you are completely taken-aback by the fact that governments engage in propaganda
Not at all. Having lived in many countries, I'm well acquainted with propogandist regimes. My comments were restricted to the particular American form, the fact that Americans seem to buy into their own government's propoganda hook, line and sinker, and the fact that Americans tend to be in possession of a rather larger bully pulpit to preach from than most. This makes them distinctly different than most. It also explains the large amount of antipathy and, often, outright dislike of America around the world -- the perceived arrogance of America and its citizens in so loudly proclaiming its own superiority and rightness over against others. The recent flap over Bush's "evil axis" speech is just the latest example. Even America's friends are distancing themselves as quickly as possible from that attitude, and Bush himself seems incapable of realizing how inappropriate, insufferably boorish and isolationist his approach to foreign policy is.
This is the kind of image America has around the globe and, to make matters worse, America doesn't seem to care. America may be respected, it may be feared, but it all too often isn't much liked.
WTF?? Waco Texas was *an incident* were the US government dealt rather clumsily, with *very unfortunate consequences*
Exactly my point. That Americans are more than willing to extend this sort of benefit of the doubt to their own government, yet assuming that any foreign government behaving in the same way is doing it out of habit?
with a group of people who were *actively* opposing the government and public safety in general.
Sounds a lot like the goings-on in Tiananment Square. The press rarely reported the other side of the story on the true nature of the "pro-democracy" demonstrators, but I assure you it wasn't a pretty picture. They were petty, they were ugly, there was constant infighting amongst the various factions there, and -- per the government -- they were a danger to public safety. Most of the demonstrators were not their for ideological reasons, they were there for the power trip.
This is in no way meant as a defense of the actions of Beijing in supressing the demonstrations. I fully agree it was a rephrensible act. But most of the demonstrators there were not the angelic martyrs the American press made them out to be.
Once again, those were incidents, not standard policy.
But with Beijing it's a matter of policy? Why do you make that assumption? Were the genocidal actions of the American government in the 19th century toward native americans also an "incident", or were they matters of policy?
they can't stand being refered to as being Chinese
Depends whether you intend "Chinese" in a political or an ethnic sense. Americans make similar distinctions. When Americans refer to themselves as "American", they mean it in the sense of national or political identity. Ask an American what his ethnic background is, however, and he'll generally give you a run-down of the countries his ancestors came from. That is, a US citizen may take great pride in his German heritage, but he would never identify himself as a German. Conversely, I've never met a US citizen who identifies himself as ethnically American.
the Japanese Kanji... continues to be semantically compatible with the Chinese character set
Sometimes. Japanese adaptations to the Chinese script sometimes employed the characters in semantic fashion, sometimes phonetically. Take, for example, the word "Yamaguchi". In Kanji the first part -- "yama", meaning "hill" in Japanese -- can either be represented phonetically by using two Chinese characters which sound like "ya" and "ma", or it can be represented with the single Chinese character whose semantic meaning is "hill", but whose pronunciation is utterly different (shan in Mandarin; I don't know what the Cantonese pronunciation is).
Aside from the semantic meaning of any given character, one must also worry about grammar and syntax. Japanese and Mandarin are not even in the same language family; they are at many points quite radically divergent. To say that a Mandarin speaker will recognize the occasional Kanzji character is a far cry from saying that a Chinese person can read Kanji.
Roman Catholicism... has been illegal in China since the 1950s.
Not precisely true. Catholicism is not illegal, per se; it is "merely" illegal to profess allegiance to Rome ahead of allegiance to the state. There are in fact millions of Catholics freely practicing their religion with the full blessing of the PRC in state-run Catholic churches throughout China.
Having said that, however, as a Catholic who does profess allegiance to Rome, it is precisely for this reason, more so than any other, that I do not take up permanent residence in China. Without meaning to open a whole theological can of worms, the issue of state- rather than Rome-appointed priests raises fundamental questions regarding apostolic succession, which calls into question the validity of the consecration of the Eucharist in the state-run churches. While neither the form nor the content of Catholicism differs in the sanctioned church, there are deep religious issues involved.
Obviously, you don't really have an idea about what "freedom" means in the west.
No? I was raised in the west (Wisconsin, USA to be precise; educated at UW-Madison, to be even more precise), which means that, unlike you, I have personal experience living under both systems.
if you think the way the Chinese gov't limits freedom... in a manner resembling the way western gov'ts limit them
I did not say East and West limit freedoms in the same manner. I simply said both East and West limits freedoms. It is not the limiting of freedoms which is at issue here, it is merely the particulars relating to the nature and methods of the limitations which are at odds.
(Falun Gong), if I were to join my cult in a peaceful demonstration... the authorities would let me do this without sending in the army.
You're conflating Falung Gong with Tiananmen Square. The PRC has never used the army to deal with the Falung Gong.
But if you're looking for examples of governments using military might to crush dissident religious movements, you need look no further than Waco, Texas. Before you go decrying genocide in Bosnia or Uganda, you should reflect for a moment on the blatant genocidal policies perpetrated by the American government on Native Americans in the last century. Before you parade human rights abuses in Chinese prisons as examples of the barbarism of "communist" China, you would do well to examine your own prisons to make sure you're not just a pot calling the kettle black.
