Communist censorship goes cyber
international |
rights, freedoms and repression |
news report 
Monday June 20, 2005 21:08
by Ed Lee
www.edleeblog.blogspot.com
Yahoo! search: democracy, falun gong, human rights, taiwan... CENSORED!
In an attempt to censor subervise and anti-government sentiment in cyberspace, the Chinese government have employed over 40,000 internet lapdogs to monitor internet usage, primarily in Beijing.
The Beijing Public Security Bureau watches over 800 cyber cafes and 3000+ internet service providers, that's about 94 million users and rising.
By October 2002, about 90,000 cyber cafes have already been shut down. That's almost half of the 200,000 nationwide. The remaining ones are required by law to have surveillance equipment installed.
Websites, blogs, and bulletin boards alike are under the careful eye of the Communist party. Many of these sites need to register with the government or else face fines, closure or even imprisonment.
The police maintains a black list of forbidden websites and updates daily. It is reported that the list contains over 500,000 websites outside China.
Key words such as 'freedom', 'falun gong' or 'democracy' will be censored. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are just some who are cooperating in an effort to please the government.
Huang Qi is notable for being the first person in China to be arrested for posting articles concerning human rights and political issues on his own website. For 'inciting subversion', he was detained for almost 3 years and is due to be released this month. In fact he had only posted names of individuals arrested during the pro-democracy march in 1989.
It'll be interesting to see how this operation goes, to monitor internet usage of the world's most populous country will certainly be a challenge.
No wonder the Chinese government is so eager to learn from our IT sector..
More info:
www.freechineseinternet.org
Comments (5 of 5)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5It's been a long time since there were any communists involved in running china ...
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For a regime that has murdered tens of millions of its citizens over the past 80 years (yes, they were at it in the "red zones" long before 1949), censoring the internet is a minor affair.
As for silly comments about China not being run by communists, or being "state capitalist". Grow up. China is the reality of totalitarian Marxist Leninism.
Check especially the paragraph under social costs!!!
Capitalism with out the inconvience of democrary. Of course some liberals would have you believe that they are inseperable but China and Korea well prove that there's nothing like the strong hand of the state to keep the workers in line....
from the world socialists (of all people!)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jan2003/chin-j31.shtml
conor
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Up to December (2003) , China’s volume of foreign trade increased by 21 percent from 2001 to $620 billion, ranking it as the world’s fifth largest trading nation. China’s exports stood at $266.2 billion for the year to December and its imports at $212.6 billion, a 17.2 percent increase. However, the character of China’s trade is demonstrated by the fact that more than half the imports were associated with export processing—in other words, the materials or ready-made components needed for manufacturing export goods.
A study published on January 15 by a US-based think tank, Hale Advisors LLC & China Online, noted: “Fifteen years ago, intra-Asian trade inflows were simple. Capital goods and components were shipped from Japan to newly industrialising countries for processing and then re-exported to industrialised countries. The opening of China has added a new link to this chain. Capital goods are now shipped to Taiwan and Korea, which in turn send capital-intensive inputs to China and [South East] Asia for labour-intensive processing and assembly before re-export to developed markets.”
Social costs
The chief function of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Beijing has been to offer terms and conditions that have transformed China into the world’s most attractive sweatshop.Many transnationals have shifted their labour-intensive operations to China from South East Asia or Latin America, because of favorable labour costs and other financial concessions—with devastating results in many countries. Mexico, for example, is estimated to have lost 230,000 manufacturing jobs since 2001, most of them to China."
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This wouldn't have been possible without the active help of such great capitalist role models like M$, Google and Yahoo.
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