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Telling the Truth In Today's China
eldavojohn writes "Inside the land of the Great Firewall censorship is rampant although rarely transparent. Foreign Policy has a lengthy but eyeopening recounting of what it's like being an editor for the only officially sanctioned English business publication inside the most populated country on Earth. Eveline Chao of the magazine 'China International Business' writes in her piece 'Me and My Censor' about her censor named Snow, the three taboo T's (Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen), a bizarre government aversion to flags and how she was 'offered red envelopes stuffed with cash at press junkets, sometimes discovered footprints on the toilet seats at work, and had to explain to the Chinese assistants more than once that they could not turn in articles copied word for word from existing pieces they found online.' Anecdotes abound in this piece including the story of a photojournalist who 'once ran a picture he'd taken in Taiwan alongside an article, but had failed to notice a small Taiwanese flag in the background. As a result, the entire staff of his newspaper had been immediately fired and the office shut down.' " (Read more, below.)
Eldavojohn continues: "From shoddy CYA maps to language misunderstandings to an elusive 'words group' faxed out by government censors, this article exposes a lot of the internal workings and responsibilities of a 'government censor' inside mainland China but also the ridiculous absurdity of government censorship: 'I was told that we could not title a coal piece "Power Failure" because the word "failure" in bold print so close to the Olympics would make people think of the Olympics being a failure. The title "The Agony and the Ecstasy" for a soccer piece was axed because agony was a negative word and we couldn't have negative words be associated with sports.' The magazine couldn't use images of an empty bowl for its restaurant pieces because it might remind readers of the Great Famine."
You cannot tell the truth (whatever this means) in a number of other countries .
I wonder whether adding all those population numbers up you'll go higher than China's.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I know, right? Keeping everyone in that mindset so that the people on the top running everything and owning the biggest companies can continue to make gigantic profits while the rest of the workers remain non-disruptive and work for dirt cheap is textbook communism.
As they say on the internet, Hey China, ur doin it wrong!
Hi, what are you using to write and read these comments? Where is it made?
See also the Take Back types tweeting "Woo! Down with the corporations, man!" from their iPhones.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
My first thought was that she meant there were people hiding in stalls to spy on people, as in listening to people talk in the bathroom. But your comment makes more sense. I guess I'm just paranoid.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
How's this any different from banning Big Gulps?
Well, the ban on big gulps is not a ban on soda or even how much soda you can buy, it's a ban on the convenience of selling massive amounts of soda in the interest of public health. Also, the ban is clearly defined and written into law. If you read the article, you would get a taste of the ambiguity and the surprising way that censorship in China can bite you in the ass. It's neither codified nor tested in a court of law, it just happens.
Big overweening governments do things like this "for your own good".
Big overweening governments also require you to have car insurance and wear seat belts and now it's illegal to smoke in bars almost everywhere and dump your fecal matter in rivers -- on top of a number of other things that you're not bitching about. You are free not to live in NYC where Big Gulps are banned but if that experiment turns out to have a positive effect on health, you'll see a lot of other cities follow (similar to no smoking in public restaurants and dumping fecal matter in rivers). That fine line may be felt out by governments but at least it's well defined when they tell you what is and is not legal.
Are you really comparing your rights to buy soda in 64 oz containers with your right to free speech and free criticism of the government? Really? You see those as two equivocal "overweening" acts? Please.
My work here is dung.
But capitalism sucks and socialism is the way to go!
What part of the article indicated or led you to believe that this is a problem of socialism or capitalism and not one of basic human rights and government corruption?
Also, can you tell me which country is more socialist and which is more capitalist, USA or China? Both are working hard to meet each other in the middle.
Representation can be achieved in capitalism as well as socialism. Ethical versus morally corrupt politicians can arise in either system with ease. Why do you change the focus from one of criticism of abuse of universal human rights to some bullshit political thing?
My work here is dung.
Censorship never helps an economy.
