China Hits Back At Google 432
sopssa writes "After Google yesterday started redirecting google.cn users to their uncensored Hong Kong-based google.com.hk servers, the Chinese government has now hit back at Google by restricting access to Google's Hong Kong servers. 'On Tuesday mainland China users could not see uncensored Hong Kong-based content after the government either disabled certain searches or blocked links to results.' China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the country, has also been approached by the Chinese government to cancel a contract with Google about having google.cn on their mobile home page for search. China Unicom, the second largest carrier in China, has also either postponed or killed the launch of Android-based mobile phones in the country."
Re:Is this really that surprising? (Score:3, Informative)
My favorite quote from the article, from Premier Wen Jiabao:
"The Chinese government will create opportunities for you, and ask you not to lose the opportunities," Wen said.
A mob boss couldn't have said it better.
Re:OMG (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Informative)
People would and have risked their lives in the name of religion. People have and would risk their lives in support of those who they believe died for a worthy cause.
If it stayed like this, I doubt it would inspire revolutions. But with all of the talk about it, it is going to make people wonder -what- they are censoring. When they figure out what, they won't understand why. When they finally understand why they will see that the Chinese government is corrupt.
Think about it this way, if you don't know about curse words, there is no need to look them up. But how many of us once our parents told us that one word was a "bad word" tried to look it up in the dictionary? None of us would look it up otherwise, but once we know that it is "forbidden" knowledge we will look it up. The Chinese government and Google are effectively telling us that there -are- "curse words" tempting some of the citizens to look it up.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:2, Informative)
China censors: Tibetan and Taiwanese websites, any police brutality, Tiananmen Square protests, freedom of speech, pornography, international news sources, religious movements, personal blogging websites... and has imprisoned many people over violations.
Comparing US censorship to Chinese censorship is ridiculous.
Re:Ping Pong (Score:5, Informative)
is censoring their search engine according to US laws different from censoring according to Chinese laws?
It depends: what does China not censor that the US does?
I'd say that the key difference is that in the US, criticism of the government, exposure of official misdeeds, and calls for regime change are not suppressed, which is why I still see members of the Revolutionary Communist Party passing out pamphlets calling for violent revolution, and why Rick Perry can talk about Texas seceding from the US. The government may outlaw child porn and make copyright law increasingly onerous, but it doesn't try to use censorship to protect its own position. In China, on the other hand. . . well, I'll just quote a section of their criminal code:
Whoever incites others by spreading rumors or slanders or any other means to subvert the State power or overthrow the socialist system shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than five years, criminal detention, public surveillance or deprivation of political rights; and the ringleaders and the others who commit major crimes shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than five years.
I'm sure you can find some equally brain-dead sections of US legal code, but the only thing even close to this in intent would be direct threats against the life of the president.
Re:And let the war begin (Score:5, Informative)
Wong wong wong... I mean wrong.
China had a republic for a few years after the end of the Qing dynasty (1912-1949 to be exact.) Had they stayed with it, this conversation probably would not even be happening right now.
The revolution was violent sure... But far less people died overthrowing the Qing than have been killed by the Communist Government in even the last 20 years (Uygurs, Tibetans, Zhuang, Falun Gong, etc. have all been victimized by the government in all manner of ways including straight up murder.)
China's current political stability is a ruse, nothing more, you go into southern China (Guangxi, Yunnan) and it's basically the wild west right now.
I lived in Yangshuo (Guangxi) for almost three years, and Beijing for one year, and lost count of how many times I saw government personal of one for or the other behaving like heshehui (mafia.) I can elaborate more if people care, the point is, the China's government is hurting its people.
Google isn't exactly doing right by them, but at least they're taking a moral stand.
Re:"We make and manage information." (Score:3, Informative)
By value the U.S. is still the #1 manufacturer in the world ( http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33962 [un.org] ). And our research system, considered as the sum of government, corporate, and university research progams, is still very strong. (I'd say it's the best but don't have a citation...who's better?)