🚀 go-pugleaf

The Womp wrote:
> Beijing may fear it, but porn means passivity not protest
>
> China's web crackdown is apparently rooted in fear of social unrest.
> Absurd: easier, surely, to control a society of atomised men?
> Source:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/10/china-firewall-internet-porn
>
>           o Zoe Williams
>           o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 June 2009 22.00 BST
>
> It has such a stupid name, it doesn't actually sound like software: it
> sounds like a deliberate attempt to mock a totalitarian government
> that tries to use software; like someone's brought George Orwell back
> from the dead (just one more job, mate ?); nevertheless, the Chinese
> government is pretty serious about its Green Dam Youth Escort package,
> through which it aims to control individual access to porn sites on
> the internet. A press ?release on Monday detailed three Chinese
> ?computer companies who had vouched to pre-install the software (no
> foreign ones as yet), and said it had already been installed in 52.7m
> units.
>
> The immediate worry, reported by this newspaper's correspondent in
> Beijing, Jonathan Watts, is that it will be used to restrict access to
> dissident sites, not just pornographic ones. He elaborated: "What they
> have at the moment is a fairly crappy, easy to uninstall piece of
> software. But you have to remember that this is stage one, once you
> enable the authorities to censor at machine level, the software will
> get better and better. So my feeling is that this is an attempt to
> shore up the great firewall which doesn't work a lot of the time."
> Chinese bloggers are currently concentrating on that crappy aspect: it
> is a terrible programme, apparently, with a hair-trigger that blocks
> access on the basis of innocuous phrases like "touch-ball",
> unsophisticated enough to block not just pornography but all news
> articles that mention pornography.
>
> There are also sinister rumours ?surrounding the collection of
> personal information on people who try to access banned sites: the
> worry being, again, that this has nothing to do with ?pornography,
> this is about putting in place the technology to control all
> ?computers, and all users, to the point where the would-be dissident
> has no safe way to use the internet at all.
>
> And yet it's possible that the government is on the level, that
> pornography is the target. The immediate impulse with Chinese
> legislation of this sort is always to look to political freedoms being
> encroached upon. I would suggest three reasons for this: first, if we
> were just to take at face value the impulse to control access to
> internet pornography, it wouldn't look so radically different to that
> proposed by the Australian Labour party last year. Sure, China moves
> faster and is somewhat less receptive to criticism, but the methods
> are the same, and so indeed is the rhetoric ? stress the dangers to
> children, ask yourselves, ?citizens, whether you wouldn't do anything
> to protect the innocent, and if not, why not, you pervert? It seems
> important to a sense of western democratic identity to distance itself
> from China, particularly in situations that don't look very different.
>
> Secondly, because one's image of China is of a repressive country, we
> don't think of it as a place with an active sex industry. In fact
> illegal prostitution and semi-legal concubinage is everywhere; when
> there was a clampdown on prostitution in 2000, economists saw a 1%
> fall in GDP. The country is now seeing, after all, the first
> generation to reach adulthood since the one-child policy was
> introduced in 1979, and the gender disparity is marked: estimates give
> 32 million excess men. As long ago as 2004, government minister Li
> Weixiong directly cited the gender imbalance for the febrile sexual
> atmosphere, predicting worse to come in terms of prostitution and
> people trafficking, as well as social unrest, civil war, even, and
> insisting "this is by no means sensational".
>
> Researchers are wary, however, of blaming the sex industry on gender
> ratios. Dr Th?r?se Hesketh, a senior lecturer in International Health
> at UCL, observes that: "The areas where there are most sex workers are
> not the areas where there are the highest gender ratios. Largely,
> poverty is one of the ?greatest drivers of the sex industry." Hesketh
> is also suspicious of Li's predictions of orgiastic apocalypse: based
> on research she's conducting at the moment, she has found that: "These
> unmarried men are quite withdrawn, introvert, shy guys. They are not
> the kind of guys who are going to go out and start a riot."
> Nevertheless, the government remains terrified of sex in terms of its
> potential as a spur for unrest.
>
> And here, thirdly, is the cognitive gap that makes it so hard to take
> the Green Dam Youth Escort programme at face value: the Chinese think
> they can prevent social unrest by controlling pornography. We think
> this must surely be a smokescreen for preventing explicit political
> content, since sexual content is itself a form of control. There is no
> better way on earth to castrate collectivised protest than to have
> everyone sitting in their bedroom, atomised and alienated, doing
> things they want to do in private. The Chinese government don't even
> need market research to see that, they only need to look at us.
>
> In the end, precisely because there appears to be this curious
> institutional naivety about the impact of gender imbalance as well as
> the impact of pornography, indeed, about the interplay between sex and
> politics altogether, I find it more and more plausible that they mean
> what they say. This really is an attempt to control sex on the web,
> and has nothing to do with dissidence. Just because it's plausible, of
> course, doesn't mean it's not ridiculous.
>
> --
> Clean Feed, it "cleans" the Internet in the same way that Ethnic
> Cleansing "cleanses" the population.
>
> http://filtermenot.googlepages.com/home
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If it fails to do "what needs to be done"
then they can just roll out the tanks...

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