He is commenting on Chinese politics in a way that is too unorthodox. He is taking a stance against the Chinese firewall in his latest comment, declaring that those young people graduating from tech institutes and now are involved in reinforcing China's golden shield are doing the country a disservice, and that their deeds will ever be remembered in the future. He puts this censorship and monitoring, with certain credibility, on the same level as the misdeeds during the Cultural revolution.
Technically, what he says could be interpreted as illegal ("going against the interests of the People's Republic of China"), but he is not what is normally considered a dissident; he is just having strong opinions, and as a journalist, he is believed to have more influence than regular bloggers. Thus, the Internet police (wangjing) is trying to block him. They know that he will accessible to all of those who know how to bypass the obstacles, but he will not be reached by the great masses.
It is unlikely he will experience other forms of repression, because Beijing needs to strike a balance between how many they make examples of and how much damage they actually do; this dude is just in the average league.
Yeah, them dudes never realized that Apple's one-button mousey was superior, and now they are repeating the mistake yet again. Of course, the Lunix community will begin a new era of six button jokes as of this year.
You Amuricans still have an unfiltered Internet (except that you might not write "anal" or "Lolita" on MSN Spaces, just like the Chinese may not write "democracy" or "freedom on MSN Spaces), but it really was the Bush administration who initiated the SURVEILLANCE trend, after the unfortunate little intermezzo in New York in 2001.
Although I agree with many of their positions, they are a bit extreme in their desire to abolish ALL immaterial rights. Such rights, given that they are implemented the right way for a limited period, are useful to encourage invention and artistic production. The main problem of today is the excessive implementations of IM, not IM in itself.
One of their goals is to fire the current minister of justice, Thomas Bodström, and I whole-heartedly support this. He has implemented the "Bodström filters" in Sweden, and the country has thus joined the club of filter regimes (Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Bahrain etc.). He is also the man behind increased surveillance of phones, e-mail and other means of communication in Sweden, and he has been labeled as dangerous to society by many leading newspaper columnists.
The sad reality is that this "Bodström Shield" probably will be implemented in most of Europe rather than be dismantled. This is the unfortunate political trend of today, initiated by the Bush administration.
The Pirate Party says it will allow Mr. Bodström selling hotdogs outside the parliament building, at least in the winter.
The party stands no chance of reaching the required 4% to reach parliamentary seats, although Sweden has many such fringe parties. They may, however, affect the attitude of other parties, which may take a ride on the popular train of file sharing.
TFA says: "Thousands of people, all over the world, from all cultures, working together in harmony to freely share clear, factual, unbiased information"
At least one culture, namely the Chinese, is permanently excluded from this harmonious collaboration since November 2005. This is because China deems Wikipedia "detrimental to society" (or at least not so unbiased in a few articles).
This is not Wikipedia's fault, but whenever I try to access Wikipedia from Anonymouse, it says Wikipedia has blocked access from that very anonymizing gateway... hilarious. I really don't have time applying proxies or go throguh SSH accounts in the West.
I think Wikipedia needs to start distribute its stuff in a decentralized fashion, letting others deliver the stuff through their pipes. And it also should have encryption enabled to circumvent the censorship in the filter regimes.
Why do you think there is an error message? There isn't. Either nothing happens (blocked), or else the intrusion detection system cuts off the page halfway through (filtered).
China regularly launches campaigns like this, and although the "saohuang" (clean up the porn) movement is effective in barring domestic porn sites, there is absolutely nothing China can do about the influx of porn from abroad, especially from Japan and the West.
Furthermore, China is becoming more and more lax about porn, which any visitor to the country will realize within a day or so. Only the hardliners are still fighting it, but they might as well start a program to eradicate all the flies in the world. It is all in vain.
Now, why is China fighting porn? Because it is an old taboo since the times after the Tang dynasty. Before, China was sexually liberal, and now the times are turning again. This has to do with the opening up to the outer world in general, and with Internet in particular.
