Anticipated Closure of BitTorrent Sites Spurs Panic Downloads In China

hackingbear writes "Beijing Internet users are scrabbling for downloads from BitTorrent websites following speculation that authorities will shut them down as early as this week. Internet experts told China Daily the failure might be caused by an overload of users seeking last-minute free downloads. As the largest BT download website in China with 5 million downloads each year, VeryCD has been on the verge of closure after the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) shut hundreds of similar peer-to-peer file sharing sites, including the 50 million-user BTChina, during the last 10 days in its latest attempt to fight pornography and piracy online."

Comments

Re:Build the Chinese market

[plasticsquirrel]

They'd rather have content producers they control promoting socialist morality [china-consulate.org] instead of foreigners with silly ideas like voting (universal sufferage/if you can breathe you can vote...not like wise Confucian sages ruling because they're the smartest and therefore obviously the best [at least in the eyes of the Confucian sages]).

1. The "Confucians" of the last thousand years are better described as Neo-Confucians, and they would be better described as intellectuals than sages. From Zhu Xi on, the most important works of Confucianism began to be interpreted in a very selective way to reinforce certain attempts by rulers to further their own selfish goals. These people were not Confucians in the classical sense because they did not teach individual consciousness and self-cultivation. It's for this reason that they can only be considered intellectuals.

2. The philosophy of Confucius did not exist as a separate school from Daoism originally, and they only became distinguished in the Han Dynasty when people began to reinterpret the original texts and take on partisan roles. In fact, originally each state had its own prized texts, specialties, and literary styles.

3. The teachings of Confucius stress the cultivation of the person as being the starting point of everything, and the notion of the "Great Harmony" in society comes from everyone putting this into practice, not from rulers exerting power over others. You can verify this very easily by reading the Great Learning, which is the shortest and most essential Confucian book on governance.

4. The Chinese government vilified, and still does to some extent, anything related to Confucianism, which to them is synonymous with traditionalism and conservatism. They need to, to justify their own place in society. However, in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the teachings of Confucius played a humanist role in society by emphasizing individual consciousness and essential human kindness ("ren", or benevolence).

It's sad that nobody reads the essential works of Confucianism. Scholars are only now starting to recognize that there is a huge discrepancy between the contents of the Confucian classics and what they had presumed for so long. Sadly, anyone who bothered to spend a short amount of time reading the original sources could have learned these things easily.