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

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.

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.

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/