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

Re:It's all a matter of style

[Shihar]

The only real 'speech' laws that the US has that it activly tries to enforce over the Internet are child porn laws. Those are enforced because compelling a minor to strip naked and fuck a dog or whatever is illegal. China and the West are night and day when it comes to Internet content. The West makes almost no attempt to regulate the content that goes up. The US is actually the most extreme case that does the absolutely least regulation. If you want to throw up a Nazi hate site, that is a-okay in the US.

China is full of shit if they think there is any parallel between what the US does and what they do in terms of Internet censorship.

China's problem is that at some point they are going to have to turn around and face their internal problems in a constructive non-authoritarian manner. The US can have neo-Nazi websites because it has a stable political system that, while certainly not perfect, does a good job at keeping the masses content enough that rebellion doesn't linger on anyone's mind. China on the other hand has a political system where the masses have little say in governance. China has left the only opposition to government policies to be rebellion. As a result, China deals with constant (and little reported on) riots and instances of civil unrest that are completely alien to most Western governments.

A day of reckoning is coming for China, and their tardiness in opening up their government to oversight by the general populace is going to make this reckoning all the worse. China needs to take some more serious steps towards instituting good civil governance.

Don't believe that China has a serious problem with their ability to govern? Consider this fact. Official figures admit 74,000 individual incidents of unrest in 2004.*

*Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2006/01/16/wchina16.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/01/16 /ixworld.html

There is dissent among the leadship

[caudron]

Senior Party Leaders Join Battle Against Chinese Censorship.

This idea that the Chinese government is entirely pro-censorship is a bit untrue. There are those within China---even some who are high up the political food chain---who see this as a bad idea.

I wonder how it'll all turn out?

In other words...

[Arandir]

In other words, it's okay for China to block freedom and democracy because the "West" blocks child pornography? Pardon me if I don't see the moral equivalence.

A better comparison would be France and Germany blocking certain Nazi related information. It is a better comparison because the "West" (as a whole) condemns it as well.

Re:Well played, China. Well played.

[arivanov]

You can add to that most sabotage and bomb making material being illegal in the UK and Germany to the point where it is impossible to write a truthfull article about the WWII resistance methods and post it on the web.

If put on my website a description of any of the devices used for train derailment by the Russian partisans or the French resistance my hosting company will get smacked by a takedown notice right away. And it will comply.

Same for a description of any of the biological weapons delivery systems pioneered by the Japanese in WWII (as they can be made in a basement), same for the methods used by Germans to distribute cholera in the civilian population on the Eastern front in 1917, so on so fourth.

It is scary when history becomes illegal.