The difference between America and the PRC is not that America has never been repressive; the difference is Americans seem incapable of recognizing their own fallibility. Their all too willing to excuse in themselves the kinds of behavior they seem so eager to chastise in others.
As a case in point, though you may be too young to remember it, there was the Korean Airlines incident twenty-odd years ago, in which a Korean airliner was shot down by the Soviet military over the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Siberia. The Soviet regime claimed the airliner had invaded military airspace, was flying over top secret military installations, and refused to respond to repeated attempted radio contact.
America predictably went apoplectic, claiming that this was exactly the sort of behavior one ought to expect from the "evil empire", as Reagan had recently styled the Soviet Union. Six months later, it was America's turn, as the American military shot down a civilian Iranian jet flying over the gulf of Iraq. The strident American press went suddenly silent, and the American excuses sounded strangely reminiscent of the Soviet pleas six months earlier. Quoth the American captain of the naval vessel that fired the fatal shot: "They were flying in a threatening manner."
Now the Soviets had at least this much in their favor: the KAL flight was off course, flying outside of commercial airspace. Not so the fated Iranian airliner, which had been flying a normal route in heavily trafficked commercial airlines when it was blown out of the sky by an American missile. I recall a poll taken shortly after the Iranian airliner incident in which Americans by large margins dismissed the Soviet excuses as "communist propaganda", but were all too willing to accept the eerily similar American excuses at face value.
Now, my point to all this is not that America is as evil as the Soviets, but simply that Americans are all too often unwilling to extend the same benefit of the doubt to others that they pamper themselves with. Americans simply need to learn a little humility and acknowledge that we are all flawed human beings journeying together, rather than pontificating at the rest of the world about how superior Americanism is.
Several Americans and Chinese have come to America speaking of torture following their arrest.
And you think this doesn't happen in America? Brings to mind the old Botswanan idiom: "The gorilla cannot see how ugly his sunken eyes are."
For accounts of rape, torture and abuse in American prisons, you can start with Amnesty International, then move on to Human Rights Watch (whose home page as I type this screams "Stop the Death Penalty in the USA") which currently features a report entitled Nowhere to Hide detailing the abusive conditions in women's prisons in Michigan, amongst at least a dozen other articles on human rights abuses in the American penal system.
The PRC is far from perfect. I've never claimed otherwise. What really raises my hackles, however, is this perception by Americans that they are somehow superior to everyone else. Americans would get along much better with the rest of the world if they were start by admitting that all of us have a long way to go.
You will be hard pressed to find a Taiwanese citizen anywhere who claims to be Chinese. Not a few, in fact, will take great umbrage to being called Chinese. If you don't believe me, find a Taiwanese sometime and ask him whether he's Chinese. It's not an issue of heritage or ancestry, but of political and national identity. The Taiwanese neither deny nor are they ashamed of their Chinese ancestry; but they in no way consider themselves to be citizens of the PRC.
China isn't going to sit down a negotiate with Taipei if they insist on claiming independence.
Taipei has never claimed independence from China. Quite the opposite: up until ten or fifteen years ago, Taipei continued to claim to be the rightful government of China.
Conversely, for Taiwan to accept a priori any "one China" policy would be to concede the game before the opening buzzer.
It was not my intention to claim there were no problems in the PRC. The Falung Gong certainly is one such case. This gist of my comments were that cases such as Falung Gong, Lu Xinhua or Tiananmen -- real and deplorable as they are -- are exceptional in the experience of the average Chinese. They certainly demonstrate that Beijing has tendencies that need to be overcome (though some might say the same thing about the current American president) and that the PRC has some ways to go in its human rights record. But the situation is hardly as draconian as some in the West are wont to believe, and it has improved dramatically, even since the Tiananmen incident.
It maybe more than ten years ago, but the leaders are the same.
For the time being, it is. But the current leadership will be stepping down in the next year to hand power over to a younger generation. What happens after that transition is still anybody's guess, but there are some signs that those who will be taking the reigns are more open and less authoritarian than the current leadership. If that is indeed the case, then the chances of another Tiananmen happening will be greatly reduced.
Red Flag is under the control of the China Academy of Sciences, headed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of the president Jiang Zemin
I am aware of this, actually, though "under the control of" may be a bit strong. It is, in fact (or at least my understanding is) a joint production between the CAS and a private company. And, currently, Jiang can hardly be considered a major governmental official, though I also have heard rumors that that may change after the coming power shift.
The Chinese enjoy nearly every individual right the American does...
Really? [feer.com]
Thanks for the reply.
Here's what I didn't say: I didn't say China was perfect, nor that it's system is perfectly executed, or that it doesn't impinge on its own citizens' rights from time to time (sometimes egregiously, such as the Tianenmen Square incident). If that's your point, I agree completely.
I was merely arguing that nearly every right Americans enjoy in their constitution is also provided for by the Chinese constitution; that the Chinese constitution, like its American counterpart, circumscribes and limits the power of the government; and that, despite the occasional incursion of the government on its citizens' rights, the vast majority of the time the vast majority of Chinese citizens are no more hampered in their experience of their constitutional or human rights than are Americans.
That being said, there is no single definition of what constitutes a "totalitarian" state. The totalitarian phenomenon has only been around for about a century -- the terminology for less than that -- and political philosophers are still hashing out exactly what totalitarianism is. So in a measure, whether China constitutes a totalitarian regime perhaps depends on your point of view.
