China Blocks YouTube Over Tibet Videos

Screaming Cactus writes "Internet users in China were blocked from seeing YouTube.com on Sunday after dozens of videos about protests in Tibet appeared on the site. 'Chinese leaders encourage Internet use for education and business but use online filters to block access to material considered subversive or pornographic. Foreign Web sites run by news organizations and human rights groups are regularly blocked if they carry sensitive information. Operators of China-based online bulletin boards are required to monitor their content and enforce censorship.' The blocking added to the communist government's efforts to control what the public saw and heard about protests that erupted Friday in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, against Chinese rule."

Comments

Is blocking even necessary?

[CRCulver]

I've traveled to China a few times, and encounter plenty of Chinese students at my university. All seem to be aware that their government is authoritarian and has done some terrible things, in spite of all the blocking. Nonetheless, without exception every Chinese person I've spoke with on the issue insists that a hard line is needed to keep the country together. Since the Chinese population, for cultural and historical reasons, seems okay with what's going on, is blocking the Internet even necessary?

Re:Is blocking even necessary?

[aleph42]

The effects of controling the medias are subtle and effective, and every succeful control will also convince the population it is itself necessary.

Take the example of Russia: the elections were cheated (some small towns were 105% pro government...), but even perfectly fair elections would probably show that a majority (like 55%) think Putin was a good leader. But thinking that 95%, of the country agrees with the government will make you more prone to agree yourself, whereas at 55% you'll start beleiving that alternatives exist.

I could also speak about Fox in the US, and the necessity for antiterrorist laws.

Re:Is blocking even necessary?

[rucs_hack]

There you've hit an interesting point.

China is barking huge, and its population is equally on the large side (Ha! Fear my accurate numerical statements...). They can't just be mostly sheep with a few wolves running things.

I've known quite a few Chinese students, courtesy of the US making it harder for Chinese students to study there. This is great, it's brought vast, vast amounts of cash in from China to universities in the UK, thanks for that one guys..

Anyhoo, these Chinese people, while here, have just the same net access as anyone else, and they are for the most part, belonging to the middle to upper classes in China. Just the sort of people you'd think they'd want to keep ignorant (middle class people have started all revolutions in modern times), and yet they make no effort to do so.

Doesn't quite map, does it...

It seems to me we have a large amount of 'we don't really understand what the fuck is going on in China', that frequently gets combined with a bunch of preconceptions which are probably quite inaccurate.

Store and forward peer to peer over bluetooth

[Colin Smith]

This is where something like Usenet is still better than "The Web". It doesn't even require tcp/ip to function and therefore has no centralised control. With something like an NNTP server running on every phone, over bluetooth, it would be pretty much impossible to prevent the spread of information.

Walk past someone in the street and your phone syncs it's "newsgroups" with the other phone. The smartphones around these days are coming with 2Gb of storage and 300MHz processors. More than 100,000 are being purchased per day in China.

Re:any chinese comments?

[Doviende]

well shit, son. All the unicode chinese chars i wrote in that posting got nuked. i guess we won't be hearing from any chinese commenters any time soon.

Re:any chinese comments?

[imkow]

Being a chinese , the life is very tough.

,
the fact i can still get on the internet is something gratefully granted by the gov. i wouldn't dare to raise a trouble.

in china, any public voice that does not sound "harmonious" will be "harmonized". everything is for building a "harmonious society".

,
many websites has been "harmonized", which have become a common practice..

youtube,
through some technical means the youtube site can still be reached, but that's only to geeks like me.

Re:craziness

[orzetto]

It is unbelievable the ratio of how many people are calling Tibetans liars and cheering on the Chinese. These are recent posts calling the Dalai Lama a terrorist ringleader.

One of the reasons I am wary of this whole Tibet issue is that China happens to be the West's main economic rival, and now it is convenient for Western governments to support the Dalai Lama's cause. The Dalai Lama is not a democratically elected leader, and pre-1949 Tibet was not exactly the merry free independent country you see in Hollywood depictions. Most of the Tibetans were serfs and enslaved in all but name, serving the religious aristocracy of the Lamas.

As long as China was an ally of the US against the Soviet Union, you did not hear much about Tibet or the Dalai Lama. Gone the Soviet Union, grown the Chinese economy, and hey presto! Here is a flurry of Hollywood movies designed to show just how ugly and mean the Estasians are, since Eurasia has always been our ally—right?

See, one of the downsides of reading "Manufacturing consent" by Chomsky is that I start to see unsettling patterns like this one: a piece of news is convenient for the government, that piece is spun in the best possible way for the government by the same press that should be the government's watchdog. Of course it happens as well in China: I read some CCTV Web pages with the predictable pro-China spin.

Now, where is the truth anyway? Well, obviously some Tibetans are quite angry. Some Tibetans have been assaulting Han Chinese (so much for the Buddhists who never raise a finger in violence), because of the rivalry between ethnic groups. So, as far as I can see, this is an issue of a group of people not liking another group of people, spun by every external party in their favour: the US say the Chinese are evil and the Tibetans are peaceful protesters, the Chinese say they are only criminals, and everyone else says whatever is most convenient for them.

China has encouraged immigration of Han Chinese into Tibet for a long time, and the privileged Han are an obvious target for racial hatred for the underprivileged Tibetans. What the Chinese should have done is to follow the good old way to deal with separatism: throw money at the problem. Tibet has a ludicrously small population compared to China (not even three millions), and China could afford to subsidize separatism to death. That's what Italy did to fix the terrorism problem in South Tyrol, and, guess what, it worked just fine.