Wouldn't it also be interesting if the neo-McCartyists who're screaming for Wikileaks personnel to be hunted down and thrown in the "offshore" Guantanamo camp or even assassinated were found to be hiding their loot in secret offshore accounts?
I only counted a few peripheral mentions of Nokia phones in the ~200 messages so far. Zero references to Nokia's then-revolutionary Internet (and media) Tablets that the company hesitantly slipped out between 2005-2008 and promptly abandoned.
Ouch.
Paraphrasing Brando on Nokia exec's behalf: "I don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it."
The N800 internet tablet came out four years ago, and while it wasn't absolute cutting edge even then, it was affordable to manufacture, potentially symbiotic to Nokia's phone division (as a tethered companion device) and a wonderful starting point for further development.
Except that Nokia's wise managers decided to can the project. Its sister model N810, with its slide-out keyboard and crappy GPS, did manage to escape Nokia a year later, but even a slightest charade of support was already wrapped in.
Along with the pioneering tablet mindshare and respect Nokia lost most of the community of developers and early adopters. Nokia had it and chose to throw it all away. (Google Trends)
So Nokia's now got Qt and there's this Intel joint-op Meego too, seemingly aimed at x86-based "mobile devices" of some sort. Yet Nokia has no actual cutting edge phones (the last being the bulky non-multi-touch N900 of late 2009, supported only by the unsupported Maemo OS), let alone media and/or internet-oriented non-phone tablets.
Meego may be more-or-less a proper Linux environment designed for touch, but having Nokia and Intel as sugar daddies does sound a tad ominous as neither of those wants 3rd-party ARM-based devices to become successful.
Be it "openMeego" or anything, I'd love to see affordable media/internet tablets running a secure, multi-user-capable OS (i.e Linux). Make it easily shareable between family members, friends, classmates or workmates, either using local accounts (incl. "guest") or the cloud. Support the devices with software/security updates. People will buy it.
The start of the credit crisis was either 10 or 30 years ago? Not when the US and soon afterwards European industrialists chose to grant the People's republic MFN and free ticket to WTO while relocating their factories there? Wasn't that the beginning of the end of the West? Soon after the fall of the Warsaw Pact?
"Solar water heating or solar hot water is water heated by the use of solar energy. Solar water heating systems are generally composed of solar thermal collectors, a water storage tank or another point of usage, interconnecting pipes and a fluid system to move the heat from the collector to the tank. This thermodynamic approach is distinct from semiconductor photovoltaic (PV) cells that generate electricity from light; solar water heating deals with the direct heating of liquids by the sun where no electricity is directly generated."
Basic glass-covered box + copper pipes (flattened inside the black-painted floor of the box) + water collection barrel combo has long been an important alternative technology feature in the developing world.
So soon one could tack one of these new-fangled Stanford solar/heat panels at the bottom of the box and besides photon conversion also harness the high temperatures for increased electricity generation.
I truly hope that this tech doesn't become a patent pissing contest but it is made available and even manufactured around the world without licensing impediments. Maybe the world's governments could step in, enumerate the inventors appropriately and make sure these crucial technology alternatives to fossil fuels become widely available and in massive quantities.
While the US and Soviet-Russia agreed not to develop ASBMs (remember MAD?), the Chinese "communist" regime has been at for over a decade and recently they've been confident enough in their long-range supersonic "carrier-killer" that it's been showcased in the regime's jingoistic TV programming as destroying an Aegis-equipped enemy.
Wired has a feature on this game-changing Chinese ASBM titled China Testing Ballistic Missile 'Carrier-Killer'. There's a link to a delightful youtube cartoon featuring these new Chinese ASBMs wiping out unsuspecting big-noses' aircraft carrier...
To those claiming that the CCP regime doesn't harbour imperialistic ambitions, just ask Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols, the Zhuang, the countless already-assimilated peoples and pretty much all neighbours of this current "greater China" who've made acquintance with advancing PLA troops...
If by China you're referring to the ruling Communist Party dictatorship, then sure they are.
Incidentally "GoDaddy also withdrew from China" around the same time, mainly due to the new (now more and better) draconian registration rules for individuals wishing to operate their own domains.
My hat's off for both of them for not collaborating with that regime's repressive policies.
Wow. That looks almost exactly like my friend's set, down to the hippy strap!
I used to have very similar setup until one trip in Chinese (this one didn't happen in Tibet) countryside when the lenses were destroyed (smashed but not stolen) by the Chinese "Public Security" (aka police). Luckily the body(ies) w/ good normal lens and short zoom were kept elsewhere at the time...
So this system is for Hasselblad and way out of my range, but I kinda hope that one day they'd start making affordable digital backends for the popular Olympus, Minolta, Nikon etc. analogue SLRs as there's a lot of fine glass out there and developing colour film (B&W is always manageable) is becoming very hard indeed (depending on location).
With inexpensive sensors and 40 megapixel range some of the ancient but well-built gear would get a new lease of practical life. One day, one day...
Regarding corruption, I just recently came across a study comparing corruption in countries like China, Russia and India. It was noted that in India corruption patterns resemble a pyramid: lighter at the top but heavier at lower levels; in China where the (only nominally) Communist Party controls all aspects of power, corruption was heaviest at the more powerful levels of the machinery (also taking into account the rampant cronyism prevalent at the very top through family connections) while the less powerful lower levels weren't as corrupt (upside down pyramid).
In Russia corruption was prevalent at all levels.
Of course the less tangible moral corruption (e.g. of criminal policies of the state/government/Party) wasn't being taken into account...
What this means for foreign investors is that in India companies (dealing largely with higher levels of the government) are less likely to be exposed to the large scale corruption at business levels present in China, while Indian consumers are also more likely to purchase foreign or indian-made foreign goods than the nationalistic Chinese (thanks to systematic "anti-colonial" propaganda). While India has moved towards less protectionism (import duties) since the 1990s, there also remain tax incentives for manufacturing goods domestically in India, something that can add up considering the size of the market.
I already mentioned this a few days ago (China's exploitation of colonized lands) in the thread about China's new plans to extract a century's worth of energy out of Tibet, but some people didn't think Tibetans (or Uighurs or Mongols) themselves and their status as disenfrancised and repressed people had anything to do with China's colonial resource grab policies...
Well, here again the fine article in Inhabitat goes for the single-minded technocrat approach, not unlike the glory-hungry regime in Beijing, but wouldn't it still be at least remotely relevant to also mention the other non-trade, non-technological aspects of Chinese Communist Party's rail expansion plans?
Isn't it wonderful how the Han nationalists get to mod down (supress) free speech also outside China while the "Communist Party" strictly prevents anything but Party propaganda inside China's firewalled borders?
Forgetting your flippant one-liners dismissing China's repression in occupied Tibet, wouldn't it be high time for the Han nationalists to at least get their "historical" ownership claim over Tibet fixed to one of China's own feudal periods.
"Tibet has always been a part of China since the Qing dynasty.
I'd laugh if the matter wasn't deadly serious. Some Han fanatics (and the paranoid regime which has bet its "legitimacy" on its succesful militaristic Lebensraum expansionism) indeed sometimes claim that the totally non-Chinese Tibet has "always been part of China (since the Qing dynasty)". Always?
