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?
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.
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
How can you possibly control the actions of billions of people?
To start with, you build the world's largest army, and then don't let the 1 billion citizens own guns.
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?
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
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.
- 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.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.
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.