China's problems shouldn't be whitewashed.
Agreed. But neither should they be exaggerated. China certainly has its problems. I was merely attempting to provide a context. And my experience has been that on any average day in China, any average citizen is free to believe what he wants, to say what he thinks, and to practice nearly any of the rights enjoyed by Westerners, without fear of government jackboots knocking down their doors. That, from my vantage, is what separate the Chinese state from totalitarian rule.
The article to which I am responding is written by a pro-China Chinese
1. Read my post before replying to it. If you had, you'd have noticed that I specifically denied both your assertions: that I am pro-China, and that I am Chinese. I am, in fact, neither.
2. Don't post AC. Do you have the courage to stick by your opinions when your name's attached to them?
3. I especially invite you to spend a year with the Taiwanese.
* The Chinese from "poor, little, scared" Taiwan have invested more than $50 billion into more than 50,000 businesses in mainland China.
You might want to take a closer look at home before pointing fingers. China is one of America's largest trading partners, and the fastest growing American export market. 60% of all American shoe imports, for example, come from China. Kodak owns more than half the film market in China. The largest soft drink company in China is Coca-Cola (15 times larger than its nearest competitor). KFC and McDonald's dominate the Chinese fast food industry. The US Department of Commerce estimated that in 1999 U.S. corporate assets in China and Hong Kong were worth $81 billion (compared to $30 billion for all of Eastern Europe), with sales of $66 billion and profits of $3 billion. Of the 500 largest American corporations, more than half have investments in China.
Taiwan... investments continue to grow at double-digit rates.
As do American. Through the 1990s, US-to-China exports increased by over 16% on average annually. The first five months of 2001 alone were up 20.9% over the year previous.
According to Amnesty International, China is a society that does not honor human rights.
And have you taken a look at what AI says about America? Didn't think so. You could start with its website at www.amnesty.org.
As I have already stated, I'm am neither Chinese, nor a supporter of the Chinese government. I am, however, an opponent of bigotry where I see it, including anonymous Slashdot posts.
Most Chinese in Taiwan support mainland China.
Your knowledge of the Taiwanese is almost laughably ignorant. It was, I suppose, all these "pro-China" Chinese in Taiwan who voted out the pro-reunification Kuomingdong merely on suspicion of its having ties with Beijing. It was these "pro-China" Taiwanese who in the last three Taiwanese elections elected the most independence-minded candidates (just ask Beijing what it thinks of Chen Shui-bian, or the DPP, or Annette Wu). The reason Beijing refuses to negotiate with Taipei is precisely because Taipei refuses to accept "one China" as a precondition for talks.
I'll give you credit for an active imagination, if little else.
Honest inquiry: Is Matt Michie aka Roblimo, or did the/. editor make a mistake?
Not reading many Kanji...
Not coincidentally, most Chinese don't, either. This is hardly surprising, however, given that Kanji is in fact a Japanese script (albeit, with its origins in Chinese ideography).
Americans... are very different from their Chinese counterparts.
Translation: we're morally superior to everyone else.
I have never met this kind of Chinese.
Not suprising as it's highly unlikely you've met any Chinese at all.
Most Chinese... do not give a hoot about the suffering of other people.
You, of course, having personally met "most Chinese" are therefore uniquely qualified to definitively pronounce on what "most Chinese" care about. I understand why this was posted anonymously. I wouldn't want my name associated with such blatantly bigoted trash, either.
While the Chinese government could readily be labeled authoritarian, it hardly qualifies as totalitarian.
To begin with, like the United States, the Chinese government is a constitutional government -- something which is antithetical to a truly totalitarian regime. Like its American counterpart, the Chinese constitution proscribes and limits the powers and reach of the government. Conversely, a totalitarian government has no limits (hence the name 'totalitarian'). Americans may take issue with some of the particulars of socialist rule in China, but in fact the Chinese system has more in common with American- (or British-) style government than it does with truly totalitarian regimes, from a parliamentarian law-making body, to an independent justice system, to democratic elections (yes, the Chinese DO freely elect their local officials).
The Chinese enjoy nearly every individual right the American does: freedom of speech, of worship, of belief, of assembly, to own property, privacy, to engage in business. Yes, China limits most of these rights, but neither are they unlimited in Western countries (as every American knows, for example, freedom of speech does not include the right to cry 'Fire!' in a crowded movie house, nor does freedom of the press include the right to slander). The difference is not that Americans possess individual rights and the Chinese don't, but merely that Americans object to some of the ways in which China limits and circumscribes those rights. (The converse is also true. For example, most of the world objects to the fact that America still puts people to death, something considered outside of America to be a violation of the most basic human liberty, the right to life.)
Neither does the Chinese government seek to control all ideology, or every aspect of its citizens' lives, as a truly totalitarian state is wont to do. It is only those who make themselves an enemy of the state (admittedly, as measured by the state itself) who are the subject of "oppressive" measures. In fact, the vast majority of China's 1.3 billion people are left in peace to lead lives which are, on balance, quite free of government control or meddling. I have freely discussed democracy over tea in the tea houses of Shandong Province. I can attend church regularly. My in-laws have a thriving franchise business in Jiangsu Province which is, on the whole, subject to less governmental interference than it would be in, say, San Francisco. To list but three examples.
