China Makes Arrests To Stop Internet Porn 204
thefickler writes "The Chinese Government is expanding a crackdown on Internet pornography. Xinhua news agency, which is owned by the government and can safely be used for reporting in China, says the campaign to scrub the country's Internet of 'vulgar' content has so far resulted in 29 criminal cases. Police have ordered the removal of 46,000 pornographic and other 'harmful' items from websites. The latest crackdown comes after official warnings of rising social unrest as the economy slows. It's no coincidence that this year is the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, or, to use the acceptable nomenclature, 'the June 4th incident.'"
What for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What for? (Score:5, Funny)
Considering their overpopulation problem do they really want to discourage wanking? This seems very counter-productive to me.
Re:What for? (Score:5, Funny)
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Making people stupider does not help population size.
Re:What for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Forget factors like poverty, education of women, and social expectations. It's being stupid that drives up the birth rate.
And I know that because a movie told me so.
Re:What for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget factors like poverty, education of women, and social expectations. It's being stupid that drives up the birth rate.
In either case, the whole point of the movie is that evolution favours those that breed the most.
So by your definition you eventually wind up with a population full of poor people with badly educated women and no social expectations. Similar net result, different cause.
Re:What for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortunately, the impact of poverty, education, and social norms on population growth can be mitigated. And of those three, the one with the biggest impact--education for women--is the easiest to deal with. There's a tremendous drop in the birth rate with available birth control and only a primary school education for women.
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Well, population crash is one (though unpleasant) way of solving the overpopulation problem. If people are too fussy to consider population control now, then after a generation or two of starvation and resource wars all the currently politically unacceptable population control methods will seem quite ok.
Re:What for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I think the main problem is that people assume the way to decrease a population boom is to keep teens from from . This doesn't work. Because teens want to have sex. And they will. They always have and they always will. Instead of preventing them from being near members of the opposite sex and then expecting them to understand and live properly with them a la homeschooling, or the good ol' method of an angry health teacher telling them that if they have sex even ONCE before marriage they'll get pregnant with the AIDS, or the timeless "Almighty God, in his infinite mercy, will painfully smite your ass for eternity if you so much even LOOK at a pair of breasts, you horrific sinner (P.S. He loves you, though)" we might consider, I don't know, telling teens "You really shouldn't go wild with sex, but if you do have it, at least be safe."
It's crazy, I know, but I just think it might work.
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It's almost impossible to homeschool without at least two involved
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=== SPOILERS BELOW ===
Of course, where Idiocracy does make a few mistakes are where it assumes that high-tech things (eg. the diagnostic machine in the hospital, all the equipment that runs the television station) can be kept operating more or less indefinitely by a bunch of people who can't manage a more coherent word than "shit". And assumes that in the event of a serious worldwide food shortage which, let's be honest, would have been bordering on famine, the entire world would have been sitting in front
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Re:What for? (Score:5, Interesting)
You've never watched CCTV [wikipedia.org] have you? They run 18 channels of pure shit 24/7. Soap operas, inane stock-character comedies that just drag on for hours (which I admit might be funnier if I were a native speaker) and news that tells you the exact same trivial things three times an hour. On other channels there are some form of reality shows and all the mind numbing goodness you'd expect in the west.
Food is a huge part of China, Sure, the rural poor may be living off bowls of congee but if anything the urban middle class generally eat far more lavishly than those of western countries with both dishes, more exotic ingredients, more complex preparation and larger portions (even KFC's menu is roughly double its normal size).
As for booze, everyone should try Tsing Tao or Harbin beer when over there. It just costs a few RMB, comes in massive bottles and due to its sparse flavor you can keep drinking it and drinking it and be thoroughly drunk well before your mouth feels like you've been drinking beer. If you ordering, make sure you pronounce "Tsing Tao" as "Tchingdao" and emphasize the "r" in Harbin or they won't know what you are asking for.