You should also note that there is no law against downloading or consuming porn in China. It is legal, it is practiced, and it is virtually unfiltered on the net (bar a few percent of the sites). What is illegal is copying and distributing porn, especially for commercial purposes. Spreading less than 20 "huangdai" (yellow tapes, porn videos) is not punishable. 20--99 tapes (or images) is punishable, and above 500 tapes (or images) is considered severe, with a potential lifetime imprisonment. This also goes for digital content.
The effect is that China is consuming as much porn as the rest of the world, but they won't be able to cash in on it. This is bound to change in the future, if you ask me.
I am sorry, but I really don't understand why sexually explicit stuff should have such a rating. On the other hand, I am just a dumb European, and where I am from there are no such ratings (15 for extremely violent movies or pure pornography, although it is more of a recommendation). Late teens (almost adults) can drive a car but can't see boobies!?
Could you point me to a (repeatable, verifiable) scientific study showing that kids are harmed in any way by seeing sexual content on the screen?
What, the land of the free? Oh yeah, you hail aggressive stuff such as alcohol and guns, and ban the laid back stuff like sex and marijuana.
I've just studied the Chinese law in this matter, and it seems most countries in the world define porn as imagery or literature that evokes sexual lust -- for the average person.
Most works of law also exclude physiological and educational imagery, as well as works of art. Art can be hard to define in some cases, but the rule of thumb is that if it affects your nether bodily parts more than your heartily innards, it is probably porn, not art.
And since I have just studied censorship in China, I can tell you with some accuracy that such censorship is impossible by technical means. 12% of all the web sites are porn sites, and there are some 400 million web pages displaying porn. Every month 1.5 billion pornographic objects are transferred through the pipes via P2P apps.
There are only two ways to stop the flow of boobs on the net: cut the line altogether, or globally enforce the no porn hardline.
Porn is an integrated part of the internet, and those who don't want it can stay away from the net.
And just because you can't SEND non-Latin stuff through HTTP, da focking browser can still show those characters, just like Safari does. The URIs of my homepage look like shit in Firefox. And this is not a security issue either, as those non-ASCII characters which are similar to ASCII letters can be emphasized in some fashion.
This is a major drawback with Firefox, at least for all of us who are not hard-bent on using English all the time.
And Firefox in China? Forget it. Nowadays you can use Chinese characters in URIs (Punycode), but the whole concept is annihilated by Firefox. Thus Mozilla want sno share of the Chinese market, which currently is 100.0% M$IE (except for us foreigners with PowerBooks).
Firefox also have other problems regarding "non-English" characters in the layout machine. It is a long-standing bug.
For us people in Scandinavia, this climatic change will actually be pretty good, with better climate all around the year.
Too bad, tho, for the already poor people all over the world, in Africa and Asia, and it is also too bad for the Americans.
But this is what they wanted, right? Bush didn't sign the Kyoto protocol, and he could care less about the climate, since the "climate" is so far away from Texas; man, does he detest these "international" things where he isn't the given monarch or what. Besides, Katrina and such disasters are acts of God, not an act of man; there is much intelligence in a design like a hurricane.
And China has said it won't comply to any environmental agreements, since the West already has a hundred years of polluting the world; China wants to catch up before they do anything about it, so that they also can enjoy what the people in the West enjoys. And they are so used to "natural disasters" such as floodings, droughts, "great leaps forward" and so on, and they have so many people to sacrifice for the cause.
So, if I allow myself to be just as selfish as the Americans and the Chinese for a moment, I will say this bodes well for the Swedish economy; we can thrive on your miseries, make me filfthy rich cleaning up your mess and provide services to combat a rising sea level, ever worse hurricanes, serious droughts and other phenomena.
Well, fuck, I actually do know something about Western culture, since I am a Westerner. And as a such, I can tell you that in most Western countries, you are only allowed freedom because the ruling party is *letting* you. I don't have the freedom to drive on the freeway in 190 mph, because the ruling party forbids it. In my native home country, I am not allowed to do nuclear research, because the ruling party forbids it. In neighboring Germany, I cannot express Nazi views, because the ruling party forbids it (and also does the same filtering as China with regards to US Nazi parties). In neigboring Denmark, I can't marry a pretty Chinese or Moroccan or even US girl until they are 25 or so...