I am not a Chinese citizen. As a resident of Taiwan I have no love for Beijing, nor any desire to live under the Chinese government's rule. But given the choice between living in China and, say, Iraq, a Talibanesque state, or even fascist Italy, I'd choose China in a heartbeat.
Now, to keep this post on-topic, many people in this forum are confused about Red Flag Linux. Red Flag is NOT the Chinese government. The company which produces Red Flag Linux is a private entity, neither owned nor controlled by the government. The only associations Red Flag Linux has with the government in China is that A) it is partially funded by a venture capital firm which itself is partially funded by the government, and B) has been selected as the "official" operating system of the government -- a rather hollow honour at best, considering that the vast majority of the government still conducts its business on Windows-based machines.
From where I currently sit in the capital of "Red China", there are at least a half dozen distros readily available at the local stores -- Red Flag, Linpus, Red Hat, Mandrake -- and Red Flag isn't even the most popular of them. And with CLE (Chinese Language Extensions, currently at version 1.0) nearly any distro can be converted to Chinese.
And back home (Taiwan) where Linpus reigns supreme, Red Flag barely registers. In fact, it wasn't till recently that it even appeared on store shelves, even though it's been available on the mainland for several years.
Nevertheless, the OS of choice in China, even in government circles, remains the Windows family, which is a readily available and as free-as-in-beer (read: widely pirated) as Linux.
DR-DOS is not open source. It is freely downloadable for personal use (if you can find the link; it's been buried, and Lineo isn't too interested in giving out the info; but it's there). But the source is not available, and Lineo retains all rights to the product.
evolution's most successful creations are the ones that are the most able to conquer, kill, and survive.
This I don't see. The key to evolutionary success is procreation and adaptability, not the abilities to kill or conquer. I don't see where a species -- except, perhaps in the name of competition for limited resources, but even there there are alternative answers -- needs to be able to kill to survive. You mention insects as an example, but in gneral they survive by propogation, not by killing. Many of evolution's greatest and longest-running success stories seem quite benign, in fact. The reason mosquitoes survive, for example, are simply because there are so damn many of them, not because they're aggressive.
While it is almost certainly true that aggression has played a role in the survival of some species, others seem to have done rather well without it. So while aggression can be useful, I don't see it as a sine qua non of species survival.
the more advanced the civilization, the more likely it is to self-destruct.
Well, the more advanced a human civilization is, the more likely it is to self-destruction. Your argument assumes that other species are susceptible to the same weaknesses and tendencies that have led humanity to near-destruction.
Even better than CP/M was ZCPR, a drop in replacement
True, ZCPR was "open source" (most CP/M stuff was), but it was a replacement for the command processor only (ZCPR = Z80 Command Processor Replacement); it ran on top of CP/M.
In addition to a plethora of CP/M command processor replacements, there are several complete CP/M drop-in replacements available, from TurboDOS to Simeon Cran's ZPM replacement for CP/M3, to the wildly successful and technically advanced NZ-COM Z-System which, when paired with with ZS-DOS, was a complete ZCPR 3.4-based CP/M 2.2 drop-in replacement OS. Z-System and ZS-DOS have both recently been released under the GPL.
I did downloaded source code for DR-DOS under the ABSOLUTELY NO-STRING ATTACHED condition
I'm looking at the source code right now. The license that comes with my copy reads as follows:
PART IV -- TERMS APPLICABLE TO SOURCE CODE GRANT
GRANT. Caldera grants you a non-exclusive license to use the Software
in source code form free of charge for personal, non-commercial use.
The Software in source code form may also be used for commercial
development purposes, provided a license is obtained from Caldera
before any products or derivative works are shipped for commercial gain
that utilize the Software , its components or derivative works.
You're also granted the right to produce derivate works, and to redestribute either the original source, or the source of your derivative product, provided they're for non-commercial use, and provided all modifications are "provided back to Caldera". Commercial use of the source code requires the purchase of a separate license.
Doesn't look much like a "no-strings-attached" license to me.
BTW, the source code was for the DR-DOS kernel only (and only version 7.02, at that). Source to the utilities was not included.
Well, I'm in mainland US. Not too many CLE distros available that I've seen.:-)
You might start by checking out this listof foreign language distros. You'll find links to two Chinese language distros there: BluePoint Linux, which the site describes as the most-used distro in mainland China, and Linpus Linux, which is the biggest distro in Taiwan and (I understand) also has a fair market share on the mainland.
I can't speak to the programming aspects of the CLE distros, but as far as general use Chinese support goes, they're quite good.
Re:Where we could have been....
on
Lineo Frees CP/M
·
· Score: 1
Its often easy to blame the arrogance of Gary for blowing off IBM
Hindsight and all. But in fact, there was really little to recommend the IBM deal to Digital Research. As has been mentioned, the IBM contract was prohibitively restrictive. DR was already working on a 16-bit version of CP/M and would have had to drop everything to rush out a version for IBM. And IBM's initial foray into the PC market was, in most respects remarkably unremarkable (to borrow a phrase from Douglas Adams), with more impressive offerings already available from a half dozen other system vendors. The PC was in many respects a rush-to-market kludge (hence IBM's desire to do a quick-and-diry deal for an outsourced OS at a time when they generally wrote their own in-house) that impressed almost no one. There was nothing about the original IBM PC that screamed, "I'm the future of computing! Ride my wave!" Why WOULD Kildall invest so many resources on the IBM PC when, e.g., Compaq and Kaypro, not IBM, were widely viewed as the leading edge of personal computing technology?
