Chinese Claim Internet Censorship Modeled on West 266
ubermiester wrote to mention a NYT article reporting on a Chinese Press Briefing. At the event Liu Zhengrong, supervisor of Internet affairs for the Chinese State Council, stated that the state control of Internet access is based on Western models. From the article: "Mr. Liu said the major thrust of the Chinese effort to regulate content on the Web was aimed at preventing the spread of pornography or other content harmful to teenagers and children. He said that its concerns in this area differ minimally from those in developed countries. Human rights and media watchdog groups maintain that Chinese Web censorship puts greater emphasis on helping the ruling party maintain political control over its increasingly restive society. Such groups have demonstrated that many hundreds of Web sites cannot be easily accessed inside mainland China mainly because they are operated by governments, religious groups or political organizations that are critical of Chinese government policies or its political leaders."
Harvard study (Score:5, Informative)
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/ [harvard.edu]
Re:Well played, China. Well played. (Score:3, Informative)
Hell, with all the criticism we give the Chinese govt here on
Slashdot.org is not blocked within China, not in part nor in whole. Some sites are, wikipedia.org and news.bbc.co.uk being among them. Seems the Chinese government are not bothered with the criticism they receive on Slashdot, which wouldn't surprise me, because it is extremely poor in signal-to-noise ratio and where it hits target it is extremely obtuse. The benefit of Chinese coders reading the latest PHP book reviews clearly outweighs the downside.
Lying? (Score:1, Informative)
If the U.S. lawmakers want to criticize China, they might learn another expression: Don't throw stones in glass houses.
Re:Well played, China. Well played. (Score:3, Informative)
Some content is illegal in the US, and there have been numerous high profile stings where the fed.gov has busted people for distributing kiddie porn and the like. These stories could be very easily twisted by just leaving out some of the facts, and all of a sudden, "US Government Arrests Suburban Couple for Exercising Freedom of Speech."
Sold out. (Score:3, Informative)
Taiwan was recognized as a soverign nation, until they were effictively sold out by Pres. Jimmy Carter and numerous other world leaders in the name of political expediency in the 1970s. They were expelled from the UN via Resolution 2758, and were 'un-recognized' by the US via the Taiwan Relations Act.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Gener
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act [wikipedia.org]