Yep, if you don't control the journalists completely, you've got to jail them to cencor them.
If, on the other hand, they'll print anything the government tells them as if it was The Truth, and would hardly question much, besides some partisan BS, why bother?
Especially if the few facts that sometimes escape this self-sencorship are burried in a cloud of illogical opinions, half-informed BS and propaganda, so the population doesn't even know what to think about those either...
I can't help but to add a counterpoint here for the United States. The incarceration rate in the United States is over five times that of China (although these numbers exclude prisoners in US Territories, military facilities, immigration and customs, facilities controlled by the Marshall's Service, and juvenile facilities, which would further increase the ratio). In fact, of first world nations, the United States leads every other nation for incarceration rate including Cuba, Russia, Rwanda, Belarus, and Iran.
Besides controversies related to race, America has also seen a large number of prison scandals in the past few years including:
However, the United States is not nearly as bad to journalists. If you are a foreign journalist in the US that is not liked you will be deported (Ibrahim Jassam, Jason Rezaian and Yeganeh Salehi) and/or harassed during travel (Laura Poitras) and if you are a domestic journalistic enterprise you may be surveilled (like the Associated Press surveillance scandal this administration, or the countless others from recent times). You may be aggressively prosecuted to reveal sources (ruining your ability to keep secrecy of sources and therefore trustworthiness to confidential informants) a la Risen. You may be pressured into not running certain stories (like The Washinton Post's 2004 story about the NSA mass surveillance that was pushed under the radar). You may lose access to officials or be blocked from attending or asking questions at press releases or in the converse be given access to these things for running certain stories or positive slants on them (Judith Miller, Ken Dilanian). You may be threatened with the Espionage Act for handing national documents (Glenn Greenwald). But you will probably not be directly imprisoned.
Far too many journalist in the US will not or cannot investigate the current administration, Sharly Attkinson's new book Stonewalled goes into depth about this problem.
Where you have newsrooms who are so desperate for inclusion they will not criticize any government official and are quick to back off when warned off.
Go read the other stories out there where the Whitehouse manages the press, where if you don't obey you will be excluded from press gatherings. Tell me there is press freedom when the White House can forbid attendance.
It's difficult to find articles written in Chinese, hosted on servers or social media and news sites in China that criticize China, yes.
Conversely, it's beyond easy to find articles written in English, hosted on US servers and social media and news sites in the US that criticize the US.
This isn't really true. Take for example the Harvard Study on Chinese Censorship "Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation" by King, Gary, Pan, and Roberts (http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/experiment_0.pdf).
Scathing criticism is regularly posted about the Chinese government and is not subject to any censorship. There are a few key areas that are censored: notably relations with Tibet and historical political uprisings.
> Scathing criticism is regularly posted about the Chinese government
Did you actually read the study? That's not what they studied. They studied whether postings were held for review more on social media sites over standard media. And they weren't held more. What they found was that the CCP on social media takes a "post first, censor later" approach. That doesn't mean they don't censor social media. On social media, posts are "Reviewed".
If you scroll down to the bottom of the study, they even give a listing of words that usually trigger a "review" flag.
From your linked study: "In total, 66 of the 100 sites in our sample (automatically) review at least some social media submissions, and
40% of all of our individual social media submissions from our 100 sites (and 52% of submissions from sites that review at least sometimes)
are put into review. Of those submissions that go into review, 63% never appear on the web."
Did you actually read the paper? You quote from the results section. Did you go directly there?
Here's the opening paragraph. You'll find plenty in the paper to support it, although this is directly supported with a citation from their previous paper (http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/censored.pdf): "We begin with the theoretical context. The largest previous study of the purpose of Chinese censorship (2) distinguished between the “state critique” and “collective action potential” theories of censorship and found that, with few exceptions, the first was wrong and the second was right: Criticisms of the government in social media (even vitriolic ones) are not censored, whereas any attempt to physically move people in ways not sanctioned by the government is censored. Even posts that praise the government are censored if they pertain to real-world collective action events (2)."
Critique of the state is not censored. The paper goes on to show that even discussion about having a multiparty American-style Constitutional system is not subject to censorship.
There are very select things that are censored, and these things that are censored (calls for direct collective action and specific topics related to these) see both:
1.) foreign propaganda attempts, which is a strong reason for the Chinese government to be interested in disruption (this is also true in America)
2.) parity with movement disquieting behavior of Western states (the US disquiets movements through mechanisms other than direct censorship including direct organizational infiltration, Fusion Centers, IRS harassment, JTRIG type 'warnings', character assassination, bribery, etc)
Yes, I do speak Chinese (Mandarin). I can also read a newspaper in Traditional or Simplified Chinese and have studied International Relations (and Computer Science, actually) in Beijing at Tsinghua University (清华大学) and in Taiwan at Taiwan University (臺灣大學).
