Slashdot Mirror
China Set To Ban All Foreign Media From Publishing Online (independent.co.uk)
schwit1 writes: A new directive issued by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has said that companies which have foreign ownership (at least, in part) will be stopped from publishing words, pictures, maps, games, animation and sound of an 'informational and thoughtful nature' unless they have approval from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.
...before the US and EU follows suit. You will only be allowed on the Internet with approved devices and approved content. You don't think this is possible? Think of the children and the terrorists! Why do you hate children and don't you want to protect your Freedoms?
If it only covers things which are 'informational and thoughtful nature', most companies should be fine :D
I suspect that even in China, this will get watered down a bit given that there are very powerful people in China that have business models that will be highly inconvenienced by this.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
To be clear, they're the guys with the tanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you want it printed online that is...
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
China's getting annoyed again with those that refer to Taiwan separately from the PRC on their maps, etc.
Good luck with that.
The country is prosperous, the state is firmly in power without any real challenge to it... Why do they feel the need to micromanage the Internet this way?
China's going through a very interesting transition period, and they're doing a lot of things that the average citizen might not agree with. It kind of makes sense in their society to crack down further on dissent at this point. For example, it's coming to light now that those "ghost cities" that the West laughed off as pyramid-building are actually part of a mass-urbanization movement. China's going to take hundreds of millions of rural farmers and move them to cities to jump-start their consumer-driven phase of economic development. Pulling something like that off requires total control over the population and the messaging around it. It will be very interesting to see if this can be done successfully -- the Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward didn't produce the expected results, and the Soviet crash program of industrialization had major side effects.
Now, how in the world do you enforce a ban like this? I guess the Chinese versions of internationally-owned news services are off limits now?
It is probably a mistranslation of the Chinese, part of an idiom, or perhaps a correct translation that suffers from a lack of context in English.
Could be. It's probably intended to say forms of speculative, philosophical, political, and/or editorial commentary. In other words, "Describe your products, sanctioned facts/news, and then shut up."
Table-ized A.I.
Will Slashdot be affected by this? Will it no longer be accessible in China?
Slashdot is accessible in China, always has been, and will likely continue to be. This law only affects material hosted in China. The Chinese government doesn't care much about material published in English, unless it is overtly political.
If Slashdot started supporting utf8, so that people could post in Chinese, the situation might change. But we all know that will never happen.
You have it backwards. When China was poor but growing, the government only had to grow the economy, and people are forgiving on other things for the sake of making a better economic life. Now however, with China prosperous, people want to improve the quality of life - "public goods" as political scientists call it. They want cleaner governance and a reduction in graft, fair and impartial justice, regulations of things like food safety, social safety nets, government that better responds to local needs, social liberalization, etc. These are interlocking demands that require greater transparency and accountability of the government... things that while possible even under the Chinese one party system, would still require senior CCP members to give up their lucrative side businesses and constrain their activities which is very, very hard to do.
Xi Jinping is a Maoist hardliner. He doesn't want to return to a rural China per se, but he wants that feeling of control again that he had in the 80's. No more nasty books about his affairs, or corruption, or illegal evictions, or human rights... but he can do without the horrible economy that went with it, because the Chinese will not quietly accept a slide back into that pile of crap.
The reason they tolerate the party is because it has given most Chinese a very real improvement in living standards and continues to do so for the majority - if that ends, the state capitalist party will be looking for a way to defuse internal tension. The obvious way would be a nice shooting war in the South Chinese sea.
Anyway, with WeChat and a host of other instant messaging services available in China, it is extremely difficult to censor before any publication. The great firewall doesn't help you much if the posters are sitting behind it. But they can make it very unpleasant for anyone to publish something they don't want to see. However, given enough pressure, civil disobedience in this area is a pretty serious possibility they will have immense trouble of stopping without killing off the goose with the golden eggs. Then again, they may not care.
Interesting times ahead.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)