China Blocks YouTube Over Tibet Videos

Screaming Cactus writes "Internet users in China were blocked from seeing YouTube.com on Sunday after dozens of videos about protests in Tibet appeared on the site. 'Chinese leaders encourage Internet use for education and business but use online filters to block access to material considered subversive or pornographic. Foreign Web sites run by news organizations and human rights groups are regularly blocked if they carry sensitive information. Operators of China-based online bulletin boards are required to monitor their content and enforce censorship.' The blocking added to the communist government's efforts to control what the public saw and heard about protests that erupted Friday in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, against Chinese rule."

psiphon

Maybe you want to consider hosting psiphon server?
http://psiphon.civisec.org/ [civisec.org]

Is blocking even necessary?

I've traveled to China a few times, and encounter plenty of Chinese students at my university. All seem to be aware that their government is authoritarian and has done some terrible things, in spite of all the blocking. Nonetheless, without exception every Chinese person I've spoke with on the issue insists that a hard line is needed to keep the country together. Since the Chinese population, for cultural and historical reasons, seems okay with what's going on, is blocking the Internet even necessary?

Re:Is blocking even necessary?

The effects of controling the medias are subtle and effective, and every succeful control will also convince the population it is itself necessary.

Take the example of Russia: the elections were cheated (some small towns were 105% pro government...), but even perfectly fair elections would probably show that a majority (like 55%) think Putin was a good leader. But thinking that 95%, of the country agrees with the government will make you more prone to agree yourself, whereas at 55% you'll start beleiving that alternatives exist.

I could also speak about Fox in the US, and the necessity for antiterrorist laws.

Re:Is blocking even necessary?

Fox News is just one of many TV networks in the US, and offers a unique -and different- perspective on things compared to the other 90% of media out there.

You may consider it propaganda, but nobody is forcing you to watch it, and nobody goes around shutting down liberal stations, arresting liberal TV sponsors, or shooting liberal journalists. If anything, Fox is against the kind of socialist media controls and regulations that would allow the Russia-type abuses in America.

How you think Fox News resembles anything in Russia is beyond me.

Re:Is blocking even necessary?

I would like to recommend to you the documentary Manufacturing Consent [google.com] for a levelheaded insight into how we have gotten to the media picture we have today. Interesting, and if not agreeable, at least insightful.

Re:Is blocking even necessary?

As I talked to people in China while I lived there 2003-06, most people know about democracy of the Western world; they do complain their country's lack of democracy, but at the same time, they believe it does not necessary make things better and it is only something good to have in the future when the country gets prosperous. Think about it, they do have a point. Which of the following democratic countries (at least more so than China) are much better off than China: India, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and many easter European countries? These countries are not doing better in terms of corruption, equality, development, environment protection, education, health care, etc.. How do they fare comparing to Singapore and Hong Kong, both of which have little democracy to speak of?

Their belief is that democracy won't work unless the country has reached higher level of prosperity -- i.e. massive middle class, otherwise democracy could be damaging.

Re:Is blocking even necessary?

There you've hit an interesting point.

China is barking huge, and its population is equally on the large side (Ha! Fear my accurate numerical statements...). They can't just be mostly sheep with a few wolves running things.

I've known quite a few Chinese students, courtesy of the US making it harder for Chinese students to study there. This is great, it's brought vast, vast amounts of cash in from China to universities in the UK, thanks for that one guys..

Anyhoo, these Chinese people, while here, have just the same net access as anyone else, and they are for the most part, belonging to the middle to upper classes in China. Just the sort of people you'd think they'd want to keep ignorant (middle class people have started all revolutions in modern times), and yet they make no effort to do so.

Doesn't quite map, does it...

It seems to me we have a large amount of 'we don't really understand what the fuck is going on in China', that frequently gets combined with a bunch of preconceptions which are probably quite inaccurate.

Re:Is blocking even necessary?

Can it be argued that chinese actions in Tibet and their language with regards to Taiwan is a model of enlightened society? What a joke.

Ok then, can it be argued that the way the US treats Cuba is in any way still appropriate? How much have the people of Cuba suffered because the US won't relax its embargo?

I mean, yes, they fucked up... IN THE SIXTIES!!!111one.
Seriously, shouldn't we be able to move on?

