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

Well played, China. Well played.

[daveschroeder]

Deflect the attention from yourselves, and pretend that you're just doing the same thing the West (read: United States) is doing: just trying to protect innocent children on the internet ("Who will think of the children?"), at the same time attempting to change the debate from your own despicable censorship of speech and thought to the alleged transgressions of Western governments.

Except that the reality is easy for anyone to see: you (attempt to) suppress sites dealing with politics, religion, dissent, and anything critical of the Chinese government or that doesn't support positions sanctioned by the Chinese government. The West and US don't do this (no matter how much our friendly, local conspiracy theorists might claim it).

Come on, China. I thought you could lie better than that.

Re:Well played, China. Well played.

[jahudabudy]

Except that the reality is easy for anyone to see:

Which does not mean that very many people will really see it, though. If China's talking points were picked up by Western media, and repeated as though they had some validity, people would believe them, regardless of what reality actually is. This is actually a very clever thing for China to do; at the very least, it will instill some doubt in some people. It also gives a plausible deniability scenario to those who want to support China for various other reasons, but are afraid of being tarnished by the censorship issue. They can now point to this and say "Hey, we were misled by China. It's not that we support censorship, we just believed China when they said they only did the good kind."

Come on, China. I thought you could lie better than that.

It doesn't really matter how good the lie is. These days, it is quantity, not quality. It is better to repeat a bad lie one million times than a good one one thousand times. Ironically, this sort of media image manipulation actually is China simply following other countries' leads.

So they consider searching for...

[Zantetsuken]

Tienamen square and all the other attempts at revolution as pornography?

Thank you Big Brother

[aztektum]

For keeping me safe from seeing a pair of breasts. Because you aren't very good at keeping me safe from much else.

Seriously, it shouldn't be the government's job to keep kids away from porn. It should be their fucking parent's job. So China's argument is still BS to me.

It's all a matter of style

[Harmonious Botch]

It's really not that different. Both governments believe that some of their citizens need to be protected from corrupting influnces ( a position that I do not agree with, BTW ). We here in the west, who are unduly obsessed with the silly idea of the innocence of childhood, protect one kind of citizen. They try to protect another kind.

Our governments are really very similar.