No, but you may spend a day or so questioning the sources, and what has actually been the reason for jailing these "dissidents".
In virtually all cases that I have studied, these are people who have leaked information that was supposed to be secret to begin with. One can argue that these "secrets" are ridiculous, but they have nevertheless been defined as state secrets, and there is a law that deals with such crimes. The law has been followed. Should China follow other nations' laws?
This is no different that when Western journalists are jailed for "espionage" or leaking "state secrets". You may want to google "Jan Guillou" to read about a Swedish journalist who exposed a secret intelligence agency and was sentenced to jail for it. According to the US government, he is a "spy", and he therefore isn't allowed to enter the US (even if he was invited to the Oscar awards).
Now, this Swedish journalist who leaked "state secrets" is thus a spy, but when Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, leaks "state secrets", well, then he is a "dissident".
1. Americans eat too much; there are all-you-can-eat buffets at Denny's and similar places, and fast food chains have "value-added" extra-size meals. And since Americans work a lot, they don't have time cooking.
2. Americans exercise too little; they sit in their cars for an hour to work, then an hour from work, and when they come home they are so tired that they can't do anything but watch TV and drink beer (plus having BBQ and mashed potatoes before bed time).
3. Americans are socially divided; since some parts of the US are like third world countries, it is to be expected that the lower stratum should be worse off than anywhere in Europe, where the poor at least have guaranteed access to medicine and doctors.
4. Americans don't give a shit about the environment, and is the premier polluter in the world. Pollution causes disease and death. For instance, the drinking water in most parts of the US are undrinkable, and contains various metals.
5. The American school system is to blame for giving the kids a bad dietary foundation. American schools serve pizza and hamburgers for lunch... and the P.E. in American schools also sucks.
Remember David Koresh? You sure showed the American attitude toward cults in Waco, didn't you? Do you think there is any difference between the Branch Davidian and Falun Gong? Read up, boy.
Political prisoners? How about Gitmo? Those prisoners are prisoners of war, but not treated as prisoners of war, being denied their right to an attorney. Or in Abi Grail, the sheer torture has made the world shocked over how brutal the Americans are. They came to Iraq to liberate the people from Saddam's torture, only to continue the torture themselves.
How about the cleaning up of your own TV? Janet Jackson shows a nipple (a fucking nipple!) on TV, and the US goes nuts.
Bullshit. Exercising your rights in the US may also get you jailed, shot, or just run over by a tank, like in the Kent State massacre, or the Newark riots, or... or you may just get killed by a drive-by shooting because some teenagers are having fun, exercising their "right" to bear arms.
And let's not forget that those rights have existed for just a brief time for all citizens in the US. Rosa Parks, anyone? I heard she was just pardoned (!) for her crime to sit at a seat reserved for the White man...
And by the way, you do have the right to criticize the Chinese government and also change it, although the mechanisms are different than what you are used to.
Let me also remind you that the United States have six times as many people incarcerated as China per capita. Based on this fact only, I maintain that there is more freedom in China than in the USA. I have lived in both countries, so I should have a clue about it.
I remember tanning in a park in december in the US (for us Europeans, Arizona is hot enough in December!), only wearing underwear. Of course, the police arrived and threatened me with the death penalty unless I wore clothes. For me, that episode summarizes everything about the USA.
Sure. You can go fuck a whore anytime in China without fear for retribution... it is illegal, but openly tolerated.
Try that in the US, and you may be sent to jail for fifteen years, stripped of your political rights (no more voting for Gore!), and also stripped of all your property.
Because the Chinese authorities launch a new "sao laji" (clean up garbage) campaign every month. Everyone participates initially, then it is all forgotten until a new campaign arrives. There is no one in charge over the internet in China, but there are different government bodies fighting for the power to regulate. Therefore, it is all a mess, and mostly words without action.
It is mostly status quo, and sometimes expanding, if you ask me.
That people rather attack the Bush administration is because that is so much worse. Restricting of freedoms is to be expected in a dictatorship, but less so in a democracy. Before you know it, China will be freer than America (and already is in many regards).
American people elect their president. They only have two permanent choices, but it doesn't matter in the end, since the incumbent preisdent sits no matter what (more Americans voted for Al Gore than Bush last time).
