China Makes Arrests To Stop Internet Porn

thefickler writes "The Chinese Government is expanding a crackdown on Internet pornography. Xinhua news agency, which is owned by the government and can safely be used for reporting in China, says the campaign to scrub the country's Internet of 'vulgar' content has so far resulted in 29 criminal cases. Police have ordered the removal of 46,000 pornographic and other 'harmful' items from websites. The latest crackdown comes after official warnings of rising social unrest as the economy slows. It's no coincidence that this year is the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, or, to use the acceptable nomenclature, 'the June 4th incident.'"

Comments

Re:What for?

[WGFCrafty]

Go watch idiocracy.

Making people stupider does not help population size.

An IT analogy

[r6144]

The same reason system administrators are reluctant to reboot their production servers in order to apply a kernel patch that fixes serious performance issues. Government downtime is costly. And in this case we have a fairly invasive patch involving a new algorithm, and although the algorithm itself is well researched, the specific implementation needs extensive testing for which good spare hardware is unavailable.

If only we had a good simulator to test political ideas on...

Re:An IT analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually writing this from a hotel in Ch*na, and this different culture thing is bullshit. I spend most of my time in Ta*wan, and TW really does feel like somewhere that has 5000 years of history. The culture is open enough to debate different solutions to problems, and that lets them add value.

E.g. I visited the CH factory of a TWese electronics manufacturer. The TWese company is one of the top 5 ODMs that design something like 90% of the laptops and motherboards in the world all of them are based in TW and do their design there. When you visit them in TW, they are very pragmatic about solving problems and clearly based on market share they are good at what they do.

The CHese factory by contrast is organised on very strict lines. They have absolutely no authority to question anything or make any changes. And wider TWese society vs CHese society mirrors this distinction. If you're in CH you don't talk about problems. Talking about problems will get you fired, beaten up, locked up or even killed. That just means that problems are never really solved, just papered over. All the rhetoric about 5000 years of history and a very different culture is just something the government says to foreigners who don't recognize it is bullshit. CHese people most likely do, but they know the consequences of speaking up. Also the current government spent most of its time eraseing those 5000 years of history and culture in favour of a sort of generic Stalinism.

In fact as a liberal you should be aware that sometimes governments spout self serving nonsense to excuse stomping their opponents. And hell, governments are sometimes corrupt too. Imagine what the US would be like if criticizing Bush or Haliburton was widely believed to cause you to disappear. And imagine if the Republican party/Haliburton had been in power for 50 years and owned everything.

I'm sure that TW's more open political system influences people to discuss problems at work and try to solve them and CH's system discourages this. And for what it's worth, TW did not have 'our political system' forced upon them. The US would occasionally raise reform during the cold war, but it never forced it - given that it does not recognize TW that would have been hard. It was actually student protests coupled with a sympathetic TW President Lee which triggered TW's transition. Before that it was a party state like CH. They actually happened at the same time as the student protests in CH.

I.e. regardless of people's culture, they don't like being ruled my a bunch of murdering crooks. No one plans 20 to 50 years ahead blindly, that leads to catastrophe. You need to be able to change tack as new facts appear. TW can do that, CH can't. Not politically, and not in an engineering project.

Mispellings are for obvious reasons. Hope the proxy works.

I realise the above would be very bad Last Words on the Internet...

Re:What for?

[donscarletti]

What the Chinese government really needs to give to its people is porn, addictive dumb reality TV shows, food and booze.

You've never watched CCTV have you? They run 18 channels of pure shit 24/7. Soap operas, inane stock-character comedies that just drag on for hours (which I admit might be funnier if I were a native speaker) and news that tells you the exact same trivial things three times an hour. On other channels there are some form of reality shows and all the mind numbing goodness you'd expect in the west.

Food is a huge part of China, Sure, the rural poor may be living off bowls of congee but if anything the urban middle class generally eat far more lavishly than those of western countries with both dishes, more exotic ingredients, more complex preparation and larger portions (even KFC's menu is roughly double its normal size).

As for booze, everyone should try Tsing Tao or Harbin beer when over there. It just costs a few RMB, comes in massive bottles and due to its sparse flavor you can keep drinking it and drinking it and be thoroughly drunk well before your mouth feels like you've been drinking beer. If you ordering, make sure you pronounce "Tsing Tao" as "Tchingdao" and emphasize the "r" in Harbin or they won't know what you are asking for.

Anyway, I'm not going to do any further analysis here, apart from mentioning that the Chinese government is not stupid in these matters and has probably realised the exact same thing as you and most western governments have.

Re:What for?

[TaoTehChing]

You basically quoted an ancient Chinese proverb:

"Therefor in governing the people, the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies, weakens their wills but strengthens their bones. He always keeps them innocent of knowledge and free from desire, and ensures that the clever never dare to act."

From the Tao Teh Ching (III)

pr0n

[religious freak]

I always thought it was mainly the puritan/protestant/western religious values that drove our (i.e. Western) governments and institutions to not like porno.

Recently I've discovered India "outlaws" (according the book I read) porn and now China is cracking down. If anything, I'd think they wouldn't care. What is it in these Eastern cultures that makes them not like porn? I didn't think they were uptight like that.