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Chinese, U.S. Condemn Censorship
More reactions both at home and abroad to the censorship issue. picaro writes "According to the BBC, 'party elders' in China released an open letter decrying the current state of censorship in China, and suggesting that 'history demonstrates that only a totalitarian system needs news censorship, out of the delusion that it can keep the public locked in ignorance.'" LWATCDR writes "The US government is upset over restrictions of freedom of speech on the Internet. The United States, has 'very serious concerns' about the protection of privacy and data throughout the Internet globally, and in particular, some of the recent cases raised in China."
China is now looking for a more "fair and balanced" way to report the day's headlines.
Who is this letter being addressed to? Who will it reach that have the power to change the status quo?
I'm wondering what purpose this announcement serves. I'm glad to hear this, but is this just lipservice or a precursor to some real action?
I'm at a loss as to how such a major policy change can be brought about in China aside from a sudden onset of mass altruism. Part of it stems from a very poor understanding of the Chinese government structure. I'm sure I'm not the only one in the U.S that doesn't know.
Can someone fill in these information gaps?
Sadly, the writers made the unfortunate mistake of pointing out important parts using the infamous "black highlighter." They could not be located for clarification.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Hello J.B.:
There is a difference between protecting privacy and censorship. Privacy protection involves stopping the dissemination of personal information. On the other hand, censorship involves stopping the dissemination of public information.
For example, protecting my medical records, making it inaccessible to others without my permission, is protecting my privacy. Stopping news report of an earth quake, for another example, would be censorship.
Cheers.
B.Pascal
If China censors free speech, that's bad.
But if fundamentalist religious zealots threaten us with violence for exercising free speech, we're okay with that.
Seriously - WTF?
What?
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland all tied for 1st place.
The USA ranked 44th. (Fell more than 20 places)
China ranked 159th.
Now "Party Elders" really means "former party officials", so this isn't indicating change from the inside. Still a stunning statement. The close ties of the people signing the letter to Mao seems significant... Though the cynical part of me notes that at least two of them were explicitly propagandists, implying this may simply be more of the same (but to what purpose, I don't know). Yet the statement "only a totalitarian system needs news censorship" is one of those things that is so true it doesn't matter who says it.
The enemies of Democracy are
The day those in government stop accepting Chinese money to fund our historic spending is the day we can start taking our government seriously when it makes value judgements against China.
If they're so evil, stop accepting the money, it's really simple
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
My god your right! I just tried searching for George Bush Sucks and got nothing! Nor does there seem to be any entries for George bush is a terrorist! This blatant censorship must stop!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Hypocritical though they may be, their remarks in this case are wholesome and worth paying attention to.
:)
I say we should be willing to forgive some degree of hypocricy, in ourselves and in others, if we want to make progress. That doesn't make hypocricy OK, but acknowledging that we are not perfect is a step in the right direction. A hypocrite needs a way to move forward. It's simply insane to demand that all hypocricy stop at once. If you have ever tried to abandon hypocricy in your own life you will know how insanely hard (or impossible, in some cases) it is. It requires no less than Saintly/Noble wisdom. Moral improvements can come in small increments and we shouldn't set the bar so high as to make it impossible. Hypocricy is bad, but any movement in the right direction should be encouraged.
Sometimes the person screaming "Hypocrits!" is the one who is the biggest hypocrit of the bunch. I'm not saying you are like that, mind.
All of the above is just my opinion.
So, first they model their cencorship policy on our "model", then they criticize it. And apprently, we agree with them..
I'm so confused...
The U.S. is as concerned about "privacy rights" as casinos are in letting you win. The quote comes from State Department flunky Josette Shiner, a 15-year veteran of the Washington Times and a member of the cult known as the "Unification Church". When a Moonie tells you, on behalf of the U.S. Government, that the government is interested in personal privacy it's time to run in the other direction as fast as possible. FWIW Shiner got her appointment from Bush to the State Dept. as a political favor to the Moonies for their support.
