An Inside Look at the Great Firewall of China 165
alphadogg writes "An interview with James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, who has experienced 'The Great Firewall of China' firsthand, an experience people from around the world will share this summer when the Olympics comes to that country. Based in Beijing, Fallows has researched the underlying technology that the Chinese use for Internet censorship. One good thing to know: With VPNs and proxies, you can get around it pretty easily." Will these Olympics lead to a more free China, or is it just corporate pandering?
Just more corporate pandering... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't mean to sound elitist, but most Chinese people in the USA that I have talked to have basically said that yes, while more human rights and freedom of speech would be nice, the problem is that the Chinese peasant class is so uneducated and so poor that there is a huge risk of total social chaos if China adopts the Glasnost route. They want to avoid a Soviet - collapse style meltdown.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Interesting)
CORPORATE pandering? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ask the international Olypmic commitee what they were thinking. The companies that make money off of the broadcasting and related licensing are going to make money regardless of where the games are held. It would likely be a lot easier, logistically, NOT to have to put up with the Chinese nonsense while moving the media army into place to cover the games. Which corporations are being pandered to, here? The corporation that is China? They (the Chinese) promised all sorts of open access and press freedom as part of the package they pitched while trying to seduce the panel that chooses the venues. They were obviously lying, a lot. How that broadly strokes "corporate" interests enough to refer to it that way in the summary is not clear enough in the summary to warrant that particular bit of editorial spin.
A political trojan horse (Score:2, Interesting)
Suddenly we're giving them the olympics but making demands about Tibet.
Why Tibet?
I am serious- of all injustices in the world why has the Western world particularly adopted Tibet? No matter how you look at it, it's a rightful conquest. Do we expect France to come over and tell us to relinquish Puerto Rico? No- imperialist gains are imperialist gains. I don't see why China's dominion is evil while ours is not. Besides, Tibet was a theocratic feudal kingdom before China invaded, where most people were serfs who lived in hovels underneath lords. They revolt out of nationalistic pride, but in reality they are better off with China's modernizations.
What about the great firewall? Why do we even care? I think it has to do with American corporations wanting to profit off of the Chinese populace without hurting their marketing image in the US. "Hey, our company looks like a giant kindergarten at its headquarters, so we'd never want to support censorship!" Maybe China is protecting it political and economic goods. Thanks to the great firewall, Chinese corporations boom within their subset of the internet, PLUS they don't have to worry about their people embracing the American fascist economic policies because their websites are prettier.
We walk a fine line with China. Within China, they have total copyright freedom (something slashdot cares about)- but I think at this point they're working on modernization and keeping their citizens out of poverty instead of becoming a third world nation, exploited for its cheap labor while foreign companies get to start calling the shots in their government. China is in control of China, and I am sure they like it that way.
Re:Incredible (Score:5, Interesting)
And, of course, China is a large market for many firms, and therefore the Chinese government has leverage to exert their influence over a set of intermediaries -- Yahoo and Google, for example -- to make their control effective (again, not perfect).
What kind of stupid question is this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since when has any Olympic games, even the ancient ones, ever led to to resolution of any conflict? Did the 1936 Summer Olympics get Hitler to mend his ways? Did the 1980 Moscow Olympics get the Soviet Union to mend their ways? Did any of the Olympics held in the US do anything but promote self-importance and exceptionalism amongst Americans? Did the Tokyo Olympics, or the Nagano Olympics get Japan to mend fences with China and Korea over Japanese war crimes in WW2?
At the very best, it allows rival groups to fight each other in a less murderous way for a bit (and even that isn't a given, see Munich 1972, Atlanta bombing). That's a good thing, but expecting more than that is ignoring history. The people in the "Olympic movement" that see the games as a tool for peace and understanding are just deluding themselves. Even with the ancient games, wars were only put on hold, not ended, and that was only because it was a religious event.
The only people that ever make money on an Olympics are the ad agencies.
Re:CORPORATE pandering? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Interesting)
I've lived in China for over 3 years, using the same SSH tunnel the entire time. In addition, there are too many people in China to monitor their browsing habits. What they actually care about is what you are saying (e.g. on blogs), and then only if your words get more than a certain amount of traffic.
Enough with the misinformation. Just because you speculate that something is done because it would be the "smart" thing to do, doesn't mean it's happening.
LS
Re:Just more corporate pandering... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Good luck (Score:1, Interesting)
I think that the Great Firewall is something like a high fence with lions behind it. You can easily jump over it, but most of those who do gets eaten, so the rest is less inclined to even try.
