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.

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.

So they consider searching for...

[Zantetsuken]

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

Uh oh!

[voice_of_all_reason]

Someone better call the Whaaaaaarickshaw!

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.

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

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/

Crazy kids...

[RyoShin]

"Pornography", huh? So that's what you kids are calling it these days?

Back in my day, it was either "political unrest" or "down with the man"! We didn't have to make up no fancy words for it, just said it as it is, and people were alright with that, yup.

Crazy kids. I swear, there's no telling what they will come up with next!

Now get the hell off my lawn!

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?