Slashdot Mirror
China Blanks Nobel Peace Prize Searches
1 a bee writes "CNN is reporting that China is attempting to block all communication regarding Peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Even texting is affected: 'Text-messaging on mobile phones is not immune from censors, either. A Shanghai-based netizen, @littley, tweeted his unfortunate experience: "My SIM card just got de-activated, turning my iPhone to an iPod touch after I texted my dad about Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize."' Might as well add Slashdot to the censored list."
Further coverage is available from NBC.
You got to admire their attention to detail. I wish my government cared that much about ANYTHING.
A B A C A B B
China is just trying to protect it's citizens against the terrorist and child porn. Sheesh.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
In an effort to pre-empt any assumptions about access to information, I am in China and I have been able to access news sources and most articles online using Google News and various Western media outlets linked therein. Searches seem to be filtered by key-word, but most Chinese are aware of the award. Honestly, most of them don't care that much. They all know that the award often carries a political agenda. See: Barack Obama. Some feel it's just the West finding new ways to apply pressure to China on these issues where there has been long-standing disagreement. They are aware of the news though.
Mainly, I think the government is trying to avoid any large gatherings, unrest, or protests in the wake of this decision. We'll see what happens.
I've never had a problem accessing Slashdot from here. Some of the linked articles, yes, but not Slashdot itself. *ducks*
~A~
And it's as boring as fuck and written by men scared of pork products. Next?! I love bacon. Where's your silly "god" now? 666, Hail Satan!!1!
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Somebody ought to write an exploit for Chinese iPhones and Android based phones that autotexts the name "Liu Xiaobo" to everyone in a person's contact list, then goes on to force their phone to do the same thing. Within a matter of days the entire population of the two most popular smartphone platforms in China would have their favorite toys censored. I am pretty sure that could cause an effective public outrage.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Dear China,
Fuck you and your backward, stultifying Communist state!
P.S. Do you have 4 trillion to loan us so we can extend our tax cuts?
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason?
No, it's something that is resonant with people that want to suppress speech. Look at recent articles and you will see similar lame excuses (ie. stopping terror, child porn, copyright protection) for allowing the NSA/FBI/etc to spy on citizens or try to take down their computers.
I've heard it said that much of the Chinese government's restrictions on free speech, protest, etc. are to maintain social stability.
Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason? If so, why?
Or is it a transparent attempt to maintain power (stability = keeping the same people/party in power)? Or is it both?
Kinda like announcing that a soldier who died by friendly fire actually died a heroic death? Or quietly putting a priest out to pasture so people won't figure out that he's been molesting children?
People in power do this kind of crap all the time. The only difference is the degree and the extremes they'll go to.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Then why does North Korea still exist? Why is Tibet not free? Taiwan?
We may be trading with them. We may even be their main source of income and innovation. But we're also still each other's worst enemy, still armed to the teeth, and still targeting each other.
I see you've never taken an introductory logic course before.
It is historically sound - People who are named in the Bible have been found to exist.
People named in the Futurama cartoon exist too, therefore it must be historically sound!
I'd continue, but actually I think I will go watch some historically accurate Futurama episodes instead.
In 1989, we watched in horror as the Chinese government murdered 3,000 students for the crime of asking for a Democratic government.
A lot of us tried to boycott China after that for fear of making those bloody monsters even more rich and powerful
We were shouted down. "We have to trade with China. As China grows wealthier, the wealth will trickle down to their middle class, who will then rise up and demand basic human rights and freedoms. As we trade with China, as we stregnthen their middle classes, China will be dragged into joining the civilized world."
It didn't quite work out that way. China still has no real middle class, though ours has been decimated. The Chinese government started executing prisoners and selling their organs for profit, but that uprising of the newly-empowered middle classes still didn't happen.
So where is this "Enlightenment Through Trade?" China took that money, and used it to build a military that they're now threatening Japan with. They're kidnapping Toyota executives and holding manufacturing hostage with the market corner they've got on rare earth elements.
