Censorship

I saw a couple of articles recently on China censorship, published in western magazines.  One commented that he was able to access all the news sites he wanted to whilst here, and that he interviewed Chinese citizens, who cited that they too had access to all they wanted.

 

This said, whilst I can access the BBC website, I can't read the news articles.  Also, as of about a month ago, Wikipedia has been banned, because it refused to accept Chinese government censorship controls (which Google and MSN Spaces and Blogger.com have). 

 

The shame with Wikipedia is that the censorship means that people outside China can write anything they like about China in the Chinese site, and that the citizens in China have no way to represent their own view.

 

So for example, the Falun Gong protesters in Cambridge, claiming that the CCP were torturing and killing Falun Gong practitioners in China, if they were to write anything on the Wikipedia Chinese site, then no-one in China would know about it, or be able to challenge it.

 

Because that's the way the Wikipedia system works.  If you read an article and think it's biased, you can flag the system and comment that you think it's biased.  The system then registers that, displays the article as 'disputed', and editors are asked to check it out.  But now China has no participation.  Sad.

 

Oh yeah and it's annoying cos Wikipedia is just so useful.