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20 Years After Tiananmen, China Stifles Online Dissent
alphadogg writes with this snippet from Network World: "The Internet has brought new hope to reformists in China since the country crushed pro-democracy protests in the capital 20 years ago. But as dissidents have gone high-tech, the government in turn has worked to restrict free speech on the Internet, stifling threats to its rule that could grow online. China has stepped up monitoring of dissidents and Internet censorship ahead of June 4, when hundreds were killed in 1989 after Beijing sent soldiers to its central Tiananmen Square to disperse protestors. The authoritarian government wants to ensure that date and other sensitive anniversaries this year pass without public disturbances, observers say. In recent months, China has blocked YouTube and closed two blog hosting sites, bullog.cn and fatianxia.com, known for their liberal content."
It's still inconvenient for the Chinese government that this not be seen by the public? Although not easy to pull off, perhaps there should be some plans to bring this issue up world wide when it's not around the anniversary. Catch the Chinese authorities off-guard.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Not as epic as her book Shock Doctrine but it is a must read for any tech with a conscience.
http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
secrecy.
It isn't ubiquitous surveillance that does the trick, it's ubiquitous potential surveillance. Likewise iron fisted rule is crude and inefficient. The true art is to rule without rules. China has high sounding and extremely vague legal principles. Put the two together and you are never (a) sure if you are not being watched nor (b) if what you are doing is legal.
When you've achieved this, you don't need Big Brother. Every citizen is his own Big Brother.
You almost have to admire this system. It is tyranny, perfected.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You so happy to talk of China censorship but what of censorship in the West?
no it snot!
I am not convinced that an authoritarian government is so necessary to re-write the popular mythology of recent history. The US does not have a government which is strongly authoritarian, yet the re-writing of history is a prominent form of political speech in America.
I've come across several other examples: Japanese popular history of the nature of their involvement in WWII. Australian & American popular history of the treatment of Aboriginals / Native Americans. I am more familiar with American & Australian histories, so I could name many more... but I think that is beside the point. Someone with a solid knowledge of another country doubtless could list many other examples.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/export/home/httpd/htdocs/news/2009/052909-20-years-after-tiananmen-china.html&pagename=/news/2009/052909-20-years-after-tiananmen-china.html&pageurl=http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/052909-20-years-after-tiananmen-china.html&site=datacenter
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This is one of the countries that people want to let control DNS.
When the overwhelming majority of people in a nation truly want democracy and human rights, the nation quickly and peacefully transforms into a liberal Western democracy. Case in point is Eastern Europe. Once the Kremlin ceased suppressing Eastern Europe, the Eastern Europeans peacefully and quickly transformed into liberal Western democracies. Except for Romania (where the dictator was killed), there was no bloodshed. There was no violence.
In the late 1980s, what was the strength of desire for creating Western democracies in Eastern Europe? Consider Czechoslovakia. In one day of 1989 November, about 800,000 people gathered in Prague and rallied for the creation of a Western democracy. 800,000 people is about 5% of the population.
By contrast, in one day of 1989 June, about 1 million people gathered in Tiananmen Square to demand the creation of a Western democracy. 1 million people is only 0.1 % of the Chinese population.
In other words, in the late 1980s, the strength of support for democracy in Eastern Europe was 50 times the strength in China.
I admire the Eastern Europeans.
China is what it is due to how the Chinese people act and think. No foreign power is imposing the CCP on China. The Chinese people support the CCP.
An explosion of discontent is unlikely in China because the 20 years since Tiananmen have been dominated by incredible economic growth. It is hard to complain when your walette is getting fat. I realize the global economic downturn hit China somewhat, but it certainly didn't roll them back 20 years. (Not that this is specific to China; Americans never minded the Iraq war enough to do anything about it, even after they learned it was a sham, it was high gas prices and finally the economic collapse that made people revile the Bush presidency.) One implication of this is that the notion of political liberalization as a necessary byproduct of capitalism is not yet dead. The next time China's growth slows or reverses for a sustained period, then we will see if its new middle class has power to go with their wealth.
