An official joke

China official: What 'net censorship? What jailed journalists?
Speaking today at a United Nations internet summit in Athens, a Chinese government official claimed that the PRC does not practice any form of internet censorship.

[Yang Xiaoqun]: I don't think we should be using different standards to judge China. In China, we don't have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that's a different problem. I know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their offices from the Webcast. And I've heard people say that the BBC is not available in China or that it's blocked. I'm sure I don't know why people say this kind of thing. We do not have restrictions at all.

Nick Gowing, BBC anchor and session moderator: Would you like to elaborate on that?

[Yang Xiaoqun]: How can I elaborate on it if we don't have any restrictions?

October 31, 2006 was not April fool's day, but a Chinese government official did not want to withhold his strong will for making jokes. The official is a truly jackass, he didn't respect truth at all. Why this stupid could speak for Chinese people? He then asked "which site is banned in china?"
Ok, I'd like to sample some of them:

Google cache, wordpress.com, blogspot.com and Chinese wikipedia. And these are just tip of the iceberg.

I know china claimed itself as a socialism country for more than 50 years, but I always think in some respects, it is still feudalism. One thing I found interesting is that almost all the socialism countries like China, Soviet, North Korea and Vietnam experience a very long time of feudalism. So I believe there goes some inner link between feudalism and socialism. Probably it is the weak sense of democracy of people in traditional feudalism countries.

We can often hear so called "Chinese characteristics" from the government. While admitting that people are different in nature, I believe they are not so distinct, and for most of the time, the "Chinese characteristics" stuff is a good excuse for strengthening the control of people. The government recognizes the difference between countries, but why doesn't it admit the difference between people and try to unify our thinking through censorship?

Censorship has a very long history in China, back to Qin dynasty (221 B.C.). At that time, the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang buried millions of educated people alive and burnt lots of books. And as I see it, net censorship is just a relatively humane clone of ancient barbarous acts.

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the blogspot.com was banned again in china, it is harder and harder for me to access my blog now.