Communism and Internet censorship, communists fear educating their people Options

[herosword]

China's tight rein on online growth
By Mark Ward
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website 


In less than 10 years China has gone from a net newcomer to the country with world's second-largest online population.
The first international internet data from China started travelling across the net in 1994, yet now the country has more than 100m net users

Jail time

Net cafes have to abide by a strict series of guidelines that govern where they can be sited, what services they can offer and how they must monitor what customers do.

Those that do not comply are shut down. In 2004, more than 47,000 net cafes were shut for breaking these laws.

This leads to a lot of self-censorship and a willingness by private firms to co-operate with government monitoring of what people do online, said Julien Pain, head of the internet freedom desk at Reporters Without Borders.


"The intention is to clear the web of subversive material," he said.
The monitoring of comments posted in chat rooms and on bulletin boards is quite aggressive, said Mr Pain.

Now, he said, thanks to automatic censoring systems undesirable postings only last a few minutes.

Less than 18 months ago, such posts would survive for up to 30 minutes, he said.

The consequences of posting subversive information, be it about Tibet, Falun Gong, or even Sars can be severe.

This week Amnesty International released a report that highlighted the number of people imprisoned for championing human rights in China. Many were jailed for posting information online.

Currently 54 people are thought to be in jail because they were judged to distributed "illegal" information via the net.

Many activists used to think that the more people that were online the harder it would be to censor, said Mr Pain.

But, by contrast, censorship of political debate in China seems to be getting more effective.

"We are talking about software that's really efficient," he said, "and when you have 100 million or 200 million people it does not make any difference."

The resources that the Chinese government puts in to monitoring dwarfs the efforts of the activist groups working to combat it.

Said Mr Pain: "Surveillance is much easier in cyberspace than in the real world."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/4327067.stm

Internet censorship and distortion of information. Communist countries seems to fear letting their people think beyond anything "scientific or technological." They want people to be mindless little chumps who eat up all the nationalist propaganda; they want to do away with individuality and replace it with collectivism; the dnager is that individuality is the driving force behind inovation and entrepreneurship. Censorship and harsh control seems to work in Vietnam and in China. A website like asiafinest would probably be banned by this firewall.

Some say that an improved economy and better standard of living might also bring more freedom, but I recently read an article that this wasn't necessarily the case. The article is about the Tianamen Square mothers who complain that their lives are now worst under the "reformist" Hu Jintao than under Jiang Zheming. I always thought that improved economy in Vietnam might mean improved political conditions for the people ; but with China's experience as a paradigm, perhaps I am mistaken.

Some little whiny hoard will probably ask me why I'm posting about China in Vietnamese Chat. The reason is that both countries seems to parellel each other in censorship of informations and trying to dumb down their citizens and destroy individuality. In a a few decade or years, Vietnam might look very much like China does now (on a smaller scale). What can we learn from the Chinese experience and what option is there to bring improved political freedom along with economic growth?

This post has been edited by herosword: Mar 8 2005, 08:18 PM