China Cracks Down on Internet Cafes

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."

YRO?

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of the guise of "protecting the children" to allow censorship is something that definitely belongs in YRO, and is very frightening.

It is eerie, blocking content for the purpose of "Protecting the children".... COPA anyone? If the government were censoring our access to information, and doing it well how would we ever know? /* Warning: heavy usage of vast right-wing conspiracy theories follows: */

Hell, all these stories about the great firewall of china could be government introduced filler to distract us from the truth. While I don't understand why they would want to do this, I dont know why the would want to do it in china either.

I wonder how well known it is in china that censorship is going on. If it were a really well protected secret, tor could work, but if noone knows they need to use tor/what tor is, they will never get anywhere.

How many lunatics acctually belive that they are lunatics? If you had alzheimer's, and someone told you you did, then asked you the next day, would you know? I dont think i have alzheimer's, but for all I know, I do, and someone told me that yesterday.

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Losing the Mandate of Heaven

[paladinwannabe2]

I feel that the Chinese Government has been in an interesting position for some time- in order to compete with the developed nations they need educated, intelligent workers, they need technology, and they need communications. However, an intelligent, informed, communicating populace is much harder to control than a population that has no phone lines, can't read, and never learned to question assumptions or think critically.

They are trying to keep a tight grip on everything while the world is changing around them. Already their system is more capitalistic than communistic in many respects- but it is a totalitarian capitalism. The Communist party has the power and they are afraid to let the reins of power go. Most Chinese in power have a few skeletons in their closets, and I feel many of them are worried that if they lost control, they would be arrested, tried, and executed.

I'm curious how China will look like in 20 years. I'm thinking they will either become the next United States or be involved in a bloody revolution. Maybe even both.

Re:CCP is out of touch

[SteroidG]

I'm not sure how many Chinese have you been talking to or where they come from, but in my experience, the Chinese from at least the northern provinces (north of Yang Zi river, within China or overseas) tend to see it rather differently. To me, the impressions is more like: Taiwan is another province of China, it'll be back to China sooner or later. Surprisingly enough, I find the same thing to be true for some of the Taiwanese I know too.

I think you underestimate how much patriotism the Chinese, especially the Han Chinese [wikipedia.org] has.

P.S The reason I can't include southern provinces is because I can't understand some of their dialect, therefore have much less conversations with them.