27 September 2007

China and web content control

One of the long terms issues related to the Internet is the desire of some governments to manage the content that its residents/citizens may view.  There are many reasons for this; without getting into a long discussion about what may be appropriate or not, we can generically say that these content controls are intended as an expression of social (or at least governmental) preferences.  These controls can take many forms, such as preventing the sale of Nazi memorabilia in Europe, controlling Internet gambling in the US, etc.

China has been widely criticized for its Internet content control, which has been said to suppress dissent.  This item points to a more nuanced analysis of these content controls.  Is self regulation due to fear of reprisals better than explicit governmental control?

3 comments:

alecwmu said...

In my opinion the Chinese government should not restrain what Chinese people can say on the web, as human beings they have the right to express all what they think, but on the other hand,i wonder what are the limits of freedom of speech??

I cannot really say what the government is doing is wrong, because maybe they are only trying to protect their nationalism, with as less outside influence as possible, but on the other hand they are not allowing their citizens to explore other ways of living.

Besides if they do not allow people to express what they feel or how they feel about the way their country is being ruled, how they as the government can know what the people really needs and what changes are really needed. what is more, if they are applying auto-censorship in their national servers, I'm sure people is aware that there are servers in other countries, all what they have to do is find a way to get to them. People cannot be restrained forever!!!


web control is not a right decision, people always find a way to overcome restrictions.

I would really like to know how Chinese people feel about this.

seongbong_lee said...

I wonder whether the web content control innitiatiated by the government only will be successful or not. On the contrary, it is very sure that the social cost caused by incessant hide and seek gets higher and higher.

In ancient China, they experienced similar historical pain, which was burning books on the Chinese classics and burying Confucian scholars alive in order to zip up the public's voices.

The next coming Olympics in 2008 will probably trigger the people's (netizen's) need to unshackle the gag which refrains the speech of freedom from maintaining the particular political regime.

As to certain activities of the government to regulate the internet-related trancactions or contents, I am attaching(linking) an article below written by J.Kobrin. This article points out some unique elements to be considered during the process of regulation implementation.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0047-2506%28200134%2932%3A4%3C687%3ATATGOC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F

From Seongbong_Lee
A student at Information Technology Application Class by Prof. Hwang.

YUN DU said...

ok, i want to answer jesus' question. i am a chinese student who just arrived in pittsburgh.
i know--i think all the chinese people know--that chinese government filters the information which has bad infuence on the communist party. i think it is only just politics, and does not influence the regular life in China.
in the past, especially in the 60s, chinese people cannot express their ideas easily, but now, after china opened the door to the world, the environment of politicsbecomes better than before, we all know that is not enough, but we also see the chinese government makes their efforts to be democrocy.
so i think we just need time, and need time to progress.
nothing is more important than the problem of 1.3 billion having food.

we just need time!