I always read the Chinadaily (or globaltimes, the two big English newspapers in China) in a contrarian way. If Chinadaily denies something, then it must be true; e.g., when they denied that Beijing was going to start rationing car plates, I knew it was going to be happen (and indeed it did). That's just how things work here, why would the government work to refute a rumor that wasn't true?
NYT checked their sources and they are known for being factual (and when that is proven not the case, their is holy hell to pay and lots of people get fired). This story is probably true, all of the Chinese officials do this, no one is not corrupt; if their was someone who tried not to do this, they would be kicked out of the party on the principle that it would make everyone else look "bad" rather than "normal."
That's a completely illogical conclusion to make. Whether it is true or not, blocking a page does not imply admission of guilt. If the article was complete bullshit, they still would have blocked it.
B (Admission of guilt) -> A (Truth) is not the same as A -> B.
It's not iron-clad proof that the contents of the article are truthful.
However, if the contents were not truthful, I think you would also expect the Chinese government to forcefully deny them. There is no mention of a denial in the referenced Times article...at least as of yet.
Therefore, I think the blocking of the Times can be taken as a reasonable indicator that the Chinese government wants to hide embarrassing information.
The Chinese government is unlikely to deny claims about sensitive personal issues like this. This is especially the case if the public sentiment (both inside and outside of China) is considered. When people expect something to be true, denials can be perceived as lies and they will make things worse (for the parties being accused). The worse part is, more people will know it and more people will believe in the article.
No, it is not a logically sound argument, and is not proof. But in this world of imperfect information, sometimes you have to infer certain facts simply based on action and reaction. Also, truth (or fact) in such articles is very seldom a 1 or 0, there are many shades of it, many sides of the story. it's like there are a million other little letters between A -> B, sometimes its a guestimate where is falls on the scale. Another thing to remember, even articles appearing in the NYT are written by humans, who aware of it or not, write with some pre-bias, or with an intent.
I really, really doubt that. They pulled back on “patriotic education” which is honestly something a relatively large minority cared strongly about. If they tried to phase out Cantonese everyone who didn't move from the mainland would go ape. Also, Mandarin isn't even an official language, Cantonese and English are it.
Matthewrudy is right. The legislation for regulating Cantonese in broadcast and print media was enacted in Guangzhou, not Hong Kong. My mistake.
No politicians would say outright that they want to eliminate a major language, but they could drastically reduce its usage by imposing specific restrictions. And not just on spoken Cantonese, but variations of written Chinese other than the official simplified characters.
I wish I could post an original article here with more details, but for some reason even the bilingual news sites don't cover this story in English. Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Anti-Cantonese_regulations. The sources are all in Chinese (the only English link appears to be dead) but Google's translations weren't too bad.
But I believe that most Bloomberg terminal subscribers would argue that capitalist-style money accumulation (free markets, etc) is a good thing for an overall population, and that corruption-style money accumulation (which is the implication of the article) is a huge negative for a country.
But you can easily phrase it the other way and argue that corruption is good because it gives leadership an incentive to keep the capitalist system going instead of flipping back to Communism, and the cost of the payoff (a few hundred billion?) is far less than the increased welfare of the Chinese people (pulling hundreds of millions out of deep poverty).
Indeed, some have argued corruption is a good thing in general because people can buy what they want from the leadership instead of their running rampant over everything, which ameliorates any abuses: see for example Bryan Caplan http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/incorruptibly_e....
Well put. On my way to read it now. More on the topic though, censorship at the pressure by the government is a slippery slope we've been on for some time. There is almost
no country( citation needed ) that can vouch to be free from it.
One of the differences between India and China seems to be that in India at least, there's a free 4th estate, and there is no way a Government would be able to block articles like this.
As a matter of fact, through the Right To Information Act, there's an activist who is currently raking up dirt on a whole bunch of politicians serially.
Makes me thankful of the freedoms we enjoy and take for granted!
So, combining these two statements, it seems that they blocked both sites 30 minutes before the article was posted in Chinese?
If that's true, it's disappointing the Times didn't do a simultaneous release in anticipation of the block.
"HONG KONG — The Chinese government swiftly blocked access Friday morning to the English-language and Chinese-language Web sites of The New York Times"
"By 7 a.m. Friday in China, access to both the English- and Chinese-language Web sites of The Times was blocked (...). The Times had posted the article in English at 4:34 p.m. on Thursday in New York (4:34 a.m. Friday in Beijing), and finished posting the article in Chinese three hours later after the translation of final edits to the English-language version."
