Watchdog Blogs in China
Interesting op-ed that explores the roll of blogs is playing in changing the political landscape of China:
All this underscores how the Internet is beginning to play the watchdog role in China that the press plays in the West. The Internet is also eroding the leadership’s monopoly on information and is complicating the traditional policy of “nei jin wai song” – cracking down at home while pretending to foreigners to be wide open. …The authorities have arrested a growing number of Web dissidents. But there just aren’t enough police to control the Internet, and when sites are banned, Chinese get around them with proxy servers.
One of the leaders of the Tiananmen democracy movement, Chen Ziming, is now out of prison and regularly posts essays on an Internet site. Jiao Guobiao, a scholar, is officially blacklisted but writes scathing essays that circulate by e-mail all around China. One senior government official told me that he doesn’t bother to read Communist Party documents any more, but he never misses a Jiao Guobiao essay.
aint tecknology sumthin? ye caint cuntrol the propupganda no more!