And in the holy USA, the land of the free, you can't take a goddamn joint without risking being jailed, stripped of all your property, and also stripped of all your democratic rights. This is because the ruling party in the US decided you shouldn't be allowed to vote if you have a deviant opinion from theirs. And since the other party agrees, it doesn't matter that you formally have a democracy (a two party system).
The BBC, like most other foreign news sources, get their news from Chinese sources. There is a vivid debate in most areas in China, and people are interested.
The censorship in China really boils down to a few key points, like independence movements and other threats (or imagined threats) to the regime. Although I certainly don't agree with this or think it is a good situation, it isn't as bad in China as people in the West are LED to believe by BBC and others.
But to understand the censorship in China, one needs to understand the country, its history, its cultural heritage, its social context and so on. I suggest that you start with Confucius. Fuck, the BBC should be doing this background job for you, but they don't care.
Well, that's not the way the GFW works, since it 1) doesn't censor calls from the OUTSIDE world, and 2) doesn't censor WITHIN the Chinese network. The GFW only censors calls from China to the outer world. That is the reason Google breaks so easily, while Baidu always works for the same topics. Now, all this makes sense, since the only reason for the GFW to exist is to make an information speed bump for the large majority of users; tech savvy people don't even notice it when set up properly.
The process, the Intrusion Detection System, will cut off the connection for a while if several criteria are met. Entering "Fang Zhouzi" in a search engine isn't enough criteria, since there are many people with that name, not just a person associated with 6/4.
I tried the links to Renmin Ribao, and as expected, there was no cut off. If you experience a cut off, it is your ISP that has an additional monitoring system. I currently surf in standard mode.
Chinese sites are censored, because most Chinese don't care for foreign language stuff. The BBC is actually blocked, and has been for a long time. The reason is just because they are so obnoious about China and internet censorship, not because of their content. The BBC is like an irritating fly to the Chinese gubmint.
But I agree with you that internet censorship is a small thing compared to journalism and the regular censorship of litterature. The entire Internet in IS available to any Chinese, and I believe the gubmint will one day scrap the system when they discover that enough people already know the stuff that they aren't supposed to know, and when they realize it is harming more than it is preventing (whatever it is supposed to prevent). For instance, access to Wikipedia has now been cut, because you can find all the "bad" stuff there (but also all the "good").
Slashdot is a blog. It is on the Internet. I am posting this from China.
Here is my blog entry:
1. Chinese people ought to have the same or more freedom as people in the West.
2. Taiwan IS an independent state, which all Chinese already know.
3. China should abolish the fanghuo changcheng (GFW) immediately, and let people use the Internet as freely as in the West (and it can be discussed how freely it can really be used in the West). I don't how many times I have argued this on Chinese state-owned BBS:s.
4. Mao Zedong was an asshole, a pervert and a mass murderer. He was renowned for his serious cases of VD after trying out guniangs in the villages on every one of hid goddamn trip. I have said this too on state-owned BBS:s.
I am now waiting for the gong'an to storm my apartment, transport me to a football field and give me the neck shot in front of a cheering audience...
Oh, before I die, let me just add that I, too, am fed up with the BBC, because they DON'T report the social and cultural context to the filtering in China, but see it all from a modern Western perspective (just back fifty years, and it would be different); they DON'T realize there is a process, and they CAN'T see that much has already gone in the right direction. Freedom IS gradually increasing in China, but you should NEVER expect China to be EXACTLY like the West.
I once had a similar idea to spread Quicktime as the religious multimedia doctrine of the world, delivering the best porn for free. To my surprise, Apple declined supporting the project.
Since what I see here in China, who has the second largest internet user population in the world after the USA, the vast majority uses QQ, which is basically ICQ adapted to a full-fledged Chinese client (all Western IMs have questionable language support and transparency).
Money is best made in peace time, using trade and export of high quality American iPods, computers and other consumer gadgets. Need I remind you of the social unrest in the US during the Vietnam war, and the following economic stagnation? Of coursem you could always SELL your weapons to make money, letting others fight it off.
Besides, China is the third largest military force in the world; you wouldn't want to go to war with China, because there is nothing to win. Many have conquered China, but none have been able to sustain a permanent rule over the country. There is nothing to win in such a situation.