Anyway, I'm not going to do any further analysis here, apart from mentioning that the Chinese government is not stupid in these matters and has probably realised the exact same thing as you and most western governments have.
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Yeah, seriously!!!
They could improve their image worldwide AND become more efficient in their repression by using your suggestion, (which henceforth shall be referred to as "The American Model."
Re:What for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps the Chinese have suddenly turned Christian. It certainly sounds like something Pat Robertson or other fundamentalists would say:
"the campaign to scrub the country's Internet of 'vulgar' content"
Re:What for? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Therefor in governing the people, the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies, weakens their wills but strengthens their bones. He always keeps them innocent of knowledge and free from desire, and ensures that the clever never dare to act."
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The words before your quote is:
Not to value/employ men with superior ability keeps people from rivalry; not to prize articles which are difficult to procure keeps people from becoming thieves; not to show people what is likely to excite their desires keeps their minds from disorder.
The real meaning of Lao Zi's quote (the quote in the above post) actually centred to two things: 1) Fulfill their physical
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Re:What for? (Score:5, Funny)
Chinese porn stars have a habit of yelling out antigovernment slogans as they finish. Sounds weird to us, but consider some of the foul words they use in American porn, it's not that strange.
political porn ... mmm a new subtree (Score:4, Funny)
Id like to see that in a porn film, the girl yelling out, "freedom to all, death to taxes, no riaa, get rid of older 50yos in govt!!!, release all aliens info"
Re:political porn ... mmm a new subtree (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they do. I've never watched a porn film through to the end.
Re:political porn ... mmm a new subtree (Score:5, Funny)
Don't you usually skip to the end when you're ready to finish? ...or is that just me?
Re:political porn ... mmm a new subtree (Score:5, Funny)
Re:political porn ... mmm a new subtree (Score:5, Funny)
Don't you usually skip to the end when you're ready to finish? ...or is that just me?
I don't know what's scarier - his wanking practices being marked "informative" or the fact that his name is "SQuiRT".
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Id like to see that in a porn film, the girl yelling out, "freedom to all, death to taxes, no riaa, get rid of older 50yos in govt!!!, release all aliens info"
Porn actresses rarely share the same agenda as libertarian Slashdotters, you know? ;-)
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So are libertarian Slashdotters betraying their principles when watching porn?
Or is it just that they are wankers?
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Only if they paid for it.
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Id like to see that in a porn film, the girl yelling out, "freedom to all, death to taxes, no riaa, get rid of older 50yos in govt!!!, release all aliens info"
Oh, you'll like her [wikipedia.org].
Cicciolina is a Hungarian-born Italian porn-star and occasional singer, turned politician and the first hardcore performer in the world to be elected to a democratic parliament
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I don't know whether to believe that or not. I could see how in a culture without the same Judeo-Christian moral foundation and with a restrictive government, that anti-government rhetoric takes the niche of obscene talk away from sexual words. It's a hilarious idea, scary if real. citation?
Re:What for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably the keyword is: control. They can't leave something in the hands of people (no pun :) over which they don't have control.
Loosing control in one area of society (namely sex) leaves the door open for loosening up in other areas.
That's why dictators try to control everything.
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They can't leave something in the hands of people (no pun :) over which they don't have control.
well, they could at least have the common courtesy to give them a reach-around then...
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I don't understand comrade. You do want to do what's best for your countrymen don't you? Or are you questioning us?
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But I don't think it's going to work. China's had a pornography problem ever since it's had the internet. If you've ever visited Chinese websites (I'm Chinese so I know), even the mainstream news websites are plastered with 18+ advertisements. Needless to say, it's a bit late to start fixing the problem, eh?
Think Of The Children? (Score:2)
Maybe it's similar to the kind of push we get here -- porn is seen as immoral, and is a natural scapegoat, so no one minds censoring it. From there, it's easy to justify censoring whatever you want -- after all, it does say "other 'harmful' items..."
