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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."
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?
Millions of spambots, what else? If they want a Great Firewall of China, I'm happy to help!
I'd encourage everyone to simply null route China's netblocks and enjoy the sudden decrease in criminal activity.
Read all three parts of it, the author summarizes both sides of the issue in order for people to see that the Tibet issue is much more than just a communist regime bullying an occupied region, for example:
I know I might be modded offtopic but the discussion of Chinese censorship of Tibet videos will no doubt lead to the discussion of Tibet vs China itself. I'm just asking everyone to please form their opinion after looking at both sides of the issue, and how each side feels about it. Try not to base your opinion solely on just what you hear news.
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.
Deleted
If you want to see something crazy, check out the political spam in the comments of these videos. 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. It confuses me that so many people outside the great firewall are posting this stuff.
Anyone want to help me mod these comments down, and rate these videos up?
It seems to me that there's a pretty big language barrier that prevents us from hearing much from most chinese internet users. The ones i met in china tended to stick to purely chinese sites, which i found quite hard to read with only my basic level of chinese.
("if we get some chinese comments, perhaps people here can translate them")
"The value of a man resides in what he gives,
and not in what he is capable of receiving."
--Albert Einstein
Just because you take it as propaganda doesn't mean that others don't have a more leveled response to this statement. For example, you could take it as saying: "what is going on with this type of morality?". If a person condones authoritarian rule, what is the need for censorship? Yet these people seem to do both? This statement is about the human condition, and not politics. Personally I think a lot of official chinese statements express an embarrassingly amorale attitude.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Since when have the Olympic games (Berlin in 1936, Moscow in 2000) been about freedom and democracy? They're about showing off to the world and bragging.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
China has installed a media blackout (Chinese public doesn't know what is going on), they don't want to get the same response as Burma did get when the protest where cursed there few months back. But not only that, China government has also closed down the border zone between China and Tibet. Preventing tourist and reporters to get inside the occupied country. They do this as they don't want a new 1989 for the world to see. Chinese news agents are spewing out propaganda at the moment, nothing that comes from them is accurate or true on what is happening.
Let's not forget the fact that China did invade Tibet in 1950 and claimed Tibet as there own, while Tibet is in fact indepent country that is military occupied. While in fact that is not the case. U.N should have for long time protested the China occupation of Tibet long time ago. It is however sad fact that the business deals prevent that from happening.
I expect information on the action of Chinese military forces to come to light soon. As I expect that the information is going to get out one way or an other. View of the Chinese public are based on what the government chooses to tell them, not necessary the facts of what is going on.
We are going to see more bloodshed to happen in Tibet for some time now. However, it is as question how much of it reaches international media.
all chinese characters i have typed here became dot...
i take it as a censorship
China, in fact, is very fragile.
You are over simplifying things. Western provinces can't survive without the East, why do you think so many people from the West travel to the East for work. If they become separate and independent, say goodbye to an open border.
As for Taiwan, they're just as bad as the PRC. Taiwan asserts ownership over all of mainland China (actually this view varies depending on which political party gets elected). Taiwan with its democracy is more corrupt than the CCP, just look at Chen Shui-bian. He would be under house arrest or in front of a firing squad if he pulled that shit in the PRC. The Western media didn't make a big deal out of his affairs because he is an ally.
Giving in to Taiwan would be like having let the Southern States form their own country. Furthermore, if your into "human rights" look at how Taiwans native tribes were treated by the Taiwanese Hans who took over.
If you have never lived in China, you don't know anything about the situation and should not comment.
Excuses Are Like Assholes - Everybody's Got One
It's really rather simple.
The Tibetans have a charismatic, articulate and eloquent spokesman in the Dalai Lama. Here in the US he's probably the most venerated spiritual leader in the US outside of the Pope or the conservative protestant movement. He's almost the chief rabbi for large swath of American intellectuals who think of themselves as "spiritual" but not aligned with a conservative religious movement and who eschew formal theological dogma.
So, in a way the Chinese leadership is right on the mark when they talk about a "Dalai Clique".
The thing that makes him a tough opponent in this game is that he's so darned reasonable and mild mannered. He's not calling for armed uprising. He's not even insisting on national sovereignty. He refuses to act angry, or even wronged. He just insists that the Chinese leadership should talk, and listen with an open mind.
