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Wednesday, August 02, 2006
China and the coming Intranet One of the first rules of blogging: don't snap at your audience. Tough! I am pissed today and it is not at the Chinese government for their recent censorship activity. A few days ago two blogs maintained by Tibetan poet (We poets are sooo dangerous. The 20-30 people left in the world who read us might actually stage a demonstration in front of a bookstore one day) according to another site, Reporters Without Borders, which is unreachable from where I live. The Tibetan blogs displayed, instead of the pornography and bootleg DVD download links that go untouched on the big sites, poetry and essays by the writer Woeser, along with work by her husband, writer Wang Lixiong. According to RWB: Her collection of travel stories, "Notes on Tibet," was banned in 2003, reportedly because it deviated from the official government take on Tibetan history and culture. Imagine that! Woeser was subsequently fired from her editing job at a government-backed journal ( We have to feed ourselves somehow. When was the last time you bought a poetry book or donated to a poetry site that did not offer to make you famous?) and forced to leave her home in Tibet's capital, Lhasa. What is really disconcerting here is less the logarithmic shutdown of the blog-sphere than the indifference of the blog community to the tragedy. Blogs and the Chinese Internet in general are seeing growth US companies only dreamed of in years past. And the growth here has made liars of the folks who thought that the explosion in citizen use of the net in China would herald in a new era of curiosity, dialogue and education. Several blogs like China Digital Times (I can't get there from here) have reported on the demise of the New Century open academic discussion forum. It is a strong statement on the current state of affairs here. After 16 attempts to access information on the closure I was able to open only one site: IFEX The International Federation for Information Exchange. The site makes clear that the latest cases of censorship come less than a month after the Council of States' information office and the ministry of industry and information expressed their intention, on 29 June to reinforce control over blogs, search engines and chat forums. Despite that, bloggers or caring citizens in the West are not exactly flocking to sites like Bloggers Without Borders, Global Voices Online, PEN ( a writers group that supports those held in jails and exile for writing their conscience), IFEX, The ACLU (Hate them if you will, but they may be protecting you next week), Blogger Corps Org' or the Electronic Frontier Foundation to name a few. There are 39,000 incoming links to this site and only a handful of blogs have signed up to protest censorship worldwide by posting a simple ribbon and blogroll on their site in support for the alliance of banned blogs. And over a million of you bloggers are affected. Ya, a lot of folks took pot shots at Google and Yahoo! (me included) for being a bunch of cowering wimps with regards to helping China mold information, but did contributions to groups, working overtime to ensure free speech, get a concommitant increase in membership and donations? No! Even the popular TLB The Truth Laid Bear seems more interested in commercial ad revenue than watching a 100 million netizens suffer from information hypoxia. A host of bloggers have seen it as a joke or badge of pride that they are blocked in another country and done nothing to help. Shame on you.  China Asia Blogging China Blogs China Blog Blogging Bloggers Rights Freedom of Speech Censorship Banned Blogs TLB Ecosystem Carnival of Banned Blogs Blogger News Network is advertiser-supported, and your visits to our advertisers help BNN to meet its expenses. Help keep us afloat! posted by Lonnie at 11:32 AM |
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I support you!
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