Slashdot Mirror
100 Million Online in China
Colin Smith writes "Rising levels of personal wealth in the nation of China means that the country now has over 100 million internet users, and the authorities are discovering just how difficult it is to place a dam against information in the digital age." From the article: "Only last week, the authorities threatened to shut down websites and blogs that failed to register with regulators in a new campaign to tighten controls on what the public can see online. The so-called Great Firewall of China is constantly being breached as citizens and the authorities play a cat and mouse game with the flow of information."
The interesting point for me is the US companies who participate in helping the Chinese government censor their internet (ie Microsoft, Cisco Systems). I understand there is heaps of money to be made, but I question the integrity of their decision. IMO ethically it is *wrong*, but does that mean these companies can be faulted?
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
I think this is going to be almost identical to the "War on drugs" in the United States.
With all those millions and millions online in China swapping programs, songs and such, you'd think the RIAA would go after them, if the purpose was really to prevent damage to the intellectual property holder.
What's going to be extremely interesting is watching a closed society like China start talking one-on-one to the rest of the world. I'd give it twenty years before public opinion changes in China. I can't see them sharing information freely and being as nationalistic as they currently are. If you want to stop a future war with China, help them talk to each other all you can. My two cents.
Brains! Brains! Give me Brains!
"But the Chinese authorities are less in love with the net. The government regularly tries to block access to material it considers pornographic or politically subversive."
There goes about 80% or more of internet content.
Yeah, that sounds about right. 80% or more of the internet is pornographic material.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
The greatest weapon the US has against oppressive regimes is our cultural, entertainment and information exports. It's hard to oppress a people when they know that there's something slightly cooler then living in China under a communist regime.
The Soviets could regulate so many aspects of their citizenry's daily life, but what they couldn't manage to get a hold on was what they thought was cool. It might be an overly simplistic view, but part of me thinks that it was Coca-Cola and Levi's jeans that brought communism to its knees in the soviet bloc. (and of course, coca-cola and levis is not much to base a government on, which is why so many countries have struggled with the concept of democracy)
I think something similar could easily happen in China.
I don't presume to think that the Chinese would try, or even want to be like the US, but I think there's a certain sense of freedom and independence embodied in American culture, and that freedom is alluring and infectious. The more the Chinese people have access to something as stupid as Slashdot or Wikipedia or...anything, the more they're going to crave more content. The more content they crave, the more content must be censored until something has to break.
:::: the insomniac's digest
You have to remember, with a country with a population of 1.3 Billion, with only 100million people online, that's still just over 7% penetration. While I admit it is growing by leaps and bounds, it is by no means a large percentage compared to the US, some European nations or Japan.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would
deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
-- Sid Meier's Alpha Centuri
So true, so very true.
oh, so it has nothing to do with Chinese currency being devalued (some say about 15%) to keep the flow of goods travelling in one direction?
Let's face it, the Chinese government has no intention of yielding power to the free market. In fact, they will use the profits from trade to build up their military might.
The Chinese are not the "enemy" per se, but they have plainly stated their intentions to dominate the globe, and the US is just a stepping stone along the path.
Screw our politicians for helping them in their quest.
For the last month or so, I've been chatting with a lot of different people in China using Skype. (Nice thing about Skype, is that it's encrypted end-to-end. No JBT's listening in.)
I've found that the people I'm talking to are entirely aware that their government lies to them routinely, and they want to know about their own history.
They know that they lost some relatives in the 1960's, but they have no idea that Mao killed more Chinese than Tojo. They know that something happened in Beijing in 1989, but they don't know that thousands of unarmed protestors were slaughtered. I've been doing a lot of cutting and pasting of wikipedia pages.
I'm convinced that the internet will be the end of the Red Dynasty, and the way it will happen is that the JBT's will lose their ability to lie to the people. Once most Chinese realize that most of their countrymen are sick and tired of the Red Dynasty, then it's game over for the gerontocrats in Beijing.
I only hope that China becomes a free country with as little bloodshed as possible. Killing the Politburo would probably suffice, although justice would demand the demise of thousands of the petty thugs as well.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Soon the Chinese government will learn from modern democratic governments and sophisticated corporations that trying to control the flow of information is the wrong way to go about it.
It's far easier and more effective to control the public's interpretation and prioritization of information than to limit the information itself.
This seems very much to me like the proposed anti-p2p bill in congress. It is incredibly hard to filter the internet. Makers of internet porn filters already know this quite well, and they spend a lot of money compiling blacklists. They will never be able to filter out all porn. Same with china, they are spending loads of money keeping their citizens censored. And they will never completely get it done. And if they somehow do, there are always proxies.
Now about the p2p bill. Congress is proposing a bill to make p2p internet transactions illegal. China is doing the same thing, except they are already trying. I must also mention that finding more that 50% of p2pers is incredibly hard, and arguably impossible.
In summary, the internet cannot be filtered, at least completely, as it is impossible.
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