Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Here are a few keywords that the Great Firewall will keep the sensitive citizens of China from having to think about:
- Freedom
- Human rights
- Liberty
- Representative government
- Elections
- More than one political party
- Freedom of speech
- Freedom of religion
- Freedom to assemble
- Freedom of the press
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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.
Yes, well popularity does tend to fade with the restriction of basic freedoms, jailed/killed political dissidents and persecution of one's religious beliefs!
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Oh. come on. Every Olympic game is used by the host nation as an opportunity to show off; why the hell would any country want to spend the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars on what is basically a slightly lame entertainment project?
Apart from that, I think it is petty and stupid to keep criticizing China without any real insight into to country and its culture. Yes, there are things that are not right in China, and it is right to point that out, but that is not what is going on at Slashdot. Instead of insightful commentary and opinion, all you get is an automatic yapping of whatever people happen to have picked up from Fox News - or possibly the Simpsons, which is only slightly better.
The population of any country have certain expectations to their leaders - they want them to deal with what they perceive as problems, and in China the vast majority of people feel that the internet is a filthy mess and that the government should do something to clean it up, so their children are not led astray by unhealthy, foreign influences. Chinese parents are afraid of the internet and computer games; they want their children to do well in the future, not waste time. This is perhaps an alien concept to a westerner, but in China this is almost fundamental - 'Work hard, study well' is a phrase you hear all the time, and I bet if you know any Chinese students, you'll know that most of them work harder than anybody else.
Don't just assume per automatic that people in other countries want the same as you - to an American 'freedom' may be a sacred ideal, but to Chinese and to many others it is more important to fit in and be successful. Who can say who is 'right'? Or, to turn it around, don't you believe in the right of others to choose what they want, even if it is completely different from what you would have chosen?