A People's Republic?
The media and people's access to media here amazes me. This covers the way news is broadcasted to the control over the news people can get.
I have a classmate right now researching media control in China and it seems like the government information agency needs to play a constant game of catch to block all the news that people within China are trying to broadcast. She told me one story that a person she had an interview with told her. Their website's tactic was to broadcast real news, that China would allow them to broadcast. After the officials do their obligatory check of the websites contents, maybe a week or two later, their company will change the links to the actual articles they want to share. Of course these articles contain content which the government would not want other people to see.
Being that this whole internet thing is being controlled with computers and there are always a million ways to do things with computers it is not really hard to get around the national firewall. Just use a proxy. The problem is that you can't easily find these proxies from within China. Their happened to be a person who had a blog hosted by blogspot.com that decided to share these proxies through his blog. Not long after the government simply blocked all of blogspot. Talk about a few bad appples spoiling the bunch. However, this may not be the only reason. In a country where media is so heavily controlled it would be dangerous for them to potentially give a large portion of their population the freedom to say whatever they want, whenever they want and have billions of people around the read it. So now the only way to be able to read your blogger blog in China is to have it hosted by a 3rd party server.
I find all of this really interesting that it seems like everyone knows, but no one has the power to do anything about it. This is just reflective of the divide between the rich and the poor and the powerful and the powerless here in China.
I have a classmate right now researching media control in China and it seems like the government information agency needs to play a constant game of catch to block all the news that people within China are trying to broadcast. She told me one story that a person she had an interview with told her. Their website's tactic was to broadcast real news, that China would allow them to broadcast. After the officials do their obligatory check of the websites contents, maybe a week or two later, their company will change the links to the actual articles they want to share. Of course these articles contain content which the government would not want other people to see.
Being that this whole internet thing is being controlled with computers and there are always a million ways to do things with computers it is not really hard to get around the national firewall. Just use a proxy. The problem is that you can't easily find these proxies from within China. Their happened to be a person who had a blog hosted by blogspot.com that decided to share these proxies through his blog. Not long after the government simply blocked all of blogspot. Talk about a few bad appples spoiling the bunch. However, this may not be the only reason. In a country where media is so heavily controlled it would be dangerous for them to potentially give a large portion of their population the freedom to say whatever they want, whenever they want and have billions of people around the read it. So now the only way to be able to read your blogger blog in China is to have it hosted by a 3rd party server.
I find all of this really interesting that it seems like everyone knows, but no one has the power to do anything about it. This is just reflective of the divide between the rich and the poor and the powerful and the powerless here in China.
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