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."

Comments

Chatting with People in China

[jcr]

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