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."
From TFA: So she's a professional astroturfer as well as an informant.
Some more: 'Sterilize' the Internet would be more appropriate.
And finally: Ji Xiaoyn, please report to your local Party official for reeducation.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Considering the recent ink on Google, is anyone suprised here?
What essentially is happening in China is a 21st Century version of the Cultural Revolution - an electronic purging, if you will, of any "impure" expression among the populace.
You only get one guess as to who decides what "impure" is... or is not.
Interesting (but not at all a shock) that students are recruited to rat out their peers. There must be a big-time carrot being held out to rise up high within Party ranks.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
In the U.S. if content the government dislikes is printed or spoken by a journalist who chooses to do so, they don't end up sentenced to forced labor, or worse, end up with their family billed for the price of the bullet used to execute them.
I'd say there's more of a difference than you think.
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
This is impossible as we have been told, by numerious "students" from china, on this forum that such things simply do not happen and that the reports of such in the western media are simply because we "don't understand them".
Although most of its students know nothing of the university's Internet monitoring efforts, the leaders of Shanghai Normal conducted seminars last week for dozens of other Chinese universities and education officials on how to emulate their success in taming the Web.
University officials turned away a foreign reporter, however, making clear that the university does not wish to publicize its activities more broadly. "Our system is not very mature, and since we've just started operating it, there's not much to say about it," said Li Ximeng, deputy director of the university propaganda department. "Our system is not open for media, and we don't want to have it appear in the news or be publicized."
Because then someone might find out, although I doubt anyone in China would find out since it would no doubt be blocked by censors. The fact is, it's just an extension of their internal spy network, adding one more data source to allow the Chinese goverment to keep tabs on its citizens and purge "unwanted ideas." This is just astounding, especially in a country with such a large population. But I guess when you keep the rural poor in ignorance, you can pretty much run the country any way you please, even though they outnumber you. China was such a fascinating and interesting place two or three thousand years ago, but now it's taken the concept of "insular" to a new extreme.
For her part, Hu beams with pride over her contribution toward building what the government calls a "harmonious society."
Read: dissent will not be tolerated.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
What is most interesting, at least in my opinion, is that economic success, which we once thought of as solely the result of a free market, is also attainable by a heavy-handed communist society. China is soon to be the world's economic leader with its billion or so people and growing technological prowess.
So what are they doing right? We can sit back and bask in our freedoms, but as we can see from our current situation, we will languish economically. Is the rate of growth of China's economy sustainable and is there anything we can learn from them in regards to our own economy?
Everything else is a red herring. Anyone that tells you the most important problem with China is its lack of civil rights is either ignoring their economic threat or is purposely leading you away from that topic. One or two hundred people locked up for no reason or a handful of "bad images" are just a blip on the radar compared to the damage they will be able to inflict against us if they ever gain the economic upper hand.
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
copier machines monitor KGB men!
Actually, sounds like Soviet Russia was a lot like Kinkos.
In colonial India they had a tradition where when a man died, they threw his wife into a fire. Upon hearing this the British general said "well, we in Britian have a tradition too, we hang people who thow women in to fires, so you go a head with building your fire and we'll go ahead with building gallows next to your fire and after you carry out your tradition we'll carry out ours."
The point is that countries don't have rights, traditions and cultures don't have rights either, but individuals do. While everyone talks about respect for Chineese culture and Chineese traditions, they often seem to ignore how these same Chineese nationals adjust to the freedom in neighboring HK in a matter of days. It is not Chineese culture that is unable to adjust, it is China's communist government. I is not US expectations that are being judgemental and rash, it is the Chineese government. It is not only OK to help Chineese people find freedom and liberty, it is our duty as indivduals irrespective of US policy.
Couldn't happen here, right? Say, I'm just going to pop down to WalMart and buy a brand new Chinese-made big screen TV and move it into my living room (the one with the Chinese-made carpeting and drapes). After I cook my food using my Chinese-made utensils, I might just sit me down in my nice Chinese-made easy chair and dream about democracy.
The U.S. has more than just an addiction to oil - there's an addiction to cheap products too and before long our dependance will have us bowing to the Chairman too.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I for one, would not like to be Ms Hu Yingying when the revolution comes. Sure, she might have a sob story, needs the cash, sick grandfather, all the usual. Bottom line, she's an "Informer". Same as Stazi agents, same as party spies, same as every type of sleeper agent who sells out their neighbours to dictators for a piece of the pie. Money, power, prestiege. Maybe they've got something over her.
But it doesn't matter. When the revolution comes, the people whos necks have been stamped on one too many times won't be too sympathetic and Ms Hu and her ilk are going to get their heads blown clean off, and I have no sympathy whatsoever . I condemn capital punishment, but when you've sold your fellow human beings up the bloody river as you skip joyfully about the heels of tyrants, I'm not exactly going to weep at your passing.
People like this are essentially traitors. They betray their countrymen by colluding with the illigitimate power currently in control. Treason is a weighty offense, and doing it by pointing and clicking doesn't make it any less grave.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
Yes. They're called slashdotters; bringing unsuspecting websites to their knees daily.
