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Microsoft Bans 'Democracy' for China's Web Users
Doc Ruby writes "As reported, paradoxically, on MSN, 'Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words 'democracy' and 'freedom' from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors.' MSN China says it must comply with local laws, but there is no Chinese law against the use of these words."
Remember Pastor Ken Hutcherson, and how he leaned on Bill about the whole gay issue? Where the hell is he now?
Surely, if he and his band of fundies can kick up that much of a fuss about homosexuality, they can certainly flex their muscles in the defense of human liberty and dignity.
C'mon, Ken...you've still got Bill's number...and here's a cause actually worth fighting for.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The more heinous laws may never be written down.
Anyone else think it's odd that this is being reported by MSNBC?
Hey! Check this out! The company i work for is being immoral!
No, that would involve freedom.
MSN China says it must comply with local laws, but there is no Chinese law against the use of the use of these words."
Law? You don't need law to enforce the will of the party in China.
PS. Before this is mark flamebait- I am a chinese.
As I recall, RedHat was criticized a few years ago for removing the Taiwanese flag from their distribution to appease potential customers in mainland China. Let's face it, China is a huge market to get into; if a company that refused to ship an MP3 library with their distribution can be seduced by the Chinese market's potential, what good is a little democracy or freedom going to do to prevent Microsoft from acting in the same manner? It's all about money.
The World is Yours.
They want our money but not our beleifs. That's their right. But what are we getting from them in return?
How does it benefit OUR citizens? As you can see... China's priorities clearly have nothing to do with our beleifs, our products or our labor force. China only wants our dollar, and corperate America just wants slave labor?
Why do we allow this to continue? What is the real benefits of allowing our US based corperations, to exploit the world and devalue our country?
Who can stop the rise and rise of China? The communists, of course /opinion/2005/06/12/do1203.xml
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 12/06/2005)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=
Seventy years ago, in the days of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, when the inscrutable Oriental had a powerful grip on Occidental culture, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote en passant in the course of a short story: "The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entrée to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel."
Well, the mansion's pretty much out in the open now. Confucius say: If you got it, flaunt it, baby. China is the preferred vacation destination for middle-class Britons; western businessmen return cooing with admiration over the quality of the WiFi in the lobby Starbucks of their Guangzhou hotels; glittering skylines ascend ever higher from the coastal cities as fleets of BMWs cruise the upscale boutiques in the streets below.
The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal that Jacques Chirac (borrowing from Harold Macmillan vis-à-vis JFK) now promotes himself as Greece to Beijing's Rome, and the marginally less deranged of The Guardian's many Euro-fantasists excuse the EU's sclerosis on the grounds that no one could possibly compete with the unstoppable rise of a Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have squashed America like the cockroach she is.
Even in the US, the cry is heard: Go east, young man! "If I were a young journalist today, figuring out where I should go to make my career, I would go to China," said Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, in a fawning interview with the People's Daily in Beijing a few weeks back. "I think China is the best place in the world to be an American journalist right now."
Really? Tell it to Zhao Yan of the New York Times' Beijing bureau, who was arrested last September and has been held without trial ever since.
What we're seeing is an inversion of what Erle Stanley Gardner observed: a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that is, in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid hovel. Zhao of the Times is not alone in his fate: China jails more journalists than any other country in the world. Ching Cheong, a correspondent for the Straits Times of Singapore, disappeared in April while seeking copies of unpublished interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, who fell from favour after declining to support the Tiananmen Square massacre. And, if that's how the regime treats representatives of leading global publications, you can imagine what "the best place in the world" to be a journalist is like for the local boys.
China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private. China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a provocateur with which to torment Washington and T
That's an awfully un-American action for such a large American company. If we're so committed to spreading democracy throughout the world, then it seems that every individual and corporation ought to act like we really do believe in the values that we profess. Otherwise, they're just words, and we really do prove who we are by our deeds.
And because I'm a left-wing radical like Justice Rehnquist, I can't help but wonder how long before the same thing happens here?
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
I know this is pretty cynical, but Microsoft can't change China. I think it's unreasonable to expect them to burn all their bridges there in a futile attempt to change things that they can't.
As a nation, we (the US) have decided to look the other way about whatever problems China might have, in exchange for money. A huge proportion of the stuff at Wal-Mart is made in China. We swallow our principles and take the cheap prices.
Why should MS be better than anyone else?
