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With Olympics Over, China Re-Censors Internet
eldavojohn writes "We last left the story of Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China when the IOC had reached a deal with the Chinese government whereby some of the press restrictions were lifted. With the 2008 Olympics now but a memory, China has began censoring foreign news sources again. Maybe the West is making too big of a deal over this, as many Chinese citizens seem to like it that way."
Somehow, I find that suspect.
Happiness in slavery.
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They don't like it this way, they just know better at this point. It's like hitting a dog with a stick anytime he goes to get a snack from you, eventually he won't go get the snack even if you aren't carrying a stick. The dog learns not to like snacks, because who knows if you are hiding a stick somewhere. It's just safer not to like snacks. The chinese people are tired of being hit with sticks and are afraid. It's fear, plain and simple.
Maybe the West is making too big of a deal over this, as many Chinese citizens seem to like it that way.
Many US citizens liked slavery, once. And not letting women vote. The fact that only a minority is being oppressed doesn't make it not oppression, and it doesn't make it right.
I'm sorry if it makes you feel awkward to take a stand on basic human rights, but when it comes to issues of rights and ethics, not all viewpoints are equally valid.
Then again, I rather suspect you knew all that. I suppose I've been trolled.
In America, people complain when the government starts censoring the news. In Soviet China, people complain when it stops.
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The IOC must learn that there is no long term positive effect of allowing a totalitarian government to host the olympics in exchange for agreements that are slowly implemented and quickly removed, just as the western countries have learned that when the IOC makes such a mistake it is wrong to respond by boycotting the games.
I think it can compare to when you first wake up or come out of a dark area. At first all of the light hurts your eyes and your initial reaction is to shield yourself or go back to the darkness.
It has to be a slow transition to open information flow or it will be overwhelming.
As far as most Chinese are concerned their government is great. For more than a decade the average Chinese citizen has seen there lot only improve. Naturally the government there is taking full advantage of this by giving themselves all the credit. Thus to many in China it seems that the government is doing a great job, and who are they to argue with success?
It won't last though. There's a generation of children being born who will take economic prosperity for granted. It's the nature of humanity, and by that same token they'll want more than just that. With economic power in their hands they'll want political power, and that's when the government will be in trouble.
I have heard people complain about things like spam and porn on the internet and say "Why doesn't the government do something about it". If you frame the question properly in the US I bet you would get a surprising amount of support for government censorship.
More like:
Toe the "Party Line" or find yourself "Dissapeared" in short order.
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I was there during the Olympics and had internet access through a residential hookup. There was a lot of censoring going on: for example, URLs containing "blog" were generally not accessible. It was clearly not related to what was on the blog, but a blanket thing.
It's not just Chinese. US citizens seem to enjoy having their rights violated as well. They reelected Bush, most of those responsible for the PATRIOT act are still in office, etc. etc. As long as the government provides bread and circuses, nobody really cares about rights. That's the same for the East and West.
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Just wait until the London Olympics. We'll show the Chinese. Ha, they don't even have 5 million security cameras. Amateurs. Hadriansfirewall will kick your Greatfirewall's ass.
Comrade Gordon "the Butcher of Woolies" Brown-shirt, and Leader Jacqui "Winston" Smith will show you the way.
Care to justify your assertion that they don't like it this way? Your own beliefs regarding free speech, etc., are not valid justification for what other people may believe.
As hard as it may be to believe for jaded Americans, the majority of the Chinese actually approve of and trust their government. I say this because it seems in America, people whine and bitch about being forced to choose the lesser of two evils, whereas in China people generally tend to be content with whoever Congress deems suitable to elect.
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
I think it can compare to when you first wake up or come out of a dark area. At first all of the light hurts your eyes and your initial reaction is to shield yourself or go back to the darkness.
So it like that bright shiney thing in the sky. I saw it once. I hate that thing.
Also, there is no Chinese "people." There are Chinese individuals, and they are most definitely not the government. They are its victims. You might want to look into organ harvesting to see what's going on over there.
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Uh, tank guy didn't get run over.
Anyway, you have to realize that Chinese values are fundamentally different from your own. "The Right Thing", to you, might mean freedom of expression, the right to bear arms, etc., but that's not true of all people. Here in Canada, we believe The Right Thing is gays should be allowed to marry, and nobody should walk around packin'. In China, people believe The Right Thing is a centralized, stable government.
