China Shuts Down 17,000 Internet Bars 599
Astin writes: "According to this article, Chinese authorities have shut down more than 17,000 Internet bars for failing to block Web sites considered subversive or pornographic. Out of the 94,000 Internet bars in China, 17,488 have been shut down and another 28,000 were ordered to install monitoring software soon. Of the 27 million Internet users in China, about 4.5 million rely on these bars. Foreign news organizations fall under the category of 'subversive'."
Highlights of the above report (Score:3, Informative)
- crackdowns on religion
- harsh treatment of political dissent
- falun gong practitioners put in detention, sentenced to "reeducation-through-labor" camp, incarcerated in mental institutions or killed
- extrajudicial killings
- torture
- forced confessions
- arbitrary arrest and detention
- mistreatment of prisoners
- lengthy incommunicatdo detention
- denial of due process
- a judicial system that denies defendants basic legal safeguards
- restrictions on freedom of speech and the press
- restrictions on freedom assembyly and freedom of association
- restrictions on freedom of movement
- violence against women, including forced abortion and sterlization
- trafficking in women and children
- massive abuses in Tibey and Xinjiang
- a lack of worker rights
- forced labor in prison facilities
- child labor
The list goes on, and details are provided. Check out what goes on in the country that makes your shoes for such a good price.Buy Nothing Day (Score:1, Informative)
Speak out against Chinese-style internet censorship by urging the 5 Media Companies to end their practice of censoring ads for Buy Nothing Day [adbusters.org] which adbusters.org [adbusters.org] has tried to purchase for the last several years. Each year, the Five turn down the paid ads from adbusters, citing that they do not run ads that advocate a cause. This is rubbish, considering that nearly all advertisement advocates the cause of mindless consumerism.
Buy Nothing Day is celebrated on the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the holiday season. The purpose of the campaign is to bring awareness to the problems of rampant consumerism that are magnified around the holidays. Why is it that we are encouraged to live beyond our means when consumer debt is at an all-time high, most people work more than 40 hours a week, and joblessness and homelessness are on the rise?
Ask yourself: Is capitalist censorship any better than communist censorship?
Re:In the US, This Would Be "Illegal" As Well (Score:3, Informative)
True for porn (not unreasonable in a public place), but in China the "subversive content" would include foreign newsfeeds as stated in the article.
I would call this an abrogation of a fundamental freedom, but that's just me.
Here's what the Chinese Government's Rules Are (Score:5, Informative)
Taken from http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/ne treg.htm [usembassy-china.org.cn] :
Section Four -- No unit or individual may use the Internet to harm national security, disclose state secrets, harm the interests of the State, of society or of a group, the legal rights of citizens, or to take part in criminal activities.
Section Five -- No unit or individual may use the Internet to create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit the following kinds of information:
(1) Inciting to resist or breaking the Constitution or laws or the implementation of administrative regulations;
(2) Inciting to overthrow the government or the socialist system;
(3) Inciting division of the country, harming national unification;
(4) Inciting hatred or discrimination among nationalities or harming the unity of the nationalities;
(5) Making falsehoods or distorting the truth, spreading rumors, destroying the order of society;
(6) Promoting feudal superstitions, sexually suggestive material, gambling, violence, murder,
(7) Terrorism or inciting others to criminal activity; openly insulting other people or distorting the truth to slander people;
(8) Injuring the reputation of state organs;
(9) Other activities against the Constitution, laws or administrative regulations.
Section Six No unit or individual may engage in the following activities which harm the security of computer information networks:
(1) No-one may use computer networks or network resources without getting proper prior approval
(2) No-one may without prior permission may change network functions or to add or delete information
(3) No-one may without prior permission add to, delete, or alter
materials stored, processed or being transmitted through the network.
(4) No-one may deliberately create or transmit viruses.
(5) Other activities which harm the network are also prohibited.
Section Seven The freedom and privacy of network users is protected by law. No unit or individual may, in violation of these regulations, use the Internet to violate the freedom and privacy of network users.
A ground-level analysis. (Score:4, Informative)
First, Internet cafés are ubiquitous, and yes most of them are dimly lit holes with 12 computers sharing one ISDN line, or sometimes a 56k modem. Generally there are no bathrooms, the dimly lit room is filled with cigarette smoke and the whole place is grimy as the bathroom of your local pub. I.e. typical China, outside Beijing/ Shanghai/ Guangzhou. There are of course nice internet cafés in the big cities, like the one in shanghai that proudly displayed the chair President Clinton once sat it to surf the web, but those places are the exception.
Now just like any industry, there's licensing involved and in a Chinese Internet Café that means registering with the Chinese Bureau of Post and Telecommunications. Part of the Café license is the understanding that you'll filter all unsuitable content, which mostly consists of pornography (highly illegal in any form), actual dissident sites (yes they do exist, our government happily cracks down on the same sort of thing here) and yes BIG name foreign media. By big name I mean NY times, CNN, BBC, Washington Post etc. Anything that's local, or my mother wouldn't think of as a news source- i.e. Slashdot, Guerrilla News Network or the Economist, are not filtered at all.
Of course being a big place with a lot of people, regulation of this sort of thing isn't ubiquitous, which means that it's not that difficult to find Cafés that don't filter CNN and what not. They're just officially banned. And of course all bets are off when one uses any sort of proxy. Now the unofficial level of restriction raises and lowers depending on current circumstances. For example when we "accidentally" bombed the Chinese embassy a couple of years ago, the restriction was quite high. Chinese people were pissed at foreigners and the restriction level went up. On the flip side, after the Sept. 11th attack, they had an unofficial moratorium on the restriction of foreign news, which got extended all the way through the APEC conference.
When we hear that the Chinese government cracked down on internet Café's allowing subversive content through, what it generally means is the Cafés were letting in pornography. Most Chinese couldn't give a damn about foreign news, and of the few that do, the number that have the ability to read English is quite small. On the other hand the number of people who would be looking at pornography is quite large.
On average I would even venture to say that the aggregate level of information freedom of PR China is equal to or even greater than that of the United States when one takes into the account the development of intellectual property law. The Chinese didn't even have a concept of property when they opened up 20 years ago, so they sure as heck don't have a concept of IP, something that we're still struggling with, today. Hence buying pirated anything- software, music, movies- is many times easier than buying the officially licensed thing.
None of this is to say that the Chinese aren't being oppressed with regards to their online freedoms; it's just that the oppressors aren't nearly as strict as our own news tells us.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)