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An email conversation about selfishness

The 《High Tech Low Life》was broadcasting in PBS in United States recently, and available on iTunes now,I am one of the subject of this documentary , lot of US citizens wrote email to me, only few people talk to me they though,that’s great feedback, but most people focus on “selfishness” ,because I was have a short talk with another subject Tiger Temple and mentioned “selfishness “, I think that audience have different background, I want repost a mail conversation to my blog, hope more people understand different angle with different background.

below email from a professor from California.

Hi,

I have recently watched the documentary in which you and “Tiger Temple” are feature.

I am writing to offer my modest views about your cause.

1.       Freedom of Information

a.       I agree with you that Freedom of Information and Freedom of the Press are important. It is important for a free society for people to be able to freely report and responsibly report about what is happening within their communities and/ or country. Whether the reports are about important social/economic issues more mundane issues, the right to report shouldn’t be curtail or censored. Because of this, I feel that your work is important, whether your reports are mundane or socially important, and you should not be censored. It is clear that  a free and independent media is of great importance to a free, just and democratic country. (democracy here is use as a synonym for equal treatment of the citizens.).

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A lesson in censorship(2008)

Read ‘Notes on the Net’, Zola’s article on Internet activism for Index on Censorship‘s ‘Made in China’ issue here (pdf ) ,it was published in 2008, I am archive it on my blog.

Chinese blogger Zhou Shuguang’s journey through censorship, journalism and the Internet – from the Great Firewall to reporting banned stories

A lesson in censorship

In 2002, I hung around the online forum bbs.tencent.com. My first encounter with a BBS [bulletin board system] was also my first encounter with keyword filtering. On that website, all articles were censored by the software before they were posted. If certain sensitive words were found, such as ‘4 June’, ‘Falun Gong’, ‘hooker’ or ‘revolution’, the piece would not be posted. Sometimes, if an article contained non-political sensitive words like ‘fuck’, it would still be posted, but the system would replace those words with the * symbol. So I frequently saw BBS articles that contained * symbols. Some people used other symbols to separate individual characters in words like ‘revolution’ to avoid being censored by the software. I began to understand online censorship from that point.

Propaganda rules

On occasion, I’ve seen netizens make BBS posts about ‘propaganda notices’ and ‘propaganda rules’ which include prohibitions against reporting on ‘rights crusaders’, religious issues, family planning, forced eviction and demolition. The traditional Chinese media supervision framework consists of a strict registration and review system, a post-hoc censorship system, a personnel management system, and a permit system for practitioners, thereby exerting strict control over the dissemination of news.

How it works

All domestic websites must be registered, including non-commercial websites. The government assigns monitors to comment in chat rooms, direct the discussion and thereby influence public opinion. Server rooms control website content, under the supervision of the Internet Data Centre (IDC): if they discover sensitive content on websites under their jurisdiction, then the IDC will exert pressure to delete that content. ISPs and ICPs [internet content providers] are also tapped for content control. All sorts of online intimidation, complaints, administrative punishments and legal actions are employed to guarantee that all content is under the government’s control.

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about non government organization in China

A few days ago, I was met a guy from Facebook, he were know my name after Hillary Clinton Speech ,and give me lot of praises, and will give me some help if I need. I said, I just do something for fun,for myself, maybe sometimes is also useful for other people. of course I need money, but I am always do something by single person, I can’t accept money from foreign NGO, if I build a team or organization to accept donations,may get arrest and questions . Independents individual or organizaion it is very difficult to live  in China ,will get financial problem, and policy problem form government, Chinese government do a lot of  research about NGO to make sure that there isn’t risk form independent organization , to make sure everything under the control.

In China, independent person was called dissidents, independent organization was called “illegal organization”, both of them will get trouble.

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