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China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article
- untog 14y agoWell, at least we know the article is telling the truth now.
- Claudus 14y agoI was only motivated to read the original article after I saw it had been blocked.
- erynvorn 14y agoAnd it is not blocked in Hong Kong! Still one country, two rules...
- apaprocki 14y agoAnd even when they blocked Bloomberg, the articles could still be read by anyone in China with a Bloomberg terminal..
- jbigelow76 14y agoIf you have a Bloomberg terminal an article about money accumulation isn't going to be the type of article that would bother you.
- mdda 14y agoBut 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.
- gwern 14y agoBut 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.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/incorruptibly_e....
- matthewrudy 14y agoMany people here in Hong Kong don't regard themselves to be part of China. We have our own legal, visa, financial, and political system. Although Beijing occasionally steers the political system, censorship of any kind usually ends up in protest. I can't imagine what would happen if they tried to do censor the internet here.
- 46Bit 14y agoFor that reason it's the one sort-of-part of China I'd actually like to visit one day soon - me and a lot of others I think.
- viviantan 14y agoHong Kong's awesome. Love the food, love the people, love the incredible cityscape, love everything :) I heard that Beijing's trying to phase out the Cantonese language in Hong Kong. Has it been enforced?
- bduerst 14y agoDoubtful - last I checked they were trying to shift the financial center from Hong Kong to Shanghai.
- barry-cotter 14y agoI 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.
- viviantan 14y agoMatthewrudy 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 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.
- wildmXranat 14y agoWell 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.
- Shenglong 14y agoThat'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.
- busyant 14y agoIt'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. Is that really such a stretch?
- zhoutong 14y agoThe 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.
- rhizome 14y agoYes, it is a stretch, and that stretch actually has a well-established name: strawman.
- untog 14y agoI will admit that my reply was a little snarky. But I will tend to presume bodies that engage in widespread censorship are guilty.
- rhizome 14y agoOf censorship, sure.
- starpilot 14y agoNo. We just know the article is unflattering.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoI 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."
- Claudus 14y agoSo, 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."
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Vivtek 14y agoNo, 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.
- nitrogen 14y agoThe 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.
- w1ntermute 14y ago> 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.
- jcromartie 14y agoIt happens in pockets of the US, too: Jerry Falwell's conservative Liberty University did a very similar thing. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-overload/post/falwells-liberty-university-blocks-newspaper-web-site/2011/04/13/AFLYNJXD_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-overload/post/fal... EDIT: mircocosm was a poor word choice
- secalex 14y agoLiberty University is in no way a "microcosm of the US". If anything, it is a Christian version of the Islamic Republic, hidden in Virginia.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- tellme 14y agoif 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.
- jcromartie 14y agoYou're right. I chose a poor word there. I meant that they are a pocket of this kind of ideology in the US (retaliatory censorship).
- danielweber 14y agoLiberty is a private university, and its students choose to attend knowing full-well its policies. (And it blocks a lot more than WaPo.) FIRE and the Virginia ACLU both agree with Liberty's right to do so: http://thefire.org/article/10717.html http://thefire.org/article/10717.html You are, of course, free to criticize LU for its policies.
- est 14y agoChina is a private country, the whole fucking nation owns debt to the greate Communist Party.
- udonmai 14y agoI just want to say ... 呵呵
- kaptain 14y agoCan someone post a mirror or the content of the article? I'm in China.
- BCM43 14y agoThis one: http://pastebin.com/mT0e2uFH http://pastebin.com/mT0e2uFH Original: http://pastebin.com/Vaani5BE http://pastebin.com/Vaani5BE
- wilfra 14y agoDear god, get a VPN. I used strongvpn.com when I lived in China, worked great. There are many others.
- woodhull 14y agoAgreed. I think the set of people who read HN from China and do not have a VPN account would probably consist of just this one person.
- evoxed 14y agoSome 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).
- vorg 14y agoYour 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?
- duxup 14y agoI was reading that article last night thinking... this is gonna get blocked.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bluekite2000 14y agoNow I m anxiously waiting for one written for Vietnam. I lived there for a few years and the 2 countries closely resemble each other
- bennyfreshness 14y agoHonestly, 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.
- wilfra 14y agoThe 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.
- tokenizer 14y agoNot just in China, I'm sure if this was AlJazeera being blocked in the US the majority of Americans wouldn't care as well.
- codewright 14y agoThat'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.
- kooshball 14y ago>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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ImprovedSilence 14y agoYeah, 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.
- zschallz 14y agoLooks like its no longer blocked in China... http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/index.php?siteurl=www.nytimes.com http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/index.php?siteurl=www.ny...
- codyZ 14y agoI'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....
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoIts 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.
- ethana 14y agoThe Times should not just only be blocked in China. Serious.
- thomasfl 14y agoChina blocked Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation's sites two years ago when the Nobel commitee awarded Liu Xiaobo the peace prize.
- hastur 14y agoThat block only proves NYT was right. Wen Jabao might just as well have said - yeah, I stole it.
- jonathanyc 14y agoLoving the racist comments on HN these days.
- arbuge 14y agoSo it has been, so it always will be. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- blrgeek 14y agoOne 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!
- kaitian521 14y agoAs a Chinese, I want to say that the hosts file to facebook or titter,as same as google.com（google.com.hk） is not available any more because of the National People's Congress ‘s approching. Most Chinese are willing to join in the Communist Party because they want to be superior to who dose not--- every Chinsese want to be unequal...for example, i worked in a big 3 software cop in beijing, where nine of ten of my fellows are Communist members. God loves America, God loves Taiwan, he dose not love China.