We've sacrificed our manufacturing base to this idea that a richer China is a friendlier China.
Really? How do you explain this?
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/870490--chinese-dissident-tipped-for-nobel-peace-prize
"Last Dec. 25 her husband was sentenced to 11 years behind bars, after being found guilty of trying to incite others to subvert state power.
Liu was the lead author of a document called Charter '08, calling for multi-party elections in China, where the Communist Party keeps a lock grip on power."
Why are we still doing business with these monsters?
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."
This is an example of real censorship. Please reserve this word for things like this, and not your boss preventing you from using company computers to chat with someone about whatever you want. Thank you.
Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason?
No, it's something that is resonant with people that want to suppress speech. Look at recent articles and you will see similar lame excuses (ie. stopping terror, child porn, copyright protection) for allowing the NSA/FBI/etc to spy on citizens or try to take down their computers.
Actually, the idea DOES resonante with the Chinese, for cultural reasons that go back centuries. Confucianism held sway in China throughout much of their history, and that philosophy puts a high value on deference to the authorities, be it the Emporor or your local official. And what replaced it in the 20th century... Maoist communism... went from deference of authority to virtual enslavement of it. Chinese culture has never known an ethos of personal freedom the way the West understands it. And lest you think that improved living conditions and the presence of a market has changed anything, keep in mind that when Jackie Chan gave a speech to a major business group in Hong Kong, he got a standing ovation when he said that too much freedom in China was a bad thing, and that the government needed to maintain order and tranquility. One of the reasons that NY Times pundit Thomas Friedman admires the Chinese so much is that they have the benefits of a market economy, while having a government with total authority... easier to "get things done" that way, you see.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I can't even recall how many of those I've personally tossed myself... at least a dozen or so over the years.
Dude, you're going to hell. You don't recycle?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Every foreigner who's in China is a loser who's there for Chinese women? Uh huh. Suuuure...
Might it be that you're pissed that one or more Chinese gals paid you no mind? Or, are you one of those who derides any Chinese female who goes out with a non-Chinese as a "yellow cab"?
Or is it that there's a shortage of them?
China's made its own problem of being 2 million female children short because of "one child" and the cultural emphasis on sons. Better start working on opening your own minds before trying to change minds here.
Oh, wait. You're here in the West according to your comments. Then how is it that you aren't just the same sort of loser leaving your own failures in the country you left behind? Oh. I got it. Different standard for you and others. You're inherently superior somehow. I've heard that philosophy somewhere before.
Or, maybe you were born here, and became embittered all on your own. Good to know to know that bullshit xeno attitude of yours can spring up anywhere.
Here in America (and across the world) we know your kind. We despise you.
Almost as much as we despise a totalitarian government censoring.
(Hopefully, you just wrote something silly because you were ticked off at the previous poster. Very few here sympathize with the Chinese government, but your comment came across just as alienating and biased as how I tried to wrote the above.)
"On the topic of valuable materials too where do you think we're even going to get the rare-earth metals for our iPhones, and LCDs, or communication grade lasers given that China has pretty much all the worlds supply"
Pretty much every country that has a rare earth mine (and they're not really that rare) put it back into production after last month's fiasco.
Again I like the ideal but the though is shallow and the consequences are more far reaching than you could imagine.
Oh, kid, I got the grey hair to remember what it was like before we started whoring ourselves out to the Chinese government. I can remember when a blue-collar job could buy a house and put your kids through college. Meat-packers and construction workers used to make comfortable livings. Now airline pilots in charge of hundreds of lives have to apply for food stamps.
The United States, unlike Japan or Britain, is not a tiny little island with few natural resources. We don't HAVE to do business with the outside world. Unlike North Korea, we are capable of feeding ourselves. We can supply all of our own manufacturing inputs for steel, plastic, electronics, etc.