China is really big and really powerful. They're so big and powerful they can tell MS to shove it. And they can tell the US to shove it. If or when China changes, it will be because Chinese people do it. No one is going to push them into doing anything they don't want to do.
There's lots of people criticizing Israel in the US. And lots of people criticizing the Palestinian government. The American corporate media doesn't cover it much, because it's *their* game, that they're playing with the Bush government. All the American media corporations have stakes in the global weapons business, and their relationships with the Pentagon, which gives out the money. They like the game, because they get to control the people who pay the bills for their profits.
This is certainly not unique to the US, or China, or anywhere else. Even in Israel, the media coverage of the government's perpetuation of the war with Palestinians is inverse to the people's criticisms of it. It's even worse in Palestine, where the government's thugs, who embody the word-of-mouth media of the street, kill Palestinians who criticize their goverment's perpetuation of the war with Israel, as "collaborators".
None of this is necessary, but it's easy. And as long as its profits keep the government/media corporate cartels (fascism) in power and profits, it's going to stay that way.
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make install -not war
What about the freedom Microsoft has to run (or not run) whatever content they wish on their web site? You can't have true freedom if you force people to extoll freedom and democracy.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I find this odd and interesting. Most Chinese I've met feel they are free. Also, democracy is as old in China as the Communist party: Mao Ze Dong's little red book has a whole section lauding the advantages of democracy. In fact, this seems to be a move against the government by Microsoft. The best way to censor would be to not bring up any pages when someone searches for "democracy". Letting them know they entered a forbidden word will make them more aware of things they can't do, and will make them feel oppressed.
Qxe4
The Great Firewall of China actively monitors incoming data for keywords. There's no set list, and red-flag words will vary from city to city (Shanghai tends to be strictest) and time to time. It's not at all unimaginable that 'minzhu' (democracy) would set it off, causing the Great Firewall to stop the transfer and return a fake "server not responding" message.
So yeah, it's lame that MS is doing this. But why do they have to? Because Cisco and other American companies provided router, firewall, and filtering tech to China, showed them how to set it up, and still maintain an active role in restricting the browsing of 100 million internet users. What MS is doing is a symptom, not a cause -- follow the money.
So, did the people flaming microsoft today also note that Google the Wonderchild Company basically did the exact same thing a few months ago? Somehow, i don't think you'll see half the outrage over THAT incident, if only because this one involves "M$"
You need a FREE iPod Nano
No, most Americans don't care. Or they think it's just the "liberal media," at it again. Just like how they don't care about the impact of driving their SUV alone to and from work every day, etc...
Remember that, according to the story, there is no Chinese law against the use of these words. Microsoft is doing it "proactively" (eh).
The story is naive. How much business have you done in China? When a representative of the government expresses concern over some issue that is as significant as something on paper. Reality is far more complex than academic arguments.
Isn't it odd that a gung-ho American company that's all for free market capitalism can so very easily make itself look like a soul-crushing, freedom-hating, communist-friendly entity by just removing a couple of words from all its websites?
Kind of says something about the state of affairs in America these days.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
No, I don't think so. It does point out the fact that MS is lying when it says it must censor to remain within the law, because there is no such law. If it said "policy" rather than law, it would be more honest. If it listed the forbidden words in its TOS, it would be in the open. Contrast Google, which when faced with legal orders to remove links to contentious sites brings up documentation of why they are doing it, and a link to another site which does have the information linked. Though Google has I think chickened out on its Google.cn version from even trying.
China has many journalists in prison on unspecified charges for breaking such non-laws. (Anything the govt doesn't want you to write about can be declared a "state secret", and you become a spy &/or traitor.) Unfortunately the US has lost all its moral authority to argue against that, and China knows it can do so with little fear of embarrassment, let alone real pressure.
OK, that's pretty funny.. Sadly, I think I'll probably live to see that day.
Communism is a religion because it is based on faith, on unproveable principles. And most people who live under it are indoctrinated into it as part of a complex of beliefs, provable but never actually proven. It is taught in the vacuum it creates by destroying traditional religions, which it replaces. Which is why its trappings of ceremony, ritual, and heroic leaders is so effective. Communism, as it is practiced, is a religion - very different from the historical/economic/political theory developed by Marx and Engels, which was scientific (even if not entirely valid). Science itself is a faith, its consistent practice a religion, but that's a topic for another post, with its inevitable debates about Logical Positivism and inconsistency.
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make install -not war