Reading this article just reminded me what a farce the whole thing is. What’s a New York Time Writer got to test? What don’t we know gets banned in China already? What is he proving by doing what everyone knows? So that he can also be banned and then say he researched? So he can get onto the news wire? Then of course the American owned China sites say that nothing gets censored but we all know they do and are. What else do those 30,000 people do for work? (It seems one of them at least reads this site page by page and chooses what he or she deems aceptable. (HI!!! How are you doing today??))
I don’t know, I feel cynical today. It’s like the fact Chinese government censors the net is not even news to me anymore. It’s more like, so what are we all going to do about it… well not much either.. because it’s important to trade.
Wed Jun 21, 5:03 AM ET
A New York Times columnist has created
Chinese-language blogs on two of China’s most popular Web
portals to test the limits of the Internet in China — but one
of them could not be accessed on Wednesday.
In new blogs on Sohu and Sina, Nicholas Kristof denounced
the imprisonment of his Chinese colleague, Zhao Yan, and called
for President Hu Jintao to set an example in the fight against
corruption by disclosing his financial assets.
He also mentioned Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned
by Beijing as a cult in 1999, and described how on June 4,
1989, he saw the Chinese army fire on Tiananmen Square
pro-democracy protesters — both taboo subjects in China.
Zhao, 44, has pleaded not guilty to fraud and leaking state
secrets, but his lawyers expressed little hope he would be
cleared of charges for which he faces more than 10 years in
jail.
Sohu appeared to have pulled the plug on Kristof’s blog on
Wednesday but his Sina blog could still be accessed.
A Sohu spokeswoman reached by telephone declined to
comment.
"The upshot is that China is much freer than its rulers
would like," Kristof wrote in his column. He shared the 1990
Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting with his wife,
Sheryl WuDunn, for their coverage of the 1989 massacre.
"To me, this trend looks unstoppable. I don’t see how the
Communist Party dictatorship can long survive the Internet, at
a time when a single blog can start a prairie fire," he wrote,
borrowing a quote from the late Chairman Mao Zedong.
In December, Microsoft Corp. shut down a blog at MSN Spaces
belonging to Michael Anti, a Chinese researcher for the New
York Times in Beijing, under Chinese government orders.
Google Inc. has come under criticism for toeing the
government line by blocking hundreds of words or by denying
access to politically sensitive Web sites.
China employs about 30,000 Internet censors to filter
politically sensitive information and help the Communist Party
cling to power.
The search engines of Sohu and Sina resumed operation on
Wednesday amid media speculation they had been closed down by
the government after failing on-the-spot censorship tests.
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, citing unnamed
industry sources, said on Tuesday Beijing had stepped up
controls on portals that had failed to filter certain words
deemed politically harmful.
But spokeswomen for Sina and Sohu said their search engines
had been closed on Monday afternoon for "system upgrading."
They denied knowledge of any government crackdown.
The Ministry of Information Industry declined to comment.
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 