China has recently threatened Taiwan with war on several occasions, and in actuality, there is a war between the Mainland and the Guomindang island; there never was a peace treaty, since both sides see themselves as the legitimate rulers of all of China.
China has invaded Tibet, although this is more justified from a historical perspective.
China has throughout history maintained tight control over Yuenan (Vietnam), Korea and other neighbors, sometimes escalating to war when tributes weren't paid.
Ever wondered why China has become such a vast nation?
Wnat you mean is that we do everything we do for the sake of our self-interest. Correct. But it's not all about the money. Above all, we want China to be the stabilizing factor of Asia, in order to avoid war.
Why else would the US care about North Korea having nukes?
Well, the fact that I take part in these "anti-revolutionary" Slashdot discussions about China FROM China is proof that the control over the Internet in China is nothing more than an attempt and a wisg from the government to control it.
Most Chinese DO know how to get out of this control (which is rather light), and most Chinese DO know how to get news that is not supposed to be. There IS spread of such inflamatory pamphlets also in China; I have seen it myself.
The coastal and major cities are indeed ready for democracy. But the vast part of China is comprised of 800 millions peasants, whose income is a far cry from those in the city. This is why China is still referred to as a third world country, despite the fact that Shanghai, Beijing, Honggong etc. are all developed.
Introducing democracy at this stage would lead to destabilazation, and quite possibly civil war.
However, there IS democracy in China on the local level; this was introduced with the help of Jimmy Carter. People in towns and villages DO elect their mayors, and these are then in turn represented in county, province and state governments.
Slashdot Mirror
He is commenting on Chinese politics in a way that is too unorthodox. He is taking a stance against the Chinese firewall in his latest comment, declaring that those young people graduating from tech institutes and now are involved in reinforcing China's golden shield are doing the country a disservice, and that their deeds will ever be remembered in the future. He puts this censorship and monitoring, with certain credibility, on the same level as the misdeeds during the Cultural revolution.
Technically, what he says could be interpreted as illegal ("going against the interests of the People's Republic of China"), but he is not what is normally considered a dissident; he is just having strong opinions, and as a journalist, he is believed to have more influence than regular bloggers. Thus, the Internet police (wangjing) is trying to block him. They know that he will accessible to all of those who know how to bypass the obstacles, but he will not be reached by the great masses.
It is unlikely he will experience other forms of repression, because Beijing needs to strike a balance between how many they make examples of and how much damage they actually do; this dude is just in the average league.
But only you can operate it and tweak it when the sound is out of sync, the video is B/W, or your customized bash script enters an infinite loop.
Yeah, them dudes never realized that Apple's one-button mousey was superior, and now they are repeating the mistake yet again. Of course, the Lunix community will begin a new era of six button jokes as of this year.
WMA downloads not compatible with iPod?
Believe me, when the snake bites the apple, the apple makes no mistakes...
You Amuricans still have an unfiltered Internet (except that you might not write "anal" or "Lolita" on MSN Spaces, just like the Chinese may not write "democracy" or "freedom on MSN Spaces), but it really was the Bush administration who initiated the SURVEILLANCE trend, after the unfortunate little intermezzo in New York in 2001.
Don't cut and paste my arguments like that.
Although I agree with many of their positions, they are a bit extreme in their desire to abolish ALL immaterial rights. Such rights, given that they are implemented the right way for a limited period, are useful to encourage invention and artistic production. The main problem of today is the excessive implementations of IM, not IM in itself.
One of their goals is to fire the current minister of justice, Thomas Bodström, and I whole-heartedly support this. He has implemented the "Bodström filters" in Sweden, and the country has thus joined the club of filter regimes (Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Bahrain etc.). He is also the man behind increased surveillance of phones, e-mail and other means of communication in Sweden, and he has been labeled as dangerous to society by many leading newspaper columnists.
The sad reality is that this "Bodström Shield" probably will be implemented in most of Europe rather than be dismantled. This is the unfortunate political trend of today, initiated by the Bush administration.