It's easy enough to point fingers at Kildall's decision. I wonder how many of us would have done it differently.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. Having lived in many countries, I'm well acquainted with propogandist regimes. My comments were restricted to the particular American form, the fact that Americans seem to buy into their own government's propoganda hook, line and sinker, and the fact that Americans tend to be in possession of a rather larger bully pulpit to preach from than most. This makes them distinctly different than most. It also explains the large amount of antipathy and, often, outright dislike of America around the world -- the perceived arrogance of America and its citizens in so loudly proclaiming its own superiority and rightness over against others. The recent flap over Bush's "evil axis" speech is just the latest example. Even America's friends are distancing themselves as quickly as possible from that attitude, and Bush himself seems incapable of realizing how inappropriate, insufferably boorish and isolationist his approach to foreign policy is.
This is the kind of image America has around the globe and, to make matters worse, America doesn't seem to care. America may be respected, it may be feared, but it all too often isn't much liked.
Exactly my point. That Americans are more than willing to extend this sort of benefit of the doubt to their own government, yet assuming that any foreign government behaving in the same way is doing it out of habit?
with a group of people who were *actively* opposing the government and public safety in general.
Sounds a lot like the goings-on in Tiananment Square. The press rarely reported the other side of the story on the true nature of the "pro-democracy" demonstrators, but I assure you it wasn't a pretty picture. They were petty, they were ugly, there was constant infighting amongst the various factions there, and -- per the government -- they were a danger to public safety. Most of the demonstrators were not their for ideological reasons, they were there for the power trip.
This is in no way meant as a defense of the actions of Beijing in supressing the demonstrations. I fully agree it was a rephrensible act. But most of the demonstrators there were not the angelic martyrs the American press made them out to be.
Once again, those were incidents, not standard policy.
But with Beijing it's a matter of policy? Why do you make that assumption? Were the genocidal actions of the American government in the 19th century toward native americans also an "incident", or were they matters of policy?
I'll take a stab at this (is it Gaelic?):
No, I'm not Irish.
How'd I do? :-)
Depends whether you intend "Chinese" in a political or an ethnic sense. Americans make similar distinctions. When Americans refer to themselves as "American", they mean it in the sense of national or political identity. Ask an American what his ethnic background is, however, and he'll generally give you a run-down of the countries his ancestors came from. That is, a US citizen may take great pride in his German heritage, but he would never identify himself as a German. Conversely, I've never met a US citizen who identifies himself as ethnically American.
Sometimes. Japanese adaptations to the Chinese script sometimes employed the characters in semantic fashion, sometimes phonetically. Take, for example, the word "Yamaguchi". In Kanji the first part -- "yama", meaning "hill" in Japanese -- can either be represented phonetically by using two Chinese characters which sound like "ya" and "ma", or it can be represented with the single Chinese character whose semantic meaning is "hill", but whose pronunciation is utterly different (shan in Mandarin; I don't know what the Cantonese pronunciation is).
Aside from the semantic meaning of any given character, one must also worry about grammar and syntax. Japanese and Mandarin are not even in the same language family; they are at many points quite radically divergent. To say that a Mandarin speaker will recognize the occasional Kanzji character is a far cry from saying that a Chinese person can read Kanji.
Not precisely true. Catholicism is not illegal, per se; it is "merely" illegal to profess allegiance to Rome ahead of allegiance to the state. There are in fact millions of Catholics freely practicing their religion with the full blessing of the PRC in state-run Catholic churches throughout China.
Having said that, however, as a Catholic who does profess allegiance to Rome, it is precisely for this reason, more so than any other, that I do not take up permanent residence in China. Without meaning to open a whole theological can of worms, the issue of state- rather than Rome-appointed priests raises fundamental questions regarding apostolic succession, which calls into question the validity of the consecration of the Eucharist in the state-run churches. While neither the form nor the content of Catholicism differs in the sanctioned church, there are deep religious issues involved.
No? I was raised in the west (Wisconsin, USA to be precise; educated at UW-Madison, to be even more precise), which means that, unlike you, I have personal experience living under both systems.
if you think the way the Chinese gov't limits freedom ... in a manner resembling the way western gov'ts limit them
I did not say East and West limit freedoms in the same manner. I simply said both East and West limits freedoms. It is not the limiting of freedoms which is at issue here, it is merely the particulars relating to the nature and methods of the limitations which are at odds.
(Falun Gong), if I were to join my cult in a peaceful demonstration ... the authorities would let me do this without sending in the army.
You're conflating Falung Gong with Tiananmen Square. The PRC has never used the army to deal with the Falung Gong.
But if you're looking for examples of governments using military might to crush dissident religious movements, you need look no further than Waco, Texas. Before you go decrying genocide in Bosnia or Uganda, you should reflect for a moment on the blatant genocidal policies perpetrated by the American government on Native Americans in the last century. Before you parade human rights abuses in Chinese prisons as examples of the barbarism of "communist" China, you would do well to examine your own prisons to make sure you're not just a pot calling the kettle black.