Now, granted, the US is at least only censoring child porn, so far, which we can all agree on, right? And swear words, now, in South Carolina, if that bill passes -- which we can all agree on, right? See how slippery the slope is?
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Its all part of the citizens towing the governmental line without question. Anything that could remotely promote individualism is bad.
Or they are just jealous.. take your pick.
Ask your Republicans (Score:2)
Who are constantly trying for the same double play.
Re:What for? (Score:4, Insightful)
During the USSR days, it was customary for Mr. Putin's agency to declare political dissenters as common criminals to soften the West's attempts to free them.
Your asking the question and its high moderation both explain, why the tactics worked. Unable to perceive the actual levels of evil of the Communist regimes, Western "liberals" (who seriously think, G.W. Bush is vilest creature ever to rule a country) fall for their lies:
Similarly:
Why? (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Modesty and sexual conservatism, which are not unique to the Chinese culture, but rather understood and appreciated by almost all [organized] societies. Nobody, however, has ever been able to 'enforce' these things, which is what the Chinese don't get. If you are in a Free(TM) country, consider yourself lucky.
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Masturbation *is* sexual conservatism. It doesn't take a billion Chinese to figure this out.
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Masturbation *is* sexual conservatism. It doesn't take a billion Chinese to figure this out.
Well, it appears that it does.
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Well, i don't know what you classify as "sexual conservatism", but i sure don't think that we have that now - neither in the US nor here in Europe.
Porn is everywhere and completely legal, prostitution is legal in most places in Europe and some places in the US.
12 year olds that want to dress up as whores as the idols on TV also dress like that isn't my idea
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Well, i don't know what you classify as "sexual conservatism", but i sure don't think that we have that now - neither in the US nor here in Europe.
Yes, and our birth rates are leveling off or falling (Germany, for example, and the U.S. population is increasing largely because of the influx of illegals and all their offspring.) Consequently, it seems to me that if you want to have a high birthrate take away all the porn, make masturbation illegal and give people no other sexual outlets other than sex itself. Oh, and don't forget to keep women in the dark as to consequences of their sexual activity, and take all forms of contraception off the market. Gu
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the ancient and beautiful temples in India happen to have bas-reliefs depicting bestiality. Illustrated sex manuals were a popular form of literature at one point in China's history. Japan has had tentacle porn since at least the 18th century.
Sure, every culture has its sexual mores. But that's not exactly the same thing.
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Read the poems of Martial, Juvenal, and Catullus, and look at the architecture and decorations preserved at Pompeii, and tell me that the Romans were.
Women in ancient Rome had little importance as independent citizens, but could be very influential in their primary roles as mothers and wives. Devotion to one man was the ideal. A good Roman matron was chaste, honorable, and fertile [about.com].
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*cough*
Not sure which organized society you are from, by here in western civilization, sex is by no means modest or conservative. Maybe it is "supposed" to be, according to the evangelicals, but it is not. Nor is sexual conservatism appreciated, except by a small but vocal minority composed mainly of puritans.
Prejudice abounds in the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it really _is_ a coincident that China started targeting porn sites on the twentieth anniversary of 'the June 4th incident'.
You think they looked at the calendar and realized... OMG, this is the year we must start censoring internet porn!
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"You think they looked at the calendar and realized... OMG, this is the year we must start censoring internet porn!"
Perhaps internet porn is devaluing their pin up calendar?
Re:Prejudice abounds in the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it really _is_ a coincident that China started targeting porn sites on the twentieth anniversary of 'the June 4th incident'.
You think they looked at the calendar and realized... OMG, this is the year we must start censoring internet porn!
Well, since there are so many important Chinese anniversaries this year, how come the author picked Tian'anmen? Why not the ban of Falun Gong (10th anniversary)? Why not the declaration of The People's Republic (70th anniversary)? Or May 4th Movement (90th anniversary)?
I'm sure there are some more, but I can't think of them off-hand.
arrests not necessarily due to porno (Score:5, Informative)
"28 suspects arrested in the campaign included 4 men in their twenties who ran the Midnight Prostitute Call website from eastern China. They also included two men accused of using a video chat service to defraud customers."