I'm more curious about how they feel in regards to North Korea.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
This is by far the most useful post, and needs to appear above the other rubbish about secret police, and government conspiracies.
Chinese culture dictates that personal freedoms are completely sacrificed, for the sake of social stability. Authoritarian government is the natural result, and the meta-stable bizarro world we see now is a result of sustained government meddling.
Also, before the cultural relativists come out to disagree, you already lost.
The universal nature of human rights and freedoms is beyond question
Here's my search: http://images.google.cn/images?gbv=2&hl=zh-CN&sa=1&q=Tiananmen+Square+(massacre+OR+killing+OR+event)
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
. . . never heard of that place. I'd better check the Internet . . .
Ah, here it is: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Tiananmen_Square
It's worth a peek for Slashdotters just for the photo of Li Peng using his laser eyes . . . sharks are up next.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I've been told the Chinese are willing to open up the discussions about Tiananmen if the USA will release the Abu Ghraib pictures.
It wasn't hundreds that were killed. That was a very carefully propogated lie of the PRC goverment. It was thousands .. probably more than 10,000 people.
And people say it is tin foil hat if you point out the thousands of hiding in plain sight high tech spies that China has in the US and all over the world.
There is going to be a day when China and the US cha cha over some issue, and all these students and businessmen here are going to be getting phone calls from back home and they will follow orders and sabotage a shitload of stuff. They are already stealing anything that isn't nailed down. And your anecdotal goes to help prove that, brainwashing from birth works.
Opening up normalized trade with China and allowing the wall street scumbag traitors (and I think they should be charged and treated like traitors) to sell off everything and destroy manufacturing in the US, combined with this ludicrous allowance of high tech spies having unfettered access to what is left, loosely now called our IP, is the biggest policy blunder the US ever made. Our economy is collapsing from it, and we will suffer militarily from it at some point. They don't care, China is still a massive master/slave society. The same set of insane tyrants who killed off 60 million of their own people are still in charge (or now their brainwashed children), just now WE are paying their salaries. WE are paying them to control Africa, where the last remaining good sources of critical minerals are located. WE are paying them to build the largest military ever, advancing at a rate ten times faster than the entire western world combined. And before some internet mastermind cares to quote figures, remember a dollar goes a lot further in China than it does in the US. So take the published numbers and multiply China's rate by several times over, both in dollars and percentage of budgets, to get a better picture of their rate of military buildup. Their rate of military expansion will surpass the US easily within 20 years, at the same time as our military is being ground into the sand and rocks in stupid little penny ante wars, and their gross economy will surpass the US within 5 to 10 years now (most estimates now are settling on around 2015), and combined with their manufacturing might, that means that they will be able to pump out ten fighters or advanced missiles for our one, and so on down the list.
And it doesn't matter what tech we develop in the west, the Chinese have been and will continue to get their hands on it, one way or the other. They either steal or or buy it, but they get it all. We will shortly be losing any sort of high tech advantage, and we will never be able to gain any sort of manufacturing advantage now. They aren't even hiding this! You can find their position papers and read it! They consider the US to be their number one military threat and are actively working to neutralize that threat. This isn't a joke.
They have beaten and surpassed EVERY DOD and CIA analyst prediction that I have read over the last decade. The military they are constructing is for one purpose, to expand forcefully globally and control as much land and resources as possible, and they are counting on several million exported citizens to be spies now and saboteurs then, when the time is necessary for them to be used. Even if those people don't know it, having friends and family back home to be used as an inducement, plus their ingrained brainwashing about how China can do no wrong. That will be enough so that most of them will follow the orders they get in that phone call or text message.
Isn't that special.
The world is running out of resources, we are approaching peak everything, and once it gets to China gets them, or anyone else, China will do what it takes to triumph. Anything. Anyone who fails to see this by now is living in denial.
We've had now 20 years of absolute proof, nothing has changed over there except they got a LOT richer and more powerful and are constructing the most high tech police state imaginable, and their brainwashed people are mostly OK with that.
