Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Official Vows to "Purify" the Net
Sleeping Kirby writes to tell us China's Communist party leader, Hu Jintao today announced the intent to leverage the economic potential of the web while seeking to "purify the internet environment". He proposes to do this by maintaining "the initiative in opinion" on the internet and to "'raise the level guidance on the internet," thus civilizing and purifying the internet environment.
From TFA:
It's still why I think Bolshevism* and its sequelae are more insidious than fascism: sure, the fascists will shoot you if you agitate against them; but the Bolshevik state would prevent you from agitating in the first place by limiting the set of stimuli that comprise your world.
Reminds me a great deal, actually, of that old Semitic myth about a certain garden and tree of knowledge; whose premise was: fragile and jealous power depends upon the ignorance of its subjugates.
The ignorance of subjugates will always be a Bolshevik, and not a fascist, end.
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* Or Marxism, etc.
unlike USA with their "think of the children" "piracy", "PAC" excuse
truth ? you can't handle the truth !
You might think that the average person wouldn't stand for it. But I recall someone once saying the "average person" is 5' tall, female, and Chinese.
While China may only house 15-20% of the world's population, that's still a huge fraction. That would be one hell of an astroturf.
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Yeah, just what we needed - officials of a country with a long track record in crimes against humanity bent on 'cleaning up the Internet'.
Though, to be sure, one cannot assume that just because governments sometimes manipulate the press, any negative information about a government that eventually comes to light is true. During the reign of Justinian, he had Procopius produce a history of his times which was, of course, laden with remarks to sooth the emperor and avoid ascribing anything negative to the empire's administration. After his death, Procopius' Secret History appeared, purporting to give the "real story" of things, calling the general Belisarius an imcompetent fool and the Empress Theodora an outright whore. Yet, almost no historians believe anything in the secret history, which seems to be a kind of saucy genre of fiction that flourished at the time, and the reliable account is actually in the official production.
What I find at Slashdot is often groupthink that anything from the government is automatically wrong and any gossipy rumours that come from "underground sources" (who are more appreciated the more they try to look victimized) are automatically true. The world isn't that simple.
See, the Founding Fathers of the US thought of this and wrote up the Constitution to say "This is what the Government CAN do" (Articles) and "This is what they CANNOT do" (Amendments). The last amendment states that any other rights are left to the states to decide, and then reserved by the people.
All of your bolded words (especially "unlawful", used multiple times) can be interpreted by Chinese courts to mean anything, because the Chinese Constitution purposefully spells out rights (grants them) as opposed to saying they are self-evident.
The first Chin Emperor (Qin in modern romanization), ZHENG Ying (259-210BC), gave his Dynasty's name to the entire country of China. He burned all the books in the country and banned scholarly discussion of history. Sounds a lot like the current Emperor is just doing what a Chinese Emperor normally does. And that might explain why the Chinese people, whose sense of history extends far further back than most Westerners', tolerate his continued rule. A sense of "unity" for all of China comes from the Emperor. See the modern movie "Hero" for one take on this facet of Chinese culture.
He also changed his name to Shi Huangdi, meaning "First August God". This is certainly nothing that the current Emperor would ever deign to do.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
After all, the Bush Administration continuously borrows extraordinary sums from the Chinese government to buy war materiel from the Chinese Red Army-owned factories (along with Wall Mart and Sam's Club, and various other retailers [Nordstrom, The Gap, etc.]) for the occupation of Iraq (and no doubt, the soon-to-be nuclear strike on Iran!). Perhaps not coincidentally, the newest foreign affairs advisor to Bush/Cheney is Henry Kissinger, a paid registered foreign agent to the government of China for many, many years (along with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia).
Now...I suppose all those "coincidence theorists" out there would have a logical answer for this.......
``For all the bitching about the United States you see on Slashdot, at least our government actually has to try to subvert the Constitution, and we have ways of fighting back.''
But only terrorists fight the US government!
``The US Constitution doesn't have an "Oh, and everything we promised you you have, you don't have." escape hatch built in.''
But the President does have "constitutional powers" which put him above the law. Well, at least he thinks so and acts like it. Wholesale surveillance of US citizens, while prohibited by the constitution, is ok, because it's in the interest of the state.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
``This is just a media spin on what china has been doing all along, blocking major portions of the internet off completely from it's own citizens.'' Not sure if you have been to China personally and surfed there at all. While it is true that many sites have been blocked, mostly oversea Chinese sites, majority of the rest are not, including your comments on slashdot.org
Aware of the situation, generations of ocial elite have been struggling to build up such rule-of-law tradition in China since the late 19th century. But revolutions, civil wars backed by foreign powers, Japanese invasion sanctions during the cold war and communist blunders of pre-Deng Xiaoping era meant the seed had never got a fair chance to grow. Most part of the 20th century saw China in upheaval. If the same situation had happened in 19-century US for comparably long period, what the founding fathers of America envisioned in the US constitution would not have been realized either.
Now it has been almost 30 years since China has had a chance to focus on improving its people's lives. Dreams of generations are gradually coming true, albeit slowly. Everything complex enough takes time to mature, democracy, rule-of-law tradition, etc... they don't just happen.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.