Personally, I find it easy to understand the sentiments of the people you mentioned who believed Tiananmen was a case of "tough shit", because given China's chaotic political history, especially in the recent past, organized, stable government is a top priority for many people. And you can't blame them, given the shit they had to suffer through with unstable governments. Many people today still remember said shit, and deems it important to pass these values, namely avoiding said shit, down to the next generation. And the protestors were challenging those very values - the main goal behind the protest was further government reforms, and sought to basically remove the Party from power. In essence, completely disrupting the stable government that China had suffered through three or four periods of complete chaos for.
Obviously Westerners, when presented with the two sides, take the side of the idealistic students clamouring for rights and liberty, since you've enjoyed the luxuries of stable government for centuries. I mean, when was the last major revolution in the Western world? The French Revolution? The availability of these luxuries means that you no longer rank them as high as someone who's lived through several turbulent governments would, and instead prioritize further luxuries like the freedoms I mentioned above. Well, when you look at those freedoms from the perspective of someone who just came out of the feudal age, they're really not that essential to life. So you must understand why they don't rank as high on the list of priorities for a Chinese person.
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
you must be new here.
You take it, I don't want it...
If you read the report that says that 85% of those surveyed think the government should control the internet, it says, "This survey was funded by the New York-based Markle Foundation and directed by an internationally respected research team at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. As required of all public-opinion polling in China, either the survey or the surveyors must be approved by the government, and some topics that Westerners might have liked to see addressed directly, such as censorship, were not." How is any public survey useful if the respondents to the survey had to be filtered by the government?!?
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"Here in Canada" we have a charter of rights and freedoms, as a matter of fact, which -should- guarantee that every citizen in the country has equal rights and opportunity.
Don't twist my argument. My example was to show that different people in different countries have different moral grounds. Canada happens to have some similar things as the US due to similar culture, and as I said, have some dissimilar things as well. How about I protest your right to have guns?
Some morals go beyond boundaries, they're what join us together as human beings.
Wow, did you just single-handedly settle the absolute morals debate, and expected everyone to just go along with your assertion? The justification is that you believe this to be fact, thus everyone else should too? This is the exact underlying problem I'm attacking.
Secondly I find it absolutely laughable, and perhaps intentionally misleading that you would even -suggest- that the past few centuries have been in any way peaceful for the Western world (of which France is not considered a part, incidentally). Starting from the 18th century (a "few hundred" as you would put it), there have been over 40 major conflicts involving North America, either on its own soil or others (ones that you seem to have conveniently forgotten include both World Wars, the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and a few other blatantly obvious choices). Try reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_North_America to educate yourself, assuming that Wikipedia isn't censored where you live. We have -not- had stable governments for centuries and we've been through our own share of atrocities ("Here in Canada" we also had concentration camps for the Japanese during the second World War, which you also seem to have conveniently forgotten).
You missed my point completely, perhaps intentionally. It was not about peace or conflicts. Internal chaos is not the same as conflict against other countries. Let me simplify:
- Government changes three times in the span of about thirty years, lots of people die, lots of people starve, lots of people homeless, not to mention all the opportunistic warlords making their own landgrab.
- Chinese person: "Shit, this sucks. Let's pick a government and stick with it for a while and trust it to do the right thing."
- After about another forty years of turmoil, things are finally starting to look up.
- Government censorship.
- Westerner: "HOLY FUCK THE GOVERNMENT IS CENSORING SHIT! OUR GOVERNMENT DOESN'T DO THAT, SO THAT AIN'T RIGHT! DOWN WITH THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT!"
- Chinese person: "Well gee, I don't really give a damn about the censored stuff or very explicitly and loudly expressing my ideas about how the government sucks. Also, the economy's booming lately, and changing governments suck. Yay government!
To summarize, your way is not necessarily the best way, even if it is the only way you know. Other people in other countries have had different circumstances and came up with different methods to cope, and developed different value systems as a result. Learn to look at things from a different perspective, and deal with it.
On a kind of related tangent, this is exactly the reason, in my experience, for a lot of Middle- and Far-East resentment against the US. Americans are on this moral high horse and tries to push their own values and standards onto everybody else, which is especially ridiculous considering all the hypocritical bullshit that goes on in America. You know what I'm talking about.