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What's wrong with prostitution? It's my body and if I want to have an abortion & kill a fetus, I can due to those bodily rights. Likewise I should be free to sell my body in exchange fox wages. There's no valid reason to limit how I use MY body, unless you endorse enslavement.
So, what is making China so prude? (Score:2)
It's not like America with a puritanical past, Communist regimes actually tend to suppress religion. Not that most eastern religions were like the western ones. I think the Soviet Union didn't care about that stuff, but am not entirely sure.
So what's the deal?
The Soviet Union DID care about it... (Score:2)
I think the Soviet Union didn't care about that stuff, but am not entirely sure.
Government persecution of Christianity continued unabated until the fall of the Communist government, with Stalin's reign the most repressive. [wikipedia.org]
Stalin is quoted as saying that "The Party cannot be neutral towards religion. It conducts an anti-religious struggle against any and all religious prejudices."
It is tradition act of the government (Score:5, Informative)
In the past, the government had done many gang/crime enforces during certain month of year before, they call it "Yan Da" which basically mean strict enforcement.
But everyone in china knows that It doesn't solve anything permanently and the people who are involve with such act just keep low profile and wait for it finish.
As for the porn busting thing.. my coworkers are making jokes about it and pulling out any thing vaguely sexual. such as, you can't mention "Mei Nv"(beatiful girl) in the game description.
Bottom line, Everything will be business as usual in a month or two.
Chairman Rudd also likes your idea (Score:2)
http://www.propertywire.com/news/asia/property-prices-fell-sharply-china-2008-200901072355.html [propertywire.com] http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jYY3ugKb9diKGictWunUrDVu-aBw [google.com] http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/07012009/323/china-fears-recession-riots-europe-joblessness-grows.html [yahoo.com] http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/11/20/china.jobs/index.html [cnn.com] http://uk.reuters.com/ [reuters.com]
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Why would property be expensive in a healthy economy in the first place? It's not US, where all wealth comes from ability to print money and stuff them into pockets of consumers by all kind of idiotic means including overpriced cardboard houses. In China people actually make stuff.
simplest answer: somebody forgot to pay the cops. (Score:2)
Better than Korea ... South Korea that is (Score:2)
South Korean authorities have arrested a blogger for saying the won will fall [latimes.com] after he predicted that Lehman Brothers would implode. Apparently he is being charged with "spreading false information" -- which seems funny to me, if the guy is predicting the future, how does the government know it is false? Are they claiming to be able to see the future?
I know if *I* was in charge of a country (Score:2)
with over a billion people, I'd want to have male births outnumber female births for awhile, and then take away all the porn.
other 'harmful' items (Score:2)
AH, like the truth.
"no coincidence" (Score:2)
You keep using that word...
I'd say that this feeble anti-porn initiative occurring 20 years after Tiananmen is a great example of a coincidence.
(Why do people get so excited about anniversaries anyway?!)
Perhaps a less muddled way of making your point might be to say, "Twenty years after Tiananmen, not much has changed in government policy." But we all learned that anyway, through the disgusting, ugly, wasteful and pathetic charade that was the 2008 Olympics.
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(Why do people get so excited about anniversaries anyway?!)
You're asking the wrong crowd. Ask your wife.
pr0n (Score:3, Interesting)
Recently I've discovered India "outlaws" (according the book I read) porn and now China is cracking down. If anything, I'd think they wouldn't care. What is it in these Eastern cultures that makes them not like porn? I didn't think they were uptight like that.
Re:100 Million Horny Men (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine if they did that in our countries? You would feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Slashdotters cried out in anger and considered stepping outside of their home to do something about it.
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step 1. Get the names of all communist govt people, and all army people and all police people.
step 2. Get their home addresses, and family names.