If you ask me, that's what's kept Castro and his friends in power for so long.

The point is, China isn't alone in acting stupidly towards other countries. It doesn't excuse them, but lets keep a sense of proportion about this.

Absolute Moral Consistency Is Not A Prerequisite

Because absolute moral consistency is not a prerequisite for doing the right thing.

More to the point, no one is blocking Texan access to the net, or anything else for that matter. Texans, and Mexicans, are fully aware of their history. The Chinese people are not aware of Tibet's recent history because the government controls the media and their access to the net.

Besides, Mexico acquired Texas by force from Spain, which had acquired it by force from any number of indigenous peoples, who, in turn, were often at each other's throats. How far back do you want to go? Few of us, if anyone, live on land that was not forcibly taken from someone else at some point in history.

you probably talked to Han Chinese

Especially in the western regions, Chinese authoritarianism is mainly directed at preserving Han-Chinese supremacy over separatism among other ethnic groups, such as the Tibetans (in Tibet) and Turkic groups (in Xinjiang). This involves both the sort of direct control and suppression we see here, and more subtly and long-term, a program of sending Han Chinese settlers into those regions to dilute the non-Han majority.

As you might expect, you get different views on this issue if you talk to Han vs. non-Han Chinese citizens.

Then think about it more

Just because you take it as propaganda doesn't mean that others don't have a more leveled response to this statement. For example, you could take it as saying: "what is going on with this type of morality?". If a person condones authoritarian rule, what is the need for censorship? Yet these people seem to do both? This statement is about the human condition, and not politics. Personally I think a lot of official chinese statements express an embarrassingly amorale attitude.

urgh

Before everyone presses the reply button and start typing "FREE TIBET!", could slashdotters please read this [theatlantic.com] article first?
Read all three parts of it, the author summarizes both sides of the issue in order for people to see that the Tibet issue is much more than just a communist regime bullying an occupied region, for example:

Another aspect of the Chinese duty in Tibet is the sense that rapid modernization is needed, and should take precedence over cultural considerations. For Westerners, this is a difficult perspective to understand. Tibet is appealing to us precisely because it's not modern, and we have idealized its culture and anti-materialism to the point where it has become, as Orville Schell says, "a figurative place of spiritual enlightenment in the Western imagination -- where people don't make Buicks, they make good karma."

But to the Chinese, for whom modernization is coming late, Buicks look awfully good. I noticed this during my first year as a teacher in China, when my writing class spent time considering the American West. We discussed western expansion, and I presented the students with a problem of the late nineteenth century: the Plains Indians, their culture in jeopardy, were being pressed by white settlers. I asked my class to imagine that they were American citizens proposing a solution, and nearly all responded much the way this student did: "The world is changing and developing. We should make the Indians suit our modern life. The Indians are used to living all over the plains and moving frequently, without a fixed home, but it is very impractical in our modern life.... We need our country to be a powerful country; we must make the Indians adapt to our modern life and keep pace with the society. Only in this way can we strengthen the country."

I know I might be modded offtopic but the discussion of Chinese censorship of Tibet videos will no doubt lead to the discussion of Tibet vs China itself. I'm just asking everyone to please form their opinion after looking at both sides of the issue, and how each side feels about it. Try not to base your opinion solely on just what you hear news.

Store and forward peer to peer over bluetooth

This is where something like Usenet is still better than "The Web". It doesn't even require tcp/ip to function and therefore has no centralised control. With something like an NNTP server running on every phone, over bluetooth, it would be pretty much impossible to prevent the spread of information.

Walk past someone in the street and your phone syncs it's "newsgroups" with the other phone. The smartphones around these days are coming with 2Gb of storage and 300MHz processors. More than 100,000 are being purchased per day in China.

 

craziness

If you want to see something crazy, check out the political spam in the comments of these videos. It is unbelievable the ratio of how many people are calling Tibetans liars and cheering on the Chinese. These are recent posts calling the Dalai Lama a terrorist ringleader. It confuses me that so many people outside the great firewall are posting this stuff.

Anyone want to help me mod these comments down, and rate these videos up?

Re:craziness

It is unbelievable the ratio of how many people are calling Tibetans liars and cheering on the Chinese. These are recent posts calling the Dalai Lama a terrorist ringleader.

