China Cracks Down on Internet Cafes 39
China has increased restrictions on internet game cafes. They've clamped down on anti-government slogans or displays and are now barring teenagers from them completely. Gamasutra reports: "'With the development of the Internet, there has been some harmful and illegal content,' said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao. 'The Chinese government has adopted some management measures so as to limit the immoral and harmful content, especially for young people.' Chinese regulation of Internet content has become controversial in recent weeks due to popular search engine Google's acquiescence to Chinese censorship of its results in exchange for official license to operate in the country."
Re:CCP is out of touch (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:CCP is out of touch (Score:3, Insightful)
Vast majority of mainland chinese considers Taiwan as a province. Call it brainwashing, call it national pride, call it whatever, just don't go off running your mouth as if it were a fact. Most Taiwan-Taiwanese doesn't like KMT. So here in the US, there's a distinction of "taiwan-taiwan", "mainland-taiwan", and "mainland" chinese. And why did you drag Taiwan into this anyway? totally irrelevant from this discussion.
Mainland Chinese haven't developed a large enough middle class to realize or understand "free from oppression." The distinction between "communism" and "capitalism" in the current Chinese society are just difference in words. Official CCP's stance's been "a market driven economy with socialistic flavor" for the past several decadesn now. And as the government moves towards more capitalism and away from communism, you are now seeing lots of social-unrest from the farmers. The biggest fear is one hand, you have know-nothing farmers who are poor and consists of 80% of the population wondering where's the money they've been promised (I think something like bottwom 75% holds 15% of the wealth or some staggering number I read recently), while 20% of the remaining population slowly becoming self-aware and demanding more rights, including freedom of speech. CCP isn't strong enough to deal with both issues right now, and if they come together, you'll have a social-upheval that'll set back 1/6th of the world's population back to the late 70s, and then what?
If the economy is fully market driven instead of central-plan, China would've crashed back in the late 90s and you would've seen a global economic meltdown far worse than what took place. If China's economy suddenly becomes market driven now, all the major banks of China will be in trouble due to bad-loans of the 90s, and you'll have even more social-unrest. Given its size, history, and current situation, the CCP is doing an amazing job keeping things together. I'm not saying what they are doing is all good-and-dandy, and all for the good-of-the-people, but sometimes some things are a necessary evil.
India's facing similar problems as China... the poor are wondering where's all the wealth gone. They are, however, the only successful democracy with annual per-capita income of under US$5k...