That's really the easy part, all you have to do is look them all up on the Red Pages (redpages.cn), that's like the White Pages except that on top of giving the phone number and name it also gives you their occupation, street address, maiden name and birth date.
Re:numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is that if there are so many damn people in China why they don't just overthrow their government... it wouldn't be difficult.
Well, a lot of chinese people happen to like the chinese government and approve of what's going on, at least enough to put up with it. I'm sure a lot of people around the world were probably wondering why Americans didn't overthrow Bush. I personally hated the guy from before day one, but I wouldn't want to overthrow the government even if we were facing 8 more years of Bush. Probably similar in China, they don't agree with everything, but the government does reflect a lot of their values, an overthrow would be damaging, and they don't see a lot of other people willing to rise up.
It's not like the government holds on to power entirely by force, in other words.
Re:numbers (Score:5, Informative)
a lot of chinese people happen to like the chinese government and approve of what's going on
Quite right. This is anecdotal, but the Chinese people I've spoken with about this simply do not see the problems that I try to ask them about. They largely agree with what the Chinese government is doing. They see government as their protector, and mostly agree/assume that "the government knows best." They point to the remarkable progress and advancement in China (in terms of tech, economy, society, etc.) to prove their point.
At worst, I've gotten some of them to begrudgingly admit that some things the government is doing may be "necessary compromises" in order for the country as a whole to grow.
Those that I've met are among the more educated and traveled/worldly of the Chinese population. I'm not sure which way that biases the sample. I'm well-aware that there are dissidents in China trying to stop things like censorship; but doing so must be exceedingly difficult when the average person (and even the "intellectual elite" if you will) support the government.
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The educated and traveled/worldly Chinese population is also those in the the top 1% income bracket in China - have you seen one of those Dongguan sweatshop workers in the United States? Even those guys and girls are doing much better than their rural counterparts. If you're among the top 1% earners of your country, have a nice house (or more than one house), a nice car, a nice wife, eats gourmet f
Re:numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a lot of American students that were pushing the Chinese students to fight the government.
No, it was not. That is a little conspiracy theory that the most patriotic of Chinese will peddle as a catalyst for the Tiananmen Square protests. Blame the Americans rather than their own people. It has no basis in fact.
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Overthrowing a Government just means you'll end up replacing it with something that'll eventually become worse.
The best course of action is to talk to them, remind them why Governments should be afraid of their people and not the other way around.
Please note, this doesn't necessarily mean using violence.
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It's not like the government holds on to power entirely by force, in other words.
Just because the threat is more often implied than actually followed through doesn't mean that force wasn't or isn't used. China has made so many 'examples' over the years that most people are easily pacified with just a disapproving look from a policeman. For those who aren't there is always the re-education camp where attitudes, among other things, are adjusted.
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And how is this any different from Americans? Other than, of course, Chinese not messing with other countries regardless on their point of view on the quality of governments there.
An IT analogy (Score:4, Interesting)
The same reason system administrators are reluctant to reboot their production servers in order to apply a kernel patch that fixes serious performance issues. Government downtime is costly. And in this case we have a fairly invasive patch involving a new algorithm, and although the algorithm itself is well researched, the specific implementation needs extensive testing for which good spare hardware is unavailable.
If only we had a good simulator to test political ideas on...
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My Chinese teacher says China is not yet ready for democracy. For one, it is a huge country, which also means it is inert. Such radical changes, if implemented haphazardly, mostly lead to problems.
The Chinese do not plan in 4-year mandates. They plan in chunks of 20 or 50 years. At the same time, they do not tend to improvise as much.
There is quite a number of issues here, and the more I learn about China, the more I understand that applying the western model would be the wrong thing to do. It is a differen
Re:An IT analogy (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm actually writing this from a hotel in Ch*na, and this different culture thing is bullshit. I spend most of my time in Ta*wan, and TW really does feel like somewhere that has 5000 years of history. The culture is open enough to debate different solutions to problems, and that lets them add value.