You're kidding right?
Mainstream media censors news and entertainment in the US, but starting your own sidebar discussion about how corrupt politicians are or dumb the president is in a cafe won't get you arrested. The problem isn't the media - it's the people that think news is entertainment. If they abandoned shock based entertainnews, rating would falter and that would be that.
Heck, threatening the president only gets you an obligatory visit by his guards, you don't get beaten up and dissappeared. Heck, they probably agree that he's an idiot too - they get to hear his real stupidity.
Here run a test. Take the following quote:
"Every government official in [insert country your standing in here] should be run out of office on the backs of a mob and replaced with someone who isn't allowed to accept any money for their duties."
Have a chinese friend translate it for you and help you pronounce it correctly. Drive/fly to Washington, DC. Stand in front of the Capital building and shout this, repeatedly, until you're sure someone official looking hear you.
Now, fly to China and repeat this action in front of their government building in Chinese. Let us know the results when you get back home....
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
It's not like our universities are exactly bastions of free speech with all of their speech codes, free speech zones on campus and things like that. America really doesn't have any moral high ground because we tolerate things like "if you laugh at a joke that is perceived as sexist, you're a harasser." Sorry, but that is the same type of discressionary censorship power that this student has. Just swap out the usual litany of left-wing victim group terms for "subversive," "pornographic" and "state secrets" and you find that our universities and China have a lot in common. The only difference is that China is more hardcore... and a lot more honest when you think about it.
And before the yahoos come out complaining, most universities in the US are state agencies, they have no legal right to impose speech codes on non-employees. As private citizens we have every legal right to express ourselves on campus, provided that we do so in accordance with the constitutional standards of the state and federal governments and the law duly passed by the state legislature.
So Nazi Germany could make laws saying Jews were not people and subject to extermination, and that's all right? Being a sovereign nation, they had the right. So the only justification we had for toppling the Nazi regime was their invasion of other sovereign nations; if Hitler had never invaded another country, we should/could have done nothing about it?
I admit, I'd have a hard time if another country tried to make policy here in the US, but wait, don't they? OPEC raises prices and suddenly our government has to drill in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. The Taliban government of Afghanistan decides to house Osama Bin Laden and the result is the destruction of the World Trade Center and the start of the war on terror. The Soviet Union launches Sputnik and the US lands men on the Moon. Perhaps these aren't the intentional acts of one nation trying to run another, but their consequences are the same -- one nations alters its behavior because of the effect of what another nation does. And that alteration doesn't have to be destructive, that's just usually the most common occurrence.
And so China may indeed do what it likes, but that isn't going to stop those of us on the outside from trying to influence what's going on inside China.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Fuck the government. Democracy is bullshit, our president is incompetent, and we should go communist. Our whole system is wrong.
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Now, I personally don't believe any of that. Not to troll, but to everyone posting about how the US is just like the PRC on censorship - read the above again. I can say that. All I want. Without fear of retribution from the government. I can talk about socialism, communism, monarchy, even anarchy. I can even encourage them - peacefully, of course. People in China can't even DISCUSS democracy, period.
We censor things here because they threaten monetary income; ignoble, I'll admit, but we don't jail you just for criticizing the government. People of the free world, first recognize what you have, and others have not. That's the first step to freedom for those who don't have it.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
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?
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!*
Do you really believe that tripe?
The Politically Correct movement is about speech against speech. Those who hold certain political views against what they consider social ills, such as: Racism, Sexism, Political and/or Wealth Inequality, blah blah blah. A litany of left of center views. Welcome to life in a Democratic Republic where free speech is -- supposedly -- valued.
Contrast this with China under Mao. Where, at the zenith of Mao's power, people were expected to believe that he could utter no incorrect statement. That he would live for ten thousand years. That he was sacred, essentially a religious prophet (who preached against religion -- he was a Communist after all). Anyone who spoke even slightly against Mao, by suggesting that he was just a person, a human who could make mistakes like anyone else, they risked being grabbed by party officials and dragged to the center of town. There they would be charged with "Capitalist Thought" and forced to "Self-Criticize" in front of their townsfolk. They would have to recite a litany of their crimes against Mao and the Party. And if they were lucky they would simply be stripped of their job, their children would be removed from school, and their supply of "Rice Coupons" (food) cut to nothing. Then their local citizenship would papers would be destroyed and they would be sent to live with peasants in a twenty-seven thousand person commune. Where they would likely starve.
If, on the other hand, they did not properly repent, they would have a heavy stone sign with the words "Capitalist Criminal" engraved upon it, hung from their necks with piano wire. They would be forced to sit on their knees in the center of town and wait while for days while the sign, so heavy that the piano wire would cut through their necks to the vertebrae, slowly killed them. If they were lucky they might repent and beg forgiveness. Whereupon an executioner would put a rifle bullet in the back of their head. And then charge the family a fee for the bullet and service. No shit.
I'm sorry, but campus political correctness in the US doesn't even come close to the suffering the Chinese have had to endure.