I also lived in China for about 2.5 years (and not surrounded by foreigners) and in Taiwan for close to the same length of time. The classes I took at Tsinghua were taught in Chinese and I was usually the only or one of two non-Chinese citizens.
I've been to Chinese NGOs, on the set for the filming of CCTV news programs, and spoken to Government officials in China. For about a year I only had access to the Chinese web (国内).
I think the parent is suggesting that a fact based criticism of China is difficult to perform in China.
This claim is actually a much more complicated one than the parent suggests. While it is true that a number of search terms are going to raise eyebrows in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_blacklisted_keywords_i...) the 'blacklisting' is a much more complicated algorithm than post-and-you-are-disappeared - for the most part there are filters for how large an audience certain messages can reach although on some platforms 'errors' will prevent certain words from being posted. (Anecdotally, I have encountered such 'errors' in America on Facebook while posting news about Occupy, leaked Trans Pacific Partnership documents, Snowden Documents, Wikileaks links, Manning documents and others. Facebook assures me that it's the spam filter - this never made logical sense to me but alas a tangent). Another complication is that much of the blocked content in China is foreign propaganda - if you look at the dissident news section of the Wiki article and follow up on them you will see that they are not grassroots news organizations but set up by Western states and notably America. This is a well known favorite tactic of the United States (see the use of militarized media in the invasion of Iraq, the Lincohn group infiltrations, Radio Free Iraq, Voice of America, the compelled press released by Iraqi bloggers detained while passing American checkpoints, etc - or look at the Cuban Twitter effort to overthrow Cuba this year - or look at the DARPA programs to use Twitter to 'deradicalize the Middle East', where they go so far as to use brain scans of people reading Twitter messages to predict which propaganda items will have the most positive US political impacts in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and others). A further complication is that America is under some of the same propagandizing efforts today and has asked a number of ways for authorization to interfere (it is not really known what is currently done without explicit authorization to combat these messages). Also, as mentioned in the 'sister comment', highly critical commentary is regularly and freely posted about the Chinese government. This is confirmed by both speaking with Chinese citizens and by Western studies of Chinese media.
Finally, I encounter this criticism fairly often. I actually agree in moderate doses with it. There are certainly states which a person would not get away with any sort of criticism of the government and there are states where all records of history are destroyed and rewritten as favored by whichever administration (both historically and today) - I do think to the degree that the United States allows most select information to become public and to the degree that the United States minimally alters records it should be commended.
Yet these freedoms are not worth anything if they are not practiced - it is important not to buy into the myths of our nation (well, my nation, I don't know where the reader resides) and to demand ever more of it and of ourselves.
And we must be careful here of the comparison - we do not want to suggest that the United States is somehow in every way more free than China. China is landing very softly into a modern Republican Capitalism, it's civil rights have been steadily increasing, and the China censorship bit is drastically overemphasized. As a last thought, the point the parent makes is tangential to the discussion at large, which is about Fourth Estate and penal system.
When the Communist party persecutes Falun Gong practitioners, where are the Chinese activists ? Now, I invite you to imagine the outrage that would follow if the US started persecuting Yoga instructors because they were not "Christian" enough.
Discussions of Falun Gong needs to be couched in the context of its withdrawl from the CQRS and its political power to organize its tens of millions of supporters, and in fact crack downs truly only came when mass demonstrations were launched. Many parallels can be seen between the abuse of Falun Gong practitioners by police and the abuse of Occupy protestors, Ferguson protestors or by the abuse of those in the civil rights movement and the harassment of those known to be involved, or historically the abuse of union workers in America and countless other examples.
I don't think your comparison of Falun Gong to Yoga and Communism to Christianity is one that is aligned with the facts.
When the state persecutes Muslim people in America where are the American activists?
No, I don't agree with your view of Falun gong; the line that you take is that of the CCP. There may be some truth to these allegations, but I wouldn't believe it, given that it is the CCP.
I did not mean to portray China as some "evil" machine, but I do think China has some way to go still, when it come to civil liberty.
Frankly, I think that Maoism befell China is a tragic mistake, even if the outcome has lately been positive. In that I also give away my colours.
Yep, if you don't control the journalists completely, you've got to jail them to cencor them.
If, on the other hand, they'll print anything the government tells them as if it was The Truth, and would hardly question much, besides some partisan BS, why bother?
Especially if the few facts that sometimes escape this self-sencorship are burried in a cloud of illogical opinions, half-informed BS and propaganda, so the population doesn't even know what to think about those either...