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.'"

Comments

Echoes of 1936

[Billosaur]

The Communist Party is preparing for a congress later this year that is set to give Hu another five-year term and open the way for him to choose eventual successors. In 2008, Beijing hosts the Olympic Games, when the party's economic achievements will be on display, along with its political and media controls.

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.

Re:What can really be done about this?

[SQL Error]

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...

Re:So the chinese can't read this article

[VendettaMF]

And yet I just read them all and am replying to them from Shenyang, Liaoning, China.

It ain't so cut and dried.

But who cares?

[hackingbear]

This may sound like a big trouble to you who are not in China.

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.)

Human Nature

[Mateo_LeFou]

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.