Often dictatorship and communist governments would take the “turn a blind eye” approach to social issues. I call it the “ostrich approach”, what one does not see does not exist.
Just this past week the mainland China government passed a law to allow the government controlled news agency full control of the type of electronic information, which are allowed to be accessed from within the China borders, excluding Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Haven’t the mainland China government learned? We live in an information age with a global economy. Everything that happens, no matter where it is, will affects the lives of individuals elsewhere in the world.
It is time for China to open up its thinking and adopt the changes around them (their borders). Their citizens will eventually find out about these changes on their own. Attempts to close off information access to its citizens will only cause them to seek out other ways to obtain the information.
Remember when we were young? Our parents would tell us we cannot do something, it is our nature to want to do it even more. Or may be that’s just the rebellious side in me?
Have you heard of the TOR network? This was a system originally developed by the United States Navy, but now an opensource system/project. This service is now used by journalists, government agencies, law enforcement agencies and many more to avoid detection of their activities on the Internet.
TOR is like the traditional activist concept of “People Power”, it hides your electronic communications among the other users within the network. So the trail back to you is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to follow. More details can be found on the TOR web site.
So yes the latest law from the mainland China government is inconvenient to Internet users in China, but the informed users will have ways around it using solutions like TOR.