dagblog - Comments for "China Reins In Entertainment and Blogging"

Are China?s Rulers Getting

artappraiser — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:25:45 +0000

In reply to China Reins In Entertainment and Blogging

Are China’s Rulers Getting Religion?
By Ian Johnson, New York Review of Books blog, October 29, 2011

....While it is easy to read this move simply as censorship, which it certainly is, it also reflects the new preoccupation with morality: many of the banned shows are pure entertainment—the party now wants more news programs—and Chinese microblogs have long been a forum for anonymous character assassination. Meanwhile, though it has been far less noted, Beijing is giving new support to religion—even the country’s own beleaguered traditional practice, Daoism.

After decades of destruction, Daoist temples are being rebuilt, often with government support. Shortly after the plenum ended, authorities were convening an International Daoism Forum....

The article reminded me of

artappraiser — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:32:48 +0000

In reply to I read this with more than a

The article reminded me of Bork and his Slouching toward Gomorrah because of Articleman's thread. I was thinking of putting a comment there but I didn't want to ruin Articleman's emphasis on the tactics of borking and what resulted from it. That though the tactics were regrettable, the threat to life as we know it from Bork turned out to be real. Some would say that Bork went that way because of the borking itself, but Andrew Sullivan is one that argued that wasn't the case, see page 17-18 of Sullivan's essay for the 1998 NYT Magazine, "Going Down Screaming." Sullivan was more conservative back then than he is now, just left on social freedom issues, yet he saw Bork as a very dangerous fellow finally outing himself as one in that book, not just a conservative legal scholar.

Not that I think that Chinese Party councils or Borks on the Supreme Court can forever control cultures once they are out of the bottle, but it's the resulting dysfunctions that the societies have to endure with black markets (i.e., the Prohition lesson) and all that kind of stuff, the endgame loss of respect for rule of law, etc.

While the tactics may have been regrettable, I shudder to think of what might have happened with him on the court once he felt free to attempt to shape the culture, at that point in time especially. I do think he was/is a much worse jihadi against our culture than any of the others sitting on the bench now.

I read this with more than a

Richard Day — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:09:08 +0000

In reply to China Reins In Entertainment and Blogging

I read this with more than a little interest.

I forget sometimes that we do have some freedoms over here that are not present in places like China which never had a tradition of free speech, free association....

It must be pretty scary over there for the government officials.

I mean what a shock! all of a sudden they have hundreds of millions in a middle class; hundreds of millions tweeting and texting and emailing and...

We have our right wing crazies and left wing crazies but if you refrain from giving out the addresses of Federal Judges and refrain from discussing how to make the best meth or pipe bombs you are left alone. Although you may end up on some 'fly list' and thereby merit a personal pat down at the airport.

But if we have so many 'hackers' in the country and so many amateurs who know how to manipulate the net, I assume the same type of groups reside in China.

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out.

But I cannot believe that the new tech, the new forms of instant communication are not the centerpiece of that country's magic transformation!