Yes, we do take the side of idealistic students clamouring for rights and liberty, because it's the same thing that we are clamouring for every day.
Clamour in your own country? Fine. That's the value system your society has decided to adopt. Quit judging other countries' value systems.
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Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
Sorry, but I'm going to have to agree with the other poster that you've simply missed out on the fact that the Chinese actually do *like* this system. If you had a time machine and took pictures of what happened at Abu Ghraib back to 2000 and asked most Americans what they thought of the events, they would've been horrified. Tell them that these were prisoners of war, and they might have been setting bombs that killed soldiers, and most Americans would have still been appalled.
Fast forward a few years until it's *our* government doing it, and patriotism / nationalism / partisanship or what-have-you has made a bunch of people wrap their brains around the notion that torture is good. Why? Because they love their country / their chosen ideology / their President or whatever, and they rationalize away any negative behavior as good. The Chinese people do the same thing. It seems to be a universal human quality that one takes pride in the group one is in and rationalizes away all bad behavior. So, I'm not surprised that the Chinese like it.
Plus, unlike us, they have been raised from birth with a values system that prioritizes social stability and harmony over individual liberty. 2500 years of Confucian thought doesn't just vanish with the modern age. China would never be the birthplace of democracy. It's just not a natural progression of their dominant social philosophies. Hopefully, they can learn, but they'll have to overcome far more inertia than the early American colonists did. FAR more inertia.
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Muslims are the filthiest animals on earth (literally from the quran, 8:55, with "infidels" replaced by "muslims")
Thanks for an easy one. Anyone following along should take this as an example of "your game" - the one I referred to originally where you and other extremists deliberately misinterpret scripture in order to rationalize your mental disease.
You claim the quran says literally "Infidels are the filthiest animals on earth" - a phrase which exists in no english translation of the quran at all, not even the most extremist. A prefect example of the way extremists like you take scripture out of context.
[8:54] Such was the case with the people of Pharaoh and others before them. They first rejected the signs of their Lord. Consequently, we annihilated them for their sins. We drowned Pharaoh's people; the wicked were consistently punished.
[8:55] The worst creatures in the sight of GOD are those who disbelieved; they cannot believe.
[8:56] You reach agreements with them, but they violate their agreements every time; they are not righteous.
Surah 8 Al-Anfaal
So, here we have first an example of how the God of Moses punished the people of Pharaoh - because he broke his promise to the Israelites - and how those rules still apply, furthermore the line you tried to misquote refers to a specific battle with the Banu Qurayza in which the Qurayza were reported to have twice broken agreements of peace with mohammed's group. It clearly isn't racist, nor is it any justification for hatred the way you would have it.
And that is a typical example of why you are just a broken record of extremist hate. Go and bugger off now little hater boy.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Here's a thought experiment. Suppose you're a Chinese entrepreneur given cash by a bunch of gullible Americans. You're an approved organisation which means you give results that won't annoy the Chinese government and cause them to pull your approval. Polling people is expensive. Do you 1) Poll lots more randomly selected people than the survey requires and cherry pick to the the politically correct results or 2) Make shit up, or poll a bunch of people who are politically reliable.
The survey is worthless.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I lived in Taiwan and Asia for 5 years. I know and interact with a fair number of Mainland Chinese now that I'm back. Many (most) have Masters degrees or higher and have lived in the US for 10+ years.
The thing I've discovered is they are extremely Nationalist. Because I spent most of my time in Asia in Taiwan and married there I get plenty of earful of how Taiwan (and Tibet) are part of China and how ANYONE who disagrees needs to be beaten up (literally, financially or otherwise) because China is a bigger more powerful entity than anyone else. (might makes right is the prevailing Political theory among the educated)
Nationalism in China is running at levels not seen since August 1914.
So it is not "Slavery = Happiness," But "Nationalism = Happiness."
The communists are really riding a tiger here. They are constantly stoking the flames of Nationalism and desperately dependent on Economic growth to give them legitimacy and allow them continued rule. So long as they can continue to step on the throats of smaller people (Tibet) and have money in their pockets it makes the people feel happy.
Anyways, there are whole volumes of books out there for those that are interested (Look up Tyranny of History (0140146776) to get started). Also ask the next Mainland Chinese person you meet outside of China what he thought of the French President meeting with the Dali Lama recently. You will get some very interesting answers.