I’m sick and tired of your goddamn national firewall. You block anything that says things you don’t want to hear, like a fucking child covering his ears yelling “LALALALALALLALALA”. You blocked Yahoo for a while until they removed offending content from their news content. You’ve blocked countless other sites, a partial list of which can be found here. One of those sites includes the Voice of America, which had nice Mandarin newscasts with a study aid that were quite useful for studying the language. And you blocked Blogspot (from www.blogger.com), which means I can’t effectively use the best free blog host on the net. That’s just pathetic. Random people posting random stuff on their little diaries that no sane person would ever mistake for an actual news or reference source… that’s somehow a threat to the mighty monolithic (snort) Chinese Communist Party? Get it through your infantile little heads: You can still get access to information that makes you look like tyrants and fools and incompetents! Sure it’s a little harder, but all you do is make yourself look bad, and even worse, FRIGHTENED in the eyes of world at large, and the Chinese people who do take notice. And really, the Chinese people who would even think to access one of these sites is probably already aware of those legions of hidden demons of yours.
In short, all you’ve succeeded in doing, you petulant sorry excuse for a government, is annoying the shit out of people like me.
Oh, and because every Pit post needs more ‘fucks’, fuck you, too, Mao, your fat fucking face on almost every bill is making me fucking sick. And fuck you for killing tens of millions of your own people while I’m at it, you dead fuck.
Well, if any nations political party deserved a pitting you certainly picked the right one. I whole heartedly agree with you and urge you to get in your licks while they can…those old fuckers days are numbered over there and the wall is rapidly approaching. Hopefully it will be the wall that they are put up against to pose for gun fire.
Wish I had your optimism. I hope I live to see the end of CCP, and I’m only in my 20’s. However great their incompetence, their propoganda wing is still doing a pretty good job with the vast majority of the population. Even when presented with contradictory information, many people I’ve talked to just chalk it up to foreign propoganda. It’s changing, but I fear the days where people aren’t afraid to burn pictures of Mao or the current Chairman in Tiananmen Square will be long after I’m gone.
I love that they put in a timed delay with their manned space launch today. Umm, wtf were you going to do if it up and blowed up? Cut to a stock footage of a rocket going into the air?
And that’s what it boils down to. This simple aphorism (developed by me)
“The repression seen in dictatorships stems from nothing more nor less than insecurity of the ruling class.”
That is, the people in charge know their rule is not supported by the citizenry and are scared that, given an opportunity, the citizenry would replace them.
Yes, I understand blocking news sites, as they are credible and are taken seriously. But blogs as information sources have little to no credibility, I would think… right? Blocking them seems to give more power to them; I mean, I’d be much more interested in reading “banned” diaries than legal ones… Forbidden fruit and all that.
I see some minor and poorly-researched parallels between your rant re: national firewall and that Great Wall thing they’re so proud of… it didn’t work too well, either, but gosh darn if it isn’t a great big wall…
Actually, blogs are a huge threat. Think about the impact someone like Glenn Reynolds (www.instapundit.com) could have if there were no other useful information source. He’d be a one-man media show! Blogs are a grotesquely huge threat to China’s Communists. They can spread news the party doesn’t want anyoen to hear. Supposedly, those riots in Shanghai were organized and advertised through blogs, essentially. It’s an autocrat’s worst nightmare: uncontrollable information flow. Worse; it’s self-organizing.
Thing is the ChiComs (gods, haven’t used that term since the good old cold war days :)) are walking a fine line. In order to bring about their current economic expansion they have had to loose their hold on the reigns of power somewhat, allow their industrialist ‘class’ (i.e. those dirty capitalist types) SOME power and room to move, and somewhat open pandora’s box on information exchange. Thus they have staved off a similar collapse to what happened to the old Soviets and have worked miricles in their economy…to a point. Problem is that something is eventually going to have to give…you can’t have it both ways, not if you have aspirations of being THE world superpower. Which, IMHO, China does.
When I said ‘pose for gunfire’ I was not being literal…though it could certainly come to that. Just wishful thinking on my part. More realistically I figure that once the old guard well and truely dies off (can’t be many of those Long March folks left around by now) you’ll see the beginnings of a shift towards a more open and moderate government in China…something like what happened just before the end in Russia with Gorby. Problem is, it won’t be enough in the end and China will be faced with the same choice the Soviets had…either to re-tighten the grip, give up their economic growth and retrench…or drop that old baggage, toss out baby AND bath water and push forward. I think its too late to retrench. I just hope when the wall comes they are able to back down like the old Communist party in Russia was able too, without a lot of bloodshed.
No doubt, and they have shown in the past a sickening willingness to use them as well. However, remember that the Soviets also had all the guns…and so did the other nations behind the old Iron Curtain. And yet, when the time came they collapsed like a house of cards. The Chinese have been able to put off that time (IMO) by making a compromise between Communism and Capitalism…attempting to walk the wire between the two. The US and even more so the Europeans have made similar compromises between Capitalism and Socialism and been extremely successful. The problem is, again IMO, that Socialism and Capitalism are reasonably compatible, depending on where you set the bar and which part predominates, while Communism and Capitalism are incompatible in the end.
If it helps, there are currently huge distubances in [city I can’t pronounce or spell]. The CHinese have pretty much closed off these to all foreigners. But, some journalists managed to find out some info by talking to democracy activists who were telling people about the rights they (in theory) had even under the Communists.
In fact, the police brutally murdered the man (activist) right in front of him (the journalist). Mistake. They stopped him into a pile of shattered bone and meat.
When the regime starts to get that violent that openly, it’s not a sign of power. It’s a sign of fear. I have no doubt the “revolution” may take decades. It may not happen in my lifetime. But I believe it is coming.
Well, first they’ll have to get the army bonus for taking over all of Asia, which means they’ll have to watch those troops in Yakutsk, and maybe hit Kamchatka via Mongolia and try to turn over a good card.