Re:Just more corporate pandering... (Score:3, Interesting)
However, given China's recent history, I'm not even sure they're wrong. The country went through a lot of chaos before the Communists took things over and got the country settled down. I've talked to people old enough to have been around a fair bit before the Communists gained control and I've never heard anyone say that they wish things hadn't turned out the way they did.
Re:A political trojan horse (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What kind of stupid question is this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, No.
First, the Olympics won't do much except to bring a bunch of well-fed non-Chinese speaking tourists to Beijing. These are only unlike well-fed Chinese-speaking tourists in the sense that they, well, won't speak Chinese.
China has a large middle class and a lot of rich idiots. The only difference is that there are a lot more poor folks in China than there are of the first two, which brings those "average income" numbers down. It's not like this will be the first chance Beijingren will have to see someone who hasn't skipped a meal recently.
Second, and I have to be very measured in what I say here, you need to understand something about the "cultural DNA" of China. The West, especially the US, is a very individualistic society. We will put up with a certain quantity of crime, homelessness, etc. as a consequence of this individualism. This isn't a "god damn America" indictment. It's a deal we've all made with each other. We like our personal freedoms, and have decided to accept a certain level of the bad in order to get the good. What tinkering is done with our social safety net is done with this background.
Chinese society comes from a more collectivist background. This does not mean that Chinese like repression, or will always reflexively listen to elders and betters. However, it does mean that there is an expectation that the state will provide public order. In short, in the interest of maintaining a well-ordered society, you can give up a little individual freedom.
Many of my in-laws from Taiwan (a free, democratic, thoroughgoingly capitalist Chinese society) find American culture to be strange and alien. The big houses and the lawns are nice, as is the open space and clean air, but what's up with all these people staggering around downtown drunk and drugged out of their mind with nowhere to sleep? Don't they have family to take care of them or something? Why on earth do they allow anyone to go to a store and buy a gun? Doesn't that encourage criminals? Isn't someone going to write a law to stop this?
Even when I talk to people in China (who have some incomplete knowledge of what the US is like), you get some interesting discussions about how the world should be put together.
Chinese taxi driver: "American houses are very big, and you have lots of land with them. That must be really nice."
Me: "Yes, but the other side of that is that it's not very convenient. You need a car to go to the market, or to visit friends, or to go out to eat."
Driver: "So you can't just walk to all of those things?"
Me: "No. They're often several kilometers away."
Driver: "Oh, that's no good at all. I wouldn't like that a bit."
Assuming that life in the USA is the apogee of human civilization and that all societies will inherently want to move in that direction as quickly as possible displays ignorance at best and arrogance at worst. Get out and see a bit of how things are put together elsewhere before making assumptions about what other people want.
Re:A political trojan horse (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't see a contradiction with saying that nothing justifies imperialism while simultaneously justifying it?
The notion that we can't criticize human rights failings because we ourselves aren't 100% perfect serves no one besides the oppressive regimes of the World.
Where did I advocate for 'policing' this situation? All I said was that the World doesn't owe China a free ride. Personally I won't be watching the Olympics and I'm considering trying to setup a boycott of any company that sponsors them. I see a bit of a difference between 'policing' and refusing to do business with companies that are profiting from the Olympics. I see a bit of a difference between 'policing' and refusing to attend the opening ceremonies.
It also doesn't justify treating them like a mature member of the community of nations -- or do you not believe that they should be held to the same standards (starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) as everybody else?
Re:Just more corporate pandering... (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading posts like this, and seeing hundreds of Chinese protest outside Tous Les Jours, a bakery chain here in Beijing, because they thought it was French (hint: it's Korean!) just makes me wonder how diplomacy between different countries ever works. It's all a bunch of chauvinistic cheerleading for whatever country you happened to be born in, with stretching of and invention of facts and a complete disregard of the views of the other part. Chinese people know they don't have a proper democracy. They don't mind this fact as much as Westerners want them to. Now I'll go back to try to convince Chinese people of the benefits of Western democracy and that the Western media is not a single-faceted entity/hate machine directed at discrediting China, but in fact allows for having several different opinions...
Back on the subject of the Great Firewall, I'm posting from behind it, and I don't know any internet user here who does NOT know how to activate a proxy of some sort for the sites that aren't available.
Re:Just more corporate pandering... (Score:4, Interesting)
See the Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism [rense.com]. The U.S. is showing all of the symptoms. Beware of 6 and 14: these are key to making all of the others possible.
Re:A political trojan horse (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought the Civil War has already decided the de facto stance the US has regarding secession of states? States are basically allowed self-rule, up to the point of seceding, and then all hell breaks loose.
Not so different from Tibet.