Sometimes both groups of extremists claim that China's colonial ownership of Tibet began during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) when the neighbouring non-Chinese Mongols invaded China and established a Mongol dynasty there. The Chinese tend to forget that the other parts of the Mongol empire (spanning from China and India to Middle East and Europe) were invaded and ruled separately in very different ways reflecting regional customs. Does the whole historical Mongol empire belong to China just because China was also invaded by them?
Then there's the "since the Qing dynasty" (1644-1912) crowd... The Qing again being China's foreign invaders, this time the Manchus (a now extinct people from Manchuria neighbouring Korea).
But when the last imperial dynasty (of Qing) was finally overthrown in 1912, didn't both the Republic and the communists act on the belief that their rule over Chinese people had been illegitimate? Yet those god-emperors' vague claims of feudal vassal ownership over neighbouring nations is somehow holiest of holy?
And considering that some of China's feudal god-emperors have also claimed ownership of Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia, and in those now sovereign countries temporarily even exerted de facto rule (unlike in Tibet until Mao's invasion in 1950), shouldn't the junta in Beijing and the Chinese ultra-nationalists also be claiming those neighbours as "China's eternal possessions"?
Of course none of these archaic claims based on some feudal Chinese despots' colonial dreams and claims over the whole wide world should have no room in the modern world where even China's communist dictatorship has (nominally) signed United Nations' treaties on the rights of indigenous peoples, peoples' right to self-determination, language, culture, religion etc.
Still the Chinese regime's propaganda machine quite successfully indoctrinates even their young to parrot these feudal (let alone non-Chinese) god-emperors as if it was justification for invading, repressing, destroying and exploiting peaceful neighbouring people and their indigenous civilization which until Mao's genocidal invasion was about as "chinese" as India.
I am sure that China's formerly communist (now nationalist/Han chauvinist) dictatorship won't be reminding anyone or allowing any debate inside the "People's Empire of China" that invading a peaceful and totally non-Chinese neighbouring nation of Tibet in 1950, resulting in over a million Tibetan deaths; brutally repressing the Tibetan people, their unique language (with Sanskrit-based script), their history, their Buddhist religion and their national identity while brainwashing Tibetans to believe that their pacifistic culture is inferior; wiping out practically all of the 6000 monasteries that served as Tibet religious and administrative centres and housed invaluable written records (burned) and precious ancient artifacts (melted for Mao's foreign reserves); exploiting Tibet's extensive and varied natural resources (precious minerals, metals, timber, various sources of energy) without native Tibetans having any say; keeping the Tibetans under constant surveillance and imposing upon them China's alien imperial language etc. amounts to genocidal colonialism.
But no, the current ultra-nationalist successor regimes of the world's most murderous dictator, the marxist Mao Zedong, have made the Final Solution in China's western neighbours (Tibet, East Turkestan aka Xinjiang and Southern Mongolia) a propaganda imperative in the name of expansionist "Han China's" unity and for them colonialism is merely the often-evoked accusation against the evil foreign powers.
So now Tibet, called the "Western Treasure house" in modern Chinese, is really facing an extensive surface stripping so that the colonizing Chinese (lead by Communist Party "princelings" and their cronies) can extract the mind-boggling amount of energy stored across the Tibetan Plateau?
One must suppose that if Hitler had provided the West cheap capitalist services under his nazional-socialist policies, he too would've gained quiet acceptance for Nazi-Germany's Lebensraum expansion and resource grab, like China does today...
After the March 2008 Tibetan uprising across the three provinces of Chinese-occupied Tibet during which a few Chinese (both uniformed and settlers) were killed and a dozen more died while hiding when Chinese-owned shops were set alight and over two hundred Tibetans were killed by the Chinese army and paramilitary and over two thousand Tibetans simply went missing (dead or kept in horrendous secret prison camps) there were demonstrations across the world featuring mostly freedom-supporting foreign nationals and occasionally angry Chinese Communist Party-organized "fen qing" defending Chinese imperialism and colonialism in Tibet.
At the height of the protest, a group of Chinese men surrounded me, pointed at me and, referring to the young woman who led the 1989 student democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, said, "Remember Chai Ling? All Chinese want to burn her in oil, and you look like her." They said that I had mental problems and that I would go to hell. They asked me where I was from and what school I had attended. I told them. I had nothing to hide. But then it started to feel as though an angry mob was about to attack me. Finally, I left the protest with a police escort.
Back in my dorm room, I logged onto the Duke Chinese Students and Scholars Association (DCSSA) Web site and listserv to see what people were saying. Qian Fangzhou, an officer of DCSSA, was gloating, "We really showed them our colors!"
I posted a letter in response, explaining that I don't support Tibetan independence, as some accused me of, but that I do support Tibetan freedom, as well as Chinese freedom. All people should be free and have their basic rights protected, just as the Chinese constitution says. I hoped that the letter would spark some substantive discussion. But people just criticized and ridiculed me more.
The next morning, a storm was raging online. Photographs of me had been posted on the Internet with the words "Traitor to her country!" printed across my forehead. Then I saw something really alarming: Both my parents' citizen ID numbers had been posted. I was shocked, because this information could only have come from the Chinese police.
I saw detailed directions to my parents' home in China, accompanied by calls for people to go there and teach "this shameless dog" a lesson. It was then that I realized how serious this had become. My phone rang with callers making threats against my life. It was ironic: What I had tried so hard to prevent was precisely what had come to pass. And I was the target.
I talked to my mom the next morning, and she said that she and my dad were going into hiding because they were getting death threats, too. She told me that I shouldn't call them. Since then, short e-mail messages have been our only communication. The other day, I saw photos of our apartment online; a bucket of feces had been emptied on the doorstep. More recently I've heard that the windows have been smashed and obscene posters have been hung on the door. Also, I've been told that after convening an assembly to condemn me, my high school revoked my diploma and has reinforced patriotic education.
On a related note Hillary Clinton is an irrational China-hater.
Incorrect, but a fine example of the irrational populistic nationalism (Han-chauvinism) that replaced communism around 1992 as Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) excuse for remaining the omnipotent clique to rule the Chinese empire.
It was actually Willy Clinton who in early 1990s delinked China's criminal record (human rights in China and the neighbouring states it continues to occupy, exploit and repress) from trade relations with the USA, which were until then annually reviewed for the "Most Favored Nation" (!) policy. The China-appeasing Clintons went on to receive illegal campaign funding from the Chinese Communist Party.
With the moral-free American multi-nationals flocking into China to take advantage of the newly business-friendly fascist environment, the moral-free European multi-nationals had "no choice" except to follow the example, gradually followed by the rest of the Western manufacturing base.
Meanwhile the desperately needed Western investment into the newly democratic former communist countries (esp. Eastern Europe) and other developing democracies all but dried up. Corporations had spoken. But it took someone like Willy Clinton to get the era of CCP-controlled globalism started.
Watch Obama have to discreetly disavow what she says and end up making it up to us. If you want to actually get anything done with us rather than just pontificate for the sake of pleasing the China-hating segment of the electorate, then keep Hillary out of it.
Again you are irrationally (or intentionally) mixing up the totally opposite concepts of China-hating and Chinese regime-hating. This is of course typical of Han-chauvinist propaganda and unfortunately common in today's China where the state propaganda machine uses "external threats against the Chinese people" to rally the masses behind its new nationalist ideology.
President Obama may lack the full backing of the powerful "pro-China" corporate lobby (the main reason why Hillary Clinton got appointed), but at least civil rights have fundamental meaning to him. That he can not act upon his natural instincts vis a vis China's rising mercantilism and aggression is due to the massive hole dug up during the four terms of Clinton and Bush Jr.
