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China Explains Internet Situation In Whitepaper
eldavojohn writes "In a new whitepaper, China has declared the Internet to be 'the crystallization of human wisdom' and officially issued what appears to be a defense of its policies on Web censorship, while at the same time making contradicting statements like 'Chinese citizens fully enjoy freedom of speech on the Internet' and (in the same paper) 'Laws and regulations clearly prohibit the spread of information that contains content subverting state power, undermining national unity, [or] infringing upon national honor and interests.' The paper also claims some questionable superlatives such as 'China is one of the countries suffering most from hacking.' On the positive side, this 31-page document might be offered as an operating guide for businesses, like Google, looking to understand exactly what the law is surrounding the Internet in China. The document is a rare glimpse of transparency in China's regulations."
'US citizens fully enjoy freedom of speech on the Internet' and (in the same paper) 'Laws and regulations clearly prohibit the spread of material that contains copyrighted content, undermine intellectual property rights, [or] infringe patent laws.'
Yeah, it goes both ways. But at least China keeps it inside their borders and isn't trying to censor me or you. USA, copyrights and patents on the other hand...
Do Chinese people enjoy freedom of speech on the Internet in a substantively different way than we do?
I can say whatever I want, except things that are against the law to say. It's the same system in China, but they have different laws. I'm no expert, but I think the only meaningful difference is that citizens cannot criticise the government -and don't get me wrong, that's a big difference, but they report they are trying a system where the nation is unified. Maybe I disagree with that approach, but I think it's suspect to say that China opposes freedom of speech when they only differ on a single issue.
Further, there are many laws here in Canada that limit speech, that don't have a corresponding law in China. Specifically, I'm thinking about race.
"I suffered from a bullying problem in school too, Lisa"
Visualization:
Homer beating up on some kid
Sure China has a 'hacking problem'
'China is one of the countries suffering most from hacking.' is quite true: they are bashed a lot for it!
Which is more ridiculous, China's claims in this whitepaper, or the RIAA's claims in the LimeWire suit? I'm leaning towards RIAA. Discuss.
"You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!"
Living With a Nerd
So they presume their conclusion: that Communism is a good thing and any excess in the defense of it is valid.
The rest of the world disagrees and wishes the government of China would just stop oppressing its people, starting with allowing those people to discuss the oppression.
...making contradicting statements like 'Chinese citizens fully enjoy freedom of speech on the Internet'...
How is that statements contradictory? All man has the inalienable right to freedom of speech.
It's another matter whether they still have freedom after speech.
China has declared the Internet to be 'the crystallization of human wisdom'
Imagine how proud Al Gore must be.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Laws everywhere are unclear. I think in China the rules are intentionally unclear at a scale not seen in the US.
The most effective sensorship is self sensorship out of fear. The vast majority of sensorship is done at the local management level.
In the US we have Safe Harbor times. No words need to legally be bleeped at midnight, Yet they are anyway.
In the US it is much more clear and limited.
The paper also claims some questionable superlatives such as 'China is one of the countries suffering most from hacking.'
I believe that Chinese, more than in any other countries, are all using Windows, and have a very poor knowledge of computing in general. Nearly all (if not simply all) banking access are windows only, and so are so many other websites. As a consequence, I wouldn't be surprised if the rate of trojaned workstation was a way higher in China, and simply considering the amount of people in this country with internet access could render the above affirmation as correct.
Given China's track record in other areas, can we really believe this document at face value? Perhaps we should view it as what China would like the world to believe, rather than the truth.
Free speech means being able to tell others how to decrypt DRM.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
he paper also claims some questionable superlatives such as 'China is one of the countries suffering most from hacking.'
Considering the substantial number of spectacular hacks that originated from China, and the fact that the Chinese have the second largest (or only soon?) Internet population, I don't see why this claim is questionable.
