Slashdot Mirror
China Employs Campus Internet Overseers
d'alz writes "China's Internet police, reportedly including as many as 50,000 state agents, have monitored the Chinese citizenry's online habits. They have blocked Web sites, erased commentary and arrested people for what is deemed anti-Party, or anti-social, speech. Several hours each week Hu Yingying, a college student, goes to a little-known on-campus office crammed with computers. There she logs on, unsuspected by other students, to help police her university's Internet forum." From the article: "Under the Civilized Internet initiative, service providers and other companies have been urged to purge their servers of offensive content, ranging from pornography to anything that smacks of overt political criticism or dissent. The Chinese authorities say that more than two million supposedly 'unhealthy' images have already been deleted under this campaign by various mainland Internet service providers, and more than six hundred supposedly 'unhealthy' Internet forums were shut down. These deletions are presented as voluntary acts of corporate civic virtue, but have a coercive aspect to them, because no company would likely risk being singled out as a laggard."
we used to have KGB men monitoring the copier machines. Every document had to be signed off along with the page count, and then there was a guy making sure you don't copy some illegal or personal stuff.
VKh
During the Nazi holocaust of european Jews and other "undesirables," there were prisoners in the camps known as "capos." These prisoners were collaborators with the SS and an instrument of the camp regime of humiliation and cruelty. Their role was to break the spirits of the other prisoners. The Capos had warm clothing, enough to eat, and lived in a reserved section of the prison barracks. In many instances Capos who mistreated other prisoners were put on trial after the war.
Hu Yingying is nothing but a Chinese capo. She works to ensure the continued oppression of her own people in the hope of being given special treatment. If freedom ever does come to the middle kingdom, you can rest assured that she and others like her will be just as reviled as the Capos of the holocaust are today. Whether or not she'll be hanged is uncertain, but one can hope.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Perhaps democracy was only a temporary blip on the radar of history, and humanity's natural state is under the boot of the tyrant?
The ancient Greeks thought so. Or at least they thought that humanity would continually rotate in and out of tyranny.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
According to chinese culture going all the way back to the Shang dynasty, the mere fact that they are in power signifies that they are legitimate. When they lose the Mandate of Heaven, they will be removed from power, and the removal will be a sign that they have lost the Mandate of Heaven. Whoever comes to power will clearly weild the Mandate of Heaven, and the people will rally around the new government.
Comparing the PRC to a Nazi concentration camp?
You're right, it's not an accurate comparison at all--the Chinese communist party has killed far more people than the Nazis ever did.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
...Defense officials recently slipped a provision into a bill before Congress...
/.ers would be on him like stink on shit demanding details. What provision? What bill? What was the vote in the committee? What about the corresponding bill in the House?
Yeah, those defense officials yelled, "LOBBYIST!", and when Congress looked the other way, they slipped the provision in the bill.
Man, if somebody posted a comment like Isikoff's here (which, incidentally, is almost two years old!),
BTW, the provision (Section 502) that was "slipped into" the Senate bill (S.2386/HR.4548) was eliminated in the conference committee.
-h-
This is a pretty bad analogy. The students did not engage in struggle in order to stifle dissent among their peers. The vast majority were slavish devotees of Mao to begin with. Instead, it was a cynical means for Mao to shift the power balance within the government from the then current leaders Deng Xio Peng and Liu Shaoqi, who had taken the reigns of power from Mao after his failed Great Leap Forward five year plan. The Great Leap Forward led to massive crop failures while farmers spent their energy making worthless pig iron in small homebrew forges instead of farming. Deng Xio Peng and Liu Shaoqui rightly realized the policy blunders of Mao and pushed him out in order to get food production back on track.
But Mao wanted his power back. So, he encouraged students to form a "Red Guard" paramilitary group to rid China of the Four Olds (old customs; old culture; old habits; old ideas). To do this they were given free reign to interrogate those old members of society who were in power -- for those who were in power were, by definition, corrupt because they were not equally sharing their gains. The students then took these old leaders and "struggled" against them through violent means, until the person either admitted his crimes or died while refusing.
Ratting on other students to stifle dissent was not the intent of the Cultural Revolution, though other students who had been children of former landlords, or whose parents had been caught up in the anti-rightist movement during the Great Leap Forward were fair game for "struggle" sessions as well. Mao's principle goal was to unseat Deng Xio Peng and Liu Shaoqui, which he did when students successfully stormed the presidential compound and took both into custody in 1968. Liu Shaoqui died shortly thereafter in prison, while Deng Xio Peng weathered the storm and eventually retook the reigns of power some time after Mao's death. As the Cultural Revolution neared its zenith, street fighting broke out among various factions of Red Guards, who each fought to proclaim their greater loyalty to Mao. In this manner outright civil war broke out between student groups broke out, with automatic weapons and artillery fire destroying entire city blocks and killing numerous civilians, until Mao released the army to re-take control of city streets by force. And then the Cultural Revolution was over, and a bunch of Red Guard students were executed for treason. And, of course, Mao was the Great Leader controlling the reigns of power once again.
It is in this context that one can view the 1989 Tiananmen Square repression, as Deng Xio Peng was leader at the time. If you remember, that was a student led revolt against the political leadership ostensibly in support of democratic reforms. However, Deng Xio Peng was most certainly frightened by the breakdown in law and order of the Cultural Revolution and likely thought he was acting to stop a repeat of the Cultural Revolution. Not that the violent repression at Tiananmen Square was an appropriate response, it's just that most people here in the west viewed it as a violent repression of democratic values, when it is more likely that Deng Xio Peng thought he was preventing yet another student led civil war that he had seen during the late 1960s.
Take us forward another sixteen to seventeen years (nearly another generation) and one can see that the context of cultural and political repression common in China today is far less bloody than prior generations. It is still repressive. It still relies on "self-criticism" in order to enforce the social norms of imposed groupthink. But the current leadership is, perhaps, a bit less violent in its repression of dissent.
Unless you're Falun Gong. Who make an excellent source of fresh organs for transplantation to the buying public. But, hey, that's just a matter of collecting hard currency by killing and selling the body parts of religious kooks. It's not political like Internet Censorship. *cough!*
the US government should be very weary about cooperating on any issue that involves taking away freedom from the Chineese people.
WARY.
Slashdot grammer makes me weary but your never going to change so it's a mute point.