> So, combining these two statements, it seems that they blocked both sites 30 minutes before the article was posted in Chinese?
Their censors probably read the English version and preemptively blocked the Chinese site as well, (correctly) assuming a translation would be posted.
> If that's true, it's disappointing the Times didn't do a simultaneous release in anticipation of the block.
I'm not sure how helpful that would've been. It would've still given them only a few hours in the early morning before the site was blocked. And posting the Chinese version at the same time probably would've resulted in the block coming faster too.
No, the second statement says it was posted at 4:34 in English, and three hours later in Chinese (about 7:30), half an hour after it had been blocked in both versions.
The OP was saying that the original English article was posted 3 hours before the Chinese version, giving the Chinese government time to block NYT before the Chinese language version was published.
There are degrees of OK. It would be much more OK than if the government is doing it. Why? Chances are if private parties are doing it, there is some third-party that isn't, if you're willing to pay.
The point is that they used their control over the information available to their "population" to retaliate against and block journalism that revealed information unfavorable to their internal narrative.
It's not a good analogy because Liberty is a private, evangelical Christian school whose population is there by choice and China is a secular nation whose population is largely there by birth.
Those who make up Liberty's "population" are students attending by their own volition and are there specifically because they share the same cultural worldview as the institution -whatever its censorship tactics or however similar they may seem to China's.
However, in both cases the censorship is an effort to save face with their supporters. China doesn't want its Communist supporters to know how rich their party leaders are (a big no-no in communism), and Liberty doesn't want its conservative students to know that they receive massive amounts of federal money (a big no-no in American right-wing anti-government-spending rhetoric).
Obviously it's a futile effort, but it's obvious that China and Liberty both had the idea of punishing journalists and suppressing information in the same way and for the same fundamental reasons.
Am I completely crazy, or does anybody else see the obvious parallel?
Having several friends and relatives who are either attending or alumni... no, AFAIK it's pretty isolated for students without a car. Not that you can't get away, just that for most people leaving the campus isn't a daily activity. Also, I would be surprised if many of the nearby businesses had public wifi, unless there's a Starbucks I've missed.
The thing is, attendance at Liberty is non-compulsory. I'm sure it does feel like China to the more worldly of its student body, but there is no law compelling them to attend there. (Maybe family is, but that's different story ;)
I think it is very inaccurate to portray the environment and "conditions" at Liberty as a microcosm of the US, let alone as an apt comparison to the people of China being kept in the dark by their government.
Oh, I wasn't necessarily agreeing wholeheartedly with the comparison, just that some of the things we take for granted on HN aren't so simple or ubiquitous as they can be made out to be by people who know what they're doing.
Well, similarly, every Chinese person annoyed at the censorship just needs a short-wave radio to pick up global broadcasts. (unless they're jamming that frequency somehow) That doesn't make it any less bad. Personally, I have yet to own a phone with internet access.
Having access to Google Maps... there's a Starbucks (and Panera) basically next door. Granted the area isn't all that walkable and "next door" is still kind of far without a car.
if my opinion of the states was formed by the loudest voices in this year's elections, I'd think the US was a Christian version of the Islamic Republic.
I'm not sure what's worse: People thinking that Chinese nationals do not care, that they are unaware, or perhaps both. Most of the people that I know in China, who are at all, remotely informed about anything knows not to get their news from regular news channels. Particularly anyone skilled enough to setup a Weibo account. Within minutes, most news gets out anyways via Weibo (Chinese Twitter)...
In fact it was two of my Chinese friends who told me about the article this morning....
Its hard to make generalizations about 1.2 billion people from 3 or 4 data points. It is even harder if these are educated middle class Chinese in a first-tier city like Beijing or Shanghai. I'm sure this topic was shutdown on Weibo already, and you would have to be in a special circle to understand any code used to talk about the subject.
Your estimate is off by at least 100% as I don't bother with a VPN. The Firewall cracks down on them every now and then so money wasted.
The real problem with reading NYT articles isn't the Chinese Firewall anyway, it's NYT itself. About a year ago they put up their own NYT Firewall so only 20 articles a month will make it to my computer. Now it's only 10 a month. Because it's late in the calendar month (i.e. 27th), NYT wouldn't serve the page anyway.
