11 ms·
China's instructions on reporting on Google
- mattcoolidge 17y agoIt seems as if this Google-China row is indicative of a larger trend taking shape: the divorce of Western capitalist enterprises and the Chinese government. There was an article saying as much in yesterday's Wapo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/23/AR2010032302487.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03...). It will be interesting to see how this affects other Western companies suffering under censorship issues there--I heard something about Godaddy possibly pulling out of there as well.
- MikeCapone 17y agoWe all knew they were doing this, but for some reason, reading the actual guidelines is chilling. I can only imagine the people who wrote this and expanded lots of mental energy in trying to make sure that their propaganda/censorship plan was as airtight as possible...
- va_coder 17y agoTo me it's also chilling that the US owes a country like this 1 Trillion dollars in debt. Also related, I think Google is f@$# awesome for standing up and doing what's right.
- raquo 17y agoSorry, but why is that chilling? The other way round seems like more potential trouble. upd: thanks, dsplittgerber
- dsplittgerber 17y agoTheir government wealth fund holds one of the largest USD reserves in the world, if not the largest. Theoretically, they could threaten to quickly unload it and send the USD tumbling if they don't get their way with some policy. Realistically, that won't happen, as the yuan is still pegged to the USD and the US is one of the largest importers of chinese stuff. It's not that far-fetched to think of some other worrying scenarios, though.
- rortian 17y agoYes, it is in fact far fetched. They are powerless to do anything about their dollar reserves without losing substantial amounts of wealth.
- dpatru 17y agoAs Peter Schiff has noted, if US dollar tumbles, holders of the dollar will be hurt, but the US itself will be wiped out. The situation is analogous to a stock market bubble. Holders of stocks with inflated values are hurt when the stocks lose their value, but the over-valued companies themselves go bankrupt. Furthermore, China would be better off if it consumed more of what it produces rather than sell it to Americans for American dollars and government bonds.
- geoffc 17y ago
- Neon2012 17y agoIt's odd that certain societies don't value discovering or reporting the truth, but instead attempt to create it.
- MikeCapone 17y agoDon't confuse a whole society with the people who hold power (and thus control the guys with the weapons).
- ahk 17y agoUnless I'm mistaken a majority of Chinese actually support their government and matters such as this are viewed through the prism of nationalism. One could argue it's because of the education/brain-washing but the facts remain.
- grandalf 17y agoMuch as opposition to it by people in the US is viewed through the prism of nationalism.
- Groxx 17y agoBecause the rest of the world doesn't like free speech? Americans may throw the term around more often, but I wouldn't equate holding it important to nationalism. If anything, American nationalism has forced free speech on America, not the other way around (and yes, I'm aware of the many failures. Not saying it's perfect).
- grandalf 17y agoIn America there is not any particular issue that is so contentious that free speech is actually curtailed. But there is tremendous social pressure for people to voluntarily curtail certain forms of speech. If the US had a less stable society, chances are certain kinds of speech would be considered more dangerous, and we'd progress from certain forms being considered socially inappropriate to being banned outright. This has happened in our past... and the usual framing of it is that we've progressed past such mistakes. In reality the pressures that force such things have abated. China still faces these pressures...
- raquo 17y agoNote how it's written in a totally non-bureaucratic language. You don't need it when everyone is afraid of you. Just make sure you're understood.
- va_coder 17y agoRight there's no spin, just clear instructions on stifling free speech.
- Estragon 17y agoI expect that's more a function of the translation, or of how Chinese bureaucratic language works.
- raquo 17y agoI can't read the "original" text in Chinese, but it is also very short. However, it could be shortened on purpose, so that the leak would be harder to track.
- Frazzydee 17y agoI found the other set of instructions, regarding a truck overturning & magazine's public letter, interesting. Anybody know the source and original Chinese text? The article only says it was "issued by the 'Ministry of Truth' on March 23, 2010"
- plinkplonk 17y agowait for the Chinese Communist Party apologists to turn up and argue that "China is not yet ready for democracy" and "The Communist party is doing this to help protect the Chinese people from evil Western imperialists" any moment now :-P . More seriously, I think the coming years maybe the first time in the last century or so that an iron fisted autocracy becomes the dominant economic power in the world. Interesting times ahead.
