.jpg "China wants internet to be its propaganda engine -")
The Glorious People's Republic of China has a cunning plan to turn the entire world wide wibble into its propaganda tool.
China is probably one of the most capitalist places on the globe right now, but it still believes that it is serving the revolution of Chairman Mao. It also has enough cold war autocracy lying around to pull it off.
According to AP, the Chinese Communist Party has released a secret strategy for transforming the internet into a force for keeping it in power and projecting what it calls soft power abroad.
China's top internet official posted a speech on the net by accident before pulling it. The speech outlines a vast array of institutions and methods to control opinion at home and also “create an international public opinion environment that is objective, beneficial and friendly to us”.
Wang Chen, who is deputy director of the Propaganda Department, head of External (foreign) Propaganda and also director of the State Council's Information Office added that those efforts provided powerful public opinion support for “unifying thinking, consolidating strength, assisting in our diplomatic battles and safeguarding our national interests”.
The speech was made to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on April 29 and posted on the Congress's website on May 4, before being removed, sanitised and re-posted on a more mainstream government website the following day.
However it was spotted by Human Rights in China and included in its report released yesterday.
The report with the catchy titke China's Internet: Staking Digital Ground said that China has this goal of establishing a Chinese intranet and removing China from the global internet.
Anne-Marie Brady, an expert on China's propaganda system at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand said that the average Chinese person knows basically how the propaganda system works but there's no need to advertise so blatantly what the government is doing.
Wang said the internet had increased the government's capabilities in social management but also brought new subversive threats.
“As long as our country's internet is linked to the global internet, there will be channels and means for all sorts of harmful foreign information to appear on our domestic internet,” he said.
Foreign language channels are becoming an important force in countering the hegemony of Western media and in bolstering our country's soft power, he added.
re: Big Brother is Watching YOU Always in Communist Dictatorship of CHINA:
A leading communist thug Chinese Internet regulator has vowed to reduce anonymity in commie China's controlled portion of unfree cyberspace, calling for new rules to require people to use their real names when buying a mobile phone or going online, according to a human rights group.
In an address to the national legislature in April, Communist Party member Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, called for ''perfecting'' the extensive system of censorship the dictatorshp of te PRC government uses to manage the fast-evolving Internet, according to a text of the speech obtained by New York-based Human Rights in China.
China's commie regime has a complicated relationship with the freewheeling Internet, reflected in its recent standoff with Google over censorship of search results. China this week confirmed it had renewed Google's license to operate, after it agreed to stop automatically rerouting users to its Hong Kong site, which is not subject to China's online censorship.
The Internet is commie China's most open and lively forum for discussion, despite already pervasive censorship, but stricter controls could constrain users. The country's online population has surged past 400 million, making it the world's largest.
Commie Chen's comments were reported only briefly when they were made in April. Human Rights in China said the government quickly removed a full transcript posted on the legislature's website. But the group said it found an unexpurgated text and the discrepancies show that Beijing is wary that its push for tighter information control might prove unpopular.
Wang said holes that needed to be plugged included ways people could post comments or access information anonymously, according to the transcript published this week in the group's magazine China Rights Forum.
"We will make the Internet real name system a reality as soon as possible, implement a nationwide cell phone real name system, and gradually apply the real name registration system to online interactive processes," the journal quoted Wang as saying.
As part of that Internet "real name system," forum moderators would have to use their real names as would users of online bulletin boards, and anonymous comments on news stories would be removed, Wang is quoted as saying.
The State Council Information Office did not immediately respond to a faxed request asking whether certain sections of Wang's address to the legislature were altered in the official transcript.
Wang's comments are in line with recent government statements that indicate a growing uneasiness toward the multitude of opinions found online. A Beijing-backed think tank this month accused the democratic and freedom loving U.S. and other Western governments of using social-networking sites such as Facebook to spur political unrest and called for stepped-up scrutiny. As if! Get a life, China!
Commie China has blocked sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, although technologically savvy users can easily jump the so-called "Great Firewall" with proxy servers or other alternatives. Websites about human rights and dissidents are also routinely banned.