Lax domestic management contaminates social ethos
Sitting here at the airport in Seoul, there isn’t much to do. I can’t find an English-language news magazine in the whole place, and I don’t have the right kind of adapter for the power outlets in the business lounge. Sure, I could go back downstairs and buy an adapter somewhere, but I only have 30 minutes until my flight to Seattle boards, so I’ll just sit here at the free internet connections for a while and type in a news article for everyone’s entertainment, and to help alleviate the trade imbalance in copyright infringement that our government claims is currently occuring between the US and China.
I’m just trying to do what I can to help. This is the lead story in this morning’s CHINA DAILY, which I picked up in Beijing before the flight to Seoul this morning …
Gambling and porn targeted
The government will soon assign “virtual cops” to monitor and wipe out pornography, gambling and other illicit activities on the Internet, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) said.
By the end of June, the virtual cops will monitor all major portals and online forums across China, the ministry said.
Nine other ministerial level government departments and the MPS will take part in the campaign to weed out “harmful material and information” and “illicit activities” on the Internet, starting this month.
Online gambling, vulgarity and fraud are among the top priorities, the ministry said.
“The existence of these problems has affected the healthy development of the Internet, brought harm to the youths’ minds, contaminated the social ethos and disrupted the social order,” Zhang Xinfeng, vice-minister of the MPS was quoted by the Xinhua News Agency as saying.
Zhang said the infiltration and spread of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic management of the internet are a problem.
Virtual cops first appeared last year in Shenzen, where the police inserted a floating cartoon icon of a policeman on major websites. The sites are linked to the local police station and have an alarm system. The success of that program prompted the MPS to take it nationwide.
Lu Benfu, an Internet expert with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the move would help maintain a clean cyber environment and deter online crime.
“The simple appearance of these floating icons will remind people these websites are under surveillance,” he said.
In the next six months, the ministries will crack down on illegal online activities such as distributing pornographic materials and organizing cyber strip shows. they intend to purge the web of sexually explicit images, stories, and audio and video clips. The campaign will also target illegal online lotteries, contraband trade and fraud, said Zhang.
Last November, police cracked the largest pornographic website in the country and arrested its creator, Chen Hui, who was later sentenced to life imprisonment. The website Chen started contained more than 9 million pornographic images and articles and had more than 600,000 registered users.
China has about 137 million Internet users, most of whom are young people.
After mentioning all those huge numbers at the end, there’s a sidebar entitled “Major cases” that starts with this item: “In March, police in Changchun, Jilin Province, arrested four suspects accused of sending emails containing explicit sexual information.” With a major case like that under their belts, surely Chinese authorities are encouraged that they’ll soon succeed in their mission.
OK, I have to find me one of those floating cartoon policeman icons and make it into a nice painting we can hang on the wall in our Second Life home. But first, I have to catch a plane.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 11:41 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on April 14, 2007 at 9:57 am orcmid wrote:
I’m not sure where your head is on this, but I think the wall painting is an interesting idea. I don’t think I would put that on my blog myself though.
It is an interesting contrast with different societal approaches to freedom, even the concept of freedom. We can use this as an example of big brother and totalitarianism, and we can also use it as an effort at preserving social cohesion and civility. (Our leaders have their own approach to that, often wrapped in “religious” doctrines.)
It makes for a troublesome contrast for us, who are accustomed to erring on the side of license in order to preserve freedom, and then having to struggle with the Kathy Sierra and Don Imus incidents, new social ills such as addiction to pornography and terrific unreality of the social costs around gaming and gambling (while justifying public lotteries for their benefits to some purpose or the other) and other forms of addiction and socially-accepted recreation. (Do the chinese still smoke heavily?)
on April 15, 2007 at 3:58 am Doug wrote:
Yes, everyone smokes. I wanted to get a good photo of the one of the smoking areas (remember those?) at the Beijing airport yesterday morning, but decided not to try because there was a cop right there and I’m assuming that in China, as in the US, cops take a dim view of fancy cameras being used in airports. (That’s a whole other topic I could rant about at length — all the situations where a big Nikon is seen as inappropriate or even illegal, but cell-phone cameras are tolerated.)
I agree there’s an inevitable tradeoff between iron-fisted control, which can — in the right hands — be good for social cohesion and civility, and absolute freedom, which can — in the wrong hands — lead to lots of ugly and hurtful behavior. That’s a debate that will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, no doubt.
Hey, I hadn’t thought of putting the cop icon on the blog. But I couldn’t resist, thanks for the suggestion:
http://www.mahugh.com/images/blog/2007/04/14/seoulairport.jpg
Of course, I won’t be putting it on the blog home page itself. I’m a rebel at heart, but I do have some sense of self-preservation. On the other hand … I’m thinking I could put it on a Second Life t-shirt, which would be quite appropriate to wear when I’m with Megan in SL, given some of her chosen attire.
on October 31, 2008 at 3:36 pm Cats on the Windowsill » Blog Archive » I’m Under Surveillance wrote:
[…] Doug posted on his blog recently, China is attempting to eliminate all inappropriate content from the Internet, via a cute […]