The Washington Post made a very sloppy article on this intriguing subject: how are the Chinese authorities going to control the internet and mobile communication? It started with a little anecdote that was new for me, but when I read this I knew I was losing my time:
It hasn't been for lack of trying. The Public Security Ministry, which monitors the Internet under guidance from the Central Propaganda Department, has recruited an estimated 30,000 people to snoop on electronic communications. The ministry recently introduced two cartoon characters -- a male and female in police uniforms -- that it said would pop up on computer screens occasionally to remind people that their activity is being tracked.
The urban myth of those 30,000 police officers monitoring the internet is the official benchmark that we are leaving serious journalism. The number has never even been proven and - it has been argumented before - on 162 million internet users that is actually a very low number. That number - if true - only proves China does not take controlling the internet very serious.
For the ministry of Public Security it might be news that they are under the guidance from the Central Propaganda Department. There is a committee of about 17 government departments who try to discuss how the government should deal with the internet, but none of those departments takes the overhand.
Of course, the cute cartoons - what a way to crack down on the internet users - were not introduced by the ministry, but by the Beijing public security. It is a very local affair, but Western media try to make small things big by declaring them wrongly into national issues.
3 comments:
Fons
On a dial up connection with no proxy your page takes over 20 minutes to load. The problem is the embedded links to feedburner will not load... so the rest of the page waits and waits and waits. On broadband with a proxy no problem. By the way I,m in Shanghai on a 163 dial up so I just give up reading your page.
Thanks for telling me. I had not yet made the connection between the downloading problems and the feedburner. I'm now in Hong Kong and indeed, there is no problem in downloading. I will remove the link and then tell more people, since I won't be the only one with this problem
Hold on, I checked: I had already removed the feedburner stuff. Now, what else would explain the slow downloading process of this site? Any takers?
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