When a woman who has spent the majority of her adult life in service to Rev. Moon there's very little credibility there.
so what you are saying is that some data is flagged 'personal' while other data is flagged 'public'.
in most cases I suppose, it is pretty easy to determine how the data should be flagged.
what about the cases where the line is not so black and white?
one could make arguments for both sides regarding something like the formula for a new drug. or source code. heck, even your medical records would be valuable public data when aggregated with large amounts of other records.
my only point is that i don't think it's as clear cut as you describe, and i think its odd in an article titled 'Chinese, US Condemn Censorship' to have it say the US is worried about data privacy protections.
when it comes to falun gong, taiwanese independance, etc, china wants the data to be private, IE not in the hands of the public. to the US that is censorship. there may also be data that china allows and the US doesn't, though I certainly couldn't give an example off the top of my head...
For instance, they're [REDACTED] about the [REDACTED] insofar as [REDACTED] is concerned, and yet they continually [REDACTED] the [REDACTED] for as long as they can [REDACTED].
I wish they'd address those issues as well.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
many say the prophet mohammed cartoons were a direct provocation of muslim sensibilities. and they would be correct. and equally true is that many muslims are rightfully deeply insulted by the cartoons... but most of them they stew in their anger in silence, or wage peacful protests. and some say the western media only focuses on the most violent of reactions. there is some truth to this too.
however, the problem is that, even with all of these mitigations, there is still a worrisome, large segment of the muslim world that thinks their reaction, violence, is appropriate. in other words...
1. the muslims were provoked: true
2. most muslims react peacefully and appropriately: true
3. western media shows a disproportionate amount of violent reaction: true
and yet, after all of those mitigations, there still really are a lot of muslims, a disporportionately, worrying large amount, who reacted with violence. and this points to a real problem in the muslim world, that haters of the west, and apologists for the muslim world, or anyone else for that matter, would be foolish to think they can ignore as a serious issue.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not really. Censorship means preventing the originator of the information from publishing it. Protecting privacy means enabling the originator of the information to keep it private, that is, not to publish it if he or she does not wish to. The one case in which protection of privacy and censorship come together is when party A wants to publish information about party B. There is then a potential conflict between A's freedom of speech and B's right to privacy.
In US law, and generally in the law of countries that protect freedom of speech and of the press, the protection of party B is addressed by means other than censorship, that is, either by laws preventing the release of confidential information in the first place (so that, e.g., your doctor is forbidden to release your medical information to a journalist without your permission, so in principle the journalist will never be in a position to publish it) or through the ability to sue someone who libels you or violates a non-disclosure agreement or its statutory equivalent.
So, yes, in certain circumstances there is a conflict between freedom of speech and privacy and protection of privacy and censorship therefore come to have similar goals, but this is true only in certain circumstances involving personal information and may, and is in many countries, addressed by means other than censorship.
I don't know what this Anonymous Coward finds hypocritical about some Chinese party elders crying foul of the censorship their "people's democracy" is practicing. The only thing I could complain about is that they're stating the obvious.
BTW, it's spelt 'hypocritEs'.
1) There are only a few top post in China that provide policy direction. Most of it currently filled by Hu, a civil engineer by trade (thus all the rail road, dam and other civil projects got a lot more funding.) 2) There is also a people's congress full of semi-elected people (some of them are appointed by local governments, some elect by villages, some by state companies). They mostly just rubber stamp what the top people want to do. But sometime they don't. 3) There is also a mass of state and local governments. The major cities' governments are controled closely from the top. But small cities and villages local government mostly ignore what ever the top tell them and do their own thing. 4) For a non-elect government, they still respond closely to the needs of the poeple. Like when the difference between rich and poor became an identified problem. The state abolished tax for the bottom 20%, lowered gas price for farmers and removed residency requirment to work in most cities. 5) To get to the top in Chinese Government, you would start in some government office. Then work your personal relationships, or prove yourself.
No, it is not. "Censorship" would be actually preventing or punishing display and distribution of said cartoon. Expressing disapproval of someone else's speech is itself a subset of free speech (not that the Government technically has First Amendment rights, but the principal applies.)
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
it is like an online flamewar, except that in real life, real flames are used
;-P
it even started, ironically, with a danish troll: the cartoons. trolls being a nordic invention, i think, that makes sense?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's strange for you guys to think that China(or Chinese) has a single mind. Or even the Chinese government is somehow unified under the same ideology and the whole nation is being ruled by one central government.
What you don't hear about is the riots in the countryside and local government officials (mostly even more corrupted than the central officials) gathering warlord-like power and basically dickslap the orders/directives from the central government.
