Google in China - The Big Disconnect

wile_e_wonka writes "The NY Times (registration required) has an article about Google's history in China (beginning way before this whole censorship thing). The article, among other things, talks about of Google's head of operations in China, and his goals for the company there. From the article: 'Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.'"

Registration Free Link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23googl e.html?ex=1303444800&en=972002761056363f&ei=5090&p artner=rssuserland&emc=rss [nytimes.com]

"fully educate themselves."

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if those students in China will be able to fully educate themselves about the events of the Tianamen Square massacre in 1989. I don't mean that they'll only learn about the Communist Party's history of the event, which differs with almost every other account including the eyewitnesses there. But I wonder if they'll be permitted to learn about the thousands of unarmed people that were shot and killed, the Tank Man, and the executions and jailings of the protestors.

If not, then these students won't be fully educated at all.
 

Re: "fully educate themselves."

[liangzai]

You know, I just searched for "Tank Man" on http://www.baidu.com/ [baidu.com] (the premier search engine in China, unaffected by the firewall), and the first link that came up was http://beyondpleasure.blogchina.com/4886647.html [blogchina.com]

It indeed has the picture and the story (in brief), and the page was indeed fetched from within China.

People all know about this, and this information will never go away. But you will not see it discussed in official media or anything like that.

Re:Hm, let's see...

[sielwolf]

Yeah, his statements are especially interesting considering that China no longer provides free primary and secondary school education. That basically means the entire 800 million sustenance-farming population lost its one way into the Chinese boom. And now all the young Chinese either work on the farm to get enough food to eat or go off to join the unskilled migrant economy. Sitting down for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to study MIT course work is comically implausible (especially for peoples who indoor plumbing would be a stunning advancement). And it isn't like China is just going to roll out internet and computers next week. Dividing any program budget by 800 million means there isn't much to spend per-rural citizen.

But I doubt there's much interest in that. I mean, why dry up your giant resevoir of hypercheap labor, the very thing keeping your economy chugging along?

Re:liberated

[IAmTheDave]

How is the U.S. government censoring the information you're want about Iraq? Oh, wait, it isn't. The U.S. is not perfect, but don't throw away perspective because of it.

While maybe not about Iraq, the US government is currently involved in the largest, most far reaching classification nightmare since Nixon. Aside from having made up dozens if not hundreds of new sensitive but unclassified [fas.org] classifications of documents that exempt millions of documents from the FOIA despite their unclassified status, the government was recently caught re-classifying some 55,000 historical documents [nytimes.com] out of the National Archive for no apparent reason other than to cover up historical embarassment on the part of the government.

Classification and secrets in this country are on par with several countries that we criticize for this very thing. The wind is slowly being taken out of the sails of the FOIA, and our right to know as citizens is being whittled away at an unbelievably alarming rate.

This is the most secret administration in the history of the US. Not only have they classified millions of new documents at a cost of billions to the taxpayer that normally would have been declassified in the past (1950s budget information for the CIA, for instance) but the secret re-classification of tens of thousands of documents that have been public for years is a scary, scary precident.

Take the words of the Memorandum of Understanding issued in regards to the now uncovered secret reclassification of documents from the national archive: "It is in the interests of both the CIA and the National Archives and Records Administration to avoid the kind of public notice and researcher complaints that may arise from removing from the open shelves for extended periods of time records that had been public available."

The GP was hardly out of perspective.

Re:Getting around Chinas Firewall

[Dis*abstraction]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id =4462719 [economist.com]

In case the story's censored by those dastardly profit-motivated editors of the Economist, the most relevant bit is "there were some 74,000 protests last year, involving more than 3.7m people; up from 10,000 in 1994 and 58,000 in 2003. Sun Liping, a Chinese academic, has calculated that demonstrations involving more than 100 people occurred in 337 cities and 1,955 counties in the first 10 months of last year. This amounted to between 120 and 250 such protests daily in urban areas, and 90 to 160 in villages. These figures are likely to be conservative. Chinese officials often try to cover up disturbances in their areas to avoid trouble with their superiors."

I'll add that more than half China's population lives in the rural countryside, eking out sustenance on increasingly infertile soil. Development and industrial pollution threaten their land, and the income gap between them and the privileged urban rich--which makes America's income inequality look like a rounding error--causes a great deal of resentment. At least that's what I'm told.