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China Blocks Web Searches About Protests
itwbennett writes "China is blocking searches on Google and microblogs for Zengcheng, a city in the country's Guangdong province, where protests have erupted against local authorities. The move is part of an effort to suppress information on the rioting."
Web searches about blocking web searches about protests, as well as protests about blocking web searches about protests. Web searches about protests about blocking web searches about protests are allowed, though.
Historically, peasant revolts have been the largest threat to whichever incarnation the Chinese government is in. It looks like the Chinese Communist Party has learned its lesson well.
Beautiful Zengcheng. Nothing bad has ever happened here. Much happiness to you.
Man, if I had fifty cents for every time I heard that...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So this is what businesses want our country to be like - where businesses can roam freely, and ask the government to cut coverage to (and search of) protests?
This is what we encourage when we send work offshore to these kind of countries. No thanks.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I haven't heard anything about these protests on the news here in the US
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There are not the usual kinds of riots and protests in China. It's no longer peasants in the villages protesting against stolen land, pollution or corruption - these are formally relatively quiet urban workers going on multi-day riots that the government is struggling to contain and that threaten to spread everywhere the same bad conditions exist. Things like stagnant wage rates with high inflation, abusive authorities and employers, political repression, etc: article from the Guardian
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
John Gilmore, quoted in Time Magazine
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
...you would have 50 cents.
But would I have 50 cent or fifty cents? HTH, HAND.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do we really encourage this behavior by outsourcing work to China? It could be argued that this helps their situation.
Sure, "our" factories over there contribute to the Chinese government's budget, but it also contributes to the overall well being of the average Chinese person. More well fed, more education, and more opportunity. I can't help but think that this encourages liberalization in the long term more than anything.
I'm going to take a controversial stand here and probably be modded into oblivion but here it goes. This is a good move by China. Why? It increases social stability at the cost of individual rights. How many groups of self-described smart people in America are trying to roll back individual freedoms in the name of "it's better our way"? After all, freedom includes the freedom to make the "wrong" choice, and this this really pisses the smart people off. After all, they're the intelligent ones and know what the correct choices are politically, and anyone who opposes them isn't a noble dissenter but (a) mistaken (b) an idiot (c) probably medically insane.
You have to understand where China is coming from with this. The first and foremost priority of the government is to hold the country together. Everyone thinks of China as a monolithic entity, but this is just plain ignorant. China is a multicultural society, and like all multicultural societies it is fundamentally unstable. Action must be taken when unrest occurs, lest it spread throughout the country and result in the horror of all Chinese: a fragmented, divided China. China experienced the warlord era in the 20th century and never wants to go back. Before that, China lost sovereignty over its own territory (foreign concessions) and that wasn't much fun either. If a few peasants need to be crushed to ensure the bad old days will never return, then so be it. These protesters are making the "wrong" choice. All the smart people agree, and it is stupidity or insanity to oppose the choices they make. In China, the smart people really do control the government without that pesky democracy interference. Wasn't there an article here recently about the high government officials all being scientists and engineers? So, the government WILL do what it thinks is necessary to ensure social stability. And to Chinese, stability is more important than progress.
Why are the people protesting? China has a long tradition of the central government having limited control over the provinces and even less control over cities, counties, and lower branches of government. Corruption is endemic. Beijing promotes reform, but local officials are powerful in their own princedoms. It's kind of like trying to reform the State Department or the CIA from the presidency. However, Beijing CAN enforce its will when it comes to clearly overriding concerns like keeping the country from splintering apart. When a few thousand laobaixing get screwed over, there's really nothing to be done. Moreover, the mandarins cheating the peasants is not a pressing national integrity concern, it's been happening in China for thousands of years. So some people in flyover territory get screwed...again, the smart people agree that this is not a problem at all and in fact is sometimes a good thing. After all, who doesn't enjoy a good redneck-bashing?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
There's no excuse for what China does. You're using their excuses, their terminology, and their justifications. It reads like it was a scripted excuse instead of a sound justification.
All China did in 1980 was to find a way to cleanse their despotism. Seeing people like you, makes me think that it worked. Yes, that's a problem.
Unlike China, we like to still give the regular individual the chance instead of disappearing them, harvesting their organs for some Party member, and putting the family under house arrest for objecting to working conditions at the company town.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I am a Chinese, and let me tell you what might happen to such software, just like the fate of many similar-purpose software before it:
1. Restriction of distribution: people can't easily search for it due to keyword filtering, any local or foreign links for downloading the software could be promptly made inaccessible.
2. Technical disruption: for example, set up "watchman" peer-to-peer nodes that use the same service, which may collect the IP addresses of people using the service, monitor their online activities, then maybe perform sudden mass-banning from time to time that makes a wide range of ports on your IP address inaccessible from the Internet. I have little knowledge about networking, but I felt it might be naive to imagine there can never be any technical way to affect the service so it either becomes too slow to use, does not work all the time, or invoke fear of being monitored and caught. Especially when the attacker have firm control over the whole underlying infrastructure. It might even be harder to avoid technical disruptions if you try to make a service that is accessible to 'dummies'.
3. Bad publicity: propaganda and education could in fact make people believe they don't ever need to break censorship, that censorship or self-censorship is necessary for reasons such as protecting national security, fighting child pornography etc. Through propaganda you may give people the mentality like those in some religious conservatives who never want to read about atheist viewpoints because they have ingrained biases and negative predispositions. So people may not have enough motivation to use your software to begin with.
It is certainly worth mentioning that most useful information services that are blocked in China, such as Youtube, Twitter, etc. all have local-brand alternatives that cooperates with the government. It may also not be too surprising that the vast majority of Chinese-language information inaccessible in China are either propaganda against the Chinese government, or could be easily branded as such. This creates a situation that lead many Chinese people into thinking that the only reason to use anti-censorship is when they want to become a political activist. Then, without access to much of the information that could cause people significant discomfort, where is the motivation to become a political activist in the first place? This lack of motivation is strengthened even further with the propaganda that "political activists are trouble-makers who generates chaos and damages society". So in simple words, an uninformed Chinese may easily believe that "only bad guys who want to do secret underground anti-government business need to use circumvent censorship software."
Combining all the above, the end result is a great majority of Chinese people without much technical prowess either never gets to hear about such software, or have too much trouble making it useful, or were discouraged due to fear or simple lack of motivation. Those are some of the important reasons why anti-censorship softwares, despite having many of them been created already, never achieved truly great popularity in China except for a limited group of tech-savvy individuals, and the situation may provoke some thoughts that the problem may not totally be on the technical side.
Perhaps one of the ways for a truly meaningful opposition to Chinese censorship to happen is when someone first delivers a significant piece of censored information through hijacking of mainstream media (or when some mainstream media slips its control), THEN tell people where to find out more about it. Without first being convinced that there are some significant censored information they should be concerned about or interested in, many Chinese simply wouldn't want go through all the trouble of getting out of censorship just because you are waving a sign saying "Free Web" in front of them, and they few curious people who did peek out have never made much difference.