And no matter who you choose, there will be more DRM, more anti-terrorist measures (so that they can map you in more detail), and more invasions abroad.
Communism is the dictatorial power of the people through a proletarian revolution. There never was a proletarian revolution in China, for the simple reason China didn't have a proletariat. The revolution in China was agrarian, and the system implemented was Maoism, which isn't anywhere near communism except for the fact that the state took over all the private property.
Since 1978 China is essentially a state-capitalist dictatorship with local (and primitive) democracy, with remaining socialism only on the countryside (state-owned farms leased to farmers). The state-owned property has largely been returned to private interests, and nowhere in the world will you find as many privately owned businesses as in China.
China of today is communist only by name, and this won't change because the party needs to pretend it is implementing "socialism with Chinese characteristics" instead of capitalism, because the party was founded on a Marxist-Leninist basis.
China of today is thus as much communist as North Korea is democratic ("People's Democratic Republic of Korea") or East Germany was democratic ("Deutsche Democratische Republik"). Why is this so incredibly hard for Americans to understand?
Please repeat after me: China is a state-capitalist dictatorship. There you go! Now when you know the basics, perhaps you will be able to discuss the problems of China with some more credibility.
Yeah, but it is inaccessible within China (probably because it is located outside China, despite the.cn TLD -- probably in Taiwan). You need http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http:// www.cryptome.cn/ to get to the juicy stuff. Yes, it is that easy circumventing the firewall.
You don't read about them on the BBC because they happen so frequently that they have become boring. And they aren't about big issues like democracy, but about local corruption. Some of them are reported in Chinese media, but even the Chinese can't take an interest in that many incidents. It is just part of life in a country aching of growth and rising inequalities.
I am not FROM China, but I am in China. The crap that is floating around here is typical China bashing stuff. It has some merits to it, but it is skewed and out of proportion. There is a myth that the Chinese are censored beyond belief, when the truth is that the internet censorship is very mild. And there is always this Tiananmen Guangchang issue coming up, as if the Chinese would associate that square primarily with the June 4th incident. They don't. It is a small thing in Chinese history, and also in the square's history. The Chinese are informed about it, and most people know someone who was there.
Americans who think that the Chinese are longing for democracy, that they can't wait until Falun gong becomes legal again, that they want a free Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan and what have you, and so on, are clearly delusional and know nothing about China. They are projecting American values on the Chinese, but it simply doesn't work that way.
China has a long way to go, and will probably never have a democracy like the US has (and even less a democracy of the European caliber), but they will have something similar -- perhaps better, and definitely better suited to Chinese conditions.
So my little roll here is just to try to strike a balance. People who gets modded informative for just mentioning the square incident should be modded -5 uninformative, really. It is just too simple to be informative, but it appeals to the usual mob of China bashers who are on an American cultural imperialistic crusade against anything unamerican.
China is much more complicated than that, and China is also in a lenghty process of transition, from planned economy to capitalism, from poverty to wealth, from madness to freedom. I'd rather see a discussion on that process than the usual hoopla on the square.
"My" government is effectual at censorship. It regularly spoofs DNS requests to kiddie porn sites, and it has also shut down a political party's web site. But then again, "my" government isn't Chinese.
Well, I am reading this from China... please enlighten me, what exactly happened in Tiananmen Square (and didn't it in fact happen outside the square)? Is that 1989 pro-democracy movement that ended in a massacre (still outside the square)?
Since I am in China, there is no fucking way I can read your reply (according to your theory).
And since I am in China, I also can't discuss this issue with you here, also according to your theory.
The only thing that is certain is that I can't discuss this in Chinese here. But that is because of the incompetence of Slashdot, which doesn't allow for it.
The verdict was correct according to Chinese law (the crime was providing documents labeled with secrecy to foreign powers).
Since China makes its owan laws, and since any company entering China needs to abide by those laws, there is little point in suing Yahoo. They did what they had to do, and Shi Tao knew what he was doing.
The only way to change things is to change the laws of PRC. This is mainly a task for the Chinese people, but international pressure is also welcome (of an initiated sort that doesn't slap the Chinese in the face).