It's not designed to. It's only desinged to do one thing: protect those in power. Those in power would gladly trade off a little economic growth for more government stability. History has shown that the PRC government fears 2 things: looking bad and dissent. You could see this during the Olympics, and you can really see it right now with the upcoming power transition. Just like the USSR before it, they have to maintain the illusion of power and superiority. By maintaining control on certain things such as the media, it indoctrinates the people to accept government control in other parts of their life, whether the government actually has control or not. From the view of an authoritiarian government, the illusion of control is jsut as good, if not better, than actual control, because people and society eventually start controlling themselves, reducing the burden of control on the state.
What's ironic is that communism is supposed to be about the power of the people, how the people govern themselves. Yet the actions of the PRC government, and indeed the actions of most Communist governments, show through the fear they have of their own people how strong teh people really are, and how weak the system is. They are like a house of cards that they claim is glued together but are afraid people will realize how easy it is to remove a card. If they start removing those cards eventually they will remove the wrong one and the whole house will come crashing down.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Just think of all the man hours spent on keeping people stupid and the labour cheap so that we can all have it made in China.
Well, if there's one thing China has in abundance, it's man-hours.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
And had to explain to the Chinese assistants more than once that they could not turn in articles copied word for word from existing pieces they found online.
Oh God, it's like grad school all over again.
But seriously, what do you expect? It's a culture built on shameless plagiarism and copyright abuse. You need look no further than the huge Cisco parts scandal to see my point in all this.
Is that a comment you can explain, or does your mommy not know you're using her ./ account again?
Not sure if you noticed, but it's absurd to compare voluntary ignorance resulting from having too much information from which to choose to mandated ignorance that helps keep in power an authoritarian elite trying to hang onto that power a little longer even though their decrepit ideology has been repudiated everywhere people have the option to do so.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
One step at a time. The argument is that it's good for public health for them to tell you what you're permitted to put into your body. Sound familiar?
Yeah like that time they wanted us to wear seat belts! Now we have to have airbags and we are chained to our seats in straight jackets with restraints on our foreheads and our eyes are peeled open so we're forced to watch the road and ... oh, wait, that didn't happen. I guess sometimes they can take little steps and never cross the line into absurdity.
This.
As one of the somewhat rare caucasian Americans who actually studied Mandarin for 5 years (during which included historical and cultural studies of predominantly mainland China but also Taiwan -- my focus was on the Han dynasty but was seconded by a fairly lengthy study of the Tiananmen incident), and for 6 months lived with a Chinese family state-side who had immigrated to the US, I'm often left shaking my head when reading highly opinionated or "dramatic" articles about China.
In no way shape or form do I agree with the government's stance or behaviour on most things (especially their approach to handling certain media-oriented items), however stories like the above often seem to lack cultural context. I'm not trying to justify the government's behaviour, I'm saying if you understand the culture, the history, and the thought process that exists in China (both amongst people and government), much of what's considered "shocking and appalling" to the average American no longer applies. For example, the above article made me nod and think "still the same as it was 20 years ago", rather than read in disbelief.
I can assure readers that there are much more nefarious and awful things that go on in China, just as there are equally horrible things that go on here in the United States.
TL;DR -- it's important to understand the history, culture, and overall "societal demographic" of any foreign country, no matter if communist or otherwise. Before jumping on the stereotypic anti-communist bandwagon, it helps to get some context first, *then* draw a conclusion.
Communism has become Newspeak [wikipedia.org] for totalitarianism.
And the Newspeak was right in the names of the countries; the more often you saw "Democratic" and "People's" on the label, the more oppressive you could bet the country would turn out to be:
West Germany: "Federal Republic of Germany" vs. East Germany: "German Democratic Republic"
Taiwan: "Republic of China" vs. Mainland China: "People's Republic of China"
South Korea: "Republic of Korea" vs. North Korea: "Democratic People's Republic of Korea"
"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'The People's Stick.'" --Mikhail Bakunin
One also has to take their culture into context...
And Muslims have a culture of abusing women, so we must tolerate that as well!
Just because "its tradition", doesn't make it right.
I was more disturbed by the article and how the lady was just determined to hate her censor. Why?