- grandalf 17y agoThankfully Google has announced that it will be furthering the anti-censorship cause by hosting a Wikileaks server.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dsplittgerber 17y agoThis certainly speaks for itself and is a drastic measure. Be aware of a strong anti-chinese bias in the general US media, though. James Fallows (spent some years in China as senior editor for The Atlantic and has written lots of articles about China) has often argued that it's not as extreme of a picture as is often presented in the mainstream media. The Chinese government has relaxed quite a topics of regulation in the last years (e.g. introduced some kind of property laws for farmers, for the first time ever) and it can be argued that they have indeed helped several hundred million people rise out of extreme poverty, the most in the world. China is just really intend on tightly controlling a few important parts of society, public opinion being one of them. Chinese society in general can probably be said to place more importance on getting out of poverty and growing into materialism than fighting for individual rights with a 'dubious material value' to them.
- smallblacksun 17y agoI'm not going to applaud China for being ever so slightly less evil than they used to be.
- dsplittgerber 17y agoYou could applaud them for helping several hundred million people get out of extreme poverty, a grand social experiment if there ever was one. I know it's easy to take the moral high ground here, just think about if any other country recently has accomplished something remotely similar. You probably cannot accomplish such a feat by going from socialism to capitalism in a day (simplified).
- rortian 17y agoWhat you assert is hard to square with things like this: >China’s remarkable economic development has gone hand in hand with the rise in nepotism which has powerfully distorted the distribution of its benefits. As a result, China’s wealth is concentrated in only a very small share of the population. In fact, despite enormous GDP growth, a large share of the population is not much better off from a decade ago. The book “Capitalism with Chinese characteristics” by Huang Yasheng demonstrates using detailed quantitative analysis that China’s state-directed economic policies since the 1990s are essentially anti-poor. Huang’s book attributes Shanghai’s strong GDP performance not to indigenous private enterprise but rather to state-controlled (and subsidized) corporations and their foreign partners, with the gains flowing to the state – and their favored business people – and overseas rather than to the general population. In fact, Huang documents how Shanghai actively discriminates against private enterprise to protect well-connected state-owned enterprises. When the state plays a bigger role in the process of development, politicians are inclined to rent-seeking. As a result, corruption in China is pervasive. With unethical business practices so common at home, it is unsurprising that such behavior would carry over to its companies’ operations overseas. http://www.cipe.org/blog/?p=2844 http://www.cipe.org/blog/?p=2844 China's growth has been extraordinary put don't imagine that it is some sort of massive poverty reduction program. The party controls massive amounts of the economy and is profoundly corrupt.
- maxklein 17y agoSometimes people ask me: why do you support China? My answer is this: Every economic development has been accompanied by huge misery and death. In Africa, South America, India, etc. When you stop shaking hands with the upper class business men and go live with the poor, you'll understand suffering. I prefer that the people lose a bit of freedom, but they have to suffer less. Those who disagree - at least be sure you have once actually been in that situation. Don't live your life in comfort and then forget that this thing you demand called freedom of speech also has always meant people dying in the streets. You are the people that would have said in Rwanda: don't block the radio stations calling for people to be murdered - speech should be free. I've been in Africa, I've been in China, I've been in South America, in the U.S and in Europe. I've seen the dead people, I've hung around with freedom loving geeks, I've talked to favela children. And after all that, I have chosen that I prefer that the people get educated and rich at the expense of free speech. I'd much rather see a blocked website than dead child.
- plinkplonk 17y ago"I'd much rather see a blocked website than dead child." False Dichotomy. The Chinese Communist party came to and maintained power over millions of people killed for ideological reasons. Dissidents are still killed for daring to think differently. Every dictatorship and autocracy warns of chaos and unpeakable bad things that will happen if its benevolent "guidance" and secret police and gulags are set aside and people could believe and speak as their consciences dictate . And some fools buy into this sophistry and support them to avoid a hypothetical violent future. It helps when you are profiting off such oppression somehow (say, by feeding off artificially depressed wages and currency and being chummy with the opressors) Nice rhetorical trick with Rwanda radio ;-)
- maxklein 17y agoThe party in china does not kill people. You say it does, but there are no reports saying that. You've just bought into propaganda. Talk about the present day (2000+) party, not about the past. Because if we're talking about the past, the EU killed millions of people in gas chambers, and the US divided people by the color of their skin and condemmed those with the wrong color to permanent slavery. I have SEEN the chaos that the freedom you want has caused. The chinese mode of non-freedom has not caused that. Let me give you just a little example: In India people are burnt to death for being witches or for theft. This does not happen in china. There is real violence in most developing countries of the world. In china, there is very little violence. If the country were loosened up, there WILL be violence. So, just observing the present, the chinese system is the system that has the least violence. And that's why I support it. If you want that freedom, are YOU going to go live in the midst of the violence? Or do you just want to condemn people to it, while you sit at your computer?
