China News: Online Censorship | China Digital Times (CDT)

China news tagged with: online censorship (5)

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The First Law of Chinese Cyberspace

From UC Berkeley Barry Bergman’s post: ‘Soul of the New Machine’ Confab Geared to Human Rights:

To illustrate the power of blogging, Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism and director of the China Internet Project, cited the collapse of schools during last year’s 7.9-magnitude earthquake in the province of Sichuan — the result, he said, of the “deep corruption” of the Chinese government.

Qiang recounted how a lone blogger — an artist and architect who helped design China’s Olympic stadium — began collecting and publishing the names of thousands of students who had been killed as the region’s substandard schools crumbled. When Chinese censors deleted the postings, the lists were picked up by other bloggers, until the authorities had little option but to publish official lists of the victims.

“From an individual act, an inter national event,” said Qiang, adding that the story illustrates “the first law of Chinese cyberspace: Censorship meets resistance.”

Actually, my original statement was:

The first law of Chinese cyberpolitics is “Where there are River Crabs, there are Grass-Mud Horses (那里有河蟹，那里就有草泥马).” According to this “Law of the Grass-Mud Horse,” online censorship always meets resistance.
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- May 8, 2009 5:16 PM
China Shuts Down 162 Lewd Web Sites

From English Xinhua:

Chinese authorities have shut down 162 Web sites that had been found providing pornographic and “lewd” content in their audio or video segments, according to a statement released by the country’s online watchdog Monday.

The blocked Web sites had not acquired permits to broadcast audio and video programs issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), said a statement issued by the Special Operation Office for Crackdown on online Porn and Lewd Content.

The Web sites include www.baigujing.com, www.bt990.com and other sites mainly based in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong Provinces.
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- March 30, 2009 8:52 PM
“Guilt by Blog” And The Trouble With China’s Universities

There is a new phrase circulating in China’s internet taken from China’s past to describe the repression of freedom of speech. China Media Project’s Emma Lupano reports:

As the internet has grown rapidly in China in recent years, there has been an attendant upsurge in cases where ordinary citizens (公民), or “netizens” (网民), are arrested, jailed or otherwise punished for things they dared to write. The latest case to have Web users up in arms involves the alleged sacking of a substitute professor at Hubei University for Nationalities after the teacher wrote an entry on his personal weblog criticizing the school’s anniversary celebrations.

The case, involving 50 year-old teacher Guo Guanglin (郭广林), has drawn a flurry of coverage in the commercial media over the last week, and it has once again resurrected that age-old term denoting the violent repression of speech — “to incur guilt by one’s words,” or wenziyu (文字狱).

“To incur guilt by one’s words” is now an increasingly popular buzzword denoting official action taken against ordinary citizens who speak their minds in spaces — like blogs, chatrooms and SMS messages — where the line between the personal and the public is blurred. But the term can also be used to point generally to more egregious examples of censorship.

A related and more direct phrase in Chinese is “incurring guilt by one’s words,” or yin yan huo zui (因言获罪).

Read more about how netizens create their own language in the face of online censorship and netizens’ voices on CDT.
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- November 16, 2008 3:31 AM
Why China Relaxed Blogger Crackdown – Jason Leow

What happened to the government’s “real name registration” plan to control online information? The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Chinese government, which spent months mulling over ways to crack down on bloggers, is retreating from its campaign, a development that illustrates the difficulty China faces as it tries to control technology.

Since September, the central government has been deliberating the need to enforce a real-name registration system, which would have required nearly 20 million Chinese bloggers to register their real identities on the Web and give up the anonymity many have gotten used to, even though bloggers can never be entirely anonymous as they can be traced back to an IP address.
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- May 16, 2007 9:40 PM
New MySpace China Tells Users to Spy on Each Other – Texyt.com

From a Texyt Blog article:

“MySpace, which already has more than 100 million users worldwide, is backed by News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media groups. The company formally announced MySpace China yesterday, and the site went live shortly after midnight in China, with a layout which mimics that of its main global site – with a few key differences.

Discussion forums on subjects like religion and politics are nowhere to be found on the new Chinese MySpace site, even though these are popular topics on other international MySpace sites. Instead, users are only offered safer topics for conversation, such as humor, sport and movies.

Users are told to click a button if they spot any ‘misconduct’ by other users. This ‘misconduct’ includes actions such as ‘endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order’ – according to the site’s terms and conditions.”[Full Text]
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- April 29, 2007 11:52 AM