E.g. I visited the CH factory of a TWese electronics manufacturer. The TWese company is one of the top 5 ODMs that design something like 90% of the laptops and motherboards in the world all of them are based in TW and do their design there. When you visit them in TW, they are very pragmatic about solving problems and clearly based on market share they are good at what they do.
The CHese factory by contrast is organised on very strict lines. They have absolutely no authority to question anything or make any changes. And wider TWese society vs CHese society mirrors this distinction. If you're in CH you don't talk about problems. Talking about problems will get you fired, beaten up, locked up or even killed. That just means that problems are never really solved, just papered over. All the rhetoric about 5000 years of history and a very different culture is just something the government says to foreigners who don't recognize it is bullshit. CHese people most likely do, but they know the consequences of speaking up. Also the current government spent most of its time eraseing those 5000 years of history and culture in favour of a sort of generic Stalinism.
In fact as a liberal you should be aware that sometimes governments spout self serving nonsense to excuse stomping their opponents. And hell, governments are sometimes corrupt too. Imagine what the US would be like if criticizing Bush or Haliburton was widely believed to cause you to disappear. And imagine if the Republican party/Haliburton had been in power for 50 years and owned everything.
I'm sure that TW's more open political system influences people to discuss problems at work and try to solve them and CH's system discourages this. And for what it's worth, TW did not have 'our political system' forced upon them. The US would occasionally raise reform during the cold war, but it never forced it - given that it does not recognize TW that would have been hard. It was actually student protests coupled with a sympathetic TW President Lee which triggered TW's transition. Before that it was a party state like CH. They actually happened at the same time as the student protests in CH.
I.e. regardless of people's culture, they don't like being ruled my a bunch of murdering crooks. No one plans 20 to 50 years ahead blindly, that leads to catastrophe. You need to be able to change tack as new facts appear. TW can do that, CH can't. Not politically, and not in an engineering project.
Mispellings are for obvious reasons. Hope the proxy works.
I realise the above would be very bad Last Words on the Internet...
Re:An IT analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Talking about problems will get you fired, beaten up, locked up or even killed.
I had lived in China for years and managed a group of software developers. While I agree that they are less inclined to point out problem. That's more like a cultural / educational thing. (Even if I put up awards for filing bugs, they rarely did.) But "Talking problem ... get you ... killed." I found that exaggerated too much. I've yet to read of anyone get killed speaking out problems in a *factory*. Did you actually know of an example? Or you just make it up?
And outside of works, Chinese make a lot of complains from the cost of healthcare to the lack of ... democracy ... (though they don't really demand it desparately.) There are plenty of criticism against the government in the Internet too, just ask the 91589 people complaining about the lack of train tickets in one website [sina.com.cn].
You are either not living in China or you have a wrong perception of what happen around you.
Re:An IT analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe that the best way to go is to follow an evolutionary path, following the experience of countries like Britain or Switzerland, which essentially evolved democracy from what had gone before. Don't impose a democratic structure from the top: create thousands of village councils, each with enough teeth to make an impact but not enough to do severe damage. Ensure you have an effective and ethical policing and judiciary function. As people get used to dealing with their problems through local politics and courts, extend it up the way.
I reckon that in ten to twenty years time Iraq will freely elect yet another lunatic, and we'll be going back again to try and straighten out another mess. You heard it here first.
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I reckon that in ten to twenty years time Iraq will freely elect yet another lunatic, and we'll be going back again to try and straighten out another mess. You heard it here first.
More likely a major nation will decide that the freely elected government isn't to their liking and stage a coup. That's how most aspiring democracies around the world end.
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"I reckon that in ten to twenty years time Iraq will freely elect yet another lunatic, and we'll be going back again to try and straighten out another mess. You heard it here first."
Saddam was and is quite popular. Only his methods can keep order in Iraq, which is why it will revert to disorder if it is not allowed to break up into its natural components. Saddams only "lunatic" behavior was external aggression against Kuwait. He could have cut deals and stayed in his box. He certainly played Sunni against S
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There is quite a number of issues here, and the more I learn about China, the more I understand that applying the western model would be the wrong thing to do.