Perhaps people criticizing the Chinese Firewall should think hard about why the NYT has a Firewall. Is the basic concept really all that different? After all, money and markets are just another form of political control, aren't they?
Some may not have had the best luck. China has been actively trying to block VPN providers as well, and even StrongVPN was apparently affected earlier in the year. Actually I'm a little surprised that they haven't gone after them harder, even if it seems pointless (since I assume the vast majority of people using them are other expats).
I'm on vacation in China right now, and my VPN isn't working in China (somehow...), so I've decided to take break from Facebook/Twitter as long as my Gmail is working - and now apparently from NYT
Pshaw, sir, pshaw, I say! The gentleman is not alone. Some of us don't even have decent home internet, let alone a VPN and must rely .upon their smartpone for sweet, sweet internet access
Honestly, I didn't really see much wrongdoing on part of the leadership, namely Wen Jiabao, as described in the article. Its mostly relatives taking advantage of political connections. Its a broken system, where the state is too closely intertwined with business. Hopefully the rumors are true and the new ruling coalition will make some progress in liberalizing the economy modeling it after Singapore's.
The truly sad part of this is most Chinese people wouldn't really mind the site being blocked because of this, nor even be all that surprised to learn what the article said. They don't get offended and angered by their government hiding things from them or abusing their power in the same way people in Western countries do, nor do they have a strong desire to learn the truth. They just accept this as the way things are.
Yes, there are exceptions, but those who feel different are in the minority.
An influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics identified, in 1981, a cultural dimension he terms "power distance", defined as "the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally".
On PDI, scaled zero to one hundred, the U.S. scores 40 and China scores 80 (Russia scores 93).
Another dimension of significance is individualism, defined as "the degree of interdependence a society maintains among its members".
On IDV the U.S. scores 91 and China 20 (Russia scores 39).
China (and Russia) value social cohesion along implicitly informative, i.e. highly contextual, information flows. Leaders are given tremendous leeway to do their jobs and are to be questioned only in cases of extreme breach of obligation, i.e. when they threaten social harmony.
Note that Russians, in surveys, explicitly prefer social stability to free speech and a free media. Chinese find the legalistic contortions American politicians have to go through to do something generally favoured as awkward and wasteful. We see allowing elites to enrich themselves off market reforms to help them buy into the idea of change as distasteful whereas from a social utilitarian perspective it's strategically kosher.
The only thing surprising to me is that Japan's number is not much higher. Their political apathy is astonishing; in my opinion there is no functioning democracy in Japan.
Call me jaded but I am surprised to see the numbers so low for a lot of countries. Perhaps the questions asked how things should be, rather than how things actually are.
If russians do indeed explicitly prefer social stability to free speech and media, then it must be an artifact of a troubled past and one where the divide between rich and poor has always been wider than europe and the americas. I think it's ingrained into their whole culture really, this kind of slave mentality which is similar almost to a serf who wouldn't dare attempt to gain his freedom for fear of starving once he'd gained it.
American individualism is hardly a natural born trait, we are all influenced by our environment. What people value and how they act in the interest of those values is what culture is all about.
While that may be true, it is also true that the environment is shaped by the people that inhabit it. Most of the people in the US come from immigrants, people who weren't afraid to set out on their own to a new place. Those kinds of people generally value individual freedoms over the stability of society.
I'm curious what the actual stats are with regards to that theory. More than a few historic immigration waves were prompted because things were so bad "back home" - for a variety of reasons including social instability - that the fear of setting out to a new place was far less than the fear of remaining. I'm not sure if that was so much an issue of individual freedom.
Examples off the top of my head would be the rise of the communist party in China and the Irish potato famine.
However, the first wave of Europeans colonists to come the US definitely did value individual freedoms over stability. I don't know how strong their influence is on the population itself, but their views are definitely reflected in the laws and historical document (e.g. The Constitution).
The short answer is that the data doesn't support generalizing the motives of American immigrants over 300 years from very diverse social, political, and economic conditions. There is no suitable generalization. The same goes for attempting to describe America's current cultural values as a single group.
