Slashdot Mirror
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.
poor them, the level of protection from harmful content by their govenement is getting lower and lower.
Unblock the BBC, that alleged bastion of impartiality. They are about as impartial as Pravda.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
The idea that democracy is the model of perfection for government is one that's just plain wrong, but one that's also taken completely for granted, no questions asked, most of the time. I am not saying that the US model is bad. It's not. But you seem to be saying that China, if it were informed and its people not repressed enough, obviously would trend towards democracy because democracy just rocks so much. Do you really think that a democracy is all that feasible for a country of China's population? Yeah, India is a democracy. And India is also a budding world power, isn't it? I think there are a lot of points that need to be made here. First: "Red China" is not communist except in name. China's economy is not growing the way it has been by being communist. You seem to assume that since the media calls it "communist" China all the time, that companies are all state-owned. I'm no expert on the particulars, but I do believe that is false. Also, there is a huge disparity in well-off-ness, particularly as you go from the cities to the rural areas. This is very, um, communist. The majority of the Chinese don't put much cred into things the government tells them. Let's move away from the traditional western view of those pitiable, brainwashed, and oppressed Chinese populace, mindlessly following what the government tells them. Bullshit. There are a lot of poor people in China. But they're not stupid, mindless government drones incapable of free thought. Which is sometimes more than we can say about the West. This particular view of communist, oppressive, anti-rights China is very much a Western one, and in many ways it has merit, because let's face it, the Chinese government isn't exactly full of angels, and the communist party's history there is not one of sterling uprightness and fluffy bunnies and such. But one thing I hope West will just get over is the feeling that since we live in America, land of democracy and perfection, we can trust the government and media. We can let them tell us how we should think about "Red China", because there's no significant government oversight in what the media says at all. We are free of propaganda and brainwashing, because our free, democratic governments would NEVER do something like that. So to sum up, I do not completely disagree with the things you say, but it looks like you're subscribing wholesale and rather blindly to the Western media view on communist China, and I wanted to add a different perspective. Things are not great, but things are not as BBC tells it either (just look at their coverage of the Tibet riots), and it's time we started questioning our own media, here in the West, and holding it up to the same standards and microscopes we apply to such heavily censored, oppressive regimes as "Red China."