You have to understand that "communism" is a very large part of the spectrum. There's a world of difference between Pol Pot and Stalin, or Stalin and Castro, or Castro and Deng.
For example, Cambodia was liberated from Khmer Rouge by communist Vietnamese, and consequently significantly liberalized under new Vietnam-backed authorities. For example, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was established by Vietnamese administration.
Incidentally you forgot the world's most murderous - and communist - dictator from your list: Mao "the great helmsman" Zedong.
Besides genuinely domestic policy differences there is also the international dimension between different communist doctrines. For some smaller countries/nation states, communism represented the often understandable national struggle against colonialism.
The larger "countries" (i.e. empires) on the other hand, such as the post-imperial China and Russia, simply used the ideology of "communist internationalism" to invade and subjugate any smaller neighbouring country they possibly could in the name of the maoist "People's republic" or "Soviet Union".
And btw. the murderous and insane Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot was only made possible by the military and political support of the maoist Chinese. Vietnam's form of communism on the other hand was based on their own national struggle. Shortly after the Vietnamese army had taken down the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia the Chinese invaded Vietnam to "teach them a lesson".
The Chinese "communist" dictatorship - the most murderous in human history - has obviously a long list of crimes to their "credit" (modern corporate speak), but in this context it might also be relevant to mention that part of that regime's near total control over the rare earth elements is due to China's invasion and ongoing genocidal occupation of Tibet since 1950.
Mao Zedong may have "only" wanted pre-one-child-policy era lebensraum for the Chinese masses (from 1950 to 1970 the Chinese population doubled from 500 million to 1 billion), geopolitical and military control over the Central Asian highlands of Tibet and incomprehensible (in communist terms anyway) validation of China's fairytale-like feudal imperial claims over the absolutely non-Chinese Tibetan people when he sent his Communist Party's then-idle wardogs to invade and occupy Tibet, but it turned out that the subsequent Chinese national-socialist (read: Chinazi) leaders and their affiliated business "princelings" have found it incredibly lucrative to ransack Tibet of its natural resources.
Nearly all historically invaluable precious metal artifacts and statues were melted for Mao's foreign currency purchases (while the invaluable Buddhist scriptures and almost all of the more than 6000 monasteries were simply burned down or bombed. Tibet's forests have been hacked down and shipped off to China (leaving only erosion behind). Uranium, gas and oil are extracted by Party-affiliated cronies and the Chinese regime only leaving behind severe pollution. All profitable industrial metals, including the rare earth metals, are being excavated while protesting native Tibetans get the old Gestapo treatment. Et cetera and et cetera.
Did I mention that the Chinese dictatorship is hard at work damming and diverting the major Asian rivers originating in Tibet and providing lifeline to over a billion South-Asians (incl. India) downstream, in order to generate electric power and to provide water for the occupying Chinese state and the newly settled Chinese instead? United Nations' conventions be damned in every case.
So what if the Chinese regime now wants to restrict the supply of crucial industrial metals? Don't say you didn't see it coming. Consider sending a distress signal to your democratic representative, that is if the "western" corporations don't already have him or her in their pocket.
The Western and democratic peoples need to either shut up and live with the consequences, or do something before it's too late for all of us.
I've no comment on US carriers (other than oligopolies tend to suck, esp. if they are regional monopolies), but generally speaking if one doesn't need higher speeds of 3G, HSDPA etc. access and the maps one might require can be preloaded, then EDGE or GPRS data connections can still be quite practical. I've found that VoIP works fine over EDGE and on most if not all current handsets EDGE uses far less power than the higher speed 3G chipsets. I carry spare batteries for my kits (no iphones here) but I still value battery life. For higher data speeds I can usually locate a WIFI AP.
I'm hoping a newer generation of mobile radio chipsets would solve the current power consumption issues.
Here we are discussing comments by Google's CEO (that only criminals worry about privacy) that are ideologically native to the Chinese "communist" dictatorship and a fan of said regime gets modded "informative" for further propagating that regime's twisted political indoctrination...
In his essay "A Lie Repeated - The Far Left's Flawed History of Tibet" Josh Schrei, among others, has thoroughly debunked the Maoist propaganda behind these useful Western Marxist idiots' like Parenti's excuses for the brutal colonial genocide of China's peaceful neighbouring state Tibet in the name of "liberation" (and annexation).
Of course any documents challenging the Chinese Communist Party's make-believe rewritten "history" are absolutely banned under their rule. Must have One Truth for the One Volk under One Reich Rule.
So, any country with some local abuse of power (ie. all the countries that ever existed) simply deserve to be invaded, annexed and kept under repressive martial rule by the likes of Mao, Stalin and their successors until the colonized peoples' unique national identities, natural resources, cultural heritage and art, languages, religious traditions, any decree of national self-determination etc. (in Tibet's case all of the above) are irrevocably extinguished?
Interestingly, the Tibetan exile government you're referring to as "a repressive theocracy feudal state" is democratically elected while the colonial military dictatorship of the CCP occupying Tibet, besides perpetrating genocide against the completely non-Chinese people of Tibet, is also operating the most unequal distribution of wealth in China's entire history.
... or not. I mean, restricting some content on the web isn't nearly as bad as invading other countries, killing its civilians by the hundreds of thousands and setting up puppet governments, and yet nobody here is calling for boycotts against American companies that support all of this (which is all of them, or at least those that pay taxes).
Huh!?
There are indeed reasons to boycott many American corporations and the USA has indeed committed crimes against other nations, but despite their best efforts they're not a remorseless genocidal colonizer with authoritarian regime with total Orwellian propaganda control over peoples lacking any safeguards of rule of law or freedoms of association or speech.
That's the "People's republic" of China.
Now kindly put that moral relativist gripe of yours about "restricting some content on the web" at the behest of that regime in some kind of perspective.
Fact: the longer the Chinese population is only fed CCP propaganda and denied access to the information the CCP wants to deny them, the longer the horror show behind the facade continues. Is that what you want to be advocating here?
If the poster had stated banned facts about Tibet and China, like "prior to Chinese communist army's military invasion in 1950 and its continued brutally repressive and systematically genocidal policies, Tibet had always been distinctly different from its neighbouring states (like China) in culture, ethnicity, religion, language and its Sanskrit-influenced (like Hindi) script. Yet the Chinese communist (now fascist) dictatorship claims absolute colonial control and even sovereignty over their historical neighbour, with whom even the Imperial China had made an eternal peace treaty between equals", one could understand that a submissive economic vassal state of the increasingly powerful national-socialistic Chinese dictatorship would take action against such dangerous free speech.
However the poster in question only referred to the all-encompassing efforts of the Chinese dictorship to control their captive subjects' access to information outside the party machine's own pervasive propaganda efforts.
The fact that the Chinese, the already siniziced minorities and the occupied neighbouring peoples still struggling to retain some level of control of their own communities and lives are not given any opportunity to debate issues (like the facts above) even partially freely should certainly be part of the United Nations' "Internet Governance Forum". Instead they tear down participants' posters for simply referring to such controls (by the "People's Republic" of China)?
Dear vampire baozi, nowhere did I refer to "Chinese expansion from 1800-1949" which you label as propagandist bullshit.
