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China Allows Access to English Wikipedia
LinuxLefty writes "Reuters is reporting that Chinese authorities have lifted the ban on the English version of Wikipedia. The Chinese version of the site is still blocked, as are English-language versions of politically sensitive topics such as Tibet and Tiananmen Square. 'The move comes after International Olympic Committee (IOC) inspectors told Beijing organisers that the Internet must be open for the duration of the 2008 Olympics and that blocking it "would reflect very poorly" on the host country. China's government, keen to avoid sparking social discontent, keeps a tight watch over the media and often blocks or censors popular Web sites and forums where dissent may brew.'"
Oh they look pretty capitalistic to me, that doesn't contradict the totalitarianism.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Westerners in the Olympic Village will see something very open and free but it's all a put on. The Atlantic had a good article about this not long ago. The great firewall of China is extensive and fine grained enough to block individual page views at random. It's enough to eliminate public discussion on many topics and it's enough to round up potential subversives. Information in China is not free because people in China are not free.
If the Chinese government keeps up this bullshit, people are going to call for boycotts of companies that advertise during the olympics, and that will reduce their revenue (because it will diminish the value of advertsising during hte olympics).
Even the Dalai Lama himself has firmly said that the Olympics should not be boycotted.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/18/2193461.htm
He has the most to lose if China's government gets more powerful.
I agree with him, I personally don't believe a boycott of the current olympics or advertisers is warranted in this case. The olympics is the one time every four years when athletes of all nations can come together. That serves more for global peace and understanding than petty quarreling, protests, and boycotts. Note, if there was serious shit going on I'll be the at the front of the protest line.
We need China to open, isolating them further will not be helpful. It's better the Chinese (people not govt.) be exposed to how people of other cultures are and vice versa.
First, you're thinking exactly like the Chinese government and that is rather disturbing. Second, it doesn't really matter what people try to edit Wikipedia, you're supposed to check facts not just blindly obey Wikipedia or SLashdot for that matter. Third, even if they did vandalize these pages it is quite likely that someone somewhere is going to notice and revert the page back.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Free Hans Reiser!
So: allow access to websites in a foreign language that most Chinese can't understand, for a period of - what - two weeks? And presumably keep a list of everyone who reads those websites? And then back to normal afterwards? Wow, the IOC is really helping to open up China to new ideas about freedom and democracy, isn't it?
America has exported large number of jobs to China. EU has started doing the same. That means that unless you live off this planet, that you are buying Chinese product. More importantly, you are supporting them, unless you are actively checking everything that you buy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yep, I have a Chinese friend who always speaks up for the government and everything as if it 'cannot be helped'. Once I asked them about Tiananmen square and they only knew that some students protested there, they didn't even know that anyone was killed! This is the kind of brainwashing and history erasing going on in China and it sickens me. If you control history you control the present..
They don't understand because the Chinese people are ignorant. They reject all contradications because they've been taught from birth that "this is the truth". Just like how a christian would reject evolution if they had be taught from birth that the earth is 6000 years old, they are no different.
You can't understand nonsense.
However as a fact most Westerners do not understand very much about the, I think, quite complex structure of Chinese society. Even if you lived there it is not easy to get a feeling for what people ranging from the very poor countryside worker to the super rich entrepeneur really thinks about the government. Chinese people are not stupid, the have the same thoughts about their government as we have. Most people in China (except the very poor people) have access to the net and know how get past the firewall. Most people's English is much better then most people's Chinese in Europe or the states. They are able to read the news and follow the ongoing controversy.
It is so easy for us to say: ok we see that our system works in our country, so please do the same in China. But I think one also has to notice that the Chinese government does make efforts to steer the country in the right direction. The country is just so big and hard to control due to its extremly diverse ethnicity and the big gap between rich and poor. If things change from one day to the next, there will be a civil war and a lot of people will die and suffer. More than do right now because of the oppression by the government.
Chinese people know that they are oppressed and they are sick of it. The country is gonna change. But not tomorrow and not the day after. Not even because of the Olympic games. It takes time.
-- LP-Research
Whereas Millions of American adults have no idea that around 1 million Iraqis are lying dead for large international corporations to profit. Tieneman square? 7000 Deaths according to NATO (One of the higher estimates).That they are living in "The Land of the Free" Despite having no large party representing anything other than fascist interests, having no independant press, infact the only right they have, is to sue anyone for anything essentially.
