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Cracks in Great Chinese Firewall, even without Google
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Cracks in Great Chinese Firewall, even without Google
Emma Graham-Harrison
BEIJING
Tue Mar 23, 2010 7:48am EDT
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A man places flowers on the Google logo at its China headquarters building in Beijing March 23, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Jason Lee
BEIJING (Reuters) - Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are out, but in China's vast and bewildering online universe you can freely read the New York Times or visit a favorite porn site.
Technology | Media
People outside China who have read about Internet censorship -- thrown into the spotlight by Google's decision on Monday to close its mainland Chinese-language portal -- often imagine online life there is bleak and boring.
The reality is very different.
China's 384 million Internet users, the world's biggest online population, enjoy everything from gaming and celebrity gossip to teenage chatrooms, academic forums and illegal file-sharing sites.
English language media reports, some highly critical of Beijing, are usually as freely available as the hardcore pornographic sites the government regularly professes to crack down on.
But Twitter, Facebook and many overseas blogging sites are out because they allow rapid sharing of information, triggering the ruling Communist Party's fears of mass unrest.
Another touchy point for government censors are contested history, politics and religion.
Sites with more than cursory or officially sanctioned information about topics including the bloody 1989 crackdown on protesters around Tiananmen Square, or the banned Falun Gong spiritual cult, are usually blocked in China.
Total outage is however the weapon of last resort for a sophisticated censorship apparatus that wants to damp down dissent, while allowing room for commercial development.
First stop is media and website editors, who have a good sense of what Beijing will and won't allow, and are regularly contacted by officials with more detailed instructions on sensitive issues.
Topics can be taken off the front page of a website, the comment function can be disabled on controversial stories, or orders given to only use official state reports on some news.
Beijing is also believed by some analysts to fund a vast "50 cent" army, who roam websites making government-approved comments, and receive a tiny commission for each one.
Yet the censors' vast reach and power are shrugged off by many in China searching for anything from a favorite video on YouTube to news about a corrupt official.
In hi-tech games of cat and mouse, they try to spread blog posts faster than censors take them down, and joke about "harmonized" or deleted messages, in a satirical reference to President Hu Jintao's vision of a "harmonious society."
And for those with the inclination and money, the whole network of shut-down sites can be conjured up again through paid virtual private networks (VPN) which essentially allow them to tunnel through the great firewall at will.
(Editing by Lincoln Feast)
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See All Comments (2) | Post Comment
Mar 23, 2010 8:38am EDT
“…in China’s vast and bewildering online universe you can freely read the New York Times…”
That communist rag is on the ‘approved’ list anyway.
Lakini
Report As Abusive
Mar 23, 2010 8:56am EDT
Information censorship is very dangerous. That is how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) instigate hatred and animosity toward CNN, Google, France, as well as USA when needed. People can say bad things about several CCP officials, but there are very strict limits to this rights as soon as people step out of the boundary. Tibet, Falun Gong, the legitimacy of CCP, as well as the evil cult nature of CCP are such limits. As such, many young people born after 1990 don’t even know the Tiananman Square massacre. They don’t even know that more than 80 million Chinese died of unnatural courses since CCP took power. They think corruption in the CCP is bad but they also think CCP is their legitimate government and they will respond to CCP’s calling when needed. What they don’t realize is that they are being brainwashed by an evil cult (the Chinese Communist Party) who controls the information and topics they are allowed to access. This article is understating such a danger.
colarry
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