Various traitors in weste
The US gov't may not censor sites, but many US corporations certainly do. Post the wrong thing on Facebook (assuming your corporate proxy server will let you get to Facebook) or send an email from work with an F-bomb, and you might be told to clean out your desk. We're free - as long as it doesn't violate company policy.
Oh, wait...
On a more serious note, you might be taken seriously if you wrote coherently.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The truth is most Chinese internet-users care about the same things as most western internet-users do: chatting and games.
Years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, more than half of U.S. citizens could still not locate Afghanistan on the map, either. I'm in Beijing right now. Having Youtube and such banned is annoying as heck, but like most Chinese I treat the blocking of many sites as an annoyance, rather than a severe crackdown on rights. Internet didn't even exist 20 years ago, and most young people (not only in China) aren't very involved in politics. They're more concerned with their future career prospects and the stock market.
The thing is, although there are a lot of problems in China right now, most people believe that the -Central- government is truly acting in the interest of the country. It has delivered better than any alternatives they can see (Russia? Ended up electing a dictator as well. India? Has twice the number of poor people, terrible infrastructure and higher levels of illiteracy, etc.), so they're happy. People forget that for many Chinese, war, internal conflicts and famine aren't that distant a memory. Now things are relatively peaceful, meat consumption has gone up, and China has become the world's biggest user of mobile phones and internet. Good enough?
For all media's talk of authoritarianism, power in China is actually very fractured, and most Chinese realize this. Complaints are usually directed towards corrupt -local- officials, not towards the higher-ups. After all, China does have pretty tough laws, but it often lacks the means to enforce it. It's not easy when the local officials are buddy-buddies with the local police and the local press as well. The Central government is apparently experimenting with elections in some villages, but it would take time until such systems are applied on a wider basis.
(by the way, Google gets bashed a lot because of it assists in the censuring, but I think people are giving it a too hard time. I can actually access most of the news articles on Google News. And most forums have discussion sections about topics otherwise censored in China, but because the forums don't specialize in it those sites actually aren't banned - case in point with Slashdot-. Google gives Chinese people access to 90% of the information they didn't have access to before, and doesn't give access to 10% of the stuff they didn't have access to to begin with. Good enough for now)
And the vast majority of Chinese don't care.
And why should they? As long as you don't say inconvenient things, you can DO whatever you want in China. With freedom of action, and a growing economy, why would most Chinese care? If it weren't for the amazing economic growth presided over by the CCP, most Chinese wouldn't have access to computers to even make these websites.
Do many westerners know about those events as well?
Those events aren't as close to us - they're trivia questions whereas for Chinese it would be their history. How many people in the US know that the US liberated Kuwait from an Iraqi occupation in 1991, invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, and invaded Iraq in 2003? That is the equivalent question.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
From what I know from the similarly totalitarian communist regime that existed in eastern Europe in the past century (my parents lived there), these kind of government prefer to hand pick the people to whom they give authorizations to go abroad.
Either select people who genuinely believe so much in the government that there's no way they could get "corrupted" even when "exposed to the evil westerner capitalists".
Or select people who have enough allegiance to the government.
And then in addition to that perform regular checks, both open (interviews organized by the local embassy) and covert (have the abroad community member spy on each other to find if someone has dared to walk aside from the "golden rules set by the government").
I'm ready to bet that the same is happening with modern China.
There are people who don't believe in the current government. But those aren't the one who'll obtain an authorization to go study abroad. To much risks of defection or getting corrupted and converted by the evil westerners.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Here is how Google kowtowed to their Communist masters. Peace and love to the Chinese, the truth about the massacre to everyone else.
"Don't be evil"? Fuck you, Google.