The thing is, there's a lot about the old Tibetan system that is ugly and bad -- along with much that is admirable and good. The Chinese would love people to think about the abuses of the old monastic system when they think of Tibet. But can't oppose somebody like the Dalai Lama without being nakedly blunt about their own unreasonableness and brutality, which makes everything they do an international embarrassment to their country. And that makes this news.
You're absolutely right, we should be concerned with other places where minorities are oppressed for their religious, cultural, racial or linguistic characteristics. But you can't focus on all the tyrants in the world at once. You focus on the ones that can be made representative of tyranny, in the hope that they some day they will become representative of the futility of tyranny.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Because absolute moral consistency is not a prerequisite for doing the right thing.
More to the point, no one is blocking Texan access to the net, or anything else for that matter. Texans, and Mexicans, are fully aware of their history. The Chinese people are not aware of Tibet's recent history because the government controls the media and their access to the net.
Besides, Mexico acquired Texas by force from Spain, which had acquired it by force from any number of indigenous peoples, who, in turn, were often at each other's throats. How far back do you want to go? Few of us, if anyone, live on land that was not forcibly taken from someone else at some point in history.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
thanks for the info. actually, there is a chinese version of slashdot, called http://solidot.org/ Solidot,or Qi-Ke(strange vistor) website..
the news on it is not up-to-date like here..and commentors also are fewer than here. that's why it not well known to many of my folks.
China, in fact, is very fragile.
Especially in the western regions, Chinese authoritarianism is mainly directed at preserving Han-Chinese supremacy over separatism among other ethnic groups, such as the Tibetans (in Tibet) and Turkic groups (in Xinjiang). This involves both the sort of direct control and suppression we see here, and more subtly and long-term, a program of sending Han Chinese settlers into those regions to dilute the non-Han majority.
As you might expect, you get different views on this issue if you talk to Han vs. non-Han Chinese citizens.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
> If you have never lived in China, you don't know anything about the situation and should not comment.
I've lived in both China and Taiwan. I was also a Chinese major, speak, read and write Chinese, and have a fair amount of friends from mainland China (both peasants and city dwellers) and Taiwan. I also have a number of friends that are members of the CCP. Does this qualify me to comment?
> As for Taiwan, they're just as bad as the PRC.
Have you lived in Taiwan before?
Taiwan is nothing like the PRC. In the PRC, corruption permeates to even the most petty of bureaucrats, who must be bribed for simple things like marriage licenses and being allowed to continue to farm your own meager plot of land. Seeing the money wasted by mid-level party officials at their 3 hour "liquid lunches" in Beijing (and hearing about it from my friends in the party) was stomach-turning, knowing what the families of my friends were going through as peasants. (My friend's younger sister -- 13 years old -- worked 15 hour days, 7 days a week in a windowless factory to help support her family, and made herself sick in the process.)
Taiwan does not assert ownership over the mainland -- what sloppy thinking! The Nationalist Party asserts that it is the rightful ruling party of all of China, and so desires unification. Other parties' desires and opinions vary.
When the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, they massacred quite a large number of people they feared were leftists. This was probably Taiwan's greatest human-rights tragedy. But that has been acknowledged and apologized for, for what little it's worth. Don't expect that kind of acknowledgment in the PRC, though, where Tibet has always been a part of China, China never invaded Vietnam, the Korean war started when the US invaded North Korea, and serious human rights violations never happen.
How the fuck did this get modded insightful?
... "Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement."
Try reading the Olympic Charter - there are principles (idealistic perhaps) that everyone connected in any way to the Olympics has to agree to: "respect for universal fundamental ethical principles"
The Olympics might not always live up to the ethical standards it sets itself, but trying to reduce it to the level of a consumerist spectacle displays a breathtaking level of malicious ignorance.
So just like any sane person from a modern free democracy, there is no fear that the autocrats ideals 'won't hold water', there is an absolute certainty that the autocrats ideals 'don't hold water' and the only way they can hold back freedom and democracy is with carefully managed lies and the point of a bayonet.
The current Chinese governments insists it has the right to use military aggression to maintain and obtain dominance over countries based upon the flimsiest of historical ties, so Tibet, Taiwan, and even Korea as well as some other regions suffer under oppression or the threat of future aggression.
That the Olympics should be held in autocratic countries at all, points to that fact that Olympic sized profits and marketing deals take precedence over the ideals and values of amateur athletes from the past. Although it already appears that some athletes are bowing out rather than taking the risk of exposure to carcinogenic pollutants prevalent in the Beijing environment.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen