China Defends Online Censorship Protest

[jeffy777]

The Chinese government said Wednesday that accusations by a press freedom group that it was one of the worst culprits of systematic online censorship were "groundless" and that its citizens could freely access the Internet.

China was one of 13 countries singled out by Reporters Without Borders in a 24-hour online protest against Internet censorship. The others were: Belarus, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

"We find these accusations groundless," said an officer at the Chinese Foreign Ministry's spokesperson's office who declined to be named according to department policy.

"The Chinese enjoy free access to the Internet and they can have the information they need. Currently, the information the Chinese people get is far more than before the introduction of the Internet in this country."

China has the world's second-largest population of Internet users after the United States, with more than 123 million people online. Though the communist government promotes Internet use, it has also set up an extensive surveillance and filtering system to prevent Chinese from accessing material considered obscene or politically subversive.

...

But the Paris-based group, Reporters Sans Frontieres in French, said in its annual report that out of 61 people worldwide who have been imprisoned for posting what the respective countries claimed was "subversive" content, 52 were in China.

Earlier this year, the Chinese government denied that anyone has been arrested for Internet postings, despite a series of dissidents jailed in recent years for online comments criticizing corruption and calling for democratic change.

...

The Cuban government, Reporters Without Borders said, "ensures that there is no Internet access for its political opponents and independent journalists, for whom reaching news media abroad is an ordeal."

The punishment for writing "a few counterrevolutionary articles" for foreign Web sites can be years in prison, it said.

...

Nepal, Maldives and Libya have been removed from Reporters Without Borders' annual list of Internet enemies. But there's an addition to the list, Egypt, where it said "many bloggers were harassed and imprisoned this year."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...n2164867.shtml

We can be thankful for the online freedoms we enjoy. The Chinese are the second-largest population of Internet users, yet sadly they only see what the government allows. And now Egypt is beginning to follow.

[BlaRo]

China's Internet censorship isn't defined outright; some sites that were blocked yesterday are suddenly free today, and may be blocked again tomorrow. Wikipedia is blocked, but its mirror answers.com isn't, but might be now. If you try to go to Wikipedia, for example, the page times out: there's no explicit "THIS IS BLOCKED BY THE COMMIES" message, but it's pretty convenient for them, isn't it? That's how the Great Firewall of China works, and for the officials to deny its existence is both pathetic yet unsurprising at all.

There are some ways of circumventing the censorship, by using Google English instead of Google.cn, but thanks to the Firewall these foreign websites load far slower than their Chinese counterparts. Sometimes they don't load at all, figures.

My father told me a story. A person he knows works at a factory, and one of its employees saw an interesting article about the Chinese government that he posted on his blog. This happened at midnight. 3 hours later, two vans full of police were banging on his door, demanding his arrest. Luckily, the blogger was sent on his way after some explanations, but some haven't been so lucky (the guy in the story, Hao Wu, was released in July).

Seriously, if China needs to be taken seriously they need to end this immediately. This is the 21st century, not the Qin Dynasty's book burning. Censorship's always been in Chinese history, though.

[///M]

Glad they put Egypt on that list. Brings some attention to the harassment of bloggers and activists in general committed by the Mubarak regime through Central Security thugs.