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China Unblocks the BBC (In English)
An anonymous reader writes in with news that China has unblocked the BBC Web site — the English-language version at any rate. No announcement was made, because China has never acknowledged blocking the BBC for the last decade. The Chinese-language version of the site has been blocked since its inception in 1999. The article speculates that the easing of censorship may be tied to the upcoming Olympic Games.
I'd imagine the reporters from other countries will not be censored, through the great firewall or otherwise. If so, they must have a devil of a time separating the chinese from the reporters. Anyone heard anything on this?
poor them, the level of protection from harmful content by their govenement is getting lower and lower.
Doesn't this just highlight the censorship that they DO perform? Since Auntie Beeb is considered by many to be respectable and balanced, aren't they the worst to censor? Its not like you're blocking FOX News. China is screwed - they've farked people over for decades, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Unblock the BBC, that alleged bastion of impartiality. They are about as impartial as Pravda.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
On my first trip to China several years ago, the expats I met complained bitterly about the firewall. When I was there last summer, however, it seems that the use of Tor has widely spread in the expat community and now anyone wishing to read English-language media has no problem accessing it.
Thank God. China will finally have easy access to Dr. Who.
what's the point?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The BBC, which had a backbone during WWII, now has the backbone of a jellyfish and will look the other way as many suffer in China. Many in the American press do the same, ignoring the millions killed by Chairman Mao and successors, but they're more independent and can't be counted on for predictable comments. Hey, is /. blocked as well???
I love the tag at the bottom of the article:
Are you in China? What is your reaction to this story? Is this your first time reading the BBC News website?
Followed by a block to enter your name, address and phone number. Yea right, that's a good idea, log on with your real info and complain about how your government censors you....and leave your contact info.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I am posting my comment from China right now, and I can tell you that [xxxxx] [xx] [xx] [xxxx] and [xxxxxxx] [xx] [xxxx] BBC [xx] [xxxx] so that [xx] [xxx] [xxxx] [xx] [xx] [xxxxx] Chinese government. What I can't figure out is, why is this the only article on Slashdot today? Slow news day? Hmm.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
The conventional wisdom is that in the lead up to, and during, the olympics that Great Firewall is going to be deactivated for those with IP addresses originating in parts of Beijing where foreigners are expected to be. The idea is that foreigners will come to China, not see anything a miss and then go back to their home countries and spread the false impression.
It's a page right out Chairman Mao's playbook. When Nixon went China, the handlers routinely gave people on the street transistor radios to listen to. That way Nixon and Kissenger would say, "Wow. What a nice scene. China truly is wonderful place." Then as soon as these people were out of sight of dignitaries, goons (I'm sorry, "the advance team") would collect the radios for redistribution to other Potemkin Villages.
As David Byrne said, "Same as it ever was."
I'm going to be in Beijing next month in a hotel down by the Bird's Nest. I'm going to have to check out the Great Firewall.
Now, before you all go conspiracy-tastic here, remember that not ackowledging something is different from officially denying something. I mean, our governments refuse to acknowledge plenty of miltary hardware, bases and so on that BLATANTLY EXIST. In the eyes of respective governments this is all in the best interest of the state and by extension it's population. So...facist-tastic away!
Why is it we are appalled at the Chinese Government's heavy handed censorship yet every capitalist business participates in a similar use of an asymmetry of information? You don't know what I do therefore you pay me to for access/product/whatever and I don't know what you know so the same applies in reverse!
Yes, I prefer that I have as free access to as much information as possible.
P226
A win for China, they finally get to watch Mr Bean!
As I lived in China for 3 years, you can surf most English foreign media websites like CNN, New York Times, etc., most of the times. They don't really care. Because if you are so fluent in English, you already know all about human rights and you are likely a member of the better-off class. In China, like everywhere else, the people that want to and will revolve against the government are the poor people -- never the middle class or rich people. Remember who in the U.S. joint the L.A. riots in the 1990's?
In China, they are most interested in blocking oversea/HK/Taiwan Chinese sites. Like sina.com is a Chinese company operating two sites -- one for domestic and others for oversea with contents not allowed in China.
I tried to watch a couple of shows online from the BBC website but I wasn't allow because I don't live in the UK, I was blocked by the BBC itself.
i couldn't have said it better myself
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...in rest of world, BBC blocks you!
Yaa, it's always the slant-eyed reds who won't bow down to the US who are the censoring types who kdawson has to post "news" articles about again and again and again. Never mind that people in the US who sell PAID-FOR satellite access to Al Manar are thrown into prison to rot. Never mind that the Great Firewall of China was mostly built not in China but by the largest companies dotting the San Francisco Bay area. As Easter just ended, a quote from old JC - look not for the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your own.
