Chinese cyber chief plays down censorship concerns The head of the China's Cyberspace Administration has again been playing down censorship concerns ahead of a global internet governance meeting in the country. At a press conference about the second annual World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Lu Wei faced questions about the country's extensive filtering and censoring of the …
Why do foreign governments such as the USA, Germany, UK etc complain so loudly about Chinese censorship... while they too are pushing through censorship bills which are just as bad, or in some cases, worse?
You don't hear the US complaining about the UKs censorship filters, or the UK complaining of the US's national and international spying and censorship or Germany complaining about them both etc.
Yet, when China does pretty much the exact same thing, all three of those countries are up in arms throwing "it restricts peoples freedom" messages at China...
Do you not see the irony there?
Wait, what's that you say? Because their communist and we're not? Ah, okay it makes sense now everything they do must be bad even if we're trying to do the same thing...
I don't agree with censorship at all, however when foreign governments are constantly complaining about China's censorship.. it is the pot calling the kettle black.
It is a choice, neoliberalist corporate sellout, Maoi'st military sellout, or Stalinist bureaucratic sellout.
The socialists think Mao and Stalin remove our freedoms in a morally superior manner to neoliberals.
Actually neoliberals are supposedly inspired by laissez faire liberals, which is a weak form of libertarianism and stands against censorship and surveillance.
I think what you don't like about the UK's neoliberals is the paternalistic socialist streak they haven't been able to discard, which justifies surveillance.
The censorship has been done by judges, not politicians, using things like 'super injunctions'. It is hard to blame politicians for what judges do when what they're doing is exceeding legislation.
One billion people. Probably the biggest gap between haves and have nots on the planet. The fastest developing economy around - at least until recently. An industrialised, educated, 'Westernised' (whatever the hell that means... is it shorthand for hypocrisy?) working and industrial class in the cities, with a rural class in the country that still works the fields by hand and remembers being part of the Red army. A land area, with one state, covering one continent. The oldest bureaucracy in the world (and the corruption that goes it with it). A national history that stretches back at least a couple of thousand years, most of them comfortably spent as the absolute, unchallengeable world power...
Imagine waking up in the morning, and it being your job to make sure that that doesn't fall apart into civil war. Can you imagine the ulcers you'd have?
I may not agree with everything the Chinese government is doing. Some of it, I find utterly appalling. But I'm sure as hell glad that I don't have their job.
It is China's government that slanders China's people, not foreigners.
It is the Chinese government that insists Chinese people cannot handle freedom of speech.
Sadly our own governments here in the west are becoming more like China's and Russia's, the gradual move is back towards the Chekism of Mao and Stalin.
Internet censorship in China is far more about controlling what people can say, it restricts freedom of speech. In the west you can not visit some sites that allow you to download torrents for example but that isn't about restriction of speech as it is about protecting the rights of owners or the rights of victims (say if you wish to post a photo of a rape victim on facebook i'm sure it would be removed)
Here in China, when you use a messaging app, it is not unusual for a message to go missing if it contains certain keywords. It's generally actually ok to complain online about the government, the chinese have this to a great art form, and the government like to see it rather than suppress it because it gives a heads up on what they need to do to keep the people happy (suppressing that is not good), and therefore the next days headlines can quell any rising unhappiness with a nerw directive aimed to tackle just that.
Watching TV here (i don't anymore) well you watch the BBC, and a news article comes on about rioting in Hong Kong and the TV screen goes black. The moment the BBC moves to the next report it's back on. It happened once i imagined maybe just bad timing, then the same thing on a different channel about the same thing, in the same day, well for sure, it wasn't a fluke.
The internet here is appalling. Google, Facebook, Twitter; all blocked. So, i already know without even looking at the reg's source code that there are links to these sites because the page will not load for minutes on end (but break the connection and it all renders on the screen - read on for why). Most sites have code to only display when the scripts have all loaded. So here, just about every website from the west will not display properly because the browser waits and hangs to download those little icons or scripts from the banned sites. It's not fun, and i assure you you only know how much internet freedom you have enjoyed when you have lived here.
My actual feeling is that most of it is about the economy, it's all rather protectionist, since every service we have come to love or loathe has it's chinese counterpart (albeit with censorship built in), unhindered by international competition and free to go out spending all that cash to buy up internet companies in the west. That should be blocked from the western side since it is clearly using censorship laws to hide the underlying fact that quite simply they are unfairly protecting their IT industry.
Foreign companies attempting to do business in China face a nightmare, being blocked, corruption surrounding every deal, the Chinese government harassing them and imposing regulations on everything (and i mean everything). Harassment in the forms of raiding the offices and locking people up maybe because you didn't give the local mayor or police chief a backhander. The West should really impose very touch economic sanctions on China now that their economy is in a position that if undermined would have so many people up in arms that the government would have to capitulate. There's more money than political will now, and it's clear to me that economics alone would lift the veil.
The current Chinese president seems rather intent on making China a less corrupt place and has some mandate to make this place a land ruled by law. A place ruled by law? Anyone can run a red light in front of a policeman, (so everyone does - everyone = not an exageration), there are no automatic machines capturing these people and issuing automated tickets, they park anywhere (and i mean in the fast lane of the highway!) to save airport parking charges, and cars turn across traffic to cut the corner when the lights go green to cross the oncoming traffic such that oncoming traffic has no right of way (every junction, anytime of the day, that's just how it is), driving up one way streets, intimidating all other road users with constantly pipping the horns (i mean constant like imagine 1000 cars holding down their horns for 1 minute) to intimidate the one road user who wants to follow the real law, It's absolutely f'cked up! Well good luck to him, but i'd start with fixing the basics, like applying your concept of ordering things to the roads before you think you give order to the internet,. If the chinese roads are the goal, then the chinese internet is going to crumble all by itself.
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