Rebecca MacKinnon, December 2: Lately I’ve given a few talks around town titled “Will the Chinese Communist Party Survive the Internet?” My answer – for the short and medium term at least – is “yes.” Western media pundits and many policymakers have a tendency to assume that the Internet will ultimately bring democracy to China.…
Showing all posts tagged China
Celebrities vs fact-checkers
Michael Anti became famous after his Chinese blog was deleted by Microsoft in 2005. He now contributes regularly to debates revolving around Western multinationals in China and the impact of the internet on the world’s largest country. He speaks here to Ethan Zuckerman, an employee at Harvard’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, on the…
Looking East
The Chinese online population is soon to eclipse America’s and currently stands at well over 170 million. A new report indicates that the Chinese are far more politically aware than many Americans: The report, “China and the U.S. in a Web 2.0 World,” also reveals that nearly half of all Chinese broadbanders ages 13 to…
Our Mandarin-speaking leader
What do Chinese bloggers think of Australia’s new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd?
Priorities, people
Americans are regularly accused of living in a ghetto and rarely caring what happens in the outside world. This is a gross exaggeration, of course, but rings true for many. So what about China? Danwei’s founder Jeremy Goldkorn explains: There has been some discussion on several China blogs recently about a statistic that only six…
Beware the three T’s
Following Yahoo!’s shameful behaviour in China towards web users, Facebook is reportedly keen to enter the soon-to-be biggest internet market in the world: Facebook appears to have decided on acquisition as its preferred method of entering the booming Chinese market, after months of speculation about how the social networking website would tap the country’s rapid…
Broadcasting troublemakers
Expressing dissent in China can be a costly affair, but this hasn’t stopped more groups stepping up the pressure on the Communist leadership: Most days, Xiang Dong leads a life typical of this city’s suburban office worker. But at nights, he takes on another persona: China dissident. The bespectacled Mr. Xiang, a 38-year-old father of…
And then they came for us
Bobbie Johnson, Guardian Comment is Free, November 14: The suppression of online information is fast becoming a crucial political question, with China now the world’s second largest country on the internet population, and expected to overtake America within just a few years. As a result of such growth and success, Beijing is now setting the…
More futile silencing
Just another oppressive day in China: Reporters Without Borders strongly condemned a five-year prison sentence and 40,000 yuan (€4,000) fine imposed today by a district court in Tianhe (in the southeastern province of Guangdong) on cyber-dissident Yang Maodong (better known as Guo Feixiong) for “illegal commercial activity.” “We are shocked by this harsh and unjustified…
Public eyes are watching you
Who do you trust? Chinese Olympic officials defended on Tuesday the collection of information on journalists, saying such databases would be used to help the media at Beijing 2008, not to create blacklists or hinder reporting. The comments came a day after state media said authorities were building a database of information on about 30,000…