Whenever I visited China, I always had a feeling of playing cat and mouse with the unseen and much hypothesised great firewall. BBC back then? no chance. but you could hunt around and use other UK based new sites - daily main, guardian, thesun (if desperate), the times. Sometimes they would grind to a halt and I imagined my unseen monitor in the great firewall office checking what I was doing - then, as if he/she decided I was not a subversive threat, it would spring back into life. Other times I would VPN or proxy and find any site I wanted - but at a pitifully slow rate as if everything I did was intercepted and checked by my unseen intermediary. Other fun things that had odd effects on the speed on which pages would load would be to proxy them through the dialectizer - I always imagined one severly culterally puzzled state firewall operator calling his boss. The 'net access was always different depending on where I hooked up - im the 5* hotel in shezhen was always the fastest, in the office soso, in a street cafe you could forget it.
My conclusion was that the firewall was very very definately real, and the moment it found a foreign news story, the wrong keyword then suddenly wierd timelags and delays in page lookups would occur as my unseen companion blocked or cleared at whim. I also could of sworn that the system could tell the difference between the net being accessed from a posh hotel occupied by Western Engineers and a street cafe.
The current Tibet situation is probably also a factor in the dropping of the BBC block. "What?!?!," you're probably saying, "But China likes to hide that kind of stuff from their citizens, they don't like news getting out about unrest." Ahh, but this is a special situation.
When it comes to Tibet, the more Western media that gets in the better for the Chinese government. There is an intense vein of nationalism in China when it comes to Tibet. With outpourings of rage about "biased" western media, distorted facts, and CIA plots to break up China. The more Tibet-sympathetic reports that come from the West and leak in the China, the stronger this nationalism seems to get, and the more the people, even the poor, rally around their government.
My other half is a Chinese national, we've had some very intense conversations lately, and she's sent me links to views coming out of China about the Tibet situation. Ordinary Chinese see this as a direct attack on their sovereignty.
Many Chinese are learning English, especially the under 20 crowd. In the major eastern cities it's now required for all students in elementary school. If the government can channel their unrest against the Imperial West who's trying to break up their country, it takes the heat off the government. The Chinese government has long used nationalism, an us vs. them mentality, to deflect attention from itself domestically.
Of course they certainly wouldn't be the only country doing this, it's a long standing tradition for any unpopular regime. If you can draw this line between you and another group, and get your people to rally around you on some point, you can easily manipulate and pacify a population.
If you're going to be in China, try to hop over to Xian- in my opinion, the Terracotta Warriors blow away the Great Wall. Simply because all the "touristy" sections of the great wall seem rather fake to me after being rebuilt. I've been to the Badaling and Mutianyu sections near Beijing, and they are alright, though Mutianyu is marginally better in my opinion. Other sections seem less traveled, which might make for a more "authentic" experience. The more remote the better.
Also, don't forget to bargain at the Great Wall or other touristy places, or you will get totally screwed like the silly laowai that you are. Offer 1/10th the asking price and walk away if they don't concede.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
I will suggest you to do two things: (1) get a travel visa to China, go to a large city like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and visit some English corners (if you don't know where to find one, try google; (2) start learning written Chinese and visit the discussion forums of Chinese news website like sina.com for sometimes, especially for discussions about corruption cases, housing prices, or even news when the stock market heads down.
(1) will show you who and how many people are fluent in English; (2) will show you if people there know about "democracy", "freedom" and "equality" and if people can criticize the government or not. don't take my words here. go try the above two things. Of course, you can also choose just to listen the mainstream opinions you have heard from CNN and Slashdot -- that's your right as well.
Thanks for the laugh. You are confusing freedom with people being impressed with a (relatively) large penis.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
I guess the Chinese may also have figured that there's no point in blocking a site from a more restricted country than them. The UK or China -- which one has the 5 million security cameras again?
Blogger Richard Stallman pointed to an Atlantic Monthly analysis of the Great Wall of China. It is surprisingly technical and well researched. I have links and quotes here.
The short answer is that there will be almost no censorship for foreigners.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
That's just an amazing amount of coincidences.
I could have thought of better ways of describing him...
It might be that the BBC hasn't said anything vaguely challenging since Greg Dyke left and it was turned into a mouthpiece for New Labor (sic) and the middle England I-reckon-right brigade that supports them.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I am an American, living in China. While it is nice to see the BBC unblocked, I know that I will still have to use ssh to be sure I am seeing the real, unfiltered, content. Thanks to the nice Cisco (American) technology we developed for them, they are able to selectively block and redirect individual articles.
We already know that for the games, the Great Firewall will be disabled at all of the access points that foreigners are likely to use (luxury hotels, the Olympic, village, etc.) James Fallows wrote an excellent article on the subject in last month's Atlantic Monthly: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall.