"inspectors told Beijing organisers that the Internet must be open for the duration of the 2008 Olympics and that blocking it "would reflect very poorly" on the host country"
Good to know the Olympic committee is all for standing up for human rights provided they're in town, and they're being paid lots of money, and those human rights only apply to people who are used to such freedoms in the first place. But seriously, if the Olympic committee gave a flying fuck about human rights they wouldn't have chosen China to host the Olympics.
I have nothing compelling to say
You don't know shit about what's like in China 40 years ago.
Just opened it now, in Beijing. Seems to be working fine. But of course, the Tiananmen Square Protest page is blocked, still. That's the keyword filter, still chugging along as usual.
Well, the Great Leap Forward showed the mastery of propaganda that Mao had mastered, though to be fair, he lost considerable influence afterwards, basically having to create a second revolution to gain back his position. I think a good many Chinese know something fairly bad happened, though it's not even clear that the Communists knew how many people died, because so many lower level functionaries lied to their superiors about the number of deaths. At the end of the day, no one knows how many people died, but what we can say is that Mao's ludicrous economic programs make him, directly or indirectly, one of the greatest mass killers in the history of our species. You have to look to Stalin, whose own idiotic economic and agricultural programs caused millions of Russian deaths, for someone who comes close.
And that's why, at the end of the day, no matter how ridiculous and hypocritical the West is, we do have it better. No Western government, no matter how hard it tried, could hide that many deaths. The press loves only one thing, and that's sales, and nothing sells better than scandal, and the ultimate scandal is an inept government. Why do you think Bush has the lowest ratings of just about any President in US history? For all his attempts to control the media, it hasn't done him a damned bit of good.
The Chinese government ultimately destroys itself with its attempting to hide information. The wonder of freedom of the press and freedom of speech is that the people can speak directly, the politicians cannot hide behind walls of information. When you see people on TV with the freedom to say "You suck", it makes it impossible to live in a vacuum, exercising power with no comprehension of what that is doing to the greater society.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
While it may make internet users in China more skillful at getting around website blocks, it's not exactly a good thing that you need that skill in the first place. By creating the Great Firewall, they are blocking all inexperienced internet users from accessing this damning information. I assume in China that the vast majority of people are inexperienced internet users (same in the States too. :/). They are controlling the flow of this information to control the actions of their people, and it's causing more harm to Human Rights than it is helping computer literate Chinese to become inventive. You seem to have twisted this horrible violation of the freedom of peoples into a good thing by saying "at least some people know how to get around a firewall now!". Not exactly comparable subjects.
There are other examples of totalitarian capitalist countries.
capitalist!=free
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
China will lose this battle. I cannot understand how they hope to contain information. Do they hope that their people just won't speak English. Its insane and hopeless, better to live in a free society, warts and all. Peace.
hukado at Products
I know this is probably futile, but what the hell...
/. know how long it took for us to get these things? I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure it took generations. Part of the explanation is that those in power didn't always want it to happen, but another part is that democracy and political freedom are things that people need to learn, and it takes time. Just look to history to see how many times people have fought for freedom in a revolution, only to throw it away as soon as they've won. We in the West held on to it because of another revolution: the Enlightenment.
We in the West enjoy democracy and freedom. Well, "enjoy" may be an exaggeration, but we have it, sort of. Does anybody on
So how can we imagine that any country can just slap democracy and freedom down in the middle of society and say "Here you go, chaps, have fun"? China and the Chinese go through that phase now, what we went through 100+ years ago, and they are doing it a lot faster than we did, not least because of modern technology, but a lot of things can go wrong if the government just let it loose. Thankfully the Chinese government aren't about to let foreign pressure push them around.
What would happen if they did suddenly try to introduce full democracy and all the freedoms the Americans still only dream about? Just look at what happened in Russia: organised criminal gangs (the Russian mafia) grew very strong and tried take over, certain big companies grew extremely strong and tried to take over, the people in general suffered great need, and the government went in circles. Now they are returning to something closer to Soviet style strong-man government, because this is what the people seems to prefer.