Chinese officials recently announced they will no longer consider death tolls and other relevant information about natural disasters to be state secrets. On the same day, China Telecom blocked Internet phone service from Skype. That left observers wondering whether freedom is growing or decreasing in China, a tough issue for American firms.
Some might argue that blocking access to cheaper and more secure telephone systems like Skype was an economic rather than a political move by China Telecom. But no one can deny that China, still a one-party Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, remains obsessed with information control.
Read more here.
A Capitalist Solution to Freeing China
you are right about the importance of this issue Sonia.
Information control is the key bottleneck – China understands that – and unfortunately so does the US. Political economy issues to do with media are not non-existent in the US – we need to be honest with ourselves about this. also something else that strikes me that isn’t at all irrelevant is the other form of information control – by restricting people’s freedom of movement – e.g. in the old days, people ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ weren’t allowed ‘out’ as they might start to think for themselves and realize the propaganda they’d been fed wasn’t quite true. There are still a lot of countries that restrict their citizens from going to certain other countries. One of them as you may know is the Cuba question: its not very easy for US citizens to get there unless you have some good, educational-type excuse. and even that is being eroded somewhat under the Bush administration – e.g.restricting psychologists who previously had some leeway ( there’s an interesting APA article about this)
Now that’s pretty much all about information control as well – wouldn’t you say? I hope more and more people start speaking out about this – at the end of the day, its our freedom that’s being restricted.