Yet, since you bring it up, even the unpopular ("foreign") Manchu dynasty of Qing and the subsequent short-lived Republic, despite dealing with foreign imperial colonies on the coast (and later the Japanese in the north-east), imposed (or attempted to do so militarily but were defeated like in Tibet, until the PLA in 1950) Chinese colonial rule in the above-mentioned neighbouring people's territories despite their independence struggles. Look up the details, they're widely available outside China. Some are of course mentioned as "rebellions" to be put out by the brave Chinese patriots...
Also consider that the majority of the so-called Han-Chinese, supposedly an ethnic group making up 1.2 billion of the 1.3+ billion population, are actually ethnically distinct from the original Hans hailing north of the Yangtze (although due to the military campaigns and later population movements the southern "sinicized Hans" have noticeable paternal "Han" DNA).
What the genetic studies, brushed under the carpet by the CCP, essentially mean is that 1) the so-called Han-Chinese aren't in fact a single ethnic group as claimed by the regime, and 2) most of the "Han" population (i.e. their ancestors) were actually invaded and annexed into the Chinese empire (which later adopted the Han concept from the 2000-year old dynasty of that name) and so throughly assimilated that practically nothing cultural and very little linguistic evidence of their indigenous past remains.
Since we were talking about empires, that is akin to the Roman empire wiping out all competing cultures until all citizens from within the empire only ever knew Rome as their "motherland" and only spoke a latin of some sort, and then imagining how the ultranationalistic "Romans" of today's France and Ukraine (ie. all over the Roman empire) were now shouting from all rooftops how the Irish or the Scandinavians don't deserve their independence because they consider everything to belong to their Rome. That's how today's Han-chauvinism is expressed.
Point being that the Chinese dynastic state has long been a shamelessly/proudly imperialistic entity. If during the Manchu Qing and the Republic periods some of their "claimed colonies" declared their desire for the modern notion of independence (like most countries around the the world did) and the Chinese sent military missions suppressing (or attempting to supress) them... well, call it what you will.
Unlike the historically vague or nominal displays of Chinese imperial superiority through "ambans" with small garrisons and the extortion of tributes (indeed sometimes beneficially in exchange of military help against common enemies), the modern form of Chinese colonialism with its massive "Han-Chinese" population transfers, prevalent and thorough military control, large scale murder, totalitarian propaganda and sinicization policies and systematic exploitation of natural resources in the occupied territories using modern technology is indeed sinister and only comparable to the worst policies of Hitler and Stalin, who unsurprisingly both inspired the "modern" Chinese regimes.
If you object to calling China's ongoing imperial policies sinister, you'd do well in trying to imagine yourself in the shoes of today's Tibetan, Uighur or "Inner"-Mongolian. Manchus have indeed already ceased to exist as a people.
BACKGROUND: From 1930's until 1945 Imperial Japan and Nazi-Germany were engaged in a militaristic expansion of their Lebensraum (lit. german expression meaning "living space for their own ethnicity") while attempting to grab foreign countries' natural resources to feed their industries (including the important military-industrial complex). This was in fact a "modern" replay of age-old imperialism and something that the most recent dominant empires, such as Britain, Russia and China had been at until then.
After WWII, (Soviet) Russia emerged as the greatest beneficiary in terms of imperial territory, while the recently democratized Britain had to begin surrendering the sovereignty of most of their empire's territory back to their native peoples.
Meanwhile the secretive and reclusive Chinese empire of Middle Kingdom, with its age-old imperial view of its neighbouring countries (of non-Chinese and non-sinicized peoples) as mere vassal states, was being taken over by Mao's communist dictatorship which uniquely combined the Marxist doctrines (like internationalism) with its own Han-Chinese chauvism (racial and cultural superiority akin to Nazi ideology).
Thus after the 1949 takeover of China by Mao the Soviet-backed "people's liberation" communist army was quickly sent to "liberate" and annex the vast territories of China's historical western neighbours, Mongols, Tibetans and Uighurs. Manchus in the north had at that point mostly been demographically assimilated already, despite Manchuria's widely recognized declaration of independence in 1932.
The sparsely populated and non-Chinese Central-Asian nations of Tibetans, Mongols and Uighurs, however, were soon put under systematic colonial exploitation, including the sinister policy of settling massive numbers of uprooted Chinese settlers into the occupied territories in order to consolidate de facto Chinese imperial rule there for eternity.
TODAY: The territories of Tibetans, turkic Uighurs and (South) Mongols (as Northern Mongolia regained its independence from Soviet Union in 1991) have been integrated into the centrally-planned industrial system of the (formerly communist) nazional-socialist Chinese empire by the virtue of their massive exploitable natural resources such as oil, gas, water and vast deposits of precious and industrial minerals of all kinds. Native people are still an annoyance to be dealt with, mainly through policies of Han-chauvinist propaganda and systematic sinicization enforced through strict military control.
Here is one example article detailing China's ongoing industrial exploitation of the occupied territories. While this particular article doesn't refer to rare earth metals specifically, both South Mongolia and Tibet are being mined for them.
The railway link to Tibet now appears to have been part of a broader plan to exploit vast deposits of metals in the disputed region, explains Fortune's Abrahm Lustgarten.
When China opened its controversial new railway to Tibet last July, international critics howled at the prospect that the region's culture and environment would be ravaged in search of resources. China repeated a solemn refrain, its officials insisting that the $4 billion project was aimed not at plundering the disputed territory but at bringing prosperity and economic development to Tibetan society.
So much for that. Now China's Ministry of Land and Resources is disclosing monumental new resource discoveries all across Tibet, and it turns out the findings are the culmination of a secret seven-year, $44 million survey project which preceded the railway construction in the first place.
In 1999 more than 1000 researchers divided into 24 separate regiments and fanned out across the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, geologically mapping an area the s
Just a footnote: There is plenty of information regarding PRC's laws regulating foreigners' and in particular foreign businesses' encryption rules, but very little in terms of specifics about the same laws concerning Chinese nationals. I have, however, followed the debate and read many a newspaper article (outside China) over the years and like in the case of "state secrets", it may be that the lack of debate (naturally also within China) is partially due to intentional obfuscation over what is permitted and what is not permitted. Discussion about Chinese people's civil liberties isn't exactly the state-approved hot topic in the Chinese media nor in the discussion forums.
My non-exhaustive search came up with a few quotes from the Network World magazine:
"We have part of our business in Beijing," says Bernie Cowens, vice president for security services at encryption vendor Rainbow Technologies. "If you encrypt data in China, you have to provide the Chinese government the ability to access the keys. By this regulation, the Chinese should be able to get access to [Secure Sockets Layer]-encrypted traffic, too."
and
Chinese government officials have had an ongoing dialogue about encryption with foreign corporations doing business there. According to attorneys familiar with the matter, Chinese officials say the encryption restrictions are aimed at Chinese citizens, not foreign corporations. However, Addis says companies can expect the Chinese government to ask for details about the encryption they're using - in addition to requiring them to appoint an "encryption contact" who will give the government the encryption keys when asked.
"China is the big problem area now," confirms Stewart Baker, attorney at law firm Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C. "China really has an enthusiasm for regulation and standardization that is unmatched anywhere else in the world."
I've many Chinese friends who are as worried about the FQ phenomenom as I am. It's always unpleasant to be shouted down or having your message buried for ideological reasons.