The ONLY people who benefit from trade with the Chinese are the wealthy in this country who get access to slave labor by proxy, who get to shirk their environmental responsibilities because the monsters in Beijing don't care if entire peasant towns die from cancer. You and I don't benefit from it because prices are already set as high as the market will bear. All that trade with the Chinese does is cut the legs out from underneath labor, allowing the wealthy to roll back all the gains that were made when the muckrakers ruled.
Welcome back to the bad old days.
As for those Chinese kids who will suffer when we pull our trade? Believe it or not, I actually do worry for them. My hope is that pulling our trade will spark the revolution that will save their future from the slave labor that now lies ahead. I WANT to see China join the civilized world. I WANT to see a real democracy in China. I would love to think those three thousand college kids did not die in vain.
But what I want more than that is that my own children do not join those Chinese kids in servitude, which is precisely where we're headed.
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."
I've heard it said that much of the Chinese government's restrictions on free speech, protest, etc. are to maintain social stability.
Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason? If so, why?
My take.
China has historically been a unitarian state. And no matter how you look at it, China is a *huge* country, and for a thousand years or so, the only one that actually managed to more or less hold itself together. Most other large empires simply dissolved into smaller states within a relatively short period.
And thus, particularly when China become "united" under one government during the Qin-Han periods (around 200BC), most of the scholars and intellectuals were concerned how to make this huge behemoth government work. There were quite a few schools of thought, mostly adapting and refining the ideas that floated around in earlier periods. I describe the two mainstream ones:
The "legalists" believed in rule *by* law, using incentives and punishments to make people keep in line with the government and boosting government efficiency. And by "punishment", I mean harsh punishments such as body mutilations for those who do not obey. The ruler sits on top of this system, and is above it, and is the only one who steers it. Everyone else is subject to the law.
The "confucians" believed in "cultural education", or what I call "propaganda". They sought to achieve social harmony by advocating obedience and subservience to higher authorities, and maintaining a strict social hierarchy consisting of the Emperor at the top, then various nobility and officials in the middle, then the commoners. The commoners would defer authority to higher ups, and in turn, the authorities should treat the commoners as if they were their children.
It should be obvious from the above why the idea of free speech never developed. The only kind of open political disagreement allowed was between high officials, and between high officials and the Emperor. Historically, it is a *virtue* for officials to admonish and risk being executed by the Emperor. I'm not kidding you. Historically, the price of speaking the truth, speaking for justice, speaking for a better society, is risk of death if your views happen to be different from the ruler.
It is under these conditions that Chinese culture developed. And historically, when China was divided into different states or factions, there were constant wars between those states. Millions if not billions of people are killed in these civil wars, and they happen *every time* the government is not strong enough to hold the nation together.
This is the only reason why the Chinese people have tolerated authoritarian governments one by one -- yes it's bad, but the alternatives simply stink.
I hope that answers your question.
Don't quote me on this.
Actually, the idea DOES resonante with the Chinese, for cultural reasons that go back centuries. Confucianism held sway in China throughout much of their history, and that philosophy puts a high value on deference to the authorities, be it the Emporor or your local official.
People say this a lot, particularly Lee Kuan Yew to justify the one-party pseudo-democracy in Singapore, but this is not really the whole story. Authoritarians choose to selectively quote his work for their own ends. Confucius is very keen on respect for parents, authorities etc, but respect should not be confused with deference. In fact Confucius says that a minister's failure to correct his prince when the prince errs is one of the few things that can destroy a country.
CHAP. XIX. Chi K'ang asked Confucius about government, saying, 'What do you say to killing the unprincipled for the good of the principled?' Confucius replied, 'Sir, in carrying on your government, why should you use killing at all? Let your evinced desires be for what is good, and the people will be good. The relation between superiors and inferiors, is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend, when the wind blows across it.'
CHAP. XXIII. Tsze-kung asked about friendship. The Master said, 'Faithfully admonish your friend, and skillfully lead him on. If you find him impracticable, stop. Do not disgrace yourself.'
CHAP. XV. ... 5. 'If a ruler's words be good, is it not also good that no one oppose them? But if they are not good, and no one opposes them, may there not be expected from this one sentence the ruin of his country?'