Tuesday, June 21, 2005

china has always been a repressive country. its strongly communist, i guess as the US is strongly republic and patriotic. one thing thought, is that the US doesnt have such a stranglehold over its citizens as china wants to have. free speech is abundant in australia, it would be bedlam if it were any other way. when i read my rss a while ago i found this article which really makes me wonder, how can a country with such oppression, be so close to being one of the largest superpowers on the face of this planet?

here is what the rss article said:

Xeni Jardin: Snipped from the FT:

Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors. Users of the joint-venture portal, formally launched last month, have been blocked from using a range of potentially sensitive words to label personal websites they create using its free online blog service, MSN Spaces.

Attempts to input words in Chinese such as "democracy" prompted an error message from the site: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item." Other phrases banned included the Chinese for "demonstration", "democratic movement" and "Taiwan independence".


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