Kev
01-25-2006, 05:53 PM
We may take surfing the internet for granted but if you’re Chinese, roaming cyberspace can be risky if you don’t stick to the political straight and narrow.
For westerners working here it’s a pain. Emails just vanish or arrive weeks later. Many of your most useful websites get banned for a few days or a few weeks and some are never allowed to be accessed.
But for China’s hundred million internet users, there can be more serious things to consider. Just the simple act of sitting down at you computer and typing in comments that are critical of the government can get you in a lot of trouble. Chinese authorities are paranoid about controlling information. Not surprisingly it’s terrified by the internet.
There are an estimated 30,000 internet police snooping on what Chinese internet users are doing - an army of thought police straight out of George Orwell’s 1984. Added to that are huge banks of servers all filtering content and looking for contentious material. It’s what they call the "Great Firewall of China". And now being added to that formidable internet control machine are the biggest western names on the internet.
A few weeks ago, from the comfort of its headquarters in America Microsoft removed the blog of a Chinese blogger after the Chinese government complained to Microsoft that he was posting objectionable political material. Worse than that, another Chinese man was jailed for ten years, after Yahoo gave Chinese authorities his name after he’d been writing critical material on the internet.
Google’s slogan is “Don’t be Evil” and its mission is to make as much information available as possible. It says it’s better to provide restricted information than be banned from china and provide none at all. But it’s a bizarre world where one of the world’s biggest champions of free speech effectively teams up with the world’s biggest censor.
What do YOU think about the Great Firewall of China? Post your comments.
For westerners working here it’s a pain. Emails just vanish or arrive weeks later. Many of your most useful websites get banned for a few days or a few weeks and some are never allowed to be accessed.
But for China’s hundred million internet users, there can be more serious things to consider. Just the simple act of sitting down at you computer and typing in comments that are critical of the government can get you in a lot of trouble. Chinese authorities are paranoid about controlling information. Not surprisingly it’s terrified by the internet.
There are an estimated 30,000 internet police snooping on what Chinese internet users are doing - an army of thought police straight out of George Orwell’s 1984. Added to that are huge banks of servers all filtering content and looking for contentious material. It’s what they call the "Great Firewall of China". And now being added to that formidable internet control machine are the biggest western names on the internet.
A few weeks ago, from the comfort of its headquarters in America Microsoft removed the blog of a Chinese blogger after the Chinese government complained to Microsoft that he was posting objectionable political material. Worse than that, another Chinese man was jailed for ten years, after Yahoo gave Chinese authorities his name after he’d been writing critical material on the internet.
Google’s slogan is “Don’t be Evil” and its mission is to make as much information available as possible. It says it’s better to provide restricted information than be banned from china and provide none at all. But it’s a bizarre world where one of the world’s biggest champions of free speech effectively teams up with the world’s biggest censor.
What do YOU think about the Great Firewall of China? Post your comments.