Anyway, I'm not sure if you noticed but elsewhere in this thread I posted the regulations governing foreign-based organizations' (like businesses and NGOs) and foreign individuals' use of crypto in the PRC. The laws governing PRC nationals' use of crypto are said to be nearly identical. But as is often the case in today's China, the actual enforcement of laws is very haphazard and selective. Using SSH while keeping totally clear of anything the State might consider subversive or controversial (like simple river crabs!) and not pushing your luck on foreign connections seems safe. Open-source disk-encryption tools are also a download away and their use highly recommended (by me!), but if the PSB comes knocking on your door they'll only make offers you can't refuse.
Surely the PRC's statute books are available online for concerned people to study, and if you are interested in looking into the exact legal terms regulating crypto in China, some useful keywords would be "State Encryption Administration" and "State Encryption Management Commission" which are the organizations charged with enforcing the regulations.
Thank you for kindly pointing out that HTTPS is a protocol, not a cipher. It is the latter that actually encrypts the traffic.
Now, is it actually legal under the PRC's laws to use ciphers not specifically approved by the State authorities?
Are Chinese individuals or organizations inside the PRC allowed to freely operate servers with strong encryption of their choice and without permission from the State? Which authority within the PRC is allowed to grant certificates?
Are the State's routers/filters able to recognize and simply drop HTTPS connections at their whim?
Does simply using HTTPS protocol prevent the State from logging your connections or attempts to connect to "suspicious sites" (eg. those about democracy and human rights or just critical of the Party)? You know the State's most powerful censorship tool is in fact instilling an inherent sense of self-censorship in its subjects.
Does the mere presence of HTTPS (with whatever ciphers are bundled) allow the Chinese "netizens" to connect to material otherwise banned or filtered by the State freely and without fear of retribution?
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it also be interesting if the neo-McCartyists who're screaming for Wikileaks personnel to be hunted down and thrown in the "offshore" Guantanamo camp or even assassinated were found to be hiding their loot in secret offshore accounts?
I only counted a few peripheral mentions of Nokia phones in the ~200 messages so far. Zero references to Nokia's then-revolutionary Internet (and media) Tablets that the company hesitantly slipped out between 2005-2008 and promptly abandoned.
Ouch.
Paraphrasing Brando on Nokia exec's behalf: "I don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it."
The N800 internet tablet came out four years ago, and while it wasn't absolute cutting edge even then, it was affordable to manufacture, potentially symbiotic to Nokia's phone division (as a tethered companion device) and a wonderful starting point for further development.
Except that Nokia's wise managers decided to can the project. Its sister model N810, with its slide-out keyboard and crappy GPS, did manage to escape Nokia a year later, but even a slightest charade of support was already wrapped in.
Along with the pioneering tablet mindshare and respect Nokia lost most of the community of developers and early adopters. Nokia had it and chose to throw it all away. (Google Trends)
So Nokia's now got Qt and there's this Intel joint-op Meego too, seemingly aimed at x86-based "mobile devices" of some sort. Yet Nokia has no actual cutting edge phones (the last being the bulky non-multi-touch N900 of late 2009, supported only by the unsupported Maemo OS), let alone media and/or internet-oriented non-phone tablets.
Meego may be more-or-less a proper Linux environment designed for touch, but having Nokia and Intel as sugar daddies does sound a tad ominous as neither of those wants 3rd-party ARM-based devices to become successful.
Be it "openMeego" or anything, I'd love to see affordable media/internet tablets running a secure, multi-user-capable OS (i.e Linux). Make it easily shareable between family members, friends, classmates or workmates, either using local accounts (incl. "guest") or the cloud. Support the devices with software/security updates. People will buy it.
The start of the credit crisis was either 10 or 30 years ago? Not when the US and soon afterwards European industrialists chose to grant the People's republic MFN and free ticket to WTO while relocating their factories there? Wasn't that the beginning of the end of the West? Soon after the fall of the Warsaw Pact?
"Solar water heating or solar hot water is water heated by the use of solar energy. Solar water heating systems are generally composed of solar thermal collectors, a water storage tank or another point of usage, interconnecting pipes and a fluid system to move the heat from the collector to the tank. This thermodynamic approach is distinct from semiconductor photovoltaic (PV) cells that generate electricity from light; solar water heating deals with the direct heating of liquids by the sun where no electricity is directly generated."
Basic glass-covered box + copper pipes (flattened inside the black-painted floor of the box) + water collection barrel combo has long been an important alternative technology feature in the developing world.
So soon one could tack one of these new-fangled Stanford solar/heat panels at the bottom of the box and besides photon conversion also harness the high temperatures for increased electricity generation.
I truly hope that this tech doesn't become a patent pissing contest but it is made available and even manufactured around the world without licensing impediments. Maybe the world's governments could step in, enumerate the inventors appropriately and make sure these crucial technology alternatives to fossil fuels become widely available and in massive quantities.
While the US and Soviet-Russia agreed not to develop ASBMs (remember MAD?), the Chinese "communist" regime has been at for over a decade and recently they've been confident enough in their long-range supersonic "carrier-killer" that it's been showcased in the regime's jingoistic TV programming as destroying an Aegis-equipped enemy.
Wired has a feature on this game-changing Chinese ASBM titled China Testing Ballistic Missile 'Carrier-Killer'. There's a link to a delightful youtube cartoon featuring these new Chinese ASBMs wiping out unsuspecting big-noses' aircraft carrier...
To those claiming that the CCP regime doesn't harbour imperialistic ambitions, just ask Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols, the Zhuang, the countless already-assimilated peoples and pretty much all neighbours of this current "greater China" who've made acquintance with advancing PLA troops...
China is still punishing Google huh?
If by China you're referring to the ruling Communist Party dictatorship, then sure they are.
Incidentally "GoDaddy also withdrew from China" around the same time, mainly due to the new (now more and better) draconian registration rules for individuals wishing to operate their own domains.
My hat's off for both of them for not collaborating with that regime's repressive policies.
Wow. That looks almost exactly like my friend's set, down to the hippy strap!
I used to have very similar setup until one trip in Chinese (this one didn't happen in Tibet) countryside when the lenses were destroyed (smashed but not stolen) by the Chinese "Public Security" (aka police). Luckily the body(ies) w/ good normal lens and short zoom were kept elsewhere at the time...
So this system is for Hasselblad and way out of my range, but I kinda hope that one day they'd start making affordable digital backends for the popular Olympus, Minolta, Nikon etc. analogue SLRs as there's a lot of fine glass out there and developing colour film (B&W is always manageable) is becoming very hard indeed (depending on location).
With inexpensive sensors and 40 megapixel range some of the ancient but well-built gear would get a new lease of practical life. One day, one day...
Regarding corruption, I just recently came across a study comparing corruption in countries like China, Russia and India. It was noted that in India corruption patterns resemble a pyramid: lighter at the top but heavier at lower levels; in China where the (only nominally) Communist Party controls all aspects of power, corruption was heaviest at the more powerful levels of the machinery (also taking into account the rampant cronyism prevalent at the very top through family connections) while the less powerful lower levels weren't as corrupt (upside down pyramid).
In Russia corruption was prevalent at all levels.
Of course the less tangible moral corruption (e.g. of criminal policies of the state/government/Party) wasn't being taken into account...
What this means for foreign investors is that in India companies (dealing largely with higher levels of the government) are less likely to be exposed to the large scale corruption at business levels present in China, while Indian consumers are also more likely to purchase foreign or indian-made foreign goods than the nationalistic Chinese (thanks to systematic "anti-colonial" propaganda). While India has moved towards less protectionism (import duties) since the 1990s, there also remain tax incentives for manufacturing goods domestically in India, something that can add up considering the size of the market.
