Tibet?

Aiyah, Dave! Honestly, I am a vanilla Auntie. I mentioned this experiment that I had performed (guess it was a slow day, that day), only because it shows how ridiculous and ineffectual such filters-by-keyword can be. I thought of adding a friendly ;-) to the end of this post for you, but have decided not too in case it is misinterpreted or scares you in some way.

Nice try there auntie but I think it's clear to everyone now how you like to spend your free time! haha! And your avatar just adds to the creepyness!

Oh no, sorry John! Please feel free to delete my post. I think we have a similar filters in Singapore, although the sensitive key words would be different (mainly certain Arabic words and names, and the ingredients you need for making things go kerboom etc). But instead of shutting off access to the site concerned, it would "red-flag" it so that agents could go in, very quietly, to assess the threat (if any). I don't have any problems with that.

However, I have some doubts about the efficacy of such filters. Googling "hot gay sex" triggered the national firewall, but the filter's vocabulary was obviously not as rich as mine: "Prince Albert piercing", "violet wand", "golden shower", "butt plug" are but a few of the search terms that were waved right through when I tried them typing them just for fun, to test the extent of the firewall. I'm not into any of these things... !

Sigh... back to my American political blogs where nobody seems to understand anything about China...

Thanks for the clarification John. I had no idea that was how it worked. Really important information to impart to those of us who appreciate to our freedoms.

Sorry, John, I did not update the page before I posted and therefore did not read your message.

What I found astonishing is how the ethnic and economical aspects are completely filtered out in the coverage of many well-renouned news outlets to convey a simple David-Goliath scheme.

The current Tibetan "resistance" is soley portrayed as a "brave" fight of a peace loving hippie monk mountain people against the heavily armed fashist security forces, who merclessly try to break all forms of free will utterance.

Well said John - hopefully that will drive this political discussion elsewhere. I can just see this thread getting completely out of control otherwise.

Let me say a thing or two on this topic. We have absolutely nothing against free discussion on real topics. We're not really afraid of getting a call from Beijing or anything like that. We're about language learning here, not politics, and we think everyone can tell that. The only real threat we pose is to the horribly out-dated traditional forms of education!

The actual danger is a very practical one. If a certain discussion is taken too far, and too many sensitive keywords appear on one page, certain automatic filters on the Chinese internet will kick in, and the website will become inaccessible to anyone in China. Sure, the rest of you outside of China will have no issues, but even the staff here at ChinesePod will no longer be able to update the service or even intervene in any way!

Obviously, we do not want that to happen. There 's no way to complain to authorities if something like this happens. It can be quite difficult to remove the "offensive" content once you get shut out, but until you do, you stay shut out.

So, you can see our situation is a little bit tricky. We don't ever want to tell people not to talk about things, but we also want to remain free to operate our website and continue to help everyone out there to learn Chinese.

Dear tvan, thank you for the link to the "Economist" article, which seems to be balanced and fair. It's painful for me because it opens the possibility that mobs of "saintly" Tibetans may actually be trying to carry out pogroms against ethnic Chinese. I just wish that there were some non-violent way to shut Richard Gere and Condi Rice up and prevent him from making the situation any worse. I'm hardly a "China apologist", as I feel that Beijing has mismanaged the inflow of Han Chinese immigrants to the Tibet area, but I am now more sure than ever that there is no clear black and white answer. For me, the question of Tibet (the rights and wrongs) is now a lot less clear to me than my very strong feelings about Chinese support for the shocking measures taken against the genuinely non-violent movement by monks in Myanmar. I've seen the youtube clips of General Than Shwe's daughter's diamond-encrusted wedding, and still feel sick whenever I think of them. I wonder how Beijing can stomach the regime in Myanmar when it is trying to position itself as a major world power. Pui.

RJBerki, i just planned to go back to Beijing from Lhasa by train this time, must be a wonderful trip. (i like to skip the tibet situation by now, called several freinds in lhasa this morning and i just hope i can fly there again in may as planned..) ... but i heard it will be very complicated to get tickets this year because of the olympic games...train will be stuffed, at least in china..i hope i can make maybe lhasa-xian and fly the rest...anyone else who took the train from lhasa?

Well there are safe topics related to Tibet. How about the new rairoad that provides trips to Tibet? A friend sent me pictures of the trip. It takes many hours and the scenery is extremely beautiful. Many snow covered mountains untouched by man. The trip takes many hours and the Chinese claim this is best since it gives the body time to adjust to the very high altitude and lack of oxygen at these heights. Flying can be tough since you have to adjust all at once. There may be some truth to this but Im not sure 60 hours is enough either. For a foreigner to take the trip to Tibet a special permit is required. You must sign an affidavit that you are not a reporter or political activist of any kind to go there and you must pay a small fee. Something I would like to do some day but you will spend an entire week on the train if you consider both ways and you leave from SH.

-RJ

Here is a link to an article in The Economist. Unlike most press accounts (and Richard Gere) it is fairly balanced and written by an eyewitness.

http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10870258

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wei1xiao4, just read the Comments Policy at the bottom of the page, I don't think there's any hard and fast rule, but a) these sorts of topics are bound to attract extremely passionate comments, and b) you have to keep in mind how the Great Chinese firewall can impact the perimeter of these political discussions.