Things ARE changing, and fast too. Keep your criticism balanced and well-informed, and you might even have an influence on China.
It's sad to see that people are abusing their moderation privileges. Labeling the parent flamebait is hardly consonant with the rules of Slashdot, and the perpetrator is most likely a sore loser who cannot participate in a debate with intellectual honesty.
Yeah, it might be that the MPEG-4/AAC/H.264 algorithms are based in part on Fourier analysis, but I fail to understand how Carleson's theorems have been used in making the iPod. Cupertino is hardly knowledgable in the more esoteric realms of theoretical mathematics, and there is simply no need to incorporate such stuff in an mp4 player.
This is bad journalism, written by bad reporters who lack the most basic understanding of mathematics and engineering. He just thought it might be cool to clam in an iPod in the mess.
Don't kid yourself. You don't protect your kids from anything, you just shield them from reality with your religious doctrinary shit. There is no harm for kids to see "coitus", other than that they should know not to bother parents involved in private moments.
And your "decency" laws only apply to the USA, Iran, Saudi Arabia and a few other theocracies; they don't apply in many European countries. Last time I checked, the internet was a global public spot.
No, no, no. Seriously. Microsoft will just dump the costs on every bloke with a PC, you know the computer that comes pre-installed with Vista. Vista as in hasta la vista with the competition who can't afford the services M$ will roll out: search, blog, whatever on M$ bought high-speed pipes.
I guess they didn't object to primte time TV footage of American troops leading naked Iraqi prisoners leashed through the prison catacombs... now that is really indecent.
Makes me wonder... why are the Americans thinking of invading Iran? The two countries are equally fucked up in my humble mind, about the same attitudes toward "indecency".
Ayatollah Bush of the Intelligent Design priesthood, the leader of the world, mwahhahhahha!
Slashdot Mirror
No, but you may spend a day or so questioning the sources, and what has actually been the reason for jailing these "dissidents".
In virtually all cases that I have studied, these are people who have leaked information that was supposed to be secret to begin with. One can argue that these "secrets" are ridiculous, but they have nevertheless been defined as state secrets, and there is a law that deals with such crimes. The law has been followed. Should China follow other nations' laws?
This is no different that when Western journalists are jailed for "espionage" or leaking "state secrets". You may want to google "Jan Guillou" to read about a Swedish journalist who exposed a secret intelligence agency and was sentenced to jail for it. According to the US government, he is a "spy", and he therefore isn't allowed to enter the US (even if he was invited to the Oscar awards).
Now, this Swedish journalist who leaked "state secrets" is thus a spy, but when Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, leaks "state secrets", well, then he is a "dissident".
Yes. Always.
1. Americans eat too much; there are all-you-can-eat buffets at Denny's and similar places, and fast food chains have "value-added" extra-size meals. And since Americans work a lot, they don't have time cooking.
2. Americans exercise too little; they sit in their cars for an hour to work, then an hour from work, and when they come home they are so tired that they can't do anything but watch TV and drink beer (plus having BBQ and mashed potatoes before bed time).
3. Americans are socially divided; since some parts of the US are like third world countries, it is to be expected that the lower stratum should be worse off than anywhere in Europe, where the poor at least have guaranteed access to medicine and doctors.
4. Americans don't give a shit about the environment, and is the premier polluter in the world. Pollution causes disease and death. For instance, the drinking water in most parts of the US are undrinkable, and contains various metals.
5. The American school system is to blame for giving the kids a bad dietary foundation. American schools serve pizza and hamburgers for lunch... and the P.E. in American schools also sucks.
Remember David Koresh? You sure showed the American attitude toward cults in Waco, didn't you? Do you think there is any difference between the Branch Davidian and Falun Gong? Read up, boy.
Political prisoners? How about Gitmo? Those prisoners are prisoners of war, but not treated as prisoners of war, being denied their right to an attorney. Or in Abi Grail, the sheer torture has made the world shocked over how brutal the Americans are. They came to Iraq to liberate the people from Saddam's torture, only to continue the torture themselves.
How about the cleaning up of your own TV? Janet Jackson shows a nipple (a fucking nipple!) on TV, and the US goes nuts.
You guys think you are so much better. But why?
Bullshit. Exercising your rights in the US may also get you jailed, shot, or just run over by a tank, like in the Kent State massacre, or the Newark riots, or... or you may just get killed by a drive-by shooting because some teenagers are having fun, exercising their "right" to bear arms.
And let's not forget that those rights have existed for just a brief time for all citizens in the US. Rosa Parks, anyone? I heard she was just pardoned (!) for her crime to sit at a seat reserved for the White man...
And by the way, you do have the right to criticize the Chinese government and also change it, although the mechanisms are different than what you are used to.
Let me also remind you that the United States have six times as many people incarcerated as China per capita. Based on this fact only, I maintain that there is more freedom in China than in the USA. I have lived in both countries, so I should have a clue about it.
I remember tanning in a park in december in the US (for us Europeans, Arizona is hot enough in December!), only wearing underwear. Of course, the police arrived and threatened me with the death penalty unless I wore clothes. For me, that episode summarizes everything about the USA.
Yes, Jintao's government listens, but they are not ready to let go of power.
Sure. You can go fuck a whore anytime in China without fear for retribution... it is illegal, but openly tolerated.
Try that in the US, and you may be sent to jail for fifteen years, stripped of your political rights (no more voting for Gore!), and also stripped of all your property.
Because the Chinese authorities launch a new "sao laji" (clean up garbage) campaign every month. Everyone participates initially, then it is all forgotten until a new campaign arrives. There is no one in charge over the internet in China, but there are different government bodies fighting for the power to regulate. Therefore, it is all a mess, and mostly words without action.
It is mostly status quo, and sometimes expanding, if you ask me.
That people rather attack the Bush administration is because that is so much worse. Restricting of freedoms is to be expected in a dictatorship, but less so in a democracy. Before you know it, China will be freer than America (and already is in many regards).
American people elect their president. They only have two permanent choices, but it doesn't matter in the end, since the incumbent preisdent sits no matter what (more Americans voted for Al Gore than Bush last time).
And no matter who you choose, there will be more DRM, more anti-terrorist measures (so that they can map you in more detail), and more invasions abroad.
Now, that is what I call a circus.
Yes, and it is important remembering that China is in their "fifties" right now.
Communism is the dictatorial power of the people through a proletarian revolution. There never was a proletarian revolution in China, for the simple reason China didn't have a proletariat. The revolution in China was agrarian, and the system implemented was Maoism, which isn't anywhere near communism except for the fact that the state took over all the private property.
Since 1978 China is essentially a state-capitalist dictatorship with local (and primitive) democracy, with remaining socialism only on the countryside (state-owned farms leased to farmers). The state-owned property has largely been returned to private interests, and nowhere in the world will you find as many privately owned businesses as in China.
China of today is communist only by name, and this won't change because the party needs to pretend it is implementing "socialism with Chinese characteristics" instead of capitalism, because the party was founded on a Marxist-Leninist basis.
China of today is thus as much communist as North Korea is democratic ("People's Democratic Republic of Korea") or East Germany was democratic ("Deutsche Democratische Republik"). Why is this so incredibly hard for Americans to understand?
Please repeat after me: China is a state-capitalist dictatorship. There you go! Now when you know the basics, perhaps you will be able to discuss the problems of China with some more credibility.
Yeah, but it is inaccessible within China (probably because it is located outside China, despite the .cn TLD -- probably in Taiwan). You need http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http:// www.cryptome.cn/ to get to the juicy stuff. Yes, it is that easy circumventing the firewall.
Dunno what you are referring to here, but the figure 70,000 is public information from the gong'anbu.
You don't read about them on the BBC because they happen so frequently that they have become boring. And they aren't about big issues like democracy, but about local corruption. Some of them are reported in Chinese media, but even the Chinese can't take an interest in that many incidents. It is just part of life in a country aching of growth and rising inequalities.
I am not FROM China, but I am in China. The crap that is floating around here is typical China bashing stuff. It has some merits to it, but it is skewed and out of proportion. There is a myth that the Chinese are censored beyond belief, when the truth is that the internet censorship is very mild. And there is always this Tiananmen Guangchang issue coming up, as if the Chinese would associate that square primarily with the June 4th incident. They don't. It is a small thing in Chinese history, and also in the square's history. The Chinese are informed about it, and most people know someone who was there.
Americans who think that the Chinese are longing for democracy, that they can't wait until Falun gong becomes legal again, that they want a free Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan and what have you, and so on, are clearly delusional and know nothing about China. They are projecting American values on the Chinese, but it simply doesn't work that way.
China has a long way to go, and will probably never have a democracy like the US has (and even less a democracy of the European caliber), but they will have something similar -- perhaps better, and definitely better suited to Chinese conditions.
So my little roll here is just to try to strike a balance. People who gets modded informative for just mentioning the square incident should be modded -5 uninformative, really. It is just too simple to be informative, but it appeals to the usual mob of China bashers who are on an American cultural imperialistic crusade against anything unamerican.
China is much more complicated than that, and China is also in a lenghty process of transition, from planned economy to capitalism, from poverty to wealth, from madness to freedom. I'd rather see a discussion on that process than the usual hoopla on the square.
"My" government is effectual at censorship. It regularly spoofs DNS requests to kiddie porn sites, and it has also shut down a political party's web site. But then again, "my" government isn't Chinese.
You know, I just searched for "Tank Man" on http://www.baidu.com/ (the premier search engine in China, unaffected by the firewall), and the first link that came up was http://beyondpleasure.blogchina.com/4886647.html
It indeed has the picture and the story (in brief), and the page was indeed fetched from within China.
People all know about this, and this information will never go away. But you will not see it discussed in official media or anything like that.
Well, I am reading this from China... please enlighten me, what exactly happened in Tiananmen Square (and didn't it in fact happen outside the square)? Is that 1989 pro-democracy movement that ended in a massacre (still outside the square)?
Since I am in China, there is no fucking way I can read your reply (according to your theory).
And since I am in China, I also can't discuss this issue with you here, also according to your theory.
The only thing that is certain is that I can't discuss this in Chinese here. But that is because of the incompetence of Slashdot, which doesn't allow for it.
The verdict was correct according to Chinese law (the crime was providing documents labeled with secrecy to foreign powers).
Since China makes its owan laws, and since any company entering China needs to abide by those laws, there is little point in suing Yahoo. They did what they had to do, and Shi Tao knew what he was doing.
The only way to change things is to change the laws of PRC. This is mainly a task for the Chinese people, but international pressure is also welcome (of an initiated sort that doesn't slap the Chinese in the face).
Things ARE changing, and fast too. Keep your criticism balanced and well-informed, and you might even have an influence on China.
It's sad to see that people are abusing their moderation privileges. Labeling the parent flamebait is hardly consonant with the rules of Slashdot, and the perpetrator is most likely a sore loser who cannot participate in a debate with intellectual honesty.
Yeah, it might be that the MPEG-4/AAC/H.264 algorithms are based in part on Fourier analysis, but I fail to understand how Carleson's theorems have been used in making the iPod. Cupertino is hardly knowledgable in the more esoteric realms of theoretical mathematics, and there is simply no need to incorporate such stuff in an mp4 player.
This is bad journalism, written by bad reporters who lack the most basic understanding of mathematics and engineering. He just thought it might be cool to clam in an iPod in the mess.
Don't kid yourself. You don't protect your kids from anything, you just shield them from reality with your religious doctrinary shit. There is no harm for kids to see "coitus", other than that they should know not to bother parents involved in private moments.
And your "decency" laws only apply to the USA, Iran, Saudi Arabia and a few other theocracies; they don't apply in many European countries. Last time I checked, the internet was a global public spot.
No, no, no. Seriously. Microsoft will just dump the costs on every bloke with a PC, you know the computer that comes pre-installed with Vista. Vista as in hasta la vista with the competition who can't afford the services M$ will roll out: search, blog, whatever on M$ bought high-speed pipes.
for Microsoft.
I guess they didn't object to primte time TV footage of American troops leading naked Iraqi prisoners leashed through the prison catacombs... now that is really indecent.
Makes me wonder... why are the Americans thinking of invading Iran? The two countries are equally fucked up in my humble mind, about the same attitudes toward "indecency".
Ayatollah Bush of the Intelligent Design priesthood, the leader of the world, mwahhahhahha!