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China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

nytimes.com

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Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

#71

Post by nicholas_tuzzio »

ihsw wrote: post #68
wilfra wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Obama Administration started regularly deleting tweets and removing things from Google search results, a pretty big chunk of the American people would be really pissed off about that - including the Supreme Court and most Attorneys General. And people would vigorously hunt down the information that was being hidden from them. Generally speaking, this is not the case in China. The people know this is being done…

They already do it with torrent websites and nobody cares, how much of a stretch is other politically inconvenient sites being unilaterally blocked?

Said torrenting sites are by and large against the laws of the US and many other nations and shouldn't be compared to the NYT.

Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

#72

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tokenizer wrote: post #38
wilfra wrote: post #37

The truly sad part of this is most Chinese people wouldn't really mind the site being blocked because of this, nor even be all that surprised to learn what the article said. They don't get offended and angered by their government hiding things from them or abusing their power in the same way people in Western countries do, nor do they have a strong desire to learn the truth. They just accept this as the way things ar…

Not just in China, I'm sure if this was AlJazeera being blocked in the US the majority of Americans wouldn't care as well.

Are you apart of the wumao? If the US blocked AlJazeera, their would be holy hell to pay in the press. It would be a huge story and their would be huge consequences. We really value free speech that much. We might not care to read it, but if it is blocked, that would go against our principles.

Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

#73

Post by cs702 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #58
wilfra wrote: post #37

The truly sad part of this is most Chinese people wouldn't really mind the site being blocked because of this, nor even be all that surprised to learn what the article said. They don't get offended and angered by their government hiding things from them or abusing their power in the same way people in Western countries do, nor do they have a strong desire to learn the truth. They just accept this as the way things ar…

An influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics identified, in 1981, a cultural dimension he terms "power distance", defined as "the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally". On PDI, scaled zero to one hundred, the U.S. scores 40 and China scores 80 (Russia scores 93). Another dimension of significance is…

Latest PDI and IDV figures: http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimen...

Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

#74

Post by seanmcdirmid »

untog wrote: post #2

Well, at least we know the article is telling the truth now.

I always read the Chinadaily (or globaltimes, the two big English newspapers in China) in a contrarian way. If Chinadaily denies something, then it must be true; e.g., when they denied that Beijing was going to start rationing car plates, I knew it was going to be happen (and indeed it did). That's just how things work here, why would the government work to refute a rumor that wasn't true?

NYT checked their sources and they are known for being factual (and when that is proven not the case, their is holy hell to pay and lots of people get fired). This story is probably true, all of the Chinese officials do this, no one is not corrupt; if their was someone who tried not to do this, they would be kicked out of the party on the principle that it would make everyone else look "bad" rather than "normal."

Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

#75

Post by jseliger »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #58
wilfra wrote: post #37

The truly sad part of this is most Chinese people wouldn't really mind the site being blocked because of this, nor even be all that surprised to learn what the article said. They don't get offended and angered by their government hiding things from them or abusing their power in the same way people in Western countries do, nor do they have a strong desire to learn the truth. They just accept this as the way things ar…

An influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics identified, in 1981, a cultural dimension he terms "power distance", defined as "the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally". On PDI, scaled zero to one hundred, the U.S. scores 40 and China scores 80 (Russia scores 93). Another dimension of significance is…

>Note that Russians, in surveys, explicitly prefer social stability to free speech and a free media.

I wonder how much this is informed by Russians being conditioned by their media to "prefer social stability to free speech and a free media."

Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

#76

Post by codyZ »

I'm not sure what's worse: People thinking that Chinese nationals do not care, that they are unaware, or perhaps both. Most of the people that I know in China, who are at all, remotely informed about anything knows not to get their news from regular news channels. Particularly anyone skilled enough to setup a Weibo account. Within minutes, most news gets out anyways via Weibo (Chinese Twitter)...

In fact it was two of my Chinese friends who told me about the article this morning....

Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

#77

Post by mikeash »

jcromartie wrote: post #7

It happens in pockets of the US, too: Jerry Falwell's conservative Liberty University did a very similar thing. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-overload/post/fal... EDIT: mircocosm was a poor word choice

And anybody who feels like bringing a smartphone onto campus can get around it.

Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

#78

Post by scarmig »

danielweber wrote: post #15
jcromartie wrote: post #7

It happens in pockets of the US, too: Jerry Falwell's conservative Liberty University did a very similar thing. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-overload/post/fal... EDIT: mircocosm was a poor word choice

Liberty is a private university, and its students choose to attend knowing full-well its policies. (And it blocks a lot more than WaPo.) FIRE and the Virginia ACLU both agree with Liberty's right to do so: http://thefire.org/article/10717.html You are, of course, free to criticize LU for its policies.

Hmmm. I'm curious: if it turned out that private ISPs in China were blocking the NYTimes of their own volition, would that make it okay?

Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

#79

Post by fijal »

nicholas_tuzzio wrote: post #71
ihsw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do it with torrent websites and nobody cares, how much of a stretch is other politically inconvenient sites being unilaterally blocked?

Said torrenting sites are by and large against the laws of the US and many other nations and shouldn't be compared to the NYT.

I'm sure NYT is at odds with the laws of China by publishing things that blatantly (and I'm sure falsely) accuse the ruling elite. That does not mean they should be compared. However, your argument is flawed (and you can do much better than this to prove why they should not be compared).

Re: China Blocks Web Access to The New York Times After Article

#80

Post by evoxed »

spinchange wrote: post #65
evoxed wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having several friends and relatives who are either attending or alumni... no, AFAIK it's pretty isolated for students without a car. Not that you can't get away, just that for most people leaving the campus isn't a daily activity. Also, I would be surprised if many of the nearby businesses had public wifi, unless there's a Starbucks I've missed.

The thing is, attendance at Liberty is non-compulsory. I'm sure it does feel like China to the more worldly of its student body, but there is no law compelling them to attend there. (Maybe family is, but that's different story ;) I think it is very inaccurate to portray the environment and "conditions" at Liberty as a microcosm of the US, let alone as an apt comparison to the people of China being kept in the dark by…

Oh, I wasn't necessarily agreeing wholeheartedly with the comparison, just that some of the things we take for granted on HN aren't so simple or ubiquitous as they can be made out to be by people who know what they're doing.
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