The biggest state threat to U.S. national security for so many reasons, China continues to censor content, having now blocked Youtube for 2 days running
I wrote about Sam Brownback's faux outrage over Chinese censorship last year at the Olympics. Of course, while the outrage was faked, the outrageous policies were very real.
Things started when China expressed anger at a video of the monk better known as the Dalai Lama
China on Tuesday accused supporters of the Dalai Lama of fabricating a video that appears to show police beating a Tibetan protester to death, while the video-sharing network YouTube said its service had been blocked for Chinese users.
The footage, which the official Xinhua News Agency said came from sources tied to the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile, was pieced together from different places, the agency said Tuesday, citing an unidentified official with China's Tibetan regional government.
But it's not like China's scared, or anything.
Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact it is just the opposite," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters.
...
Qin said China's 300 million Internet users and 100 million blogs showed "China's Internet is open enough, but also needs to be regulated by law in order to prevent the spread of harmful information and for national security."
They don't fear it. They exploit it to prevent dissent, and quite effectively.
It has been described by analysts as another step in the Party's battle to stifle dissent in a year of sensitive anniversaries, including the 20th anniversary of the government's bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
Of course, things got much tougher for them recently in that area. They were hoping to have scored a major coup by having Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation advisory board member Chas Freeman serve as head of the National Intelligence Council. Unfortunately for the CCP, he was dropped.
Of course, that's not to say that they're only stifling dissent in their own country. They're also stifling dissent in their client states in Africa.
Consider what happened just the other day in South Africa:
Organizers of a peace conference that was to have been attended by five Nobel laureates in Johannesburg this week said Tuesday that they had canceled it after the South African government denied a visa to the Dalai Lama.
Two of South Africa's Nobel Peace Prize laureates, the retired Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu and former President F.W. de Klerk, condemned the government for giving in to pressure from China to block the Tibetan spiritual leader's entry into the country and said they would refuse to participate in the conference if he was not there.
Nice.