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."
No, not unless it is a recent addition. I am not from China but travel there frequently.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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
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.