Longer answer requires the gradiated initial cultural values held by every significant immigrant group (puritans, slaves, Irish, Chinese... significant defined by impact, population, whathaveyou), determining how resilient those values were when thrown into America's melting pots (assimilated? insular?), and to what extent they influenced the groups around them over time. That's a career question, though - not a HN comment that I'm underequipped to answer.
Even in the case of migration to avoid a bad situation, it's still a small minority that left whatever the old place was. The vast majority stayed there, so you've still got a tiny self-selecting population of immigrants.
The vast difference is 'Uncertainty Avoidance' - while Chines go with the flow and are able to accept Uncertainty, the Japanese will do nearly anything to avoid uncertainty. [J:92, C:30]
The second difference is in Competition/Cooperation [Masculinity/Feminity], (J:95, C:66]. Japanese society values hard work and competition and excelling in work far more than any other society.
Interestingly India and China are pretty close on PDI, MAS and UAI, with some differences in Individualism [India 48, China 20, USA 91], and Long Term Orientation [India 61, China 118, USA 29].
But cutting off freedom of information like this would be impossible.
Perhaps it has something to do with the non-homogeneity of India? There is not as much trust and social cohesion as in China perhaps, and therefore more willingness to openly question those in power.
I just checked the latest figures for the UK vs Germany. As a British citizen who spent the best part of a decade living in Germany I was surprised by how accurately they capture the cultural differences and similarities.
I think you are correct for the most part. When I lived in China, my experience was that most people felt the way that you describe or they simply were not going to embarrass their country by admitting to a foreigner that they felt that things were unjust in China. There were some persons with whom I became good enough friends for them to feel comfortable talking about politics, and among these people disappointment in their government was the dominant emotion. Some of them showed considerable shame about the treatment of Tibet, for example, though most of them had little concept of the history of the situation.
There is also a strong reaction among most Chinese people that while the Chinese themselves might not like the policies of the government, they will not stand to have an outsider -- good old waiguo guizi ("foreign devil") -- tell them their business nor criticize their country. They will handle their own problems, thank you very much. This is an attitude one finds no shortage of in the United States.
You also need to understand the general ignorance of the wider world among the populace in China.
There is the stereotypical case: Shanghai is a major tourist destination inside China. One of the many attractions in Shanghai are all the weird looking foreigners! Walk down the Bund, the main boardwalk, and you'll be stopped every ten meters for a picture. A friend of mine with a red beard was a huge hit.
Even university teachers were misinformed about the world. I would sometimes casually question them, having traveled a lot myself, on what they thought the world was like. They were certain that Beijing was as advanced as any other city in the world. Tokyo and New York were basically the same as any big city in China. They were not aware how strange the pollution is to outsiders. They did not know that in most large cities in other countries, you can see the sky.
You are the first Westerner I've read or come across that has noticed this! Most of them seem to think things like blocking internet sites matter??? To the Chinese... I don't think it does.
There also seems to be this conspiracy thinking going on as well. Chinese people see conspiracies EVERYWHERE. If an article like that is in the NY Times...
Then, to the Chinese mind... It must be the US Government "trying to keep China down."
Seriously. Whenever I'm in Ningbo these days, I just avoid talking about anything remotely political... it is an exercise in frustration.
Sigh...
I suppose we have a Tin Foil Hat crowd over here as well. However, even though in the States I will concede that that crowd is growing, I don't think it is as big percentage wise as in China.
I can remember when this was true of people in Taiwan, as I was living in Taiwan when it was still a dictatorship. But I also know people in China who have told me very explicitly, "If China had a free press, the Communist Party would only last a week." As information flows in, desire for freedom expands. The common people in China already do not enjoy "stability." By acknowledgement of the official Chinese press, instances of social instability (street protests and even riots) number in the many thousands each year, as peasants are displaced from their homes in land grabs by the local dictators, and as official corruption and party control of the police and the courts deny people recourse when their rights are violated. People I've met in China were embarrassed by the situation there already in 1982, the first time I was there, and they are losing hope that the current economic advancement is bringing with it political freedom. That is just what happened in Taiwan. People eventually gained the courage to demand their rights. I remember lots of people in both places who told me about their desire for freedom long, hard years before that freedom was won in Taiwan. Taiwan's example will point the way for people in China. They can have democracy and a free press if they stand up together.