The difference between America and the PRC is not that America has never been repressive; the difference is Americans seem incapable of recognizing their own fallibility. Their all too willing to excuse in themselves the kinds of behavior they seem so eager to chastise in others.
As a case in point, though you may be too young to remember it, there was the Korean Airlines incident twenty-odd years ago, in which a Korean airliner was shot down by the Soviet military over the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Siberia. The Soviet regime claimed the airliner had invaded military airspace, was flying over top secret military installations, and refused to respond to repeated attempted radio contact.
America predictably went apoplectic, claiming that this was exactly the sort of behavior one ought to expect from the "evil empire", as Reagan had recently styled the Soviet Union. Six months later, it was America's turn, as the American military shot down a civilian Iranian jet flying over the gulf of Iraq. The strident American press went suddenly silent, and the American excuses sounded strangely reminiscent of the Soviet pleas six months earlier. Quoth the American captain of the naval vessel that fired the fatal shot: "They were flying in a threatening manner."
Now the Soviets had at least this much in their favor: the KAL flight was off course, flying outside of commercial airspace. Not so the fated Iranian airliner, which had been flying a normal route in heavily trafficked commercial airlines when it was blown out of the sky by an American missile. I recall a poll taken shortly after the Iranian airliner incident in which Americans by large margins dismissed the Soviet excuses as "communist propaganda", but were all too willing to accept the eerily similar American excuses at face value.
Now, my point to all this is not that America is as evil as the Soviets, but simply that Americans are all too often unwilling to extend the same benefit of the doubt to others that they pamper themselves with. Americans simply need to learn a little humility and acknowledge that we are all flawed human beings journeying together, rather than pontificating at the rest of the world about how superior Americanism is.
And you think this doesn't happen in America? Brings to mind the old Botswanan idiom: "The gorilla cannot see how ugly his sunken eyes are."
For accounts of rape, torture and abuse in American prisons, you can start with Amnesty International, then move on to Human Rights Watch (whose home page as I type this screams "Stop the Death Penalty in the USA") which currently features a report entitled Nowhere to Hide detailing the abusive conditions in women's prisons in Michigan, amongst at least a dozen other articles on human rights abuses in the American penal system.
The PRC is far from perfect. I've never claimed otherwise. What really raises my hackles, however, is this perception by Americans that they are somehow superior to everyone else. Americans would get along much better with the rest of the world if they were start by admitting that all of us have a long way to go.
You will be hard pressed to find a Taiwanese citizen anywhere who claims to be Chinese. Not a few, in fact, will take great umbrage to being called Chinese. If you don't believe me, find a Taiwanese sometime and ask him whether he's Chinese. It's not an issue of heritage or ancestry, but of political and national identity. The Taiwanese neither deny nor are they ashamed of their Chinese ancestry; but they in no way consider themselves to be citizens of the PRC.
China isn't going to sit down a negotiate with Taipei if they insist on claiming independence.
Taipei has never claimed independence from China. Quite the opposite: up until ten or fifteen years ago, Taipei continued to claim to be the rightful government of China.
Conversely, for Taiwan to accept a priori any "one China" policy would be to concede the game before the opening buzzer.
It was not my intention to claim there were no problems in the PRC. The Falung Gong certainly is one such case. This gist of my comments were that cases such as Falung Gong, Lu Xinhua or Tiananmen -- real and deplorable as they are -- are exceptional in the experience of the average Chinese. They certainly demonstrate that Beijing has tendencies that need to be overcome (though some might say the same thing about the current American president) and that the PRC has some ways to go in its human rights record. But the situation is hardly as draconian as some in the West are wont to believe, and it has improved dramatically, even since the Tiananmen incident.
It maybe more than ten years ago, but the leaders are the same.
For the time being, it is. But the current leadership will be stepping down in the next year to hand power over to a younger generation. What happens after that transition is still anybody's guess, but there are some signs that those who will be taking the reigns are more open and less authoritarian than the current leadership. If that is indeed the case, then the chances of another Tiananmen happening will be greatly reduced.
Red Flag is under the control of the China Academy of Sciences, headed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of the president Jiang Zemin
I am aware of this, actually, though "under the control of" may be a bit strong. It is, in fact (or at least my understanding is) a joint production between the CAS and a private company. And, currently, Jiang can hardly be considered a major governmental official, though I also have heard rumors that that may change after the coming power shift.
The Chinese enjoy nearly every individual right the American does...
Really? [feer.com]
Thanks for the reply.
Here's what I didn't say: I didn't say China was perfect, nor that it's system is perfectly executed, or that it doesn't impinge on its own citizens' rights from time to time (sometimes egregiously, such as the Tianenmen Square incident). If that's your point, I agree completely.
I was merely arguing that nearly every right Americans enjoy in their constitution is also provided for by the Chinese constitution; that the Chinese constitution, like its American counterpart, circumscribes and limits the power of the government; and that, despite the occasional incursion of the government on its citizens' rights, the vast majority of the time the vast majority of Chinese citizens are no more hampered in their experience of their constitutional or human rights than are Americans.
That being said, there is no single definition of what constitutes a "totalitarian" state. The totalitarian phenomenon has only been around for about a century -- the terminology for less than that -- and political philosophers are still hashing out exactly what totalitarianism is. So in a measure, whether China constitutes a totalitarian regime perhaps depends on your point of view.
