China’s Beijing Games will have to contend with the blogging phenomenon: The International Olympic Committee is for the first time permitting athletes to write blogs. The IOC has set out guidelines for blogging at the Beijing Games to ensure copyright agreements are not infringed. They include bans on posting any audio or visual material of…
Showing all posts tagged China
Repression comes at a price
It may be an act of pure symbolism, but I applaud Spielberg for this decision (and expect many more of this kind before the August Olympics): US film maker Steven Spielberg said he was abandoning his artistic role in the Beijing Olympics, accusing China of not doing enough to press its ally Sudan to end…
Osama meets track and field
Let the Olympic Games in Beijing begin (with a generous helping of “sugared Osama Bin Laden-shaped candies”):
Behold the Chinese web
Tudou, the Chinese video sharing site, claims to have overtaken YouTube with over one billion megabytes of data transfers every day.
Before the Olympic storm
The fear: A Western journalist set to cover the upcoming Beijing Olympics games said recently that he is concerned that communist authorities will crack down and arrest reporters who cover social repression in the country. Francesco Liello, China correspondent for La Gazetta dello Sport of Italy and the first reporter credentialed for the games told…
Fighting back against a major
Western internet companies should get ready for many more cases like this one: A Chinese scholar who challenged the Communist government by setting up a democratic opposition party has vowed to sue the US internet company Google for excising his name from its local search results. If a company such as Google censors its own…
Mad for the web
While internet majors are fighting for the spoils of a growing web market, the Chinese continue to embrace the new technology: One of the more striking end-of-year statistics pumped out recently by the Chinese government was an update on the number of internet users in the country, which had reached 210m. It is a staggering…
Spread only good propaganda
Keep a blogger locked up at home long enough with nothing but Chinese state TV and an internet connection to keep them occupied and they’re bound to subvert something eventually. The case of imprisoned Chinese blogger Hu Jia is symtematic of the Chinese government’s fear of the online medium. After all: Chinese President Hu Jintao…
Welcome to Beijing
This is China, 2008: Any attempt to use the Beijing Olympics to discredit China or force it to change policy is doomed to failure, the leading Communist party newspaper insisted in a commentary piece yesterday. Let nobody believe that human rights will improve before the August Olympic Games. Tragically, the opposite is occurring.
210 million and counting
According to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center, there were 210 million internet users by the end of 2007, an increase of 48 million in the previous six months.