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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.'"
OK, I understand why they would want to choke civil unrest by censoring dissidents online, but porn? How's that helping them?
You just got troll'd!
No, it really _is_ a coincident that China started targeting porn sites on the twentieth anniversary of 'the June 4th incident'.
You think they looked at the calendar and realized... OMG, this is the year we must start censoring internet porn!
- These characters were randomly selected.
Imagine if they did that in our countries? You would feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Slashdotters cried out in anger and considered stepping outside of their home to do something about it.
You just got troll'd!
"28 suspects arrested in the campaign included 4 men in their twenties who ran the Midnight Prostitute Call website from eastern China. They also included two men accused of using a video chat service to defraud customers."
What I don't understand is that if there are so many damn people in China why they don't just overthrow their government... it wouldn't be difficult.
Well, a lot of chinese people happen to like the chinese government and approve of what's going on, at least enough to put up with it. I'm sure a lot of people around the world were probably wondering why Americans didn't overthrow Bush. I personally hated the guy from before day one, but I wouldn't want to overthrow the government even if we were facing 8 more years of Bush. Probably similar in China, they don't agree with everything, but the government does reflect a lot of their values, an overthrow would be damaging, and they don't see a lot of other people willing to rise up.
It's not like the government holds on to power entirely by force, in other words.
Safe for use by second and third parties to redistribute published news, in that if you republish or distribute a Xinhua article in the PRC, you probably won't get arrested, because the article's already been vetted. It doesn't mean "safe to take for granted, without scepticism".
Countries that censor news often don't explicitly define what is acceptable, and the standards can change often, hence why internal political commentators need to rely on such gauges to see what the current acceptable topics are.
Modesty and sexual conservatism, which are not unique to the Chinese culture, but rather understood and appreciated by almost all [organized] societies. Nobody, however, has ever been able to 'enforce' these things, which is what the Chinese don't get. If you are in a Free(TM) country, consider yourself lucky.
Id like to see that in a porn film, the girl yelling out, "freedom to all, death to taxes, no riaa, get rid of older 50yos in govt!!!, release all aliens info"
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Maybe they do. I've never watched a porn film through to the end.
a lot of chinese people happen to like the chinese government and approve of what's going on
Quite right. This is anecdotal, but the Chinese people I've spoken with about this simply do not see the problems that I try to ask them about. They largely agree with what the Chinese government is doing. They see government as their protector, and mostly agree/assume that "the government knows best." They point to the remarkable progress and advancement in China (in terms of tech, economy, society, etc.) to prove their point.
At worst, I've gotten some of them to begrudgingly admit that some things the government is doing may be "necessary compromises" in order for the country as a whole to grow.
Those that I've met are among the more educated and traveled/worldly of the Chinese population. I'm not sure which way that biases the sample. I'm well-aware that there are dissidents in China trying to stop things like censorship; but doing so must be exceedingly difficult when the average person (and even the "intellectual elite" if you will) support the government.
I'm not buying it, chief. Read a comedy by Aristophanes and tell me that the Athenian Greeks were much into "modesty and sexual conservatism." Read the poems of Martial, Juvenal, and Catullus, and look at the architecture and decorations preserved at Pompeii, and tell me that the Romans were.
Some of the ancient and beautiful temples in India happen to have bas-reliefs depicting bestiality. Illustrated sex manuals were a popular form of literature at one point in China's history. Japan has had tentacle porn since at least the 18th century.
Sure, every culture has its sexual mores. But that's not exactly the same thing.
Don't you usually skip to the end when you're ready to finish? ...or is that just me?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
In the past, the government had done many gang/crime enforces during certain month of year before, they call it "Yan Da" which basically mean strict enforcement.
But everyone in china knows that It doesn't solve anything permanently and the people who are involve with such act just keep low profile and wait for it finish.
As for the porn busting thing.. my coworkers are making jokes about it and pulling out any thing vaguely sexual. such as, you can't mention "Mei Nv"(beatiful girl) in the game description.
Bottom line, Everything will be business as usual in a month or two.
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...
Only if you get off on credits
The Chinese government has managed to rocket China from an impoverished post-WWII and post civil-war famine-plagued disaster into the modern China of today in under sixty years.
That's absolutely amazing.
To expect our idea of freedom and democracy to work in China is to ignore its situation and culture. The US and Europe haven't had serious famines in living memory. China has.
Order and prosperity are more important than freedom.
People don't generally revolt because they aren't free, they revolt because freedom is seen as the path to prosperity they do not have.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Don't you usually skip to the end when you're ready to finish? ...or is that just me?
I don't know what's scarier - his wanking practices being marked "informative" or the fact that his name is "SQuiRT".
Do you have ESP?
It was a lot of American students that were pushing the Chinese students to fight the government.
No, it was not. That is a little conspiracy theory that the most patriotic of Chinese will peddle as a catalyst for the Tiananmen Square protests. Blame the Americans rather than their own people. It has no basis in fact.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
Talking about problems will get you fired, beaten up, locked up or even killed.
I had lived in China for years and managed a group of software developers. While I agree that they are less inclined to point out problem. That's more like a cultural / educational thing. (Even if I put up awards for filing bugs, they rarely did.) But "Talking problem ... get you ... killed." I found that exaggerated too much. I've yet to read of anyone get killed speaking out problems in a *factory*. Did you actually know of an example? Or you just make it up?
And outside of works, Chinese make a lot of complains from the cost of healthcare to the lack of ... democracy ... (though they don't really demand it desparately.) There are plenty of criticism against the government in the Internet too, just ask the 91589 people complaining about the lack of train tickets in one website.
You are either not living in China or you have a wrong perception of what happen around you.