China's problems shouldn't be whitewashed.
Agreed. But neither should they be exaggerated. China certainly has its problems. I was merely attempting to provide a context. And my experience has been that on any average day in China, any average citizen is free to believe what he wants, to say what he thinks, and to practice nearly any of the rights enjoyed by Westerners, without fear of government jackboots knocking down their doors. That, from my vantage, is what separate the Chinese state from totalitarian rule.
The article to which I am responding is written by a pro-China Chinese
1. Read my post before replying to it. If you had, you'd have noticed that I specifically denied both your assertions: that I am pro-China, and that I am Chinese. I am, in fact, neither.
2. Don't post AC. Do you have the courage to stick by your opinions when your name's attached to them?
3. I especially invite you to spend a year with the Taiwanese.
* The Chinese from "poor, little, scared" Taiwan have invested more than $50 billion into more than 50,000 businesses in mainland China.
You might want to take a closer look at home before pointing fingers. China is one of America's largest trading partners, and the fastest growing American export market. 60% of all American shoe imports, for example, come from China. Kodak owns more than half the film market in China. The largest soft drink company in China is Coca-Cola (15 times larger than its nearest competitor). KFC and McDonald's dominate the Chinese fast food industry. The US Department of Commerce estimated that in 1999 U.S. corporate assets in China and Hong Kong were worth $81 billion (compared to $30 billion for all of Eastern Europe), with sales of $66 billion and profits of $3 billion. Of the 500 largest American corporations, more than half have investments in China.
Taiwan ... investments continue to grow at double-digit rates.
As do American. Through the 1990s, US-to-China exports increased by over 16% on average annually. The first five months of 2001 alone were up 20.9% over the year previous.
According to Amnesty International, China is a society that does not honor human rights.
And have you taken a look at what AI says about America? Didn't think so. You could start with its website at www.amnesty.org.
As I have already stated, I'm am neither Chinese, nor a supporter of the Chinese government. I am, however, an opponent of bigotry where I see it, including anonymous Slashdot posts.
Most Chinese in Taiwan support mainland China.
Your knowledge of the Taiwanese is almost laughably ignorant. It was, I suppose, all these "pro-China" Chinese in Taiwan who voted out the pro-reunification Kuomingdong merely on suspicion of its having ties with Beijing. It was these "pro-China" Taiwanese who in the last three Taiwanese elections elected the most independence-minded candidates (just ask Beijing what it thinks of Chen Shui-bian, or the DPP, or Annette Wu). The reason Beijing refuses to negotiate with Taipei is precisely because Taipei refuses to accept "one China" as a precondition for talks.
I'll give you credit for an active imagination, if little else.
- By Matt Michie -
Honest inquiry: Is Matt Michie aka Roblimo, or did the /. editor make a mistake?
Not reading many Kanji...
Not coincidentally, most Chinese don't, either. This is hardly surprising, however, given that Kanji is in fact a Japanese script (albeit, with its origins in Chinese ideography).
Translation: we're morally superior to everyone else.
I have never met this kind of Chinese.
Not suprising as it's highly unlikely you've met any Chinese at all.
Most Chinese ... do not give a hoot about the suffering of other people.
You, of course, having personally met "most Chinese" are therefore uniquely qualified to definitively pronounce on what "most Chinese" care about. I understand why this was posted anonymously. I wouldn't want my name associated with such blatantly bigoted trash, either.
While the Chinese government could readily be labeled authoritarian, it hardly qualifies as totalitarian.
To begin with, like the United States, the Chinese government is a constitutional government -- something which is antithetical to a truly totalitarian regime. Like its American counterpart, the Chinese constitution proscribes and limits the powers and reach of the government. Conversely, a totalitarian government has no limits (hence the name 'totalitarian'). Americans may take issue with some of the particulars of socialist rule in China, but in fact the Chinese system has more in common with American- (or British-) style government than it does with truly totalitarian regimes, from a parliamentarian law-making body, to an independent justice system, to democratic elections (yes, the Chinese DO freely elect their local officials).
The Chinese enjoy nearly every individual right the American does: freedom of speech, of worship, of belief, of assembly, to own property, privacy, to engage in business. Yes, China limits most of these rights, but neither are they unlimited in Western countries (as every American knows, for example, freedom of speech does not include the right to cry 'Fire!' in a crowded movie house, nor does freedom of the press include the right to slander). The difference is not that Americans possess individual rights and the Chinese don't, but merely that Americans object to some of the ways in which China limits and circumscribes those rights. (The converse is also true. For example, most of the world objects to the fact that America still puts people to death, something considered outside of America to be a violation of the most basic human liberty, the right to life.)
Neither does the Chinese government seek to control all ideology, or every aspect of its citizens' lives, as a truly totalitarian state is wont to do. It is only those who make themselves an enemy of the state (admittedly, as measured by the state itself) who are the subject of "oppressive" measures. In fact, the vast majority of China's 1.3 billion people are left in peace to lead lives which are, on balance, quite free of government control or meddling. I have freely discussed democracy over tea in the tea houses of Shandong Province. I can attend church regularly. My in-laws have a thriving franchise business in Jiangsu Province which is, on the whole, subject to less governmental interference than it would be in, say, San Francisco. To list but three examples.
