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China's New Internet Plan
eldavojohn writes "The internet in China is diverging rapidly from the state that the rest of the world enjoys it. Recent news of China's leader, Hu Jintao, has revealed a strategy to distort it even further. Jintao is tackling the issue his Communist party is having with the youth of China that are too young to remember Chairman Mao and the fanaticism the populace had for him. A strategy he is proposing is 'cleaning up' China's internet & lacing it with a little propaganda like the need to 'Consolidate the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological sphere' online. The meeting notes also declared that 'Development and administration of Internet culture must stick to the direction of socialist advanced culture, adhere to correct propaganda guidance.'"
The parallels to the Olympics of 1936 are kind of eerie -- then it was Hitler attempting to show off German might and industry, his neat and orderly Aryan society, and the superiority of the German race. Perhaps this is not as sinister, but it is certainly disturbing.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I know it's not really what the TFB is about, but does anyone have any tech details about the Great Firewall of China? How does it work, is it some kind of giant NAT? Are there blacklist-based IP filtering, real-time content filtering? Are ISPs routes set up so that foreign IPs can only be reached via a few select routers that do the censoring?
Global warming is a cube.
In China the communist party wants to woo another generation with the story of how the revolution was made. Why cant they hire the guy who wrote "How StarWars was made" to write another book "How the Revolution was made".? If there is one thing Chinese communists really like it would be Force, I guess.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Now that China is rapidly transforming into a market economy, what Marxism is there to speak of? Or maybe the good chairman wishes to enlighted the Chinese youth of the crimes of communism in China and atrocities committed by his predecessors? It would be a great lesson in how a fundamentally flawed ideology can retard a nation with great potential for decades and decades.
Buy stuff made in Taiwan. There's plenty of it, it's cheap, usually good, and it'll piss off the Chinese.
Except that a growing number of Taiwanese companies have factories on the mainland these days...
Doesn't the Internet route around damage?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And have the party cadres live like the proletarians? I am a hardline libertarian myself, but I think even Marx would be quite disturbed to see how these revolutions have gone. At least the old regimes had honesty. The ruling class was not part of the rest of society. Funny thing is that at least in Europe, you were probably in real terms freer in the 18th or 19th centuries than you are today by a pretty wide margin. "Advanced socialist society" is a nice way of saying "we think the cost of scientific advancement is that we must regulate you from cradle to grave."
And yet I just read them all and am replying to them from Shenyang, Liaoning, China.
It ain't so cut and dried.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
But nowaday in China, no ordinary people pay any attention to these kind of useless propaganda any more. (Students may have to memorize this thing so they can pass the exams, but I can ensure you it has zero impact on their mental state otherwise, as it hasn't had any on mine when I was a student there in 1980's.)
I don't think I'm a commie troll, but I think that at least part of your objection applies to capitalist systems as well.
If I were playing devil's advocate I might say "capitalism cannot possibly work the way its designers envisioned because they didn't take corporate nature into account." For example, there is a tendency in corporocracy to treat *everything as a transaction and *everything as property (see for example "intellectual property", the privatization of drinking water, etc).
I think the fact that corporations have co-opted our ostensibly democratic government so thoroughly is almost as serious an indictment of capitalism as the corrupted Party's betrayal of basic democratic principles in the Reddish parts of the world.
Just thinking aloud, really.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
What are you even talking about? Is it something special about the land? Does the countryside get insta-worse when you cross the border into Canada? Did Hawaii get prettier when it was granted statehood? Or do you just love the political geography? The shape of the coastline?
You say you love the people... you do realize that they're responsible for their government, right? So is that a general "I love all people", or is that more of a jingoistic and/or arbitrary "I love Americans"?
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
If you need these to be censored.. you need to type them in Chinese.. Not many Chinese in China are going to search in English or Ping Ying. BTW, I was in Chengdu, Sichuan. I was reading these articles all the time.
- Tong Lin
So let's stop calling it communism-with-a-small-c, and call a spade a spade: Totalitarian China. Or maybe Fascist China?
If that's a little too far, then we should make the distinction between communism and the Communist Party Government of China -- we shouldn't allow the Chinese to pretend they are something they are not (and in the same vein, we should stop referring to the US as a democracy). Labels have power, and the Chinese political machine knows it.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai