Far Eastern Economic Review | China's Holistic Censorship Regime - The Diigo Meta page

• 19 May 08
  

  dan maertens

  Hoe werkt de censuur: band tussen mediabedrijven en CCP

• 17 May 08
  

  beth gourley

  Overview of how censorship works and its power over society, and how it is 'almost impossible to understand what the average Chinese person might “really” think."
  Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.feer.com%2Fessays%2F2008

  china censorship

  • can only loosely be termed censorship
  • There are no facts that exist independently of their significance in the social contract.
  • Thus, residence in China is not unlike working at a strongly cultured company, e.g., a Disney or Starbucks.
  • China insists that both individuals and organizations conflate their social, economic and political roles, creating significant inefficiencies and distortions for businesses.
  • almost impossible to understand what the average Chinese person might “really” think.
  • key principle that makes the whole system work is uncertainty
  • authorities’ legal tools are surveillance, arrest and imprisonment.
  • often the “legal” apparatus is deployed as a form of intimidation
  • government uses processes like approval of business licenses to keep information channels within trusted hands.
  • In print, the government controls the bar codes that printers must have in order to print legally, and nothing may go to press without the bar code. Nor may any book or periodical be distributed without the CN or ISBN code owned by a government agency
  • Internet has posed a particular challenge

  • a bias toward technical means of control.  

     
  • fall into three broad categories:
  • blocking and redirects
  • filtering,
  • covert attacks on specific sites, groups, or individuals
  • interference are propagated across a four-tier structure
  • Tier 1, are the telecommunication operators that control the main interconnection points between China’s backbone networks and the gateways to the international communications system
  • Tier 2 are somewhere between 15 to 20 large data centers operated by telecom operators
  • Tier 3 include the licensed service providers, of which there are hundreds
  • Tier 4 is all the local office and housing networks and Internet cafes, numbering in the hundreds of thousands
  • What tends to create Internet delays in China,
  • information control commands a higher priority than commercial efficiency.
  • incompetence
  • extravagant amount of human intervention required to implement all the rules boosts costs for China’s Internet. This partly explains why telecommunications costs roughly 10 times the amount it does in the United States and Europe.
  • most fascinating layer of the propaganda system is the political one.
  • operates something like a fraternity,
  • suggestion that Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang or another ethnically differentiated region might be better served by more autonomy from China proper is the cardinal, excommunicable sin.
  • government leaders’ personal lives is next
  • Growth opportunities are given to companies in accordance with their willingness to cooperate.
  • must provide coverage of China
  • “soft” inducements added over time
  • As we know from our political catechism, continuing one-party rule and maintaining social stability are really exactly the same thing.

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