Did you miss this part of the article:
This was not the relationship I wanted to have with Snow. I believed in free speech. I‘d spent a summer interning at the ACLU. I was beginning to question the morality of my paycheck, of playing any part, no matter how incidental, in a system of which I disapproved. Thinking of her as my adversary allowed me to feel I was fighting the system. But my adversary wanted to be friends.
I don't think the ACLU cares if you have a Western mindset or Eastern mindset, I think they see their values like freedom of the press as a universal human right (as I happen to as well). And when you start to challenge universal human rights, that's the point in time where I throw your politics and socialism/capitalism crap right out the window and tell you you're wrong.
Also, you might have glossed over the context this piece was written in:
This was easier back then; the August 2008 Beijing Olympics were a year-and-a-half away, and it behooved China to demonstrate that it was an open country.
So perhaps back then your color coding system was subdued to make Beijing look more appealing to the west and they concentrated on the merely the three T's. Do you mind revealing when (I don't want anyone losing their job) you ran an English magazine in China? Or where you operated? I'd imagine Beijing would be harder to operate in. If you're not afraid of releasing more details and proof, I'm almost certain the Foreign Policy magazine would be interested in talking to you -- I fine censorship around the world very interesting so you can spot it and reference ailments in other nations before it happens to your own.
But this journalist is so eager to be utterly depressed by seeing her tormentor exposed with feet of clay, she never bothers to question her preconceptions.
Odd, I read this whole piece as willful exposure of her preconceptions. She chose to keep those parts, you know. I think she disclosed all of this in an effort to be transparent. This wasn't written in an a absolutist "I'm 100% right and they're 100% wrong" way although that seems to be how you read it ... It is what it is, it happened how it happened. She's not going to make herself look 100% righteous in this piece because there are things she can't rectify in here. A good person can work for a really shitty government. A bad person can work for a really good government. Etc etc etc, this is the spice of life and makes things interesting and worthy of discussion.
My work here is dung.
Ahem - for someone whose sig is "your thin skin doesn't make me a troll", you have remarkably thin skin yourself. The OPs post wasn't about tolerance, it was about context. The context here is that freedom of speech isn't nearly as important a concept to the Chinese as to us, and that the context in China therefore isn't "we like to be evil, therefore we censor", but rather "we value stability over free speech, therefore we censor".
Now, is free speech more important stability? That's an entirely different question, as is whether free speech is a similar right as no being abused.
Finally, you also have remarkably thin skin when it comes to generalizations. They're called generalizations for a reason, and they're a fine way to operate in this world - as long as you are aware that you are making generalizations. Not every posts needs to delve deeply into the subtleties of Chinese thought. Otherwise, every post would be about 200 pages long.
I appreciate the context that you bring - but geez, lay off the hyperbole.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Ahh, the old, "If you've ever bought anything from a corporation, you can't criticize corporations" argument still gets modded up here.
Call me paranoid, but when I read that, the first thing to go through my mind was some Chinese laborer being ordered to electronically bug the restroom. Something along the lines of placing something in the plenum above the ceiling tiles.
When you want to make a private phone call, you usually do it outside where it's very noisy, or in a small restroom.
Life is not for the lazy.
Not even close to similar. Nothing in common at all and to suggest there is is evidence less of a desire to illuminate then to obscure. Or to find excuses for a failed and brutal ideology.
The Chinese leadership is trying to keep a lid on popular dissent by trying to enforce ignorance of factors which might lead to popular dissent and answers to no one on that score. In representative governments censorship is always a lively issue with those in favor of this or that convenient form of censorship finding themselves very often on the recieving end of unwelcomed attention and not infrequently losing their bid to impose censorship and just occasionally their position of political influence as well.
That's why the results are also not remotely similar. A Chinese citizen who wishes to educate themselves on some contentious issue is very likely to find their way as thoroughly blocked as the strenuous efforts of the Chinese government allows. A British, French or American citizen who wishes to remedy their ignorance on a previously ignored topic will find no such impediments in their path and, as like as not, find information on the topic from government officials.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.