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China Blocks 'Egypt' On Twitter-Like Site
Suki I writes with this excerpt from news.com.au: "China has blocked the word 'Egypt' from the country's wildly popular Twitter-like service, while coverage of the political turmoil has been tightly restricted in state media. China's ruling Communist Party is sensitive to any potential source of social unrest. A search for 'Egypt'' on the Sina microblogging service brings up a message saying, 'According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown.' The service has more than 50 million users. News on the Egypt protests has been limited to a few paragraphs and photos buried inside major news websites, but China Central Television had a report on its midday broadcast. China's Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the events in Egypt."
To us Chinese, this is hardly news, considering that they block all kinds of stuff like "carrot"(contains a character which also occurs in the president's name) and "empty chair".
None of these are equatable! They are all different events in different situations.
The Chinese govt gets nervous anytime any dictatorship is under attack.
Guilty conscience pricks the mind.
This looks a lot like what I remember from the protests in TianAnMen in Beijing. Then is was for democratic reform rather than an entirely new government but if Egypt is successful, things might change quickly in China too. I remember the horror people in Taiwan felt when the army attached the protesters. Probably made reunification impossible for decades to come unless the communists go. People with Peace Prizes under arrest seems pretty similar in both Egypt and China.
Are we going to hear about every time China farts?
Well, if they can get their entire 1 billion+ population to do it in unison, in a coordinated nation-wide "pull my finger" action, you might actually hear it. The US Geological Survey would probably release a Tsunami warning.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Well isn't that cute. Apparently the old nellies in the communist party of China are somehow feeling a bit threatened by protests happening in an entirely different country, involving an entirely different culture, and involving an entirely different type of government. What could they possibly think is the connection between communist China and the Mubarak/NDP party rule in Egypt? The politics is completely different. It doesn't make any sense.
Oh, wait, I know what the connection is -- the longing of the people to be free of autocratic rule, which transcends borders and the peculiarities of political parties. I can see why the people in power might be a little frightened by that. It's something that autocratic regimes always worry about -- that the people might finally rise up and say "enough".
I wonder if they'll block "Tahrir Square" next? (It means "Liberation Square" in Egyptian)
Pearl Harbor was a real threat. A nation that had already taken out a handful of allies and were on their way to occupying a large portion of the world attacked. It shocked us into standing up and helping our allies beat the snot out of the Axis powers which were a true existential threat to US and certainly its allies.
9/11 was when a handful of sheep herders armed with box cutters killed fewer people than we lose to accidental drowning each year and did property damage that is pittance next to one of the many minor hurricanes that hit the US each year. This shocked us into the most cowardly display Americans have ever managed. We ratcheting back liberties we had defended for a few hundred years in the face of much scarier opponents, and then precoded to spend money as fast as humanly possibly, build new worthless bureaucracies, and implement countless asinine 'security' measures against a threat that ranks right up there with being struck by lightening. We did this, all the while ignoring real threats that actually kill millions of Americans... like cancer, heart disease, and eating too much fucking food.
Pearl Harbor was a tragic catalyst that moved the US to action that it should have taken earlier. 9/11 was when we pissed ourself in the face of sheep herders armed with box cutters and ratcheted back our civil liberties and threw money in the air in terror of something that IS NOT GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU. If you are an American, you are going to die a very boring death due to eating too much. If you are very lucky, you might die in a car accident. The fucking terrorist are not going to get you. Pearl Harbor was tragic a moment that brought us to action. 9/11 was the day we pissed ourselves and surrendered to sheep herders. Please don't try and draw parallels between the two.
It's too early to tell if the events in Tunisia will produce a wave of liberation. But it does call to mind the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. This could turn out to be the Arab world's Berlin Wall, then if it spreads to non-Arab countries like Pakistan, the Muslim world's as well.
There are a number of parallels. For example, pop historians like to point to the Berlin Wall as the event that triggered the end of communism in Eastern Europe. But there were lots of false starts that go back further, at least, say, to the protest movement spearhead by Solidarity in Poland, or maybe even further back to the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, in the late 1960s. The latter was brutally suppressed by the Soviets and their allies.
Could the present events have been inspired by the earlier events in Iran after the hotly contested elections in that theocratic country? Expect any event remotely similar to the Fall of the Wall to usher in a period of instability in the Arab world, something that extremists could exploit to install psychotic regimes worse than the despots they replaced/displaced.
Who knows, maybe Obama could be this generation's Reagan when the late Republican president issued his famous challenge to his Soviet counterpart: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
I've heard a lot that the people of Egypt were a little bit embarrassed that a small country like Tunisia could topple a dictator when they couldn't. Egypt has more than 5000 years of history, and Egyptians have some pride and exceptionalism regarding their long history and power in the Arab world. Chinese people also have a lot of pride and exceptionalism in their long history, and feel that they should be the center of the world in Asia. In that regard, the two countries aren't so different, and this revolution could be very threatening to the communist regime.
In reality, I think as long as China continues to concretely improve, at a snails pace though it may be, there will not be sufficient appetite for a revolution in China. To say that the CPC is a little bit paranoid about revolutions and stability, though, would be an understatement.
Do you think that they might still be a bit rattled after the release of this?
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
I am living/working in China and the Egypt situation has been the lead story on CCTV English news for the last 2 days... complete with clips of the Egyptian protests and the mandatory "Talking Head" analysts (both Chinese and foreign). It's getting 6~10 minutes worth of air-time at the top of each hour... Even the CCTV web site at http://english.cntv.cn/01/index.shtml has many clips available. The Chinese channel newscasts tend to be leading with stories of arduous treks back home for Spring Festival [EG: Riding 600Km on a motorcycle, in winter)... but there are still items, with footage of the riots, running on those news shows.