Telling the Truth In Today's China 157
eldavojohn writes "Inside the land of the Great Firewall censorship is rampant although rarely transparent. Foreign Policy has a lengthy but eyeopening recounting of what it's like being an editor for the only officially sanctioned English business publication inside the most populated country on Earth. Eveline Chao of the magazine 'China International Business' writes in her piece 'Me and My Censor' about her censor named Snow, the three taboo T's (Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen), a bizarre government aversion to flags and how she was 'offered red envelopes stuffed with cash at press junkets, sometimes discovered footprints on the toilet seats at work, and had to explain to the Chinese assistants more than once that they could not turn in articles copied word for word from existing pieces they found online.' Anecdotes abound in this piece including the story of a photojournalist who 'once ran a picture he'd taken in Taiwan alongside an article, but had failed to notice a small Taiwanese flag in the background. As a result, the entire staff of his newspaper had been immediately fired and the office shut down.' " (Read more, below.)
Eldavojohn continues: "From shoddy CYA maps to language misunderstandings to an elusive 'words group' faxed out by government censors, this article exposes a lot of the internal workings and responsibilities of a 'government censor' inside mainland China but also the ridiculous absurdity of government censorship: 'I was told that we could not title a coal piece "Power Failure" because the word "failure" in bold print so close to the Olympics would make people think of the Olympics being a failure. The title "The Agony and the Ecstasy" for a soccer piece was axed because agony was a negative word and we couldn't have negative words be associated with sports.' The magazine couldn't use images of an empty bowl for its restaurant pieces because it might remind readers of the Great Famine."
"footprints on the seats" = "Chinese hillbillies" (Score:5, Informative)
>> sometimes discovered footprints on the toilet seats at work
Some context here - "normal" toilets in China don't have anything to sit on, so you squat over the hole or bowl, depending on your location. I believe this phrase was meant to indicate that this woman had to work in the same office as some unsophisticated Chinese citizens.
Re:The problem, of course, is religion (Score:2, Informative)
Uuuummmm..... what?
Christianity is in about 4% of the population; 42% of people in China define themselves as atheist or agnostic, and Buddhism and Daosim together make up another 48%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_China
Re:The problem, of course, is religion (Score:2, Informative)
You missed the sarcasm tags
Sweden (Score:3, Informative)
In sweden the 3rd largest political party still get bullied by the mainstream media.
Their main message is to stop immigration until we solve the problems we have with the immigrants who have not been properly integrated with swedish society yet. Also to avoid rising unemployment rates due to importing unemployable (illiterates) people by the truckload.
Complaints by smaller counties who get overrun by immigrants they can not take care of get silenced.
Police does not give a description of a criminal if it is an immigrant.
Any offence against an immigrant get blown out of proportion, recently a somalian woman claimed some kids had poured a glass of milk on her kid. Media covered it for 2 weeks, a rally supporting the somalians in the tiny community which had had 200 somalians to take care of. After all this, turns out noone had poured a glass of milk on her kid and all of a sudden all was silent again.
Meanwhile, gangrape at gunpoint of a swedish girl by 3 immigrants gets silenced for a year.
Until censorship in my own country gets taken care of, I don't think I am in any position to judge china.
As a sidenote, censorship in china is probably a bit complex, I am here right now and every day there is some controversal news with quite graphical material being shown, yesterday there was a big piece about teachers for 4-8 year olds who abused their students. One clip showed a teacher slapping a kid 10 times in a row, another a teacher throwing a kid around and 3rd some photos of a girl whose ear was cut off by her teacher, yes they showed the cut off ear too. I am fairly certain that would not have been shown at home, and I could see from the faces of the 100 people in the restaurant everyone was pissed off.
Re:No Innovation (Score:4, Informative)
What's ironic is that communism is supposed to be about the power of the people...
Communism has become Newspeak [wikipedia.org] for totalitarianism. Just like the National Socialist German Workers' Party [wikipedia.org]. Bad governments can change the meaning of words faster than you can think.
Re:This is horrible (Score:5, Informative)
Some of the more expensive labor around is woefully ignorant of large parts of science like evolution and most things outside of North America, but it doesn't seem to significantly affect their work performance or salary requirements. China is no longer that cheap [economist.com], it says "Labour costs have surged by 20% a year for the past four years" - pretty different from what most Americans have experienced the last four years I bet. China is rapidly becoming a modern country, compared to most other countries in South East Asia they are already rich. For example India is poor compared to China. Right now I'd hold Greece and Spain much more likely to have a revolution than China...
Re:"footprints on the seats" = "Chinese hillbillie (Score:2, Informative)
They use squat toilets a lot in Taiwan and China and Asian countries.
They're great for public toilets because you don't have to touch anything.
Sometimes people are a bit retarded and stand/squat on the sit-down toilets... in Taiwan it's like 50/50 squat/sit, so anyone that isn't fucking dumb should know not to stand on the goddamned toilet, but people do, because they are idiots.