Ok, I might have to re-adjust my tin foil hat for this (or you might have to put one on), but its amazing that just before the 20th anniversary of the slaughter at Tiananmen Square, their crazy little neighbour to the south sets off an atomic bomb, and yaps like a non-capitalist dog about 'the truce is over and war imminent' blah blah. Perhaps the dysfunctional leader got the go-ahead to push a button (and several psychological ones), by their freedom-agnostic neighbours to the north. "Go for it crazy Kim!" reads the dispatch, you push a button at the imperialist dogs and have the emaciated million man army roast hot dogs (I'm not talkin' sausage), I mean Hot Dogs at the fireball. "Look what the great leader has done, he is saving our lyvers". The timing is about right though. The US and allies developed the bomb in 1945. Living in North Korea is living in a 1945 world. It takes heat off China for human rights abuses. Its just as bad in North Korea, except there is no foreign (American, European) investment. North Korea as a communist experiment, is a disaster. Before 1980, China was no better.
there has always been censorship
and there will always be censorship
the question is: how vicious? (warnings versus imprisonment)
and of what? (child porn versus simple political opinion)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
that their support might evolve and decrease over time
the power of democracy is that it creates legitimacy: "i speak for the people's will, because the people actually got together and said that i did." this is extremely powerful
nondemocracies have the problem that, inevitably, over time, the distance between the government's agenda and the people's agenda shifts and grows. without democracy, there is no way to naturally reconcile the two agendas, such that the longer time goes on, the less legitimacy nondemocracies have in the eyes of their people. its an inevitable decay. eventually, revolution occurs in the nondemocracy, or some sort of other governmental implosion, and a new system emerges, once again having addressed the will of the people (in an unfortunate and tragic way, rather than an honest and straightforward way)
without voting by the average man, the nondemocractic government begins to speak only for the agenda of a ruling elite class. while in democratic countries, there are no unheard voices that grow in malcontent and revolution underground, because they can always plug in and express their grievances via democracy, become a voting bloc people have to pay attention to
of course there are people in democracies who don't believe in the legitimacy of their government. but there are always faithless, hopeless people, they don't represent any valid political opinion, just a psychological problem. likewise, in nondemocracies there are people who support their government. there always spineless types who apparently enjoy being slaves. but no majority of people, anywhere, in any time in human history, enjoys being a voiceless slave who has no voice in their own government
no matter what propaganda tricks the chinese government uses, you either have a voice in your own government, or you don't, and no set of tricks can paint over this gap forever. there will be another tiananmen square in china someday if the grumpy old technocrats in beijing don't prove to be as wise as they are supposed to be and begin to chart a course to democracy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Such a big story about something that never happened!
But how many Americans have known from their text books and TV news of the following history and facts:
Oversea Chinese's attitude is more like reactions to stuck-up American ideal and opinion as well as to the feeling of second class citizen (see all the Chinese-phobia comments on this page.) Back home, they complain about their government as much as or even more than average Americans complain about the US government; and they do not feel the oppressiveness as labeled.by the Western media. There are of course people being oppressed in China, just like there are prisoners being beaten up in the US; but it is not so widespread that it occurs to average people.
> I fail to see the hypocrisy in people who believe religion == bad idea && gitmo == bad idea since both can be used as tools of repression.
You're distorting what he said. He didn't say that they merely think that religion is a bad idea, he spoke of people who wanted to ban it. That goes far beyond merely calling religion a "bad idea." A ban on religion is also a tool of repression (and therein lies the hypocrisy).
Yes, I have seen people seriously express a desire to outlaw religion in the same ways that China does. And they don't technically even ban religion entirely (like some wish to), they "merely" regulate what you can believe and require a license from the government for your church. Even though that's somewhat less than the ban he was mentioning which I have also witnessed people calling for, jackbooted thugs will crash any unlicensed private prayer meetings you're holding.
If you've never met that kind of atheist, I can only say that you must get out even less than I do.
Do they have these? We enlightened free westerners do.
> since the country crushed pro-democracy protests in the capital 20 years ago
Dripping with bias, as usual.
IINM, the protest went on for a long time before they 'ended', and the way they ended sounded to me a lot more like panic amongst the soldiers because the protesters were burning them alive and/or shooting them, rather than any sort of 'ordered-from-on-high crush' that people in the west seem to think happened.
