Chinese Claim Internet Censorship Modeled on West

ubermiester wrote to mention a NYT article reporting on a Chinese Press Briefing. At the event Liu Zhengrong, supervisor of Internet affairs for the Chinese State Council, stated that the state control of Internet access is based on Western models. From the article: "Mr. Liu said the major thrust of the Chinese effort to regulate content on the Web was aimed at preventing the spread of pornography or other content harmful to teenagers and children. He said that its concerns in this area differ minimally from those in developed countries. Human rights and media watchdog groups maintain that Chinese Web censorship puts greater emphasis on helping the ruling party maintain political control over its increasingly restive society. Such groups have demonstrated that many hundreds of Web sites cannot be easily accessed inside mainland China mainly because they are operated by governments, religious groups or political organizations that are critical of Chinese government policies or its political leaders."

Comments

Harvard study

[slackaddict]

"...Having requested some 204,012 distinct web sites, we found more than 50,000 to be inaccessible from at least one point in China on at least one occasion. Adopting a more conservative standard for determining which inaccessible sites were intentionally blocked and which were unreachable solely due to temporary glitches, we find that 18,931 sites were inaccessible from at least two distinct proxy servers within China on at least two distinct days. We conclude that China does indeed block a range of web content beyond that which is sexually explicit. For example, we found blocking of thousands of sites offering information about news, health, education, and entertainment, as well as some 3,284 sites from Taiwan. A look at the list beyond sexually explicit content yields insight into the particular areas the Chinese government appears to find most sensitive..."

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/

Re:Well played, China. Well played.

[Uber Banker]

Your comments, too, will be censored by the chinese government by DJCacophony (832334) Alter Relationship on Tuesday February 14, @05:51PM (#14717303)

Hell, with all the criticism we give the Chinese govt here on /. - I wouldnt doubt it a bit if they just have the entire domain blocked by Zantetsuken (935350) Alter Relationship on Tuesday February 14, @05:56PM (#14717334)

Slashdot.org is not blocked within China, not in part nor in whole. Some sites are, wikipedia.org and news.bbc.co.uk being among them. Seems the Chinese government are not bothered with the criticism they receive on Slashdot, which wouldn't surprise me, because it is extremely poor in signal-to-noise ratio and where it hits target it is extremely obtuse. The benefit of Chinese coders reading the latest PHP book reviews clearly outweighs the downside.

Lying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think this is signifcantly different than the laws which have been passed in the United States to censor content on the Internet? Or the routine arrest of peaceful protesters for expressing their views in public in the United States? It isn't. China and the United States have miles to go. As but one example of a political site that has been attempted to be censored by the lawmakers in the United States: Planned Parenthood. Go to a library in some parts of the United States and experience that filter first hand. COPPA ain't an imaginary law. It actually exists. The government of the United States of America is actively trying to suppress expressive content on the Internet today. Did you support the posting of DVD-CCA code? Well, your government did not.

If the U.S. lawmakers want to criticize China, they might learn another expression: Don't throw stones in glass houses.

Re:Well played, China. Well played.

[monkeydo]

Pornography is *not* illegal in the US, despite what many people think of it.

Some content is illegal in the US, and there have been numerous high profile stings where the fed.gov has busted people for distributing kiddie porn and the like. These stories could be very easily twisted by just leaving out some of the facts, and all of a sudden, "US Government Arrests Suburban Couple for Exercising Freedom of Speech."

Sold out.

[Kadin2048]

I think you got your verb tenses wrong.

Taiwan was recognized as a soverign nation, until they were effictively sold out by Pres. Jimmy Carter and numerous other world leaders in the name of political expediency in the 1970s. They were expelled from the UN via Resolution 2758, and were 'un-recognized' by the US via the Taiwan Relations Act.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Genera l_Assembly_Resolution_2758
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act