Slashdot Mirror
China Sets New Rules On Internet News
auckland map writes "China set new regulations on Internet news content which ban the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest. Established news media needed permission to run a news Web site, while new operators had to register themselves with government information offices. This move further widens a campaign of controls Chinese government has imposed on web sites, communication, leisure and businesses." From the article: "The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest ... [internet news sites] must be directed toward serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests."
Time and time again "national security" is shown to be the antithesis of freedom. Be it in China or the United States, putting such a focus on protecting "national security" results in severe harm to the liberties and life of the nation's citizenry.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The Reuters copy is a bit spotty in its coverage...more information can be found here, here, and here.
Interesting quote from the third source listed above:
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The last great communistic/socialistic/whatever government on the planet. This is akin to the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain. Now we have the Digital Curtain (I just made that up, heh, or maybe I read it and subconsciously made it my own -- who knows...).
Wonder how long they can stand up to the onslaught of information not controlled by the state?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
In the west you dont even know when "public opinion is being guided" in supposed national interest.
Surur
Information is the location of things. Computation is moving things around.
China seems usually slow to use their power - they try asserting control over something carefully. Markets, freedoms, social networks - they can all be controlled, as long as you assert yourself very slowly over decades. They seem to have had some level of respect for the Internet, though it has gotten away from them in many ways, they're likely very used to that with social networks. But, like with America, the exceptions aren't so dangerous as converting the easilly convinced that the freedom of the internet is not as important as loyalty to the state.
Now, they seem to be getting more confident over their control - or else just want to send the message that they are confident. Is this confidence real, is it a false message, or could they be fooling themselves? I for one can't know - but it seems fairly conservative compared to the controls they could exert. It remains to be seen how they will enforce this, or try to make these new rules matter in the minds of their citizens.
The other source of confidence, of course, would be in the inability for outside forces to act against the growing market importance of China. China has done a great job of controlling the markets they act conservatively to control - now they get to reap the growing political benefit of that control. Perhaps eventually, their sheer political mass may allow them to finantially eliminate critics afar... I for one fear the day they begin to truly adopt intellectual property laws. Not because they are an especially malicious force compared to other governments, but because they are humans concentrating a great ammount of power, who may begin to assert ownership of ideas more powerfully than ever before.
China is NOT a "communist" country.
They have an authoritarian government with a capitalist economic system. "State capitalist" is the more correct term. (authoritarian states are not necessarily communist, although the reverse is generally true).
This may be offtopic, but usually the conversation always manages to drift towards this anyways regardless of the original topic.
The problem isn't "national security" as such, and there's nothing wrong with a community (country-sized or any other size) protecting itself.
The problem is that "national security", "patriotism", ironically even "democracy", are also the first excuses someone reaches for when they want to take your freedom away. No, let me rephrase that: the problem is that the people tend to get stuck on some _words_ instead of their _meaning_.
E.g., people are raised to rant and rave about how they have a right to free speech, but don't actually know what that right means. ("Congress shall make no law...") Most think it means the exact _opposite_: that they're allowed to troll a board or shout obscenities at the neighbour, but the government is still allowed to censor anything. I mean, duh, it's the government, of course they're supposed to tell us what to do and what not to do, right? Wrong-
E.g., people are raised on ideas like that patriotism means they must obey and do their duty, but they lose focus of: to whom. Hint: it means to the country, not to one particular party or leader. Sometimes the patriotic thing to do might actually be to disobey a bad leader.
And so on.
So you're left with whole generations which have been raised basically with a Pavlov's dog kind of reflex. You ring the bell, the dog does something by reflex, without thinking. Same here. You say "patriotism", people get a knee-jerk reaction to obey anything. There's a whole bunch of magic words that just trigger a reflex, without much thinking or questioning.
And it should come as no surprise when some people do come along and use them to their own interest. It's like having a big red button that says "push here to get an immediate advantage." Is it any surprise when some people come and push it?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What's great about the bulk of the media in the US is that they impose these limitations and bans on themselves, without having to have the government do it for them.
