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Chinese Censors Are Being Watched
Rambo Tribble writes "The Economist is reporting on two research teams, one at Harvard and another at the University of Hong Kong, who have developed software to detect what posts to Chinese social media get censored. 'The team has built up a database comprising more than 11m posts that were made on 1,382 Chinese internet forums. Perhaps their most surprising result is that posts critical of the government are not rigorously censored. On the other hand, posts that have the purpose of getting people to assemble, potentially in protest, are swept from the internet within a matter of hours.' Chinese censors may soon have to deal with an unprecedented transparency of their actions."
in america posts of copyrighted music are swept from the internet within hours. every society has a different opinion on what should be taken off the internet. china wants to prevent riots, america wants to prevent music.
Yea, but most Chinese are far better off now than they were just a generation ago. A woman I worked with returned to her grandparents' village in China a few years ago; she thought it was unbelievably primitive - but they told her of all the improvements: a road to the village that you could ride a bicycle on instead of walking. Good water in the community well, etc. etc. Their biggest complaint was that all the younger generation had left the village for the cities to work; nobody wanted to work in the rice paddies anymore.
There is space to criticize the government in China. It's all in how you say it. Most domestic criticism is self-censored to some extent.
I've seen it many times myself. A protester in China can usually get away with saying something along the lines of "the local party bosses are corrupt", or "this particular party policy is harmful". Anything that suggests a localized and correctable problem, but always within the confines of the Communist system. This is what successful protesters in China do these days.
What triggers censorship, imprisonment and worse, is to suggest that the party system itself is the problem. That is what is beyond the pale in China.
This arrangement is hardly perfect of course. However it has created a remarkable amount of space for public discourse in China, far more than those citizens have had in many decades. That political space has allowed China to grow, reform and modernize. In time I suspect that China's reforms will only grow and get more powerful.
China's a country of over a billion a people of different ethnicities and cultures, which you can't really look at it through the lens of averages or generalisations. The difference between rural China and Shanghai is far greater than the difference between Shanghai and Hong Kong. You might as well ask: why don't the people of the US rise up and demand better when their is so low?