Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

ESWN just posted this translation of a chain email circulating in China:

Will everybody please go to the GOOGLE homepage and search for “Nanjing Massacre” and “Diaoyutai Islands”!? Then please check out the search results. The results will always be the “This page cannot be displayed” notice and you will also be informed that you cannot use GOOGLE to search for a brief period hereafter.

But if you search for “Senkaku Islands” (which is how the Japanese ghouls call China’s Diaoyutao Islands, you can get results (I recommend that you search ‘Senkaku Islands’ first before you search for “Nanjing Massacre’ because if you searched ‘Nanjing massacre’ first, you will be prevented from searching for anything thereafter).

This is an obvious display of contempt against the People’s Republic of China and the men and women of China.

The ugly American ghouls are attempting to block information about China on the Internet! Their intention is extremely dangerous and evil!

Will everybody please attempt to experience this personally. If I am correct, then will you please relay this message so that all the Chinese people will know! We must resolutely boycott GOOGLE and use the search engine for the Chinese people: BAIDU! Let us use GOOGLE out of China!

I’m not sure what I think, except that the problem is larger than a search engine company.  The Chinese people shouldn’t be blaming foreign technology, they should be reflecting on their own government, which forces companies like Yahoo and Google to censor their results.

According to this guy, feeds powered by Feedburner are now being blocked by domain in China. Feedburner, in case you weren’t aware, services 200,000 blogs and 20,000,000 feed readers. So, when William Long noticed his subscriber count drop to 0, he tried to access Feedburner from China (which failed), and then access Feedburner through a proxy (which worked). So, the Chinese government made a smart censorship move against bloggers and cut a huge amount of access with one fell swoop.

Steve Rubel cuts to the heart of the problem:

This is a big deal. Essentially, the Chinese government is choosing to block some of the most popular RSS feeds in the world. That’s like they decided to block the largest airline from their airspace. It is as close as you will see a nation coming to blocking the entire RSS/podcast transport.

According to an article by the Register, 97% of illicit search queries in China, as determined by governmental censors, are filtered by Yahoo.  Sometimes the search engine even imposes a time-out penalty:

In fact, researchers found that searching for “Tibet independence” or “6-4″ (4 June is the anniversary of Tiananmen Square) won’t just give you shonky results but will get you barred from the site for an hour.

I must point out that censorship of the internet is simply fighting a losing battle.  If people are saying that your government sucks, the solution isn’t to prevent other people from hearing them, but to make your government un-sucky.

According the Register, Apple’s contractor in China, Foxconn, has been breaking Chinese labour laws in its iPod factories.  Its employees were forced to work at least 80 extra hours a month, paying the workers the local minimum wage.  And, according to Foxconn, an Apple representative inspected the factories and gave them “the thumbs up.”

Wired has an article with more specifics about the salary that the Chinese women working in the factory make:

According to the report (paraphrased here by Macworld UK), Foxconn’s giant Longhua plant employs 200,000 workers, who work 15-hour days but are paid just $50 a month — miserable even by China’s standards. It claims they work and live in the plant, in dormitories housing 100 people, and outside visitors are forbidden.

However, the large corporations running factories in China and abroad claim to enforce basic standards of living across all of their sites.  And, while these standards are lower than US standards, they are probably above an “acceptable” line by some local measure, or no one would choose to work at the factory.

I pray I don’t offend any true Chinese communists who worship the memory of Chairman Mao, but I came across this SA thread with an amusing photoshop:

Amusing lines include:

1. Sex Tips:  How to make it tolerable
2. Party Animal:  Putting the “WOW” in Mao

This is what happens when nerds take magazine titles too literally.