Ignore Alien Orders
Funny, I was going to say Democrats are. They're the socialist-wannabes, aren't they?
Actually, by European standards most US Democrats are pretty comfortably to the right of the center in politics. Everytime I hear you Neocons accuse liberal or moderate right wing politicians in the US of being Socialists I wonder what would happen if somebody introduced one of you US-American conservatives to a real live 24 carat way-left-of-center Socialist, never mind an acutal honest to goodness die hard Communist like we have them over here in Europe? My pet theory is that you would go red in the face, then steam would shoot out of your ears and your eyes would bulge out followed by a massive bang as your head explodes. Many US-Americans speak very belligerently about Communists, Socialsits and how they are the spawn of Satan etc... but I get the feeling most US-Americans have little or no idea what those words acutally mean.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Let me be the first to say [No Carrier]
My list of multiplayer
It would sound like a good constitution (it even includes the Freedom of Religion) if they didn't literally throw it away with Articles 51 and 52:
In other words, the freedoms that come before those paragraphs are only suffered at the state's whim. If they feel that you are in any way working against the state (e.g. the criticism they just "allowed" in Article 41) or attempting to undermine the "unity of the state" (e.g. the freedom of religion granted by Article 36) then the state will step in and run you over with a tank or throw you in jail.
So much for the constitution of the People's Repulic of China. Be very happy if you live in a country to whom rights are more than words on a sheet of paper.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
... to this and other human rights abuses in China by, uh, giving $162 billion per year (and increasing) business to China, $55 billion dollars Foreign Direct Investment, and ship hundreds of thousands of US jobs to China.
</sarcasm>
Is China already too powerful/influental that nobody could influence them even if they wanted to? Or is it simply that nobody in the ruling class cares about human rights abuses as long as there is more money to be made?
Blair is alot of things, most of all he is not a Socialist. The labor party defined it self as a 'Democratic Socialist party' (Yes, there is a big difference between Social Democrats and Socialists, the latter are usually more radical). Today New Labor has flushed most of the original Social Democratic ideals of the Labor party down the toilet. The best descritpion of him that I have yet to hear is that he is: "... a tory infiltrator in the Labor party who by some fantastic chain of events managed to become it's leader". People have even speculated about whether or not he is a Neocon. Labor may have started out as a left wing party but today they have migrated considerably further to the Right of the policial spectrum.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Seems a little misplaced to excoriate a country which has lifted more than 200 million people out of unimaginable poverty in the last 20 years. I suppose it's preferable to leave our gentle sensibilities in place and pave the streets with the corpses of those who starved.
You have to realize that, not withstanding Articles 35 and 41, any right of speech, publication, or suggestions of criticisms on state organ must be made with the premise to protect the unity of the state. As long as you establish your loyalty to the state, it doesn't mean the government can randomly throw you in jail or run you over with tanks.
This is often overlooked by the "freedom fighters." They try to fight the system itself rather than fight under the accordance of the system. Take the open source versus proprietary war for example. There may exist open source extremists who would run around erasing copies of Windows and install Linux. However, some open source developers also make their software available for Windows, so even Windows users have choice. The difference is that, when you're promoting choice using open source software, you have to recognize that those who are using proprietary software also have a choice.
The goodie bag stuff for freedom defender is that, although you promote whatever you believe, freedom of speech or what not, there are people who choose to live happily under the current system of the state and the constitution. You simply shouldn't cause disturbance to other people's lives in the name of freedom. You have to find a way to defend your rights while preserving the unity of state.
This has been necessary for China in the past century due to extreme poverty and scacity of resources. It had been too costly to tear down a system and build a new one. If you want to improve the system, you must find a way to do that without disruption. That's the historical background of this constitution.
And think about why even Linus wouldn't approve some radical changes to the Linux kernel.
I once had a signature.