Chinese central government is not as strong as most people think and they really don't have the ability to control the nation as a whole anymore. Most of the resources have been focused on developing certain areas (major cities, and costal trading zones), and most people outside of those area are not recieving any benefit from the development. If you know Chinese history, you can say that history is repeating itself(separation to unity to separation again). When the difference between country and the city reaches a critical point, there will either be 1)major riot that effects the whole nation (making the Tiananmen Crisis looking like a child's play) or 2)China in a desperate move trying to shift the nations attention by starting something big (Military action against Taiwan/Pick a fight against someone like Japan) and use the nationalism it has been developing as a tool to save its own ass.
I keep hearing about how US lawmakers don't like that Google, MS, and others have agreed to conform to Chinese law in order to continue doing business in China.
Don't get me wrong, I don't pretend to understand all the issues - or politics really.
But I don't understand why US lawmakers are giving US companies a hard time for complying with Chinese law in China. I mean, seriously - if you go to your local retailer and look at the goods for sale half say "Made in China", 49% more say "Made in Taiwan", and 1% say "Assembled in the USA". (Which reminds me, in Bush's recent state of the uninion didn't he say the foreground of the US economy was going to be our developing manufacturing industry?)
Anyway, point being - if the US lawmakers feel so strongly why are there not import/export sanctions on China rather then politcal badmouthing and epeen flexing?
Like I said, I just don't get it - but sure would like to understand more - I've googled but all I can find is fingerpointing and namecalling rather than any real pertinent information about why it's working this way. (Which I imagine someone is going to say it's political and all there is to be had on the subject is opinions, fingerpointing, and namecalling anyway.)
Ohh well, I suppose were it up to me I'd be doing my best to make sure importing goods evened out with manufacturing them here in the US. Guess that's why it's not up to me! (Kinda like I'd like to see outsourced IT end up costing US companies just as much (yes I know some would argue it already does) as having a US citizen as an employee)
First, I would strongly recommend that people listen to this clip on NPR's All Things Considered: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5206172 because it goes into a lot more depth and offers more insight than the BBC article.
1) A government for a country of that size is NOT monolithic. For example, it would be foolish to say that everyone in the US government is in favor of having troops in Iraq: there are a lot of Senators who are not happy at all. Likewise, the Chinese government has various factions. Because there is only one political party in China, political differences are expressed in the form of intra-party factionalism (whereas in the West, it is normally expressed in the form of different parties, though there are also a lot of intra-party factionalism as well). A lot of this in-fighting also happens privately, so many are not aware of it and the casual observer would think that the government was a Borg collective of identical viewpoints when it really is not.
2) This letter was written by what NPR news describes to be the "liberal wing" of the party and can be considered to be more or less a dissident voice. Such opinions are not new in China, and if you ever go there, you will notice that a lot of people will express these views (the Chinese are not stupid), except that they will express them privately, and you never hear about it in the media. I was personally very surprised that this letter of published. These folks are sufficiently power and well-connected that they are able to dissent like this.
3) I think that their target audience is the Chinese people and the rest of the government. You have to understand that the whole appeal of the Chinese Revolution is that the old government was corrupt and abusive, and there are many Chinese have not forgotten that and who are well aware of the irony that China threw out a bad government and replaced it with another bad one.
So I would not view this as some sort of public press release (that was earlier today, when they justified censorship on grounds of "pornography", which is bullshit). The earlier announcement today would be like Bush telling the UN why we need troops in Iraq. This letter would be like the Democrats grumbling about Bush putting those troops in Iraq.
Sorry to go slighly off topic, and to do some lecturing myself, but I find it incredibly sad that we've (rather, the influence of the MPAA/RIAA and similar) have created a society that actual believes your statement above. That the absurdity of owning an idea as if it were tangible property is not apparent to everyone, but rather embraced by many if not the majority, almost brings me to tears over the future of civilized society. The really sad part is that this concept of private ownership goes well beyond existing IP laws. People don't actually "own" IP; the laws allow a limited (in time and extent) right of denial for copying, distributing, or implementing the IP depending on it's form. This limited monopoly is not an inherent right of ownership, but rather an incentive to publicize the IP so that others can learn from it and use it in the long run, thus benefiting society.
To quote Thomas Jefferson:
You can have spin and still be balanced. You just need to account for precession.