The Pirate Party says it will allow Mr. Bodström selling hotdogs outside the parliament building, at least in the winter.
The party stands no chance of reaching the required 4% to reach parliamentary seats, although Sweden has many such fringe parties. They may, however, affect the attitude of other parties, which may take a ride on the popular train of file sharing.
TFA says: "Thousands of people, all over the world, from all cultures, working together in harmony to freely share clear, factual, unbiased information"
At least one culture, namely the Chinese, is permanently excluded from this harmonious collaboration since November 2005. This is because China deems Wikipedia "detrimental to society" (or at least not so unbiased in a few articles).
This is not Wikipedia's fault, but whenever I try to access Wikipedia from Anonymouse, it says Wikipedia has blocked access from that very anonymizing gateway... hilarious. I really don't have time applying proxies or go throguh SSH accounts in the West.
I think Wikipedia needs to start distribute its stuff in a decentralized fashion, letting others deliver the stuff through their pipes. And it also should have encryption enabled to circumvent the censorship in the filter regimes.
Why do you think there is an error message? There isn't. Either nothing happens (blocked), or else the intrusion detection system cuts off the page halfway through (filtered).
China regularly launches campaigns like this, and although the "saohuang" (clean up the porn) movement is effective in barring domestic porn sites, there is absolutely nothing China can do about the influx of porn from abroad, especially from Japan and the West.
Furthermore, China is becoming more and more lax about porn, which any visitor to the country will realize within a day or so. Only the hardliners are still fighting it, but they might as well start a program to eradicate all the flies in the world. It is all in vain.
Now, why is China fighting porn? Because it is an old taboo since the times after the Tang dynasty. Before, China was sexually liberal, and now the times are turning again. This has to do with the opening up to the outer world in general, and with Internet in particular.
You should also note that there is no law against downloading or consuming porn in China. It is legal, it is practiced, and it is virtually unfiltered on the net (bar a few percent of the sites). What is illegal is copying and distributing porn, especially for commercial purposes. Spreading less than 20 "huangdai" (yellow tapes, porn videos) is not punishable. 20--99 tapes (or images) is punishable, and above 500 tapes (or images) is considered severe, with a potential lifetime imprisonment. This also goes for digital content.
The effect is that China is consuming as much porn as the rest of the world, but they won't be able to cash in on it. This is bound to change in the future, if you ask me.
Well, how deep does the territorial sovereignty of Uruguay (or any nation) go? I mean, the core and the mantle are all floating around down there.
I am sorry, but I really don't understand why sexually explicit stuff should have such a rating. On the other hand, I am just a dumb European, and where I am from there are no such ratings (15 for extremely violent movies or pure pornography, although it is more of a recommendation). Late teens (almost adults) can drive a car but can't see boobies!?
Could you point me to a (repeatable, verifiable) scientific study showing that kids are harmed in any way by seeing sexual content on the screen?
What, the land of the free? Oh yeah, you hail aggressive stuff such as alcohol and guns, and ban the laid back stuff like sex and marijuana.
I've just studied the Chinese law in this matter, and it seems most countries in the world define porn as imagery or literature that evokes sexual lust -- for the average person.
Most works of law also exclude physiological and educational imagery, as well as works of art. Art can be hard to define in some cases, but the rule of thumb is that if it affects your nether bodily parts more than your heartily innards, it is probably porn, not art.
And since I have just studied censorship in China, I can tell you with some accuracy that such censorship is impossible by technical means. 12% of all the web sites are porn sites, and there are some 400 million web pages displaying porn. Every month 1.5 billion pornographic objects are transferred through the pipes via P2P apps.
There are only two ways to stop the flow of boobs on the net: cut the line altogether, or globally enforce the no porn hardline.
Porn is an integrated part of the internet, and those who don't want it can stay away from the net.
English characters? I thought they were Latin...
And just because you can't SEND non-Latin stuff through HTTP, da focking browser can still show those characters, just like Safari does. The URIs of my homepage look like shit in Firefox. And this is not a security issue either, as those non-ASCII characters which are similar to ASCII letters can be emphasized in some fashion.
This is a major drawback with Firefox, at least for all of us who are not hard-bent on using English all the time.
