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85% of Chinese Citizens Like Internet Censorship
cynagh0st writes "A Pew Internet & American Life Project report indicates that of an overwhelming majority of Chinese people that believed the Internet should be 'managed or controlled,' 85% want the government to do this managing. This is resulting from surveys on Internet use over the last seven years in China. 'The survey findings discussed here, drawn from a broad-based sample of urban Chinese Internet users and non-users alike, indicate a degree of comfort and even approval of the notion that the government authorities should control and manage the content available on the Internet.' The report goes further into describing the divide in perspective between China and Western Nations on the matter and discusses the PRC's justifications for Internet control."
I was born in Taiwan, though I was raised in America. I got to see the Chinese and American cultures up close.
Every culture and language has "lean" words, words that have special significance and emotionally potent. In America, those words include, "freedom", "liberty", "justice", "dream", and "oppression". Here, people have great fear of "oppression", and words and concepts like that.
In the Chinese culture, the individual's greatest fear isn't "oppression". It is "luan", or "anarchy", "disorder". The Chinese people in general will tolerate a great deal of "oppression" so long as the government is doing its job: keeping the nation from running into chaos. "Human rights" in China doesn't include the right to be free; instead, it includes the right to be live a peaceful life.
-Q
Do you mind sourcing that? The closest I'm able to find is that "74% would prevent public school students from wearing a T-shirt with a slogan that might offend others." Source I've no doubt that many people have very different views than me on what the first amendment guarantees, but I honestly doubt your figure, particularly considering the other data on the same site.
On the subject of the article, I must say that I'm rather skeptical. It's possible that Chinese citizens really do appreciate censorship by such an overwhelming majority, but I am reminded of this article, particularly the line "Having lived in a society where millions were arrested for speaking inadvertently to informers, many older people are extremely wary of talking to researchers wielding microphones (devices associated with the KGB)." This was last December, mind you, more than a decade after the fall of the USSR.
Actually, people have certainly been jailed in the US for daring to appear at a Bush speech without having first drunk the kool-aid. For example, Nicole and Jeffrey Rank were arrested just for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts (without even creating a disturbance). But unlike in China, people in the US are generally released pretty quickly afterwards (and in this case, actually won a legal settlement against the federal government).