China Crisis

With a year to go before the eyes of the world are on China as it hosts the 2008 Olympics, the authorities look set to loosen their grip on press freedom. Chinese censorship of blogs and websites which disagree with Chairman Hu Jintao's regime has become notorious (see "The Great Firewall of China" published in this blog last year), but there are ways around this. The international journalists’ human rights group Reporters without Borders has published a revealing report in co-operation with the Chinese Human Rights Defenders into the internet censorship practices employed by the Chinese authorities.

According to a report in last week'sObserver, China no longer enjoys the power of veto in the UN Security Council. It was forced to backtrack in its position on Burma. As the Communist Party of the world's fourth largest economy of an increasingly freer market - but not so free elections or free dissidents -prepares to choose its next leader Will Hutton in the same paper speculates on whether Hu Jintao’s successor will be China’s Gorbachev.

However, a disturbing aspect of the Beijing Olympic story was covered in Channel 4's Unreported World which revealed the story of unscrupulous property developers forcibly removing residents from their homes to make way for luxury apartments and cash in on the Olympic dividend.

If this blog was based in China, it would most likely be censored or shut down and its author harassed by the authorities if not jailed. Isn't freedom of expression a great thing?

True to the old Chinese proverb, it looks like we’re living in interesting times.

Online Censorship in the Year of the Dog

Google.cn - the Great Firewall of China

A widely reported story this week, although it didn't make front page headlines was the news that Google has co-operated with the Chinese government to censor its new google.cn search engine.
References to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan struggle for independence, Tiannanmen Square massacre of 1988 and the outlawed sect Falun Gong have all been removed (except for official condemnation) from the search engine by what has been dubbed the "great firewall of China".
Critics see this as a curb of the basic human right of free speech, but the general consensus was that Google had little choice in the matter, and was effectively giving in to the lesser of two evils in that the only alternative was withdrawing completely from the Chinese market. China's dismal human rights record is well documented, but it has come in leaps and bounds since the days of Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four. In any case it would be practically impossible to censor everything considered politically sensitive by the Chinese government. As the floodgates are slowly being forced open it seems that China in the long term will be unable to stem the tide.