And Firefox in China? Forget it. Nowadays you can use Chinese characters in URIs (Punycode), but the whole concept is annihilated by Firefox. Thus Mozilla want sno share of the Chinese market, which currently is 100.0% M$IE (except for us foreigners with PowerBooks).
Firefox also have other problems regarding "non-English" characters in the layout machine. It is a long-standing bug.
For us people in Scandinavia, this climatic change will actually be pretty good, with better climate all around the year.
Too bad, tho, for the already poor people all over the world, in Africa and Asia, and it is also too bad for the Americans.
But this is what they wanted, right? Bush didn't sign the Kyoto protocol, and he could care less about the climate, since the "climate" is so far away from Texas; man, does he detest these "international" things where he isn't the given monarch or what. Besides, Katrina and such disasters are acts of God, not an act of man; there is much intelligence in a design like a hurricane.
And China has said it won't comply to any environmental agreements, since the West already has a hundred years of polluting the world; China wants to catch up before they do anything about it, so that they also can enjoy what the people in the West enjoys. And they are so used to "natural disasters" such as floodings, droughts, "great leaps forward" and so on, and they have so many people to sacrifice for the cause.
So, if I allow myself to be just as selfish as the Americans and the Chinese for a moment, I will say this bodes well for the Swedish economy; we can thrive on your miseries, make me filfthy rich cleaning up your mess and provide services to combat a rising sea level, ever worse hurricanes, serious droughts and other phenomena.
You had it coming, suckers!
Well, fuck, I actually do know something about Western culture, since I am a Westerner. And as a such, I can tell you that in most Western countries, you are only allowed freedom because the ruling party is *letting* you. I don't have the freedom to drive on the freeway in 190 mph, because the ruling party forbids it. In my native home country, I am not allowed to do nuclear research, because the ruling party forbids it. In neighboring Germany, I cannot express Nazi views, because the ruling party forbids it (and also does the same filtering as China with regards to US Nazi parties). In neigboring Denmark, I can't marry a pretty Chinese or Moroccan or even US girl until they are 25 or so...
And in the holy USA, the land of the free, you can't take a goddamn joint without risking being jailed, stripped of all your property, and also stripped of all your democratic rights. This is because the ruling party in the US decided you shouldn't be allowed to vote if you have a deviant opinion from theirs. And since the other party agrees, it doesn't matter that you formally have a democracy (a two party system).
The BBC, like most other foreign news sources, get their news from Chinese sources. There is a vivid debate in most areas in China, and people are interested.
The censorship in China really boils down to a few key points, like independence movements and other threats (or imagined threats) to the regime. Although I certainly don't agree with this or think it is a good situation, it isn't as bad in China as people in the West are LED to believe by BBC and others.
But to understand the censorship in China, one needs to understand the country, its history, its cultural heritage, its social context and so on. I suggest that you start with Confucius. Fuck, the BBC should be doing this background job for you, but they don't care.
Well, that's not the way the GFW works, since it 1) doesn't censor calls from the OUTSIDE world, and 2) doesn't censor WITHIN the Chinese network. The GFW only censors calls from China to the outer world. That is the reason Google breaks so easily, while Baidu always works for the same topics. Now, all this makes sense, since the only reason for the GFW to exist is to make an information speed bump for the large majority of users; tech savvy people don't even notice it when set up properly.
The process, the Intrusion Detection System, will cut off the connection for a while if several criteria are met. Entering "Fang Zhouzi" in a search engine isn't enough criteria, since there are many people with that name, not just a person associated with 6/4.
I tried the links to Renmin Ribao, and as expected, there was no cut off. If you experience a cut off, it is your ISP that has an additional monitoring system. I currently surf in standard mode.
Chinese sites are censored, because most Chinese don't care for foreign language stuff. The BBC is actually blocked, and has been for a long time. The reason is just because they are so obnoious about China and internet censorship, not because of their content. The BBC is like an irritating fly to the Chinese gubmint.
