Students protest restrictions on most influential BBS
(JUST UPDATED) From Sheng Cuihua’s email:
From March 16, some of the most influential University BBS (Bulletin Board System) in China, including the one of Tsinghua University (smth.org), Peking University (ytht.org) and Nanjing University (lilybbs.org), have been restricted to users with an IP inside the university only. That means public users, who make remarkable contribution to the conversation, are not able to access these BBS any more. Before, these BBS hosted very active public forums and attracted millions of registered visitors inside and outside the university. Protests have been organized around Chinese universities. People are calling it an insult on the freedom of speech, but soon their posts were deleted and their voice stifled by university administration.
(the BBS in Peking University should be Weiming (未名）BBS，ytht.org (一塌糊涂) BBS was already closed in September last year. )
This censorship action has affected hundreds of thousands of alumni and other users of those BBS across China and around the world. Protest messages have appeared all over the Chinese blogosphere. According to Chinese bloggers, starting from February 28, many university BBS managers, including bbs.fudan.edu.cn (复旦日月光华)、bbs.xjtu.edu.cn (西交兵马俑)、bbs.sjtu.edu.cn(上交饮水思源)、bbs.nju.edu.cn (南大小百合)、and bbs.pku.edu.cn (北大未名 ) have received orders from the Ministry of Education to only allow users within campus and registered with real names. On March 16, the largest university BBS, smth.org (水木清华）also made an announcement restricting off-campus users.
UPDATE on 9:00 am March 20: Reactions and commentaries on the ban are proliferating in the blogosphere. Blog posts, flickr photos, furl and del.icio.us bookmarks on the topic can now be tracked via smth tag on Technorati or Flickr. This is a very effective way to aggregate “sensitive information” through a distributive process in a politically censored cyberspace .
Thanks to
Andrea Leung for this tip.
Also, thanks to
Bill Xia for the Google Chinese News Search. 
After YTHT was closed last year, SMTH BBS became the largest university BBS in China. SMTH has existed for ten years, and usually has tens of thousands of users online at the same time. It is ranked 1440 globally by Web Search/Ranking Service Alexa. This blog post gives the background of this censorship action. Detailed text of the announcements from different university BBS are here.
The “Global Trip” blog had this post: “2005.3.18 Fete-Day for SMTH BBS. It’s a sad day today that the government forces the biggest Bulletin Board System in China closing itself to the people outside Tsinghua University. This country is closing itself, it’s suiciding.” The blog also includes photos of protests on Tsinghua campus. Danwei blog also reaprted this news at here.
POSTED COMMENTS: One Response
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The hospitals on Southern China’s Shanxia (Shenzhen) took to issuing army hard-hats and bats to doctors and nurses after protests broke out at a hospital over the mishandling of a compensation claim.
Chinese people traditionally are fearful of protesting against government run institutions. So for a family in Shanxia to be upset enough to risk getting arrested by staging a protest in a hospital says a lot about the dismal state of the system.
Now while I don’t necessarily condone pushing, shoving and spitting on people when they are simply trying to do their jobs there seems to be deeper issues here. “Harmony” cannot be achieved through “please shut-up payments” and “hardhats” rather better “customer service” and “conflict resolution” procedures would do more the trick.
As most Chinese person will tell you, their number one fear is a family member getting sick or injured. The reason that this is so terrifying is that there is an extremely wide gap in the level of service the community need and the level of services offered.
So many of my Chinese students, friends and colleagues have told me about cases where the treatment received escalated rather than assisted a patient’s illness. They also report that many doctors will coldly refuse inform them of surgical risk and medication side effects if they are not offered a hefty “tip” for their trouble. The stress induced by the poor attitudes of hospital staff is incredible.
As one doctor said to me prior to treatment last year “your stay in hospital could be expensive or cheap, it’s up to me if you’d like to offer me something I’d arrange to help make your stay as inexpensive and comfortable as possible”.
The reforms of the 1980s ended cradle-to-grave welfare promised to the masses forty years ago at the start of the Cultural Revolution.
Hospitals are getting more advanced, more expensive but with these positive reforms attitudes of upper management and medical staffs are not showing similar improvement.
Several of my Chinese friends are doctors and cite low salaries, being understaffed and long working hours as being a major cause for the bad attitude of some of their colleagues.
They also point out that doctors in Western countries are in the upper crust of society but in China they are paid only a typical “service industry” state wage. Many doctors feel this salary insulting considering their expertise, the dedication, time and money they’ve invested into becoming competent at their profession.
So their salaries are commonly augmented with commissions for issuing expensive prescriptions and extending hospital stays and receiving illegal under the table “donations”. Such patients as commonly desperate to “insure” their loved one receives the care and attention required.
Hospital Management commonly only held accountable for a hospital’s profitability and reputation. So doctors are pushed to prescribe, to test, to operate but not to console or inform. Harsh hospital policy requires doctors to ignore critically injured or ill patients if all medical bills have not been prepaid in full.
As one Chinese women’s magazine advised, “When you visit a hospital you need to understand that doctors handle illness not people”. “They see hundreds of patients a day so only have time to quickly glance you over before determining treatment”.
Unfortunately, corners are cut. Doctors often know nothing about their patient’s medical history and don’t make adequate time to ask.
Until employee and patient care and satisfaction is added to the list of priorities, overstretched doctors will continue jadedly providing poor levels of care and consequently patients will continue being frustrated and frightened.
It seems that there is a great need for hospitals to adopt Customer Complaints Officers to instigate conflict resolution procedures and investigations into cases of negligence. Currently the state-run Bureau of Health is supposed to ensure that minimal standards are being met. But one needs to wonder when cities of millions are armed by only a couple of less than arbitrary officials. Individual cases simply (and perhaps deliberately) have no chance of receiving adequate investigation.
Legally speaking little can be done for individuals. Medical negligence cases are too difficult most lawyers to bother pursuing. Patients have already spent their extended family’s life savings prepaying for medical expenses. The last thing they need is to prepay a lawyer who may or may not diligently follow up the claim. The state-run courts are also cautious of opening the floodgates. Only rarely is compensation awarded. To boot, the emotional turmoil created by the malpractice is often ignored.