I am not a Chinese citizen. As a resident of Taiwan I have no love for Beijing, nor any desire to live under the Chinese government's rule. But given the choice between living in China and, say, Iraq, a Talibanesque state, or even fascist Italy, I'd choose China in a heartbeat.
Now, to keep this post on-topic, many people in this forum are confused about Red Flag Linux. Red Flag is NOT the Chinese government. The company which produces Red Flag Linux is a private entity, neither owned nor controlled by the government. The only associations Red Flag Linux has with the government in China is that A) it is partially funded by a venture capital firm which itself is partially funded by the government, and B) has been selected as the "official" operating system of the government -- a rather hollow honour at best, considering that the vast majority of the government still conducts its business on Windows-based machines.
Well, the fact that you can download it is a pretty good clue, dontcha think?
From where I currently sit in the capital of "Red China", there are at least a half dozen distros readily available at the local stores -- Red Flag, Linpus, Red Hat, Mandrake -- and Red Flag isn't even the most popular of them. And with CLE (Chinese Language Extensions, currently at version 1.0) nearly any distro can be converted to Chinese.
And back home (Taiwan) where Linpus reigns supreme, Red Flag barely registers. In fact, it wasn't till recently that it even appeared on store shelves, even though it's been available on the mainland for several years.
Nevertheless, the OS of choice in China, even in government circles, remains the Windows family, which is a readily available and as free-as-in-beer (read: widely pirated) as Linux.
DR-DOS is not open source. It is freely downloadable for personal use (if you can find the link; it's been buried, and Lineo isn't too interested in giving out the info; but it's there). But the source is not available, and Lineo retains all rights to the product.
This I don't see. The key to evolutionary success is procreation and adaptability, not the abilities to kill or conquer. I don't see where a species -- except, perhaps in the name of competition for limited resources, but even there there are alternative answers -- needs to be able to kill to survive. You mention insects as an example, but in gneral they survive by propogation, not by killing. Many of evolution's greatest and longest-running success stories seem quite benign, in fact. The reason mosquitoes survive, for example, are simply because there are so damn many of them, not because they're aggressive.
While it is almost certainly true that aggression has played a role in the survival of some species, others seem to have done rather well without it. So while aggression can be useful, I don't see it as a sine qua non of species survival.
Well, the more advanced a human civilization is, the more likely it is to self-destruction. Your argument assumes that other species are susceptible to the same weaknesses and tendencies that have led humanity to near-destruction.
True, ZCPR was "open source" (most CP/M stuff was), but it was a replacement for the command processor only (ZCPR = Z80 Command Processor Replacement); it ran on top of CP/M.
In addition to a plethora of CP/M command processor replacements, there are several complete CP/M drop-in replacements available, from TurboDOS to Simeon Cran's ZPM replacement for CP/M3, to the wildly successful and technically advanced NZ-COM Z-System which, when paired with with ZS-DOS, was a complete ZCPR 3.4-based CP/M 2.2 drop-in replacement OS. Z-System and ZS-DOS have both recently been released under the GPL.
I'm looking at the source code right now. The license that comes with my copy reads as follows:
PART IV -- TERMS APPLICABLE TO SOURCE CODE GRANT
GRANT. Caldera grants you a non-exclusive license to use the Software in source code form free of charge for personal, non-commercial use. The Software in source code form may also be used for commercial development purposes, provided a license is obtained from Caldera before any products or derivative works are shipped for commercial gain that utilize the Software , its components or derivative works.
You're also granted the right to produce derivate works, and to redestribute either the original source, or the source of your derivative product, provided they're for non-commercial use, and provided all modifications are "provided back to Caldera". Commercial use of the source code requires the purchase of a separate license.
Doesn't look much like a "no-strings-attached" license to me.
BTW, the source code was for the DR-DOS kernel only (and only version 7.02, at that). Source to the utilities was not included.
You might start by checking out this listof foreign language distros. You'll find links to two Chinese language distros there: BluePoint Linux, which the site describes as the most-used distro in mainland China, and Linpus Linux, which is the biggest distro in Taiwan and (I understand) also has a fair market share on the mainland.
Chinese Language Extensions (CLE) can also be downloaded separately.
I can't speak to the programming aspects of the CLE distros, but as far as general use Chinese support goes, they're quite good.
Hindsight and all. But in fact, there was really little to recommend the IBM deal to Digital Research. As has been mentioned, the IBM contract was prohibitively restrictive. DR was already working on a 16-bit version of CP/M and would have had to drop everything to rush out a version for IBM. And IBM's initial foray into the PC market was, in most respects remarkably unremarkable (to borrow a phrase from Douglas Adams), with more impressive offerings already available from a half dozen other system vendors. The PC was in many respects a rush-to-market kludge (hence IBM's desire to do a quick-and-diry deal for an outsourced OS at a time when they generally wrote their own in-house) that impressed almost no one. There was nothing about the original IBM PC that screamed, "I'm the future of computing! Ride my wave!" Why WOULD Kildall invest so many resources on the IBM PC when, e.g., Compaq and Kaypro, not IBM, were widely viewed as the leading edge of personal computing technology?
It's easy enough to point fingers at Kildall's decision. I wonder how many of us would have done it differently.