China's Great Firewall Spreads Overseas, page 2

Originally posted by space cadet
reply to post by AstroEngineer

I am not so sure that the chinese, or any government, knows best for it's people at all times, and not allowing them access to simple site like facebook says a lot about how they want their people to percieve the rest of the world, socially speaking.

I'm not sure if your response was suggesting I support China censoring their citizens. I certainly do not. Any country which engages in censoring its citizens is utterly lost. I was simply trying to make two points.

1) Intelligent people in China will always be able to access the full internet

2) Chinese leaders will never wake up one day and decide, "Today, let's make the internet uncensored." They are trying to hold together a society which cannot be held together without censorship (and not forever with it). China would very quickly break apart, in the same way that the USSR did. But China could also face graver civil unrest with the disparity between rich and poor (those with power and those with none). We must do everything we can to help the Chinese people get full access to information "illegally" and we must do everything we can to encourage the government to move towards giving their people greater freedoms. It would not be productive for us to delude ourselves into imagining that China will have a sudden change of heart in the near future. They won't. They reasonably fear losing control and having their society collapse. Likely that will happen at some point, it seems unavoidable, and it will be very messy.

John