On the positive side, this 31-page document might be offered as an operating guide for businesses, like Google, looking to understand exactly what the law is surrounding the Internet in China. The document is a rare glimpse of transparency in China's regulations. (emphasis added)
Actually, China issues documents like this all the time. They don't normally represent glimpses of transparency because they're in no way binding on the government. That is, you could follow all the substantive recommendations (if there even are any) and still be deemed to have "undermined national unity" or "infringed upon national honor" based on nothing but the PRC's desire to get you.
Thus the first sentence above is apt but the second is questionable. Might this be a glimpse of transparency? Only time will tell. If companies carefully following the guidelines available manage not to run afoul of the PRC government, then the answer will be yes. Otherwise, it's no glimpse of transparency at all, and even muddies the waters a bit more than was already the case.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
For those of you who believe that our rights are somehow egregiously eroded in the US, I give you China.
If freedom of speech is prohibited in the US, I haven't seen it.
Freedom of Speach is Censorship
I am really sick of people making the internet out to be something it is not. The Internet is a bunch of protocols that facilitates end to end communication to the boundaries of it's network. It's as transparent as indoor plumbing. All it does is connect a user to services, it is not a information super-highway (urgh), an oracle of all human knowledge or a portent of the kurzweilian singularity.
If one want to talk about those things you can talk about the services and their patrons that operate over the internet.
This definition problem is even more pertinent now social media services have become networks unto themselves.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I agree, be silent, be very silent. Better yet saying nothing might keep you out of trouble/
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
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crystallization of human wisdom???
Man, they've really handed one to the comedians with that one.
Some time ago, I saw a quote from some old sage to the effect that libraries contain the summary of all human wisdom -- and much of its foolishness. It occurs to me that the same situation has developed on the Internet, but several orders of magnitude greater. Of course, since the Internet took off, the sum total of human wisdom probably hasn't grown all that much. So we should conclude that that, while the Internet may now contain a summary of all human wisdom, that summary is buried deeply in many orders of magnitude more foolishness.
But consider what was predicted for television back in its early days, and what it developed into, I suppose this should have been expected for the Internet, too. The main difference here is that with television, the concentration of control into a corporate heirarchy was able to effectively eject most of the wisdom stuff, since that has never been as profitable as foolishness. This never worked with libraries, because they couldn't be organized into a controlled heirarchy. The Internet is even more impossible to control, since any person or small group able to set up a few links (wired or wireless) can establish their own small Internet playground outside the control of anyone. This allows for the aggregation of wisdom by the small crowds interested in such arcanae. It also allows the aggregation of anything else by other crowds interested in them.
But anyway, we should make sure the phrase "crystallization of human wisdom" reaches the attention of all the comedians we can send it to. It has a great potential, especially coming from a Chinese government committee.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If, as the paper claims, the Internet is the 'crystallization of human wisdom', then my recent purchase of a controlling interest in the world's leading cat photography company means I can retire early.
"Spend time with corrupt, homicidal political figures, and you'll hear a lot of self-pity. What kind of man throws political enemies in prison, and tortures them to death? Usually it's a guy who feels so sorry for himself, he feels justified doing anything. Killers, by and large, are whiny losers. But that doesn't make them any less dangerous."
-- Michael Westen
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
An old school friend of mine is in China teaching at a university (important to note he is not a tramp around the world teaching english type, he is a Historian) He writes a blog also and often notes that he must use many different ways to publish works or even post to facebook/twitter/otr social media. He does not really write on current Chinese events but at most makes comparisons between history and modern events without condemning current policies. I see their censorship as fact and the clear contradictions as a cultural norm on this planet distinct only though differences of language but common every where when dealing with government and business alike.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
This paper is nothing but an oozing mass of doublethink.
"While absorbing good experiences of other countries in developing and controlling the Internet, China is prepared to work with them for the further progress of the Internet."
How can you expect progress if your goal is to CONTROL THE FUCKING THING?!
So the Chinese Government finally admits that they are officially acting on behalf of and protecting their general population from wisdom. Heaven knows that the Chinese Government is the defacto expert on that very subject, and are no doubt the most practised in the art of 'head in the sand policy' of any society.