Max.
- or rather, about those who always seem to have a lot of lofty words about freedom, democracy and what people in other countries want.
First of all what do you actually know about what people in other cultures want or need? This is not just about China; one of the things that always strike is how little Americans and Europeans understand each other, despite the fact that American culture historically is mostly a concoction of elements of European culture. When Americans and Europeans can't even agree on basic terms like the word "freedom" and what it means, how can you be so smug about what people living in even less familiar cultures think and want? To the Chinese the concept of freedom is not as important as it is for Americans - hell, even the Europenas don't make such a fuss about it - and even when the Chinese talk about freedom as a concept, it is clear that it isn't identical to the American concept of freedom.
Secondly, what do you know about Tiananmen? I'll tell you: you know only what you have been told by mostly American media - so you only know the Western side of the story. You haven't heard the Chinese side of it, and even if you had, you wouldn't have listened, let alone looked for clues that might tell you whether what they have to say rings true. I don't claim to know the whole truth about what happened; from my Chinese friends I hear things that seem to indicate that there were persons - foreign agents - that did their best to stir up discontent and who distributed weapons, among other things. These are only rumours, AFAIK, not something from the official news; but even the possibility of something like is unpleasant to contemplate, in my view. And it is unfortunately all too easy to imagine CIA involved in this kind of thing.
And finally, what do you know about the Chinese government's motives? Not a single thing, I bet. All you guys know, as far as I can see from comments here, is how to repeat what the American media tell you; which amounts to no more than smug ignorance. They sure as hell don't care about the truth about this, they just want to sell minced woodland to you. Step back a little bit an ask yourself what a govenment can reasonably be expected to want? The Chinese aren't idiots and their govenment officials aren't GWBs - they know that what people want more than anything else is stability and predictability, and that the best way of holding on to power is by providing what the people craves. The Chinese is not interested in oppressing people or freedom - they know very well that democracy and freedom of speech are more or less illusory and can be easily manipulated; they can see clearly how their American colleagues do it. But the Chinese people don't want American style "freedom", they don't want lack of regulations and they don't want to be flooded with odious, American "McJesus" Christianity.
As I said, I don't know what happened, I just know that there are many more sides to the story than we hear about, especially on /. But if I should hazard guess, I would say that the situation was a whole lot more serious than what we have heard; that there was some foreign involvement in stirring up the sentiments, and that the government felt the situation was desperate and required immediate and decisive action. Maybe they panicked, and perhaps, looking back, they wish they hadn't. The only thing I feel entirely certain about is that they didn't just lean back and say "Freedom? Hah! We'll give freedom - let's massacre the lot".
In recent months, China has blocked YouTube and closed two blog hosting sites, bullog.cn and fatianxia.com, known for their liberal content.
Funny how here in America, it is "liberals" who support suppression of free speech. See: Fairness Doctrine
I Completely agree that China is not a communist country, rather a semi Facist/capitalist (worst of both worlds
China has never been a Communist country, neither has Russia, Cuba Norkland, etc.
All these examples tried to go directly to communism from Feudal societies - none of them had gone through the vital stage of capitalism
It's kind of the Bolshevik's fault, they thought they could skip the stage - in fact that was one of the main difference with their 'rival' Marxist party the Mencheviks
yes, yes, we westerners always know what's best for others. our grasp of the complex issues of a billion-plus person country are perfectly reflected by cartoonish summaries spawning countless cartoonish comments.
BAD GOVERNMENT! No Tibet for you!
INTERNET could FREE PEOPLE OF CHINA, because the truth will set you freeeeeeee!!!!
CHINESE likey censorship, if car come too
now that i think about it, it's perfect. this government vs the people narrative is just like star wars! now if only the bad guys would dress up in white plastic suits so the rest of the world could tell who they are, we could send in chewie. i hope the real emperor's head isn't as pale as it was in the movie...the camera beaming images back to a free west might crack a lens.