
China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article - jimmyjim
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/world/asia/china-blocks-web-access-to-new-york-times.html
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untog
Well, at least we know the article is telling the truth now.

~~~
Shenglong
That's a completely illogical conclusion to make. Whether it is true or not,
blocking a page does not imply admission of guilt. If the article was complete
bullshit, they _still_ would have blocked it.

B (Admission of guilt) -> A (Truth) is not the same as A -> B.

~~~
busyant
It's not iron-clad proof that the contents of the article are truthful.

However, if the contents were _not_ truthful, I think you would also expect
the Chinese government to forcefully deny them. There is no mention of a
denial in the referenced Times article...at least as of yet.

Therefore, I think the blocking of the Times can be taken as a reasonable
indicator that the Chinese government wants to hide embarrassing information.

Is that really such a stretch?

~~~
zhoutong
The Chinese government is unlikely to deny claims about sensitive personal
issues like this. This is especially the case if the public sentiment (both
inside and outside of China) is considered. When people expect something to be
true, denials can be perceived as lies and they will make things worse (for
the parties being accused). The worse part is, more people will know it and
more people will believe in the article.

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blrgeek
One of the differences between India and China seems to be that in India at
least, there's a free 4th estate, and there is no way a Government would be
able to block articles like this.

As a matter of fact, through the Right To Information Act, there's an activist
who is currently raking up dirt on a whole bunch of politicians serially.

Makes me thankful of the freedoms we enjoy and take for granted!

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Claudus
So, combining these two statements, it seems that they blocked both sites 30
minutes _before_ the article was posted in Chinese?

If that's true, it's disappointing the Times didn't do a simultaneous release
in anticipation of the block.

" _HONG KONG — The Chinese government swiftly blocked access Friday morning to
the English-language and Chinese-language Web sites of The New York Times_ "

" _By 7 a.m. Friday in China, access to both the English- and Chinese-language
Web sites of The Times was blocked (...). The Times had posted the article in
English at 4:34 p.m. on Thursday in New York (4:34 a.m. Friday in Beijing),
and finished posting the article in Chinese three hours later after the
translation of final edits to the English-language version._ "

~~~
w1ntermute
> So, combining these two statements, it seems that they blocked both sites 30
> minutes before the article was posted in Chinese?

Their censors probably read the English version and preemptively blocked the
Chinese site as well, (correctly) assuming a translation would be posted.

> If that's true, it's disappointing the Times didn't do a simultaneous
> release in anticipation of the block.

I'm not sure how helpful that would've been. It would've still given them only
a few hours in the early morning before the site was blocked. And posting the
Chinese version at the same time probably would've resulted in the block
coming faster too.

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jcromartie
It happens in pockets of the US, too: Jerry Falwell's conservative Liberty
University did a very similar thing.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-
overload/post/fal...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-
overload/post/falwells-liberty-university-blocks-newspaper-web-
site/2011/04/13/AFLYNJXD_blog.html)

EDIT: mircocosm was a poor word choice

~~~
danielweber
Liberty is a private university, and its students choose to attend knowing
full-well its policies. (And it blocks a _lot_ more than WaPo.)

FIRE and the Virginia ACLU both agree with Liberty's right to do so:
<http://thefire.org/article/10717.html>

You are, of course, free to criticize LU for its policies.

~~~
jcromartie
The point is that they used their control over the information available to
their "population" to retaliate against and block journalism that revealed
information unfavorable to their internal narrative.

I'd say that's the exact same tactic.

~~~
spinchange
It's not a good analogy because Liberty is a private, evangelical Christian
school whose population is there by choice and China is a secular nation whose
population is largely there by birth.

Those who make up Liberty's "population" are students attending by their own
volition and are there _specifically_ because they share the same cultural
worldview as the institution -whatever its censorship tactics or however
similar they may seem to China's.

~~~
jcromartie
I understand this.

However, in both cases the censorship is an effort to save face with their
supporters. China doesn't want its Communist supporters to know how rich their
party leaders are (a big no-no in communism), and Liberty doesn't want its
conservative students to know that they receive massive amounts of federal
money (a big no-no in American right-wing anti-government-spending rhetoric).

Obviously it's a futile effort, but it's obvious that China and Liberty both
had the idea of punishing journalists and suppressing information in the same
way and for the same fundamental reasons.

Am I completely crazy, or does anybody else see the obvious parallel?

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codyZ
I'm not sure what's worse: People thinking that Chinese nationals do not care,
that they are unaware, or perhaps both. Most of the people that I know in
China, who are at all, remotely informed about anything knows not to get their
news from regular news channels. Particularly anyone skilled enough to setup a
Weibo account. Within minutes, most news gets out anyways via Weibo (Chinese
Twitter)...

In fact it was two of my Chinese friends who told me about the article this
morning....

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Its hard to make generalizations about 1.2 billion people from 3 or 4 data
points. It is even harder if these are educated middle class Chinese in a
first-tier city like Beijing or Shanghai. I'm sure this topic was shutdown on
Weibo already, and you would have to be in a special circle to understand any
code used to talk about the subject.

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kaptain
Can someone post a mirror or the content of the article? I'm in China.

~~~
wilfra
Dear god, get a VPN. I used strongvpn.com when I lived in China, worked great.
There are many others.

~~~
woodhull
Agreed. I think the set of people who read HN from China and do not have a VPN
account would probably consist of just this one person.

~~~
nickpinkston
I'm on vacation in China right now, and my VPN isn't working in China
(somehow...), so I've decided to take break from Facebook/Twitter as long as
my Gmail is working - and now apparently from NYT

So thanks for the paste bin!

~~~
0_o
google "goagent", which is free and faster than VPN

~~~
nickpinkston
And now Google is down too... DuckDuckGo to the rescue!

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bluekite2000
Now I m anxiously waiting for one written for Vietnam. I lived there for a few
years and the 2 countries closely resemble each other

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zschallz
Looks like its no longer blocked in China...
[http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/index.php?siteurl=www.ny...](http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/index.php?siteurl=www.nytimes.com)

~~~
nikcub
they didn't block the homepage, they blocked the article page and the section
that linked to it.

~~~
zschallz
Not reflected in the title, and doesn't seem to be in the beginning of the
article.

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thomasfl
China blocked Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation's sites two years ago when
the Nobel commitee awarded Liu Xiaobo the peace prize.

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bennyfreshness
Honestly, I didn't really see much wrongdoing on part of the leadership,
namely Wen Jiabao, as described in the article. Its mostly relatives taking
advantage of political connections. Its a broken system, where the state is
too closely intertwined with business. Hopefully the rumors are true and the
new ruling coalition will make some progress in liberalizing the economy
modeling it after Singapore's.

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duxup
I was reading that article last night thinking... this is gonna get blocked.

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arbuge
So it has been, so it always will be. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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ethana
The Times should not just only be blocked in China. Serious.

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jonathanyc
Loving the racist comments on HN these days.

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udonmai
I just want to say ... 呵呵

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wilfra
The truly sad part of this is most Chinese people wouldn't really mind the
site being blocked because of this, nor even be all that surprised to learn
what the article said. They don't get offended and angered by their government
hiding things from them or abusing their power in the same way people in
Western countries do, nor do they have a strong desire to learn the truth.
They just accept this as the way things are.

Yes, there are exceptions, but those who feel different are in the minority.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
An influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics identified, in 1981, a
cultural dimension he terms "power distance", defined as "the extent to which
the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country
expect and accept that power is distributed unequally".

On PDI, scaled zero to one hundred, the U.S. scores 40 and China scores 80
(Russia scores 93).

Another dimension of significance is individualism, defined as "the degree of
interdependence a society maintains among its members".

On IDV the U.S. scores 91 and China 20 (Russia scores 39).

China (and Russia) value social cohesion along implicitly informative, i.e.
highly contextual, information flows. Leaders are given tremendous leeway to
do their jobs and are to be questioned only in cases of extreme breach of
obligation, i.e. when they threaten social harmony.

Note that Russians, in surveys, explicitly prefer social stability to free
speech and a free media. Chinese find the legalistic contortions American
politicians have to go through to do something generally favoured as awkward
and wasteful. We see allowing elites to enrich themselves off market reforms
to help them buy into the idea of change as distasteful whereas from a social
utilitarian perspective it's strategically kosher.

~~~
cs702
Latest PDI and IDV figures: [http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-
cultural-dimen...](http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-
dimensions/power-distance-index/)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
The full data are available on Hofstede's site, too

<http://geert-hofstede.com/countries.html>

~~~
octagonal
The differences between Japan and China are truly interesting.

~~~
venus
The only thing surprising to me is that Japan's number is not much higher.
Their political apathy is astonishing; in my opinion there is no functioning
democracy in Japan.

Call me jaded but I am surprised to see the numbers so low for a lot of
countries. Perhaps the questions asked how things should be, rather than how
things actually are.