I already mentioned this a few days ago (China's exploitation of colonized lands) in the thread about China's new plans to extract a century's worth of energy out of Tibet, but some people didn't think Tibetans (or Uighurs or Mongols) themselves and their status as disenfrancised and repressed people had anything to do with China's colonial resource grab policies...
Well, here again the fine article in Inhabitat goes for the single-minded technocrat approach, not unlike the glory-hungry regime in Beijing, but wouldn't it still be at least remotely relevant to also mention the other non-trade, non-technological aspects of Chinese Communist Party's rail expansion plans?
Namely that a scholar at a Chinese thinktank has stated that "we foresee that in the coming decades, hundreds of millions of people will migrate to the western regions, where land is empty and resources are untapped".
Why is it only a horrific never-forget issue when the 1930s German dictatorship planned for a little Lebensraum expansion?
Isn't it wonderful how the Han nationalists get to mod down (supress) free speech also outside China while the "Communist Party" strictly prevents anything but Party propaganda inside China's firewalled borders?
Forgetting your flippant one-liners dismissing China's repression in occupied Tibet, wouldn't it be high time for the Han nationalists to at least get their "historical" ownership claim over Tibet fixed to one of China's own feudal periods.
I'd laugh if the matter wasn't deadly serious. Some Han fanatics (and the paranoid regime which has bet its "legitimacy" on its succesful militaristic Lebensraum expansionism) indeed sometimes claim that the totally non-Chinese Tibet has "always been part of China (since the Qing dynasty)". Always?
Sometimes both groups of extremists claim that China's colonial ownership of Tibet began during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) when the neighbouring non-Chinese Mongols invaded China and established a Mongol dynasty there. The Chinese tend to forget that the other parts of the Mongol empire (spanning from China and India to Middle East and Europe) were invaded and ruled separately in very different ways reflecting regional customs. Does the whole historical Mongol empire belong to China just because China was also invaded by them?
Then there's the "since the Qing dynasty" (1644-1912) crowd... The Qing again being China's foreign invaders, this time the Manchus (a now extinct people from Manchuria neighbouring Korea).
But when the last imperial dynasty (of Qing) was finally overthrown in 1912, didn't both the Republic and the communists act on the belief that their rule over Chinese people had been illegitimate? Yet those god-emperors' vague claims of feudal vassal ownership over neighbouring nations is somehow holiest of holy?
And considering that some of China's feudal god-emperors have also claimed ownership of Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia, and in those now sovereign countries temporarily even exerted de facto rule (unlike in Tibet until Mao's invasion in 1950), shouldn't the junta in Beijing and the Chinese ultra-nationalists also be claiming those neighbours as "China's eternal possessions"?
Of course none of these archaic claims based on some feudal Chinese despots' colonial dreams and claims over the whole wide world should have no room in the modern world where even China's communist dictatorship has (nominally) signed United Nations' treaties on the rights of indigenous peoples, peoples' right to self-determination, language, culture, religion etc.
Still the Chinese regime's propaganda machine quite successfully indoctrinates even their young to parrot these feudal (let alone non-Chinese) god-emperors as if it was justification for invading, repressing, destroying and exploiting peaceful neighbouring people and their indigenous civilization which until Mao's genocidal invasion was about as "chinese" as India.
I am sure that China's formerly communist (now nationalist/Han chauvinist) dictatorship won't be reminding anyone or allowing any debate inside the "People's Empire of China" that invading a peaceful and totally non-Chinese neighbouring nation of Tibet in 1950, resulting in over a million Tibetan deaths; brutally repressing the Tibetan people, their unique language (with Sanskrit-based script), their history, their Buddhist religion and their national identity while brainwashing Tibetans to believe that their pacifistic culture is inferior; wiping out practically all of the 6000 monasteries that served as Tibet religious and administrative centres and housed invaluable written records (burned) and precious ancient artifacts (melted for Mao's foreign reserves); exploiting Tibet's extensive and varied natural resources (precious minerals, metals, timber, various sources of energy) without native Tibetans having any say; keeping the Tibetans under constant surveillance and imposing upon them China's alien imperial language etc. amounts to genocidal colonialism.
But no, the current ultra-nationalist successor regimes of the world's most murderous dictator, the marxist Mao Zedong, have made the Final Solution in China's western neighbours (Tibet, East Turkestan aka Xinjiang and Southern Mongolia) a propaganda imperative in the name of expansionist "Han China's" unity and for them colonialism is merely the often-evoked accusation against the evil foreign powers.
So now Tibet, called the "Western Treasure house" in modern Chinese, is really facing an extensive surface stripping so that the colonizing Chinese (lead by Communist Party "princelings" and their cronies) can extract the mind-boggling amount of energy stored across the Tibetan Plateau?
If that wasn't enough, just recently a professor and member of Chinese Academy of Engineering (a Chinese Communist Party thinktank) revealed that "we foresee that in the coming decades, hundreds of millions of people will migrate to the western regions, where land is empty and resources are untapped"!
One must suppose that if Hitler had provided the West cheap capitalist services under his nazional-socialist policies, he too would've gained quiet acceptance for Nazi-Germany's Lebensraum expansion and resource grab, like China does today...
After the March 2008 Tibetan uprising across the three provinces of Chinese-occupied Tibet during which a few Chinese (both uniformed and settlers) were killed and a dozen more died while hiding when Chinese-owned shops were set alight and over two hundred Tibetans were killed by the Chinese army and paramilitary and over two thousand Tibetans simply went missing (dead or kept in horrendous secret prison camps) there were demonstrations across the world featuring mostly freedom-supporting foreign nationals and occasionally angry Chinese Communist Party-organized "fen qing" defending Chinese imperialism and colonialism in Tibet.
During one rare demonstration at the Duke University featuring both sets of campaigners, a young Chinese student Grace Wang, who also had Tibetan and Western friends and who had mastered the art of respectful debate, tried in vain to mediate between the two groups of protesters. Here is a quote from the Washington Post article ("Caught in the Middle, Called a Traitor") on what happened next:
Now if only Mozilla et al added encrypted search plugins and made them the default, at least when and where it is desirable and ok'ed by the provider.
For now it's Scroogle SSL search (usually via plugin but their homepage works everywhere) and the Wikipedia link you provided (thanks!).
Incorrect, but a fine example of the irrational populistic nationalism (Han-chauvinism) that replaced communism around 1992 as Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) excuse for remaining the omnipotent clique to rule the Chinese empire.
It was actually Willy Clinton who in early 1990s delinked China's criminal record (human rights in China and the neighbouring states it continues to occupy, exploit and repress) from trade relations with the USA, which were until then annually reviewed for the "Most Favored Nation" (!) policy. The China-appeasing Clintons went on to receive illegal campaign funding from the Chinese Communist Party.
With the moral-free American multi-nationals flocking into China to take advantage of the newly business-friendly fascist environment, the moral-free European multi-nationals had "no choice" except to follow the example, gradually followed by the rest of the Western manufacturing base.
Meanwhile the desperately needed Western investment into the newly democratic former communist countries (esp. Eastern Europe) and other developing democracies all but dried up. Corporations had spoken. But it took someone like Willy Clinton to get the era of CCP-controlled globalism started.