Chinese social scientists are deeply frightened by the huge wealth disparities between the differing regions of China, which are greater than those that existed in Yugoslavia before Yugoslavia disintegrated. When you consider that barely more than half the population of China is even conversant in the standard national language,
there is plainly a lot of possibility that China will repeat its historical pattern (experienced during my mother's childhood) of being split into regions not really united by a national government with effective control of all the territory now labeled as "China."
That's not true at all. Not only are westerners rather proprietary about their freedoms, but most of the more politically engaged people I know read AlJazeera.
One of the most conservative people I know, a PoliSci major, gets a large portion of his news from AlJ. If you took that away from him he'd hoist the black flag and start slitting throats the next morning.
>That's not true at all. Not only are westerners rather proprietary about their freedoms, but most of the more politically engaged people I know read AlJazeera.
Lets be realistic. Only a small portion of Americans follow AlJ. Just like I'm sure there are small proportion of Chinese that follow western news stories about china closely. The parent post was talking about average citizens not political engaged people.
Yeah, but here's the thing about the US. It's a large enough number of people, to the point where somebody would be making noise until it was remedied. Also, I'd like to think that the US is culturally diverse enough, that there are large communities and groups of people outside the standard "white male" category who are reading AlJ, and would complain loudly if said paper was fire-walled. Lastly, hopefully there would be trusted academics and professors who would yell and howl and moan about the ethics of it. Then the stereotypical American would get involved, over the simple facts that his is America, and he loves freedom.
Are you apart of the wumao? If the US blocked AlJazeera, their would be holy hell to pay in the press. It would be a huge story and their would be huge consequences. We really value free speech that much. We might not care to read it, but if it is blocked, that would go against our principles.
If the Obama Administration started regularly deleting tweets and removing things from Google search results, a pretty big chunk of the American people would be really pissed off about that - including the Supreme Court and most Attorneys General. And people would vigorously hunt down the information that was being hidden from them. Generally speaking, this is not the case in China. The people know this is being done, don't really care and don't go out of their way to learn the truth.
Ultimately I guess thats why they can get away with it. If this were something the average Chinese person got really angry about, it would never work. They'd have another revolution on their hands.
Blargh... yes and no. Nothing torrentable is explicitely bannable in the US... it's just that some methods of attaining the media are being banned. I'm not sure but I suspect the Chinese government could ban physical copies of the NYT as well as the web portal and no one would be able to do anything about it. This is not true in the US.
You know I see this a lot: we have valid grievances in the US, absolutely. But we also need to be able to see our own issues within a greater world context. There is a massive spectrum and we should be very grateful for the freedom we have and institutions that enable it. If we conflate what we've got with places that truly have materially less freedom, we risk not being able to fight the most important battles.
The discussion is about attitudes towards censorship. The point of my comment was that Americans are willing to accept censorship, as long as it's "legal". And I think history is on my side. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_States
Press Freedom Index scores:
- United States: 14
- China: 136
Let's not lose focus of this very drastic difference. Sure 14 is too high, but it's not appropriate to bring it up in the context of China, in my opinion. But then, I shouldn't censor you, should i?
Did I claim China was freer than the US? I didn't mean to, and would have been outside the scope of the point I was trying to make.. which was American's are tolerant of censorship.
I'm sure NYT is at odds with the laws of China by publishing things that blatantly (and I'm sure falsely) accuse the ruling elite. That does not mean they should be compared. However, your argument is flawed (and you can do much better than this to prove why they should not be compared).
Why not? NYT has now been deemed "illegal" in the eyes of Chinese rulers, just as these torrent sites have been deemed "illegal" in the eyes of US rulers.
It is not deemed illegal in China, there is no transparent policy to blocking sites. If you call a Chinese ISP and ask them why Facebook isn't working, they'll tell you it must be Facebook's fault.
It's not difficult to argue that torrenting websites -- and ThePirateBay in particular -- are treated particularly harshly due to their obstinate flouting of American civil law, in addition to so quickly dismissing legal challenges to their existence.
Or more to the point it is retribution, and punitive measures are imposed as a warning to others.
I am by no means arguing for (or against) the concept of IP and the laws surrounding it, however the entire situation leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
It just blows my mind. I once discussed this issue with a tour guide in China, and his response was basically that censorship was ok, because people would just get all upset about things otherwise.
You are such an acute observer, sir. This is the most accurate description about the matter by someone not Chinese I ever read. For that you have my respect.