You're talking about "applying" the western model, but that is a statement clearly founded upon a western view of applying your worldview to everything. This does make some sense, since the USA's hobby is "applying" its model everywhere.
The Chinese will have a revolution if they can handle one. It has nothing to do with anyone else, nor should it.
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There is quite a number of issues here, and the more I learn about China, the more I understand that applying the western model would be the wrong thing to do.
You're talking about "applying" the western model, but that is a statement clearly founded upon a western view of applying your worldview to everything. This does make some sense, since the USA's hobby is "applying" its model everywhere.
Since that is precisely what I meant in the first place, I'm left befuddled. Should I now thank Captain Obvious, or am I missing something important?
The Chinese will have a revolution if they can handle one. It has nothing to do with anyone else, nor should it.
Precisely so. If and when the Chinese decide to start a revolution, it will be their own matter. Although should that happen, I cannot imagine the US staying out of it. The US has meddled in almost everything anyway.
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We Europeans asked ourselves the same question when Bush Jr. got 'voted' president. Obviously, the American population did not find their situation as bad as we outsiders.
Same thing with Britain. Either it looks worse than it is from the outside or the people have been lulled into a false sense of 'everything's okay'.
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As much as people want to complain about Bush, he didn't use censorship.
As much as people want to complain about China, at least China didn't wage war on the rest of the world.
I guess different things matter to different people.
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I know...because your wrong. Bush didn't wage war on the rest of the world. There was a lot of misrepresentation on the part of most of the media about Iraq. WW II was a lot worse, but if you believed them, then Iraq was far worse! Bush preemptively attacked two nations who were supporters of terrorism before they could harm us more. Both now have a freely elected governments, and Iraq is now running
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First of all, YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Furthermore, let me just say that we in the rest of the world do not see these things the way you do. Your rhetoric is pathetic, and as long as your army goes on killing people all over the world, please do shut up about the value of human life. I have lived through a war in my own country, which I am willing to bet you have not; kindly do not give me this kind of propaganda-shit. After living through a war, I'm immune.
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The US doesn't do stuff because by golly, someone should. You do it because you profit from it. Even if your government is from the people and for the people (which is a laughable delusion in itself), it does not speak for the rest of the world. The rest of the world did not get to veote. So kindly do sod off.
I wish you could see yourself from my eyes. Americans like you are the reason a good part of the rest of the world despises you.
Your empire will fall. I might live to see it. Your bully face will be s
Re:numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
The Chinese government has managed to rocket China from an impoverished post-WWII and post civil-war famine-plagued disaster into the modern China of today in under sixty years.
That's absolutely amazing.
To expect our idea of freedom and democracy to work in China is to ignore its situation and culture. The US and Europe haven't had serious famines in living memory. China has.
Order and prosperity are more important than freedom.
People don't generally revolt because they aren't free, they revolt because freedom is seen as the path to prosperity they do not have.
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The Chinese government has managed to rocket China from an impoverished post-WWII and post civil-war famine-plagued disaster into the modern China of today in under sixty years.
Also notice that all that rocketing happened in the last half of that time frame. The first half was spent wasting staggering amounts of human life.
So, after holding back China for a few decades, they're back to the single-party capitalist system of Republic they overthrew -- while proclaiming the new model was actually "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" (ie, not Socialism). Given their past history and what they've done to the nation, I absolutely refuse to give them any credit for their belated ac
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No, To expect our idea of freedom and democracy to work in China is to believe that democracy transcends culture. That freedom is not a cultural accident, but speaks to a more fundamental aspect of the human experience, which all deserve.
Re:Xinhua news agency (Score:5, Insightful)
Countries that censor news often don't explicitly define what is acceptable, and the standards can change often, hence why internal political commentators need to rely on such gauges to see what the current acceptable topics are.
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