Again you are irrationally (or intentionally) mixing up the totally opposite concepts of China-hating and Chinese regime-hating. This is of course typical of Han-chauvinist propaganda and unfortunately common in today's China where the state propaganda machine uses "external threats against the Chinese people" to rally the masses behind its new nationalist ideology.
President Obama may lack the full backing of the powerful "pro-China" corporate lobby (the main reason why Hillary Clinton got appointed), but at least civil rights have fundamental meaning to him. That he can not act upon his natural instincts vis a vis China's rising mercantilism and aggression is due to the massive hole dug up during the four terms of Clinton and Bush Jr.
Incidentally you forgot the world's most murderous - and communist - dictator from your list: Mao "the great helmsman" Zedong.
Besides genuinely domestic policy differences there is also the international dimension between different communist doctrines. For some smaller countries/nation states, communism represented the often understandable national struggle against colonialism.
The larger "countries" (i.e. empires) on the other hand, such as the post-imperial China and Russia, simply used the ideology of "communist internationalism" to invade and subjugate any smaller neighbouring country they possibly could in the name of the maoist "People's republic" or "Soviet Union".
And btw. the murderous and insane Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot was only made possible by the military and political support of the maoist Chinese. Vietnam's form of communism on the other hand was based on their own national struggle. Shortly after the Vietnamese army had taken down the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia the Chinese invaded Vietnam to "teach them a lesson".
The Chinese "communist" dictatorship - the most murderous in human history - has obviously a long list of crimes to their "credit" (modern corporate speak), but in this context it might also be relevant to mention that part of that regime's near total control over the rare earth elements is due to China's invasion and ongoing genocidal occupation of Tibet since 1950.
Mao Zedong may have "only" wanted pre-one-child-policy era lebensraum for the Chinese masses (from 1950 to 1970 the Chinese population doubled from 500 million to 1 billion), geopolitical and military control over the Central Asian highlands of Tibet and incomprehensible (in communist terms anyway) validation of China's fairytale-like feudal imperial claims over the absolutely non-Chinese Tibetan people when he sent his Communist Party's then-idle wardogs to invade and occupy Tibet, but it turned out that the subsequent Chinese national-socialist (read: Chinazi) leaders and their affiliated business "princelings" have found it incredibly lucrative to ransack Tibet of its natural resources.
Nearly all historically invaluable precious metal artifacts and statues were melted for Mao's foreign currency purchases (while the invaluable Buddhist scriptures and almost all of the more than 6000 monasteries were simply burned down or bombed. Tibet's forests have been hacked down and shipped off to China (leaving only erosion behind). Uranium, gas and oil are extracted by Party-affiliated cronies and the Chinese regime only leaving behind severe pollution. All profitable industrial metals, including the rare earth metals, are being excavated while protesting native Tibetans get the old Gestapo treatment. Et cetera and et cetera.
Did I mention that the Chinese dictatorship is hard at work damming and diverting the major Asian rivers originating in Tibet and providing lifeline to over a billion South-Asians (incl. India) downstream, in order to generate electric power and to provide water for the occupying Chinese state and the newly settled Chinese instead? United Nations' conventions be damned in every case.
So what if the Chinese regime now wants to restrict the supply of crucial industrial metals? Don't say you didn't see it coming. Consider sending a distress signal to your democratic representative, that is if the "western" corporations don't already have him or her in their pocket.
The Western and democratic peoples need to either shut up and live with the consequences, or do something before it's too late for all of us.
I've no comment on US carriers (other than oligopolies tend to suck, esp. if they are regional monopolies), but generally speaking if one doesn't need higher speeds of 3G, HSDPA etc. access and the maps one might require can be preloaded, then EDGE or GPRS data connections can still be quite practical. I've found that VoIP works fine over EDGE and on most if not all current handsets EDGE uses far less power than the higher speed 3G chipsets. I carry spare batteries for my kits (no iphones here) but I still value battery life. For higher data speeds I can usually locate a WIFI AP.
I'm hoping a newer generation of mobile radio chipsets would solve the current power consumption issues.
Sigh.
Here we are discussing comments by Google's CEO (that only criminals worry about privacy) that are ideologically native to the Chinese "communist" dictatorship and a fan of said regime gets modded "informative" for further propagating that regime's twisted political indoctrination...
In his essay "A Lie Repeated - The Far Left's Flawed History of Tibet" Josh Schrei, among others, has thoroughly debunked the Maoist propaganda behind these useful Western Marxist idiots' like Parenti's excuses for the brutal colonial genocide of China's peaceful neighbouring state Tibet in the name of "liberation" (and annexation).
Of course any documents challenging the Chinese Communist Party's make-believe rewritten "history" are absolutely banned under their rule. Must have One Truth for the One Volk under One Reich Rule.
So, any country with some local abuse of power (ie. all the countries that ever existed) simply deserve to be invaded, annexed and kept under repressive martial rule by the likes of Mao, Stalin and their successors until the colonized peoples' unique national identities, natural resources, cultural heritage and art, languages, religious traditions, any decree of national self-determination etc. (in Tibet's case all of the above) are irrevocably extinguished?
Interestingly, the Tibetan exile government you're referring to as "a repressive theocracy feudal state" is democratically elected while the colonial military dictatorship of the CCP occupying Tibet, besides perpetrating genocide against the completely non-Chinese people of Tibet, is also operating the most unequal distribution of wealth in China's entire history.
Huh!?
There are indeed reasons to boycott many American corporations and the USA has indeed committed crimes against other nations, but despite their best efforts they're not a remorseless genocidal colonizer with authoritarian regime with total Orwellian propaganda control over peoples lacking any safeguards of rule of law or freedoms of association or speech.
That's the "People's republic" of China.
Now kindly put that moral relativist gripe of yours about "restricting some content on the web" at the behest of that regime in some kind of perspective.
Fact: the longer the Chinese population is only fed CCP propaganda and denied access to the information the CCP wants to deny them, the longer the horror show behind the facade continues. Is that what you want to be advocating here?
If the poster had stated banned facts about Tibet and China, like "prior to Chinese communist army's military invasion in 1950 and its continued brutally repressive and systematically genocidal policies, Tibet had always been distinctly different from its neighbouring states (like China) in culture, ethnicity, religion, language and its Sanskrit-influenced (like Hindi) script. Yet the Chinese communist (now fascist) dictatorship claims absolute colonial control and even sovereignty over their historical neighbour, with whom even the Imperial China had made an eternal peace treaty between equals", one could understand that a submissive economic vassal state of the increasingly powerful national-socialistic Chinese dictatorship would take action against such dangerous free speech.
However the poster in question only referred to the all-encompassing efforts of the Chinese dictorship to control their captive subjects' access to information outside the party machine's own pervasive propaganda efforts.
The fact that the Chinese, the already siniziced minorities and the occupied neighbouring peoples still struggling to retain some level of control of their own communities and lives are not given any opportunity to debate issues (like the facts above) even partially freely should certainly be part of the United Nations' "Internet Governance Forum". Instead they tear down participants' posters for simply referring to such controls (by the "People's Republic" of China)?
Oh yes, the image of the banned poster ...
Dear vampire baozi, nowhere did I refer to "Chinese expansion from 1800-1949" which you label as propagandist bullshit.
