Cursing the hijackers

Washington Post article about blogs in China:

Four and a half months after he began posting essays challenging the Communist Party's taboo against discussing politics, Zhao published an item protesting the purge of a popular newspaper's top editors. Officials called Microsoft to complain, and Microsoft quickly erased his blog. [...]

"In this political system, everyone has to compromise," Zhao said. "It's not black and white. Many of the people who delete my essays are also my friends."

And that's censorship in a nutshell - all the apparatus need do is threaten and everyone does the censoring for them.

Blogging arrived in China in the summer of 2002 as a response to censorship, but not by the government. Fang Xingdong, the author of a book that attacked Microsoft's market dominance as a threat to national security, said he created one of the country's first blogs after an essay he wrote about Microsoft disappeared from chat forums. [...]

Fang said he believed, then as now, that big corporations like Microsoft presented the greatest threat to freedom of speech on the Internet, not government censors. But when he launched his firm, he said, he devoted meeting after meeting to persuading party officials to accept blogging.

"At the time, they thought, 'If everyone can publish, wouldn't we lose control?' " Fang said. "But I argued that a blog is like a person's home, and very few people would put something inappropriate in their home."

I guess our home life, here in the Free World, is a little less polite than that in the The People's Republic of China.

While Chinese firms used filters to stop bloggers from posting entries with prohibited keywords, Microsoft applied its filter only to the titles of entries. And while Chinese sites often erased politically sensitive content, Microsoft didn't appear to be deleting much. Meanwhile, other foreign blog sites, like Google's Blogger, had been blocked by the government.

So this blog is banned in China? But with Google now censoring on behalf of the PRC govt. for their search engine is it still banned? I have a suspicion that Google staff will deliberately under-censor and make it that anyone in China with any sense will be able to skirt around all the prohibitions that the govt. wants. If they are really not being evil they will leave in many holes.

One popular Shanghai blogger, who declined to be identified, compared Zhao to an airline passenger who stands up and curses hijackers. "He makes the other passengers uncomfortable and nervous," the blogger said. "What he is saying might be right, but it makes the situation unpredictable, and perhaps more dangerous for everyone." [...]

One day later, on Dec. 30, the Shanghai Municipal Information Office, an arm of the party's propaganda department, called Microsoft's joint venture.

Zhang Xiaoyu, a senior official in the agency, said the government told Microsoft to remove Zhao's blog because it contained comments on the news, and only Chinese Web sites with licenses could publish such material. He said bloggers were barred from writing about "political, economic, military or diplomatic news."

Microsoft, which by then was hosting 3.3 million blogs in China, deleted Zhao's blog the next day.

And when you can't discuss "political, economic, military or diplomatic news" then what the fuck is the point? Thus the rise of sexually risqué blogs and all the worst infections of "Western" culture plus the usual banal what-I-did-at-the-weekend crap. Of course there could be some cutting parables and vicious satire that fly under the radar and a developing culture of sarcasm given the restrictions - but that may just be wishful thinking.