China is one of the countries suffering most from hacking.
This is probably true in one sense, because I am sure they count any attempt to circumvent the government firewall as hacking, so they have a lot of hacking.
They say the same stuff to us. While that whole health care thing really didn't shut down the internet, it did scare people and was quite the bunch of bullshit.
We're also told we have a free media, but this administration and the previous administration have both thrown reporters in jail. Of course all of this Net Neutrality talk is a bunch of bullshit too.
Talk about oppressive, did they HAVE to split it up in to eight pages?
the internet is actually the crystal meth of human wisdom
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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'the crystallization of human wisdom'
with all its goods and bads, it indeed exactly is as described. its very important.
Read radical news here
I can tell who the Chinese government hired to draft that statement for them.
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." -- Leo Tolstoy
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
I want some of that.
They reckon shabs came from China too.
Just because they censor the web doesn't mean they stop Chinese saying what ever they want over the web. It just stops other Chinese hearing/seeing everything they want over the web. Plus there are about 200 odd countries so even if China only just makes it into the list of the top 20 most hacked countries, it still means China is one of the most hacked as that would mean being in the top 10%.
While China has the largest number of coal mining fatalities in the world, the highest road death toll (and actually said to be 40% higher than official figures), the collapse of poorly-built schools in earthquakes, parents rioting in China because of lead poisoning from children's toys - and one could go on and on - you have to ask the question...
Is the Chinese government complicit in "undermining national unity" and "infringing upon national honor and interests"?
Of course it is. In fact this shit happens all over the world. So the very idea of prosecuting the *citizens* of China for being uppity (and often rightly so) is the absolute, utter height of spiteful hypocrisy. [citation needed]
The problem is that criticizing the government is one of the primary reasons to have the notion of "freedom of speech".
I would think that the primary reason for having the notion of freedom of speech is to point out and criticize use and abuse of power. In the colonial America around 1776, the abuse of power came directly or indirectly from governmental power (the English king). Today, there's also use and abuse of power from private and public companies.
Look also at guilt and burden of evidence in civil vs. criminal cases: in civil cases, the verdict is decided based on a "preponderance of evidence" (51-49); in criminal cases, it's "beyond a reasonable doubt". The reasoning behind this is that the government can direct many more resources towards a legal battle than a private person.
Today, private (and public) companies can direct many more resources towards a legal battle than a private (human) person. I hold that an almost equally important use of freedom of speech is to criticize use and abuse of corporate power.
[here's my evidence (of sorts)
Something which may or may not convince you that large companies weren't such a big issue in 1776, the list of companies formed in 1700-1799: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Companies_established_in_the_18th_century
(notice how few there are, and how many are not in north America)
Note also that for the first 100 years since 1776, corporations were not citizens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern_Pacific_Railroad
]
You try to find some useful information in our government's paper? Why not go fishing on the steppe?
In other countries, Internet reports Whitepaper, in Soviet China Whitepaper reports internet.
I think you may have misunderstand the post to which you replied. That post made that point that Chinese propaganda is about as reliable as the old Iraqi minister of information.
Consider China's accounting of their fighter jets being attacked by a US cargo airplane.
I think you misunderstand, the move to capitalism is entirely reason for the "harmonious society" doctrine. Back in the day, communism was supposed to be about waging class warfare to establish a classless society. According to the CPC, communist ideology actually means promoting class harmony in developing the market economy.
Property is theft.
Two things:
First, Given the position of the Chinese that the internet is the, "Crystallization of human wisdom," and given that the Chinese are attempting to block-out the internet,
doesn't this mean the Chinese are attempting to avoid being wise?
Second, few people seem to understand the word, "inalienable." If life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were truly inalienable, someone on the US Supreme Court
would have used the Declaration of Independence as an argument for rendering capital punishment invalid. As for IndustrialComplex's assertion that, "All man has the
inalienable right to freedom of speech," well, proof exists that previously asserted "inalienable" rights are indeed alienable. A fool and his free speech are easily parted.