China blocks Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail ