Blog Censorship in China
I’m a big believer in freedom of information, be it intellectual property, political opinions, or crazy rantings. So, it’s a bit upsetting to read about the effort to which China censors online content. Worse is that Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others are working hand in hand to easily facilitate the removal of content “offensive” to the Chinese government.
The argument pro censor necessarily grows from the following theory:
We, the ruling party, know what is better for the people than they do, because we are specially selected as the best and they are the average mass. We therefore are equipped to decide what kind of knowledge is good for them or not.
To casual inspection, this is sound. However, it assumes a hidden precondition, that rulers have some natural right to arbitrarily limit fundamental freedoms of the populace. This is one that America specifically rejects by Constitution and Bill of Rights, granting certain liberties to its citizens that its founders would consider to be universal and necessary.
So, why does writing opinion about Chinese history offend the government? Why does speaking out against the government offend the government? The question of the day is: “If you care about limiting speech, are you more worried about maintaining the political status quo, or serving the Chinese people?” Perhaps the answer is obvious.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 at 6:00 pm and is tagged with crazy rantings, google yahoo, fundamental freedoms, yahoo msn, censorship in china, google, chinese history, freedom of information, ruling party, precondition, chinese government, question of the day, populace, bill of rights, believer, founders, rulers, liberties, constitution, intellectual property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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