- yannis 17y agoHere is another view: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://www.chinalabs.com/html/shiyanshiguandian/20100324/32434.html&sl=zh-CN&tl=en http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h... and here is a Chinese view http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://www.chinalabs.com/html/shiyanshiguandian/20100324/32434.html&sl=zh-CN&tl=en http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h... that Google's departure will be bad for Baidu advocating that with Google's departure Baidu will have less competition and hence will not evolve properly. I picked up the links above randomly from my wife's computer (she is Chinese). I do not support any repressive regime, but I also have reservations for Google. There is a huge propaganda machine in China and a more subtle one in the USA, either we like it or not.
- BrandonM 17y agoThose instructions read eerily like a passage of 1984, namely the parts where workers are getting instructions on how to rewrite history to portray the State in an infallible, beneficial light.
- netcan 17y agoWhat struck me was the opposite, like raquo pointed out elsewhere: this is eerily non-Orwellian. Virtually no euphemisation, no wink-wink double-think. No figure it out yourself using your subtle semi-conscious understanding of the party philosophy. This is strangely conscious and straightforward, cold. I wonder what Orwell would have had to say about this.
- tjgabbour 17y agoI've seen things like that in the west... for example, in the corporate world, they're often straight to the point about disciplined damage control. Which might not sound so bad, except that corporations are so omnipresent that the media is dominated by them. (Like with this Washington Post article; both the advertisers and the media company are corpoate.) So by an analogy, I guess it feels kind of like working for a really big corporation, where everyone knows you're basically supposed to say what the bosses want, refined by specialized PR organs. (One where they don't merely control the government; they ARE the government.) Maybe China's censors get to work in pleasant offices, and have incentives like climbing the job ladder, more luxuries and status, greater pay if they move to the private sector, etc. Some might be ideologues, others cynical; maybe most just treat it like a job and they're just cogs who kind of know better but are too comfortable where they are, like the people I know about working on facial recognition for CCTV systems. But yeah, the Chinese system is a lot cruder. The cost of disobedience isn't just losing your job and healthcare; it can be jail, maybe worse.
- netcan 17y agoI wasn't commenting so much on the content as on the, for lack of a better word, style. In Orwell's world, which I believe correctly describes many real corporate, religious and government worlds, such things are emphasised, alluded to. Never directly acknowledged. People still respond as if they were given a clear, directive, but it's never said. "News recommendations should refer to Central government main media websites." should be "News recommendations should refer to accurate official sources" "Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must apply for permission ahead of time. This type of self-initiated program production is strictly forbidden." should be "Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must be recognised authorities in their field. Verify the reputation of such individuals with the appropriate sources ahead of time." If not for their content, such clear directives might be construed as the rule of law.
- adrianwaj 17y ago"3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event." "4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy." -- attacking government perceived as dirty, so must be cleaned up. So too is cheering Google, and must likewise be cleaned up. How sick.
- yumraj 17y agoAnd I thought we all were still living in the 21st century. I wonder if this is how it is in mainland China, what it must be like in Tibet..
- cglee 17y agoReading the comments here, I was expecting worse. It's funny that this reminds of a very typical corporate memo.
- code_duck 17y agoI wonder what sort of guidelines political parties in the US send to their friends in newspapers?
- davidmurphy 17y agoThe Wall Street Journal's front page interview of Sergey Brin is a must-read if you haven't already seen it. China has "made great strides against poverty and whatnot," Mr. Brin said. "But nevertheless, in some aspects of their policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704266504575141064259998090.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870426650457514... I gotta say, Sergey Brin has my total respect right now.
- btw0 17y agoAs a citizen of this country and can't do anything on this, I feel SAD.
- y0ghur7_xxx 17y agoProbably you will not be able to read this site any longer.