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Yahoo China has the Worst Filtering Policy
rmunaval writes "Reporters Without Borders has an article on search-result censorship in China by different companies. The conclusion was made based on six politically sensitive keywords. A search on yahoo.cn resulted in 97% pro-Beijing results compared to 83% on google.cn and 78% on msn.cn." From the article: "[Yahoo!] is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu. Above all, the organisation was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or 'Tibet independence', temporarily blocked the search tool. If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond."
Yahoo may not intentionally be setting a strict policy towards censorship. You have to consider how the Chinese state is run. The Communist Party is an exclusive group of members who actively recruit in order to increase their influence over the population.
During China's rapid economic growth as a result of foreign investment and a move towards a free market economy, the Communist Party was unable to cope with the rapidly changing environment and failed to make the transition into this environment and continued to recruit amongst traditional areas of the Chinese economy.
Thus this created serious problems since Communist Party penetration in privately owned companies to less than one percent. This generated tremendous amounts of fear within the organization since they realized that they were falling behind on the times and needed to aggressively recruit from the educated portions of the population.
Without new recruits within the new economy, the hold of the Communist Party on the population would be significantly weakened. A significant problem since the Communist Party's right to rule is derived from mostly propaganda and peer pressure. Few people feel like protesting the government because Chinese culture derives it's strength through strength by numbers. Belonging to a group is especially important to Chinese people and by going against the government, you suffer severe consequences socially, economically, etc.... You can easily see how the lack of Communist Party members within the richest and most profitable portions of the workforce could become a problem.
One of the reasons why Communist Party membership penetration amongst the workforce was so low in privately owned businesses was because of a lack of recruitment amongst the intellectuals in the country. The educated group has always been shunned by the Communist Party throughout it's existence (ie Cultural Revolution/Tianamen/Hundred Flowers Campaign). However, when Communist Party members began to leave their posts to work for private corporations, the party was forced to change and the Communist Party began significantly recruiting from intellectuals. Since this movement started, Communist Party penetration has now grown to the 5-6% range within privately owned companies (although many neglect their duties and fail to pay their dues).
My bet is that the Communist Party specifically targeted Yahoo when they were recruiting for new Communist Party members in order to create an internal system to maintain control and ensure that Yahoo, as a foreign privately owned company, wouldn't go too far out of line of Communist Party doctrine. There isn't much that Yahoo can do as a foreign company can do to change the internal culture of their Chinese employee workforce. You can't fight against the Chinese government.
It will be very interesting to see what happens during the 2008 Olympics when a ton of Westerners are getting their internet gimped
Who else will be there, really, except reporters and the athletes? I don't anticipate the Jones family in Oaklahoma getting a cornsitter for the farm and heading off to Beijing to see how the East makes flapjacks.
Reporters likely know to tread lightly already, and I'm sure the athletes have to go to some workshop before the whole thing starts titled "Don't do any of these things in country X or you will be killed."
I think it's the Great Firewall that's doing the blocking, not Yahoo, according to the wikipedia article. Basically TGF sniffs all HTTP packats and attempt to find sensitive keywords in strings and put the IP on temporary blacklist for 30 min. or so.
Try typing "Tibet" and "Independence". You'll come up with scads of *.cn sites all ranting about how the Dali Lama is "splittist". I wonder if they cover the vicious Chinese invasion of Tibet in there somewhere?
The US sure isn't perfect but China shows that it could be a lot worse.
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