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posted by mrpg on Saturday July 15 2017, @11:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the people's-republic-of-censorship dept.

Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo died in custody on Thursday. Now comes the censorship:

After Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident and 2010 Nobel Peace laureate, died in custody on Thursday evening, his Chinese admirers went online to voice their sympathy and grief — and countless government censors buckled down for a long night's work.

The Chinese government's drive to silence discussion of Liu — who died of liver cancer at age 61 — predates even 2009, when he was handed an 11-year sentence for helping draft Charter 08, a document calling for multiparty democracy and freedom of speech. On Chinese social networks, searches for "Liu Xiaobo" return nothing, and most Chinese citizens barely know his name.

Yet on Friday, China's social media sites were filled with expressions of solidarity and grief, suggesting that Liu's case — and his ideals — may be more influential in China than many outsiders believe. These expressions were often cryptic and muted — snatches of poetry, allegorical quotes — but still, the censors responded in force.

On Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, they deleted photos of Liu and his wife, Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest since Liu's arrest, though she has never been charged with a crime. They blocked flickering candle emojis, the letters RIP and LXB, and the dates "1955-2017," the years of Liu's birth and death. They removed poems by Liu and Liu Xia; photos of the South African revolutionary Nelson Mandela, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1993; and even the phrase: "someone died today."

"I think this kind of pokes a hole in the narrative that he's not well known in China," said William Nee, a Hong Kong-based researcher at Amnesty International. "I don't know if I'd characterize this as a paradigm shift. But it might be that some of the seeds he'd started to plant — or, the ideas in Charter 08 — have started to bear fruit among the rights defense community, and they're becoming more well known and are spreading among parts of the general public."

[...] Yet Friday's outpouring of support also exposed some of the censorship apparatus' weaknesses. On Friday, "LXB" was censored, but "XB" was not. The Chinese word for candle — 蜡烛 — was censored, but adding a space between the characters — 蜡 烛 — brought up several results, many related to Liu's death.

This editorial will set you straight.


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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:19AM (3 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:19AM (#539847) Journal

    Is it the Irish or Scots that have the anti-Muslim immigrants sentiments?
    Otoh, it's likely common all over the west by now.

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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:33AM (2 children)

    by RamiK (1813) on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:33AM (#539850)

    The way it's perceived is that, post-Brexit, staying with the UK means less immigrants. Leaving the UK means an uncertainty between being part of the EU that lets the immigrants and refuges in or going independent and suffering the economic consequences. There's enough (old) people that prefer sticking to what they know as well as enough (young) people who are more concerned with the immigrants then with the English to sway the vote either way depending on current events.

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    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:52AM (1 child)

      by kaszz (4211) on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:52AM (#539855) Journal

      What do you think of the possibility that a giant part of EU simple breaks free and forms a new union. Ie the Baltic states, Visegrad countries, Britain, Nordic countries, Switzerland, Austria ..?
      Many of them are high performers and connected. This would free them from a lot of baggage.

      The ugly consequence is that it would form a Europe A and B team.

      • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday July 16 2017, @12:52PM

        by RamiK (1813) on Sunday July 16 2017, @12:52PM (#539879)

        There's so many financial tools compared to the actual production and exports of goods that "high performers" becomes a dubious term for EU members. Money gets swapped around so debts are kept off the books. Food prices are kept below production costs as EU - rather than local - subsidies make up the difference. Turks and Poles live in Germany, work in a processing nickel from Greece, to produce electronics sold by France and Denmark. All the while, the UK is making up it's trade off intermediary taxation between the EU market and everyone else... So now with Brexit and the recession of worldwide shipping, they're in a trade deficit.

        Overall, breaking up the EU is very hard. A lot of symbiosis everywhere with plenty of corruption gluing it all up together. It's not impossible for it to break, it's just hard to predict seeing how there's so much going below the table...

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