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from the glimpse-behind-the-Great-Firewall dept.
The Globe and Mail covers an unpublished Chinese censorship document revealing sweeping effort to eradicate online political content.
Chinese authorities have tightened their grip on the country's online broadcasting platforms, banning a long list of content – everything from tattoos to religious proselytizing, violations of "mainstream values," flirtatious dancing, images of leaders and Western political critiques – as the government seeks to stamp out any venue that could be used for dissent or behaviour it considers obscene, according to an unpublished censorship directive obtained by The Globe and Mail.
The meteoric growth of online video services in China has offered a vibrant venue for creativity and, occasionally, obscenity and political protest – unleashing a daily riptide of user-made cat videos, pranks and glimpses of everyday life. Hundreds of millions of people in China watch short video clips and live-stream video every month.
Chinese authorities have responded with strict new rules, ordering online broadcasters to eradicate a wide range of content, according to the document obtained by The Globe, which is entitled "Management requirements for live service information and content."
The document is being used as a master guideline for content blocking by some of the country's most-used video sites, multiple sources in the industry told The Globe. It began circulating early this year, and is believed to have been issued by the powerful Cyberspace Administration of China, China's central Internet authority, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Comments from Amnesty International and other organizations are included. The document outlines ten basic categories of banned content and provides insight into the Chinese government's goals.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 12 2018, @02:09PM (9 children)
Isn't that the same vision many in America have for the Internet, to eliminate wrong-think? After all, anything a man agrees with is sensible, but everything he doesn't is hate speech.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @03:15PM (3 children)
From wswswswswsws, The end of net neutrality: The US ruling elite escalates campaign of internet censorship [wsws.org]:
Emphasis mine.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday June 12 2018, @06:28PM (2 children)
These would be the proverbial interesting times, it seems...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 12 2018, @08:44PM (1 child)
When I was doing graduate work in Manchuria I made money on the side as a paid lecturer. I was trying to work that curse into one of my speeches on industrialization and modernity and asked my Chinese roommate, a PhD candidate in physics at China's equivalent of M.I.T., what the exact saying in Mandarin was and he had no idea what I was talking about. So I asked my professors in social sciences, history, and literature there and they had never heard of it either.
It turned out one of the most famous sayings people know about China and repeat often is completely fictional. No such curse or saying exists.
On a slightly related note, nobody in China says 'chop chop' either. In Mandarin people say 'kuai kuai,' which sounds nothing like 'chop chop.'
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 13 2018, @03:17AM
Thank you for confirming my suspicions. I have spent time in China too and consider myself decently familiar with Chinese culture, and I have never seen this chestnut come from anywhere but US talking heads.
"Kuai dian" is what I told taxi drivers if they needed to get a move on, but "chop-chop" seems to have attestable origins within (Pidgin) Cantonese.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday June 12 2018, @04:23PM (3 children)
And the EU as well, which is further along than the US on that hate speech game. I imagine there's a lot of people impressed worldwide with the Chinese government's ability to just do stuff: build high speed rail systems, build vast numbers of renewable energy power generators, put people in space, make new cities, build a developed world economy - just like that. But now we see the worm in the apple. It's a lot easier for that power to be used to suppress peoples' criticism of these actions than it is to do the right things.
For example, Chinese government could fix Chinese pollution, just like that (well in a couple of decades like the US and EU did), but instead they're suppressing complaints about pollution.
Sure, it's a terrible idea to let the US government get this bad, but I think the real story here is how corrupting this power is.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 12 2018, @08:33PM (2 children)
There's more than one worm in that apple, actually. The new cities they have built mostly sit empty, immediately falling down because of shoddy construction and lack of demand. The industrial capacity has come at enormous environmental and human cost (pollution in China is epic). The Three Gorges dam did the equivalent of wiping out a national treasure on the scale of the Grand Canyon. It's all according to the same approach taken during the Great Leap Forward.
Little of that is covered in the MSM in the West because China doesn't want people to know about it and because it's more useful to the power-elites in the West to variously portray China as a benign trading power or as a monolithic threat to replace the old Soviet Union.
To put it in Maoist terms, China as a rising power is one with clay feet.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 13 2018, @02:20AM (1 child)
What empty cities would they be? It's just as untrue as the interesting times quote, but everyone still believes both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 13 2018, @01:52PM
The empty cities are real. Don't be a lazy null. google it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @07:44PM
This is exactly what facetwit is doing in the rest of the world. And the clueless horde is cheering on.