One of the reasons I am wary of this whole Tibet issue is that China happens to be the West's main economic rival, and now it is convenient for Western governments to support the Dalai Lama's cause. The Dalai Lama is not a democratically elected leader, and pre-1949 Tibet was not exactly the merry free independent country you see in Hollywood depictions. Most of the Tibetans were serfs and enslaved in all but name, serving the religious aristocracy of the Lamas.

As long as China was an ally of the US against the Soviet Union, you did not hear much about Tibet or the Dalai Lama. Gone the Soviet Union, grown the Chinese economy, and hey presto! Here is a flurry of Hollywood movies designed to show just how ugly and mean the Estasians are, since Eurasia has always been our ally—right?

See, one of the downsides of reading "Manufacturing consent" by Chomsky is that I start to see unsettling patterns like this one: a piece of news is convenient for the government, that piece is spun in the best possible way for the government by the same press that should be the government's watchdog. Of course it happens as well in China: I read some CCTV Web pages with the predictable pro-China spin.

Now, where is the truth anyway? Well, obviously some Tibetans are quite angry. Some Tibetans have been assaulting Han Chinese [guardian.co.uk] (so much for the Buddhists who never raise a finger in violence), because of the rivalry between ethnic groups. So, as far as I can see, this is an issue of a group of people not liking another group of people, spun by every external party in their favour: the US say the Chinese are evil and the Tibetans are peaceful protesters, the Chinese say they are only criminals, and everyone else says whatever is most convenient for them.

China has encouraged immigration of Han Chinese into Tibet for a long time, and the privileged Han are an obvious target for racial hatred for the underprivileged Tibetans. What the Chinese should have done is to follow the good old way to deal with separatism: throw money at the problem. Tibet has a ludicrously small population compared to China (not even three millions), and China could afford to subsidize separatism to death. That's what Italy did to fix the terrorism problem in South Tyrol, and, guess what, it worked just fine.

any chinese comments?

It seems to me that there's a pretty big language barrier that prevents us from hearing much from most chinese internet users. The ones i met in china tended to stick to purely chinese sites, which i found quite hard to read with only my basic level of chinese.

("if we get some chinese comments, perhaps people here can translate them")

Re:any chinese comments?

well shit, son. All the unicode chinese chars i wrote in that posting got nuked. i guess we won't be hearing from any chinese commenters any time soon.

Re:any chinese comments?

Being a chinese , the life is very tough.

,
the fact i can still get on the internet is something gratefully granted by the gov. i wouldn't dare to raise a trouble.

in china, any public voice that does not sound "harmonious" will be "harmonized". everything is for building a "harmonious society".

,
many websites has been "harmonized", which have become a common practice..

youtube,
through some technical means the youtube site can still be reached, but that's only to geeks like me.

i have written something , but they became dots.

all chinese characters i have typed here became dot...
i take it as a censorship

Re:any chinese comments?

if we get some chinese comments, perhaps people here can translate them

Someone already did [blogs.com]:

For those living in the West who didn't realize that there's little sympathy for Tibet independence among ethnic Chinese in the PRC, this blog post on Global Voices [globalvoicesonline.org] will be a shocker. John Kennedy has translated chatter from Chinese blogs and chatrooms that generally runs along the lines of: those ungrateful minorities, we give them modern conveniences and look how they thank us... where have we heard this before? Reuters has a roundup [washingtonpost.com] on the Washington Post that begins: "a look at Chinese blogs reveals a vitriolic outpouring of anger and nationalism directed against Tibetans and the West." (...)

"Davesgonechina" at the Tenement Palm blog has been translating the chatter coming from Chinese netizens on Fanfou and Jiwai - Chinese versions of Twitter. Click here [blogspot.com], here [blogspot.com], and here [blogspot.com], specifically. Dave has done more than translate: he points out that this Tibet situation is a real challenge to all people who believe that the Internet can help foster free speech and bring about better global understanding. Here is his challenge to all of us [blogspot.com]...

The above info, plus a great deal of other material well worth spending the time to read, was aggregated [boingboing.net] by boingboing's Xeni Jardin, who since this situation has erupted in Tibet has kept a close eye on the whole thing and provided some very good info like the above mentioned post.

Re:Hiding something?

Millions of spambots, what else? If they want a Great Firewall of China, I'm happy to help!

