying the word "brainwashed", I'd rather think everybody is brainwashed by his/her own surroundings.
The fact that the board admins are dismissed might seem not so bad. But does anybody know what other consequences they might suffer? How about their carreers? Wil they have a record now that will limit what jobs they can get? There are so many possible other repercussions that may follow (other then the most obvious). I'm not saying that the bad stuff is happening there, but do we actually know? Can we somehow get in touch with them?
But it looks to me like the Soviet Union fell less because the citizenry got fed up, as it did because the government lost its capacity to maintain order. The citizenry, it seems, in the late 80s weren't any more empowered or oppressed than they were in the 40 years previous. The only thing that changed were the machines of oppression; and the change wasn't even in terms of getting more compassionate, it was in terms of efficacy at oppression.
For example I seem to remember-- again, could be wrong-- that while the soviet union had a massive standing army, by the end, that army wasn't getting paid.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
First off... the german and french editorials were asking a question... probably the title of the editorials. The next word could have been "No!"
After that, the article mentions other article writers. Who knows the political leaning of these papers he is quoting from.
No citation of scientific polls. Yeah that is a really good source.
Do you believe everything you read? If so, don't read.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The BBS community became so popular among those young elite, that it (or at least part of it) would become an unignorable force with knowledge, wealth as well as political need someday. Also some people pointed out that this might be a resurgence of the standpatters after the reformation of China's politics during the last year.
Life is hard.
1: SMTH BBS become half open, only technical discussions is accessible to the public, other talks remain available only to students inside Tsinghua University and its schoolfellows.
2: SMTH BBS forks into 2 communities, one inside campus which is charged by the university and the other outside which may be possessed by an individual corporation.
Life is hard.
What China does is *immaterial*. What Hitler did is immaterial. What Pol Pot did is immaterial. The United States is doing these things NOW. That is ALL that matters. Any noise to the contrary is just to try to distract you.
The only reason it is immaterial is because you know those governments aren't going to do anything when you protest them. China doesn't give a damn what you think as they pass authorizations to use force against Taiwan, and as they rehearse an invasion of Taiwan with Russia. Idiots like you are going to be protesting the US the day that China waltzes into Taiwan, kills and rapes millions, and idiots like you are still going to apologize for it. Go back to your stalinist cooperatives, bub, we're not buying.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
Clue: Most of the world has traditionally been tyrannical. The point is that some people try to make it less tyrannical and some people apologize for the tyrants. Which side are YOU on?
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves