China bans Youtube

http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE52N1VN20090324?feedType=RSS&feedName=internetNews&rpc=22&sp=true

by vaksel • 17 years ago

53 39 17 years ago

reuters.com

garply2• 17 years ago

Does anyone know if the ban is nation-wide? I was under the impression that bans are often province-specific.

josefresco• 17 years ago

They also tend to flicker on and off, I'm reserving judgment on this until some time passes.

jballanc• 17 years ago

This article is inaccurate. It makes it seem as if YouTube is no longer blocked in Turkey when, last I checked, it still is...

Retric• 17 years ago

Actuality, they don't say it works in Turkey only that: YouTube, which has country-specific sites in 23 countries, has in the past been blocked in certain countries, including Turkey which might suggest it currently works but does not say so.

Anyway, while I don't think it's an issue with Turkey I expect China blocking YouTube might become a free trade issue.

garply2• 17 years ago

I hadn't thought about that angle - I'm sure Youku and Tudou, the native competitors, are getting huge traffic surges right now.

utku_karatas2• 17 years ago

You're right about Turkey, it's no free trade issue here.

The bans are about our archaic laws allowing anyone to claim any site for being a threat to our national unity. And these lawsuits usually end up with banning the whole thing. At some point even Blogger.com was gone (probably because some smart-ass didn't like one post and issued a suit).

And as for the inaccuracy of the write up, Youtube's status is quite flaky because of all the lawsuits against it - one after another. Even we lost the track of what's going on there - let alone the poor guy :)

jhancock2• 17 years ago

Its not going to become a free trade issue. Not as long as the U.S. needs China to keep buying treasury notes.

Pay attention to want _isn't_ being said in the U.S. press about China. This will point you to the laundry list of things China is telling the U.S. to keep its hands off if it wants China to keep buying US$ debt.

petercooper3• 17 years ago

Don't be too quick to blame this on political fear - China probably just wants to increase productivity in the workplace. Next on the chopping block.. Facebook, Digg, and Reddit.

dinkumthinkum3• 17 years ago

You've got to be kidding. Stifling another outlet for free speech is just to get a few more widgets produced per day right? Of course it has nothing to do with political fear, even though every other instance of such an action did. Right, you can't be serious.

marksutherland2• 17 years ago

It can't be both? The percieved benefits of protectionism, combined with the squelching of unsavoury opinions and other content must be very appealing.

petercooper3• 17 years ago

Yes, I was kidding. I just didn't realize the ;-) on the end was necessary this time because it was such a ridiculous comment ;-)

megaduck• 17 years ago

Actually, you can blame this one directly on political fear. Recently, video footage of Chinese police savagely beating prone Tibetan protesters got posted onto YouTube. Next thing you know, WHAM! Blocked.

There's a lot of precedent for this, too. The government blocked the whole iTunes store when a music single with the word "Tibet" in it hit the front page. They frequently ban news sites whenever news from Tibet (especially negative news) hits. It doesn't last forever, though. After things simmer down, they'll usually lift the general block and just keep targeted blocks on specific stories or pages.

I'm hoping YouTube comes back soon. Sometimes domains that were totally banned spontaneously become free and clear. Any blogs hosted by Wordpress were blocked until this last week. Now, no problem. Same thing with Andrew Sullivan's blog, and half a dozen other sites. I think it's just to keep people guessing.

electromagnetic• 17 years ago

I think it could also be that whenever something pops up they don't like they review the entire site. If someone says 'Free Tibet!' on blogger and it gets too popular, they'll block the whole of blogger until they've got their targets down to specific blogs and pages, then they can unblock the entire thing.

IMO, if they're doing that, it's a very smart system of reducing dissent. I completely disagree with it, but then I grew up in a western country. I'm also not too ignorant to call China evil for doing so, they've made colossal strides in the past 50 years and perhaps in the long run this will be good for the country as a whole, potentially the worst thing that could happen is a civil war involving 1.3 billion people.

petercooper3• 17 years ago

Now I realize I should have put the obligatory ;-) on the end, although I thought mentioning Facebook, Digg, and Reddit would have been enough :)

bk3• 17 years ago

This is hardly big news. Sites rotate in and out of being blocked all the time. wikipedia, wordpress.com, news.bbc.co.uk, etc. have all been blocked at one point or another.

The only mainstream site that's been consistently blocked is bbc news. Interestingly, no US news outlets are blocked. It always makes me wonder why.

Also, the major cities tend to have more liberal access policies than more remote areas.

h34t• 17 years ago

For the year I was living there Flickr and Wikipedia were blocked 100% of the time.

bk3• 17 years ago

Wikipedia was blocked completely for a long time, later they moved to blocking only certain pages (en.wikipedia.org, I think the Chinese version is still blocked entirely). For flickr only the image hosts (static.flickr.com) were blocked, which led to the strange experience of being able to browse an image sharing site with no images.

unalone• 17 years ago

Not to sound snarky, but US news outlets very rarely deliver controversial information. They tend to avoid edgy stories entirely to stop from offending people.

chiffonade3• 17 years ago

> It always makes me wonder why.

This doesn't make me wonder at all.

The US and China were the two biggest allies in World War 2, became economically unified during the cold war to defeat the Soviet Union (remember the Soviet Union?), and now are the two biggest economic powers in the world. Don't look at official GDP figures, they're meaningless. Look at influence, manufacturing/logistical and financial power centers, and purchasing power parity.