Yet, since you bring it up, even the unpopular ("foreign") Manchu dynasty of Qing and the subsequent short-lived Republic, despite dealing with foreign imperial colonies on the coast (and later the Japanese in the north-east), imposed (or attempted to do so militarily but were defeated like in Tibet, until the PLA in 1950) Chinese colonial rule in the above-mentioned neighbouring people's territories despite their independence struggles. Look up the details, they're widely available outside China. Some are of course mentioned as "rebellions" to be put out by the brave Chinese patriots...
Also consider that the majority of the so-called Han-Chinese, supposedly an ethnic group making up 1.2 billion of the 1.3+ billion population, are actually ethnically distinct from the original Hans hailing north of the Yangtze (although due to the military campaigns and later population movements the southern "sinicized Hans" have noticeable paternal "Han" DNA).
What the genetic studies, brushed under the carpet by the CCP, essentially mean is that 1) the so-called Han-Chinese aren't in fact a single ethnic group as claimed by the regime, and 2) most of the "Han" population (i.e. their ancestors) were actually invaded and annexed into the Chinese empire (which later adopted the Han concept from the 2000-year old dynasty of that name) and so throughly assimilated that practically nothing cultural and very little linguistic evidence of their indigenous past remains.
Since we were talking about empires, that is akin to the Roman empire wiping out all competing cultures until all citizens from within the empire only ever knew Rome as their "motherland" and only spoke a latin of some sort, and then imagining how the ultranationalistic "Romans" of today's France and Ukraine (ie. all over the Roman empire) were now shouting from all rooftops how the Irish or the Scandinavians don't deserve their independence because they consider everything to belong to their Rome. That's how today's Han-chauvinism is expressed.
Point being that the Chinese dynastic state has long been a shamelessly/proudly imperialistic entity. If during the Manchu Qing and the Republic periods some of their "claimed colonies" declared their desire for the modern notion of independence (like most countries around the the world did) and the Chinese sent military missions suppressing (or attempting to supress) them... well, call it what you will.
Unlike the historically vague or nominal displays of Chinese imperial superiority through "ambans" with small garrisons and the extortion of tributes (indeed sometimes beneficially in exchange of military help against common enemies), the modern form of Chinese colonialism with its massive "Han-Chinese" population transfers, prevalent and thorough military control, large scale murder, totalitarian propaganda and sinicization policies and systematic exploitation of natural resources in the occupied territories using modern technology is indeed sinister and only comparable to the worst policies of Hitler and Stalin, who unsurprisingly both inspired the "modern" Chinese regimes.
If you object to calling China's ongoing imperial policies sinister, you'd do well in trying to imagine yourself in the shoes of today's Tibetan, Uighur or "Inner"-Mongolian. Manchus have indeed already ceased to exist as a people.
BACKGROUND: From 1930's until 1945 Imperial Japan and Nazi-Germany were engaged in a militaristic expansion of their Lebensraum (lit. german expression meaning "living space for their own ethnicity") while attempting to grab foreign countries' natural resources to feed their industries (including the important military-industrial complex). This was in fact a "modern" replay of age-old imperialism and something that the most recent dominant empires, such as Britain, Russia and China had been at until then.
After WWII, (Soviet) Russia emerged as the greatest beneficiary in terms of imperial territory, while the recently democratized Britain had to begin surrendering the sovereignty of most of their empire's territory back to their native peoples.
Meanwhile the secretive and reclusive Chinese empire of Middle Kingdom, with its age-old imperial view of its neighbouring countries (of non-Chinese and non-sinicized peoples) as mere vassal states, was being taken over by Mao's communist dictatorship which uniquely combined the Marxist doctrines (like internationalism) with its own Han-Chinese chauvism (racial and cultural superiority akin to Nazi ideology).
Thus after the 1949 takeover of China by Mao the Soviet-backed "people's liberation" communist army was quickly sent to "liberate" and annex the vast territories of China's historical western neighbours, Mongols, Tibetans and Uighurs. Manchus in the north had at that point mostly been demographically assimilated already, despite Manchuria's widely recognized declaration of independence in 1932.
The sparsely populated and non-Chinese Central-Asian nations of Tibetans, Mongols and Uighurs, however, were soon put under systematic colonial exploitation, including the sinister policy of settling massive numbers of uprooted Chinese settlers into the occupied territories in order to consolidate de facto Chinese imperial rule there for eternity.
TODAY: The territories of Tibetans, turkic Uighurs and (South) Mongols (as Northern Mongolia regained its independence from Soviet Union in 1991) have been integrated into the centrally-planned industrial system of the (formerly communist) nazional-socialist Chinese empire by the virtue of their massive exploitable natural resources such as oil, gas, water and vast deposits of precious and industrial minerals of all kinds. Native people are still an annoyance to be dealt with, mainly through policies of Han-chauvinist propaganda and systematic sinicization enforced through strict military control.
Here is one example article detailing China's ongoing industrial exploitation of the occupied territories. While this particular article doesn't refer to rare earth metals specifically, both South Mongolia and Tibet are being mined for them.
China mines Tibet's rich resources
Just a footnote: There is plenty of information regarding PRC's laws regulating foreigners' and in particular foreign businesses' encryption rules, but very little in terms of specifics about the same laws concerning Chinese nationals. I have, however, followed the debate and read many a newspaper article (outside China) over the years and like in the case of "state secrets", it may be that the lack of debate (naturally also within China) is partially due to intentional obfuscation over what is permitted and what is not permitted. Discussion about Chinese people's civil liberties isn't exactly the state-approved hot topic in the Chinese media nor in the discussion forums.
My non-exhaustive search came up with a few quotes from the Network World magazine:
and
Thanks for your constructive query. :-)
I've many Chinese friends who are as worried about the FQ phenomenom as I am. It's always unpleasant to be shouted down or having your message buried for ideological reasons.
Anyway, I'm not sure if you noticed but elsewhere in this thread I posted the regulations governing foreign-based organizations' (like businesses and NGOs) and foreign individuals' use of crypto in the PRC. The laws governing PRC nationals' use of crypto are said to be nearly identical. But as is often the case in today's China, the actual enforcement of laws is very haphazard and selective. Using SSH while keeping totally clear of anything the State might consider subversive or controversial (like simple river crabs!) and not pushing your luck on foreign connections seems safe. Open-source disk-encryption tools are also a download away and their use highly recommended (by me!), but if the PSB comes knocking on your door they'll only make offers you can't refuse.
Surely the PRC's statute books are available online for concerned people to study, and if you are interested in looking into the exact legal terms regulating crypto in China, some useful keywords would be "State Encryption Administration" and "State Encryption Management Commission" which are the organizations charged with enforcing the regulations.
Thank you for kindly pointing out that HTTPS is a protocol, not a cipher. It is the latter that actually encrypts the traffic.
Now, is it actually legal under the PRC's laws to use ciphers not specifically approved by the State authorities?
Are Chinese individuals or organizations inside the PRC allowed to freely operate servers with strong encryption of their choice and without permission from the State? Which authority within the PRC is allowed to grant certificates?
Are the State's routers/filters able to recognize and simply drop HTTPS connections at their whim?
Does simply using HTTPS protocol prevent the State from logging your connections or attempts to connect to "suspicious sites" (eg. those about democracy and human rights or just critical of the Party)? You know the State's most powerful censorship tool is in fact instilling an inherent sense of self-censorship in its subjects.
Does the mere presence of HTTPS (with whatever ciphers are bundled) allow the Chinese "netizens" to connect to material otherwise banned or filtered by the State freely and without fear of retribution?
Thanks for any clarification.