As Fallow's notes, the Great Firewall isn't exactly difficult to bypass anyway, for those people who are so inclined. What's truly pernicious about it is its panopticon effect: the Great Firewall it engenders a tolerance for censorship and surveillance among the complacent majority of the Chinese populace so that it becomes simply an accepted part of life. The censorship itself is almost beside the point - the actual objective is social control, so that the population will censor themselves and know what sort of ideas are inappropriate to express/learn about online. It doesn't matter how easy the Great Firewall is to bypass if the citizens know that certain subjects are off-limits and that you can be thrown in jail for violating that barrier.
I'm ethnically Chinese, and I find this sentiment, frequently expressed by apologists for the totalitarian government, appalling. That it frequently comes from the mouths of fellow Chinese hardly makes it any less offensive. The implication, sometimes explicitly stated, is that "Democracy may work for Western nations but here in Asia we have to do things a little different to run things."
Now I don't want to assert that the U.S. model of government is necessarily a great one - indeed, if anything it has become clear our electoral model and presidential structure is constrained by two-party lethargy and is a decidedly inferior to parliamentary models (and statistical studies of the comparative success rates of new democracies would seem to confirm this). But when people say "democracy" in the vernacular, what they actually mean is "democratic values", also known as "human rights", or "liberalism" in the classic JS Mill sense. The actual act of voting is almost immaterial, and may exist only as a final defense against government overreach.
So what are these values and rights? It's really simple stuff, like a government that has to reasonably demonstrate guilt before it can jail the accused, that doesn't punish you for believing in the wrong ideas or saying the wrong thing, that is accountable to the same rule of law that it holds its citizens, that doesn't shoot you in the street because you happen to be expressing your displeasure at the way things are going (a sentiment that IMO is somewhat misplaced in the Tibet's case, but hey, that doesn't mean you need to shoot the uppity buggers for it), stuff like that. The suggestion that these truly basic, inalienable, natural rights are somehow exclusive to "Western" peoples, and the more pernicious implied suggestion that the Chinese people are a uneducated, backwards and rambunctious lot, unable to civilly exist as a free society, THAT is a racism more profound than anything I've encountered in any of the admittedly imperfect Western countries, which is saying quite a lot.
Go to English corners? Holy Jebus! :D
Ok, that outlandish advice has actually worked well for me, though I bet most foreigners get tired of the same old tired questions the students ask. "Where are you from, why does the usa support taiwan, do you like chinese food, how long have you studied chinese, what is your job, can i have your phone number, how old are you, are you a cunning linguist(ok not really)etc"
My experiences:
My first English Corner- girl I am dating asks if I can go to her University's English Corner. I grudgingly agree.. I get there and... I am the only foreigner there! What's more, I am a guy who has been suckered into going to an all girls' uni.. Sweet!
Second, a year later, a girl outside my university(BLCU) solicited me to go to her school's EC. Later she and I had some crazy dates- her consumption of beer probably correlated to being a physics masters student.
Most of the other times were favors where I could not say no. All in all, the English Corners were good fun, though not the best place to practice speaking chinese. You could definitely get a sense of peoples' politics and personal beliefs. Plus, it is fun to play the part of the eccentric foreigner...which is not a stretch for me.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
They think it's good to *unblock* a website? Who give them the right to determine what websites that chinese citizens can visit or cannot visit?
As a chinese, I feel very ashamed that the most of our people are being treated like prisoners under the PRC government.
What! How dare they - this is just what you'd expect from an evil, communist country, blocking a news-service like BBC... Oh, hang on...
Seriously, though, despite all the flak China keeps getting no matter what they do, they keep going forward, slowly, but steadily. I think they actually want to be a free, modern, democratic country. It's just that they know that it has to be done slowly - they only have to look to their neighbor, Russia, to see what happens if you just suddenly let go and try to be all things at once: you get a hugely powerful mafia, hugely powerful companies that operate above the law, common people starving, infrastructure that breaks down. They are doing it the right way, the Chinese.
Googlebomb "Olympics" to lead to pages about Tibet!
This made me do a double take. The first thing I thought was "NO f-ing way! The Dalai Lama?" but then I tried to see it from the perspective of a Chinese national. That led me to wonder, does she know that most of the world finds the Chinese government's explanations... untrustworthy?
And what is her reaction to that?
With all of the international pressure on China right now because of the olympics, and all of the people who are threatening to boycott, it's no wonder that they've decided to ease up bit on their ridiculous internet policy, even if it's moving at a ridiculously slow rate. This is probably a step in the "diplomacy" direction for the Chinese Government. Next they might even give us back our market!
Nope, it appears to still be blocked.
I cant get to the BBC webpage anyway... (without tor, that is)
coming atcha from beijing.