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Google in China - The Big Disconnect
wile_e_wonka writes "The NY Times (registration required) has an article about Google's history in China (beginning way before this whole censorship thing). The article, among other things, talks about of Google's head of operations in China, and his goals for the company there. From the article: 'Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.'"
I like the way he talks about the liberating power of technology... so long as you don't want to discuss anything that the government doesn't agree with... or want to find out what happened in Tianamen square, or if you want to have unrestricted access to other webpages. But appart from that it does makes people completely free, free as a (caged) bird
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23googl e.html?ex=1303444800&en=972002761056363f&ei=5090&p artner=rssuserland&emc=rss
I've heard through sources that Google's webpage opens with, "A Great Leap Forward."
They thought about, "Smile, you're happy," but then figured it would offend too many and the pigeon rank system would get messed up.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
All lofty stuff in the article about getting "fully educated"... but in reality (as seen in the US and other places), I can envision one billion Chinese reading Slashdot, gambling online, surfing for porn, and watching paint dry
Otherwise the Internet could just become a way for the Chinese authorities to nab groups that used to be too spread out to effectively contain.
Just like every other technological leap since the hand axe has made people fre--oh wait...
students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.'
Cause, you know, just look at the US - Internet access for the past 10 years has turned the current crop of high schoolers into a bunch of geniuses, all just itching to discover antigravity or write a new sociopolitical theory that eliminates inflation and market swings...
lol of course on the other hand my little brother of 14 is writing better games than I was at 18...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Unfortunately I think a lot of what's seen in China is going to be censored, even if there are ways to get around their firewall (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4496163.s tm). I think most people aren't technically savvy enough or too lazy to bother searching for ways to beat the system, but there are those who will (even if its just a handful) and one can only hope the information will disseminate to the average person in China.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
That sounds great... until you think it through. Besides connected villages, this would also requires students who have...
I'm all about the rural poor becoming educated in China and everywhere, but it's going to take more than access to Google to do it.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.
But what good is an ivy-league education if you can't freely express your ideas?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
MIT does OpenCourseWare. Not sure about Harvard
I wonder if those students in China will be able to fully educate themselves about the events of the Tianamen Square massacre in 1989. I don't mean that they'll only learn about the Communist Party's history of the event, which differs with almost every other account including the eyewitnesses there. But I wonder if they'll be permitted to learn about the thousands of unarmed people that were shot and killed, the Tank Man, and the executions and jailings of the protestors.
If not, then these students won't be fully educated at all.
This high cost, of education, is kept artificially high by regional accreditation cartels. Of course people can argue that education is free; it is also unmarketable. People do not market their education, in most cases, they market their degrees. There are a number of solutions to this situation. However, there is a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, with it's accompanying high cost.
It will be interesting to see how they work around this problem.
Cryptome CN publishes information, documents and opinions banned by the People's Republic of China. http://www.cryptome.cn/
The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves
"Fully Educate Themselves". Not likely. For one, the courses are in english. Two, almost all of the courses on M.I.T.'s Open Courseware site require the purchase of multiple $100+ text books. In addition there is no feedback when following the courses. Unless you understand *how* to learn its very difficult to use these courses effectively.
Those are issues though, that only come to pass when "all the villiages are connected" and by definition reliably powered (which they are not). Furthermore, access is great - however the very nature of learning, long periods of reading, problem solving require that those wishing to learn have a dedicated console, or computer to utilize.
I'm all for educating the masses, I just think that running around spouting this "vision" is disingenuous.
Wouldn't it be great if one day we all woke up and China, along with every other repressive society, dropped all their inhumane activities and censorship? Wouldn't it be great if, on that day, every Chinese person was allowed to speak and inquire about whatever they want, whenever they want? Of course that would be great, but its not going to happen. Things like that don't magically happen over night. It takes time to move from censorship to free speech.
Unless you believe that this change should happen overnight, how do you expect it to happen? Isn't a gradual move to full freedom of speech better than not progressing at all unless you make the jump in one leap?
I think the problem here is that there is a big difference between what he calls "liberating" and what we call liberty. Liberty is a universal end in itself, technology may be a means for that, it may be a means for education too, but when all is said and done - if liberty is not an end in itself then people are not going to be what they were desinged to be. Technology doesn't magically secure and respect peoples free will, people half to do that, and it is clear that people who have power in China refuse to respect that.
Now if he was all goo goo about people using technlolgies to secure their rights and liberties, then that would be a different story, but that's not what I'm getting here at all.
Deliberate data corruption, such as censorship, can give users the illusion that they are well informed when the data permitted through appears authoritative. Ponder, for example, the confidence one felt upon reading cherry-picked information about Iraq; Judy Miller may well have thought she was better informed when in fact she was less informed.
How, then, can the data corruption be exposed, and who is motivated to do it?
One approach is maximizing the number of links to censored pages, to alert the censored individual that their data is corrupt. However there must be more effective techniques.
Perhaps more important, there must be a way to motivate individuals to fix this data corruption; forgive me for being cynical, but if there were a way to profit from the repair, that would be a powerful motivator.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/vi ew/
In the 6th video, university students in China are shown the picture of the Tank Man. They have no idea of who he is or what he is doing. They are unable to put the picture in any kind of social context or even guess what is going on in the photograph. China has a long way to go.
Yeah, that's exactly the problem, "you don't think so".
There are stuff that don't get coverage in the media. Video tapes confiscated by the US army from reporters. News that is forbidden to be released in the press. And you call that freedom of the press?
And besides, the American people are happy in allowing their country to do the things that happened in Iraq. Nobody's trying to stop their government. That's why you can talk all you want. If you are really planning to overthrow the US government (and is becoming a serious threat), you can bet you'll have FBI agents looking for you in no time.
Disclaimer: IANAA (I am not an American)
Don't quote me on this.
I think you have uncovered a big conspiracy here. Looking at the robots.txt file, It appears that what BUSH and CHENEY have conspired to do is to disallow search engine from indexing of the text only versions of the pages on the site!!!!
By disallowing the text only pages, search engines will end up indexing only the propagandist versions of pages that include pictures! I did not know that the corruption in the whitehouse has gone this far. If only Kerry were president, then there would be no disallowing of duplicate content in robots.txt. People would be free, when searching in Google, to see both the content with pictures in it, and content without pictures in it!
...you yourselves benefit from the experience, correct? I'm sorry but I'm going to have to question Google's reasoning here. I understand if you talk about markets, and how it's important for profits or this or that, but to act like it's in China's best interest to have Google there, come on. It's in Google's best interest to have Google there. I'm not saying that MS and Yahoo aren't doing the same thing with less press coverage, but let's not call a fart a perfume just because we liked who farted more. The average Chinese person isn't going to be liberated by the fact that Google has put in place a censored search engine, with or without a message. The only way the Chinese people will liberate themselves is through violent overthrow, most likely, just like all other revolutions in history. Or, and get this, they could fall like other forms of "communism", by the fact that this type of government system leads to poverty and eventually crumbles. But guess what, with Walmart, Google, and every other mulit-national corporation more than happy to do business with a fascist dictatorship, the economy continues to thrive, so there goes that idea.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
The communist bosses are really between a rock and a hard place. They can't have a capitalist business model and a totalitarian political model.
Yes they can. It's called facism. It just needs a war or three every decade to keep people in line.
May the Maths Be with you!
The author started his journey fixated on an 'absolutist' stance on freedom of speech, much as you are demonstrating. In the course of developing the article, he came to see that there ARE gradations in such freedom and that insisting on jummping instantly to an imagined 'pure' state may not be that productive.
It's so easy to look pious rather than make the hard choices as Google did.
The most exciting behavior that I read in the article is the exploding level
of voluntary participation, expression, and personal choice to take more risk.
It is NOT the technologies themselves, but the behavior and perception changes
that they enable that will make the biggest difference.
There are thousands of small colleges and school far from the major universities that will benefit from the MIT materials. It is much more afforable for them to get power and internet access than to amass a collegiate level library. There are also many English speaking teachers in China who can craft courses to suit the level of their students. You're right that few studentls can use the materials on their own. But it is a great resoure for teachers.
... what the answer here is -- I'm not entirely convinced that access to a censored internet will somehow eventually blossom into a democratic China, nor am I entirely convinced that it is possible (or impossible) to effectively censor the internet.
But I AM convinced that if the Chinese were to completely block outside content, creating a Chinese intranet with only government-approved content, it would be a stable system, and would satisfy the Chinese people's need for contact and communications... and would also be a horrible thing to have happen.
So I reluctantly support the western net services doing business in China under Chinese totalitarian rules.
But I do wonder how the Chinese authorities are going to deal with the influx of lots of tourists at the Olympic games, many of whom will want to photograph Tianamem Square and will inevitably ask a lot of awkward questions. If the Chinese want to interact with the West, they cannot avoid these things.
In recent Frontline episode on the Tianamen Square "Tank Man" (really a report on China's political and economic evolution since the massacre), it made it seem that the Chinese government has stopped funding public education in rural areas. Peasants now have to pay to send their children to school, which most can't afford. It seems as though China is working very intently on keeping the rural peasants ignorant and illiterate, so that they can be more easily controlled and exploited by the government, Western corporations, and the "new Chinese capitalist elite" in the big cities. I find it hard to believe that the Chinese government would allow this incredibly valuable slavelike underclass to learn enough to read web pages. The only ones who will benefit are the new Chinese capitalist elite, who have a similar vested interest in keeping the underclass ignorant.
"students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T."
... Shanghai is a long way to go to retrieve the Caltech Cannon.
Will they also get other "ideas" from that coursework
Get your tagline off my lawn.
People love to exaggerate the potential of the internet. It's going to make it so that you don't actually have to leave your seat to travel the world! You can go to school from your living room! It's going to liberate everybody!
Like those stupid AOL commercials with that over-weight middle-aged guy running with professional runners or the kid swimming with athletes. Yeah, because reading a bunch of text, screwing with an unintuitive flash interface and looking at miniscule over-compressed photographs is just like being there!
The internet certainly has a lot to offer, but it's not going to do anything for people living in places like rural parts of China. What they need a fancy computer with all the blinking lights isn't going to provide. Where would these people even afford such a luxury when they can barely afford to keep enough electricity running to power a few lightbulbs, assuming they even have any electrcity at all.
If anything this is going to cause a bigger gap between the weathy and poor. The impoverished remain where they are while those already well off exploit every opportunity they see.
Of course the big problem I see here are American companies stumbling over themselves to appease China with the United States along for the ride. If this nation were a bit more principled and didn't worship the mighty dollar at the expense of everything else they'd threaten to take their business elsewhere the moment China starts trampling on human rights. It isn't like China is the only nation in the region with over 1 billion citizens.
Take a wild guess at which president said:
"He's used the word 'win-win,' and that's a very important concept when it comes to economics that are mutually beneficial."
It is truly amazing when you consider which one has been speaking his native language. God Bless America...cause if He doesn't we're even more screwed than I thought!
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
I'd suggest everyone watch this 90 minutes doucmentary online (free). It's excellent. It also talks about people outside of cities, like villages, having to come to work in the cities. Also, censorship. Even video clips of the cases with Yahoo!, Google, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).