I'd encourage everyone to simply null route China's netblocks and enjoy the sudden decrease in criminal activity.

Re:Hiding something?

> If you have never lived in China, you don't know anything about the situation and should not comment.

I've lived in both China and Taiwan. I was also a Chinese major, speak, read and write Chinese, and have a fair amount of friends from mainland China (both peasants and city dwellers) and Taiwan. I also have a number of friends that are members of the CCP. Does this qualify me to comment?

> As for Taiwan, they're just as bad as the PRC.

Have you lived in Taiwan before?

Taiwan is nothing like the PRC. In the PRC, corruption permeates to even the most petty of bureaucrats, who must be bribed for simple things like marriage licenses and being allowed to continue to farm your own meager plot of land. Seeing the money wasted by mid-level party officials at their 3 hour "liquid lunches" in Beijing (and hearing about it from my friends in the party) was stomach-turning, knowing what the families of my friends were going through as peasants. (My friend's younger sister -- 13 years old -- worked 15 hour days, 7 days a week in a windowless factory to help support her family, and made herself sick in the process.)

Taiwan does not assert ownership over the mainland -- what sloppy thinking! The Nationalist Party asserts that it is the rightful ruling party of all of China, and so desires unification. Other parties' desires and opinions vary.

When the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, they massacred quite a large number of people they feared were leftists. This was probably Taiwan's greatest human-rights tragedy. But that has been acknowledged and apologized for, for what little it's worth. Don't expect that kind of acknowledgment in the PRC, though, where Tibet has always been a part of China, China never invaded Vietnam, the Korean war started when the US invaded North Korea, and serious human rights violations never happen.

Re:More proof of chinas real goals

Since when have the Olympic games (Berlin in 1936, Moscow in 2000) been about freedom and democracy? They're about showing off to the world and bragging.

Re:Why only Tibet?

It's really rather simple.

The Tibetans have a charismatic, articulate and eloquent spokesman in the Dalai Lama. Here in the US he's probably the most venerated spiritual leader in the US outside of the Pope or the conservative protestant movement. He's almost the chief rabbi for large swath of American intellectuals who think of themselves as "spiritual" but not aligned with a conservative religious movement and who eschew formal theological dogma.

So, in a way the Chinese leadership is right on the mark when they talk about a "Dalai Clique".

The thing that makes him a tough opponent in this game is that he's so darned reasonable and mild mannered. He's not calling for armed uprising. He's not even insisting on national sovereignty. He refuses to act angry, or even wronged. He just insists that the Chinese leadership should talk, and listen with an open mind.

The thing is, there's a lot about the old Tibetan system that is ugly and bad -- along with much that is admirable and good. The Chinese would love people to think about the abuses of the old monastic system when they think of Tibet. But can't oppose somebody like the Dalai Lama without being nakedly blunt about their own unreasonableness and brutality, which makes everything they do an international embarrassment to their country. And that makes this news.

You're absolutely right, we should be concerned with other places where minorities are oppressed for their religious, cultural, racial or linguistic characteristics. But you can't focus on all the tyrants in the world at once. You focus on the ones that can be made representative of tyranny, in the hope that they some day they will become representative of the futility of tyranny.

Re:China = Muslim?

The Chinese government is an autocracy, is it not really a government of China, it is just a government of a few self serving control freaks who prosper while the majority suffer and serve. They obviously want to maintain total control over what the majority hear, say or do, lest the majority realise that the government should serve and protect the majority rather than empower and enrich the minority.

So just like any sane person from a modern free democracy, there is no fear that the autocrats ideals 'won't hold water', there is an absolute certainty that the autocrats ideals 'don't hold water' and the only way they can hold back freedom and democracy is with carefully managed lies and the point of a bayonet.

The current Chinese governments insists it has the right to use military aggression to maintain and obtain dominance over countries based upon the flimsiest of historical ties, so Tibet, Taiwan, and even Korea as well as some other regions suffer under oppression or the threat of future aggression.

That the Olympics should be held in autocratic countries at all, points to that fact that Olympic sized profits and marketing deals take precedence over the ideals and values of amateur athletes from the past. Although it already appears that some athletes are bowing out rather than taking the risk of exposure to carcinogenic pollutants prevalent in the Beijing environment.