back to article Beijing offers cons reduced sentences for friendly Tweets

The Chinese government is offering to reduce prison sentences for inmates who post pro-Beijing comments on social networks, according to a new study on the Middle Kingdom’s murky censorship regime. Xiao Qiang, professor at Berkeley’s School of Information and founder of China Digital Times, has acquired and sifted through over …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anomalous Cowshed

    GET IT NOW! GET OUT TOMORROW!

    Get your new annotated Chinese dictionary of favourable expressions, each with its "reduced tariff" score. Get it now, and get out tomorrow! Includes helpful prison scrabble board for practising and your own ipad with Wifi! You can buy these items straight away for 1,000,000,000 Yuan. Or earn them by working hard at the prison factory for a few decades. Then tweet away and earn days off your sentence. You could be getting out TOMORROW!

    1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

      Like at the end of Winston Smith's story

      "He loved Big Brother."

      Ah well. A creepy totalitarian government is creepy. Is this news?

      (How are they on allegedly executing prisoners to harvest organs for transplant, these days? If you come for me, chum, I'm going to infect myself with hepatitis. But in the West these days that probably counts as "terrorism". But, as I see it, just vaccinating myself against organleggers.)

  2. auburnman
    Unhappy

    Horrifying

    Tacit acknowledgement that having a pro government stance will ensure you pay a lesser price for your crimes than equivalent but unloyal peons. I'm sure they will be pushing for this to become a socially accepted/tolerated state of affairs (if it isn't already.)

    1. Suburban Inmate
      Megaphone

      Re: Horrifying

      Socially accepted? That's already the case in the USA and other places. Heck, some people willingly tune in to pro government (read: military/financial/industrial oligarchy) programming and will happily projectile-defecate that drivel all over facetard and suchlike. For no financial reward at all.

      That hasn't stopped the USA from hiring people anyway: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

  3. frank ly

    Obvious next stage - work off your sentence in advance

    If a Chinese citizen made lots of pro-goverment tweets/comments/etc over a long period of time (properly recorded and logged), could they commit a small crime and not go to prison because they've already 'paid for it'?

    1. dssf

      Re: Obvious next stage - work off your sentence in advance... "You are being arrested...

      ... For crimes you WILL commit..."

      For an answer to that, you'll need to either find a way and a time to contact the PRTC (People's Republic's Temporal Commission), or maybe find Silik and find a way to reach out to two people: Daniels and Silik...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I've always been of the opinion that the 'Wu Mao Dang' (informal term for these internet stooges that the CCP hire) are alive and kicking on this site. They generally don't comment as their English is not up to scratch and it would be a bit obvious, but the likes and dislikes of certain comments on here concerning anything Middle Kingdon related is quite interesting...

  5. Yag
    Trollface

    Nothing to see here...

    They are only commuting a part of prison sentences to public-relation community service.Far better than the west's slave-labor kind of community service.

    It's a good step for China's carceral system.

  6. marhor

    ... and this probably works.

    I recognize this type of censorship to be very similar to the censorship Germany had during the Nazi period.

    J. Goebbels used these methods ("which - from a technical standpoint - you could probably call ,brilliant"

    - Sebastian Haffner) to get all Germans to accept the regime and its doing as good or at least as not too objectionable. Only small changes, such as pushing back an outrageous story to the back pages, or painting a slightly different picture of an event, work because they're not easily recognizable as censorship.

    However, I fully believe the Chinese are way more aware of what happens than the Germans were.

  7. Maharg

    What happens if the reason they are locked up is because of anti-government propaganda? And could you say post “China Sucks!” and then “I Love China” repeatedly and nothing happens.?

  8. Captain DaFt

    An intersting point

    How would they feel about mis translations to English? Note: NSFW, language

    http://adult.engrish.com/2012/12/21/glorious-bastard/

  9. ches
    Go

    The idea is catching on already...

    Seems the Vatican are stealing this idea as well... :)

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/16/vatican-indulgences-pope-francis-tweets

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like