China Shutting Down Bloggers
From Business Week Online’s Blogspotting, it appears that China is shutting down bloggers that are critical of the government. Is this new news? After Tiananmen Square you would think that this kind of behaviour would be old hat.
I posted a huge list of 236 reserved “keywords” that the Chinese Government uses in its web filtering process to stop its citizens from viewing. So to me, looking at this a day after, I’m hardly surprised at C|Net’s article, this is the opening excerpt:
Two of China’s most adventurous Web logs closed on Wednesday under government orders, the latest in a wave of shutdowns as Chinese censors tighten controls in cyberspace, especially while the national parliament meets.
The two Chinese bloggers in question are Beijing-based journalist Wang Xiaofeng who blogs under the name Dai San Ge Biao, and Yuan Lei, another reporter at Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis News, whose blog is named Milk Pig.
As the C|Net article points out – these acts of government censorship coincide with the annual 10-day meeting of the Chinese parliament. Obviously the Chinese government would like to have nothing mar their model meeting, we should expect more bloggers to be taken offline in lieu of these two shutdowns.
There is no news as to whether these two government-critical bloggers have been arrested or detained, but since the Chinese Government does have a large army of censorship police, and has a history of jailing brave Internet bloggers, it might be a possibility.
Since the Chinese have indicated that they want to control their own Top Level Domain (TLD) using chinese characters instead of english characters (.cn), it would seem that George Orwell’s 1984 isn’t just an act of fiction, but a blueprint for a society that is growing rapidly in world power.
So what are your thoughts? Do you think this system these Chinese have in place will last? Will they succeed in controlling every aspect of their citizen’s lives? Will the world do anything other than pay lip service to an economy that makes their own run smoothly? Is there anything we, single people, can do to help?
0