After all, what is China but a United Provinces of Asia? You think 1.3B people are naturally part of the same country/culture/creed/flag? No fucking way, to think otherwise is racist ignorance.

Japan is quickly being usurped by Korea as well. Once the re-unification of Korea happens and there is a large source of inexpensive labor from the North for the developed economy in the South to employ, Japan will start its relative decline. They've already started to use Chinese manufacturing to remain competitive and leverage what's left of their engineering/design head-start given to them by the Marshall plan and previous Imperialist mindset.

The big picture, folks. It's always worth looking at.

eru2• 17 years ago

> Once the re-unification of Korea happens and there is a large source of inexpensive labor from the North for the developed economy in the South to employ, Japan will start its relative decline.

The historic example of German re-unification does point in another direction..

Caligula• 17 years ago

I have to disagree with some of what you said.

It was the USSR and the US who were the biggest allies in WW2. China was a non factor. And after WW2, the US opposed Mao by supporting the losing side. The USSR supported Mao's revolution. Trade began between China and the US in the 70's but it was not part of a plan to defeat the soviet union. It only really picked up at the end of the cold war.

I don't think Japan is being usurped. If and when the re-unification happens, it will be chaos. South Korea just hopes it does not bankrupt them. Having a new source of inexpensive labor will not help Korea surpass Japan. China is close by and there is still plenty of inexpensive labor to be had there.

Also, its not like just Japan uses Chinese manufacturing. The whole world does including the US. Japans engineering head-start was not given to them by the Marshall plan(which was mostly directed at europe). They earned it starting in the 50's.

mdemare• 17 years ago

The bbc has an chinese language edition. Do the US news outlets?

bk3• 17 years ago

Only the news.bbc.co.uk subdomain (which is in English) was blocked, www.bbc.co.uk was fine, except for certain sub-pages.

steamboiler• 17 years ago

I wonder if this has any connection to the huge popularity of the "grass-mud horse" online, particularly on youtube?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?em

phugoid2• 17 years ago

The hard thing to bend my mind around is the fact that many people in China are in favour of Internet censorship. I have witnessed the same thing here in the UAE - even from young Western-educated locals.

I suppose that if you grow up in a society where heavy-handed censorship is widespread in all media and even conversation, you'd accept it as normal and perhaps necessary. Self-censorship is even more effective and omni-present.

Note: I'm not claiming that censorship is absent in the West, but you'd be silly not to acknowledge that there's less of it.

One local told me that he wouldn't dream of giving an unfiltered Internet connection to many of his countrymen, as nothing in their culture has prepared them to deal with what they'd run into. Of course, he himself uses a VPN to dial out.

chiffonade3• 17 years ago

> Of course, he himself uses a VPN to dial out.

Sounds like class warfare. Same shit, different country.

jacoblyles• 17 years ago

China is less than a lifetime away from its last civil war. I can see how that would make people fearful and cautious.

Allowing populism to run a muck could lead to revolution, especially in a young and poor nation like China. Contrary to the romantic ideal of revolution we have in the West, in practice it is a bloody, miserable, and violent thing.

Call me a fascist, but I can understand the Chinese authorities' attempts to short-circuit anti-government movements. I can also understand popular support for such actions, given that the current Chinese government is more competent than all but a handful on this planet.

Also - I'm just trying to understand and explore their side here. I do enjoy living in a free society where I can support market anarchism and make frequent anti-government comments. I'm just not so much of an idealist to believe that American-style democracy is optimal for all places, times, and situations.

For example, I can understand why the Germans chose to ban Nazi publications in the wake of World War II, free speech be damned.

netsp• 17 years ago

No Censorship, like like no economic intervention, no prohibitions etc. are not intuitive concepts.

Censorship is not bad just because it's bad (like murder or assault). It doesn't usually hurt anyone directly. In fact it's trying to help. If heroin, fascism, homosexuality or anorexia are bad, why not work to stop them? To oppose censorship, you need to accept that in order to censor bad things, you need to have institutions that decide what is bad (don't we already have those?) and a means of blocking them. This will lead to bad things like censoring good things. There is no way around that, just like outrunning light. That's a pretty flimsy argument to make. If it hasn't been drilled into you, you probably won't accept it.

This isn't something that just people in the UAE or China will not 'get.' Australians today will not be convinced that banning pedophilia sites is a bad idea.

Try separating a debate about the legalization of drugs from a discussion about how harmful it is to take drugs.

est• 17 years ago

> The hard thing to bend my mind around is the fact that many people in China are in favour of Internet censorship.

Wait, where did you get that?

jhancock2• 17 years ago

they are in favor of the same things other country's peoples are in favor of blocking: porn, etc.

trouble is once you have a "great firewall" in place, it gets used to block whatever is convenient with no oversight.

phugoid2• 17 years ago

A number of articles I've read, but sorry I haven't recorded any specific links.

I've also read about some very patriotic Chinese surfers that go around flaming anything that doesn't conform to the Party line. Same happens here in UAE.

From several indicators like this, I have assumed there's quite a bit of similarity between the two situations. The two national cultures are very different, but they both actively punish those who publicly differs from central authority, they both try to censor all media.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

The most surprising thing about this is that it wasn't already banned.

China bans Youtube

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