But I agree with you that internet censorship is a small thing compared to journalism and the regular censorship of litterature. The entire Internet in IS available to any Chinese, and I believe the gubmint will one day scrap the system when they discover that enough people already know the stuff that they aren't supposed to know, and when they realize it is harming more than it is preventing (whatever it is supposed to prevent). For instance, access to Wikipedia has now been cut, because you can find all the "bad" stuff there (but also all the "good").
OK. I take the bait.
Slashdot is a blog. It is on the Internet. I am posting this from China.
Here is my blog entry:
1. Chinese people ought to have the same or more freedom as people in the West.
2. Taiwan IS an independent state, which all Chinese already know.
3. China should abolish the fanghuo changcheng (GFW) immediately, and let people use the Internet as freely as in the West (and it can be discussed how freely it can really be used in the West). I don't how many times I have argued this on Chinese state-owned BBS:s.
4. Mao Zedong was an asshole, a pervert and a mass murderer. He was renowned for his serious cases of VD after trying out guniangs in the villages on every one of hid goddamn trip. I have said this too on state-owned BBS:s.
I am now waiting for the gong'an to storm my apartment, transport me to a football field and give me the neck shot in front of a cheering audience...
Oh, before I die, let me just add that I, too, am fed up with the BBC, because they DON'T report the social and cultural context to the filtering in China, but see it all from a modern Western perspective (just back fifty years, and it would be different); they DON'T realize there is a process, and they CAN'T see that much has already gone in the right direction. Freedom IS gradually increasing in China, but you should NEVER expect China to be EXACTLY like the West.
OK, off to the football field...
24/7 remote surveillance of college students!?
The land of the free!?
Sounds to me like the US is turning into another North Korea.
And you slimy amoeba have the nerve complaining about China!
Clean up your own mess before you ever open your mouth again.
I once had a similar idea to spread Quicktime as the religious multimedia doctrine of the world, delivering the best porn for free. To my surprise, Apple declined supporting the project.
Is that the _domestic_ market?
Since what I see here in China, who has the second largest internet user population in the world after the USA, the vast majority uses QQ, which is basically ICQ adapted to a full-fledged Chinese client (all Western IMs have questionable language support and transparency).
I read this article in Shanghai, China, without a proxy. This is also true for the WSJ article.
221.239.214.3
Money is best made in peace time, using trade and export of high quality American iPods, computers and other consumer gadgets. Need I remind you of the social unrest in the US during the Vietnam war, and the following economic stagnation? Of coursem you could always SELL your weapons to make money, letting others fight it off.
Besides, China is the third largest military force in the world; you wouldn't want to go to war with China, because there is nothing to win. Many have conquered China, but none have been able to sustain a permanent rule over the country. There is nothing to win in such a situation.
China has recently threatened Taiwan with war on several occasions, and in actuality, there is a war between the Mainland and the Guomindang island; there never was a peace treaty, since both sides see themselves as the legitimate rulers of all of China.
China has invaded Tibet, although this is more justified from a historical perspective.
China has throughout history maintained tight control over Yuenan (Vietnam), Korea and other neighbors, sometimes escalating to war when tributes weren't paid.
Ever wondered why China has become such a vast nation?
Wnat you mean is that we do everything we do for the sake of our self-interest. Correct. But it's not all about the money. Above all, we want China to be the stabilizing factor of Asia, in order to avoid war.
Why else would the US care about North Korea having nukes?
Well, the fact that I take part in these "anti-revolutionary" Slashdot discussions about China FROM China is proof that the control over the Internet in China is nothing more than an attempt and a wisg from the government to control it.
Most Chinese DO know how to get out of this control (which is rather light), and most Chinese DO know how to get news that is not supposed to be. There IS spread of such inflamatory pamphlets also in China; I have seen it myself.
The coastal and major cities are indeed ready for democracy. But the vast part of China is comprised of 800 millions peasants, whose income is a far cry from those in the city. This is why China is still referred to as a third world country, despite the fact that Shanghai, Beijing, Honggong etc. are all developed.
Introducing democracy at this stage would lead to destabilazation, and quite possibly civil war.
However, there IS democracy in China on the local level; this was introduced with the help of Jimmy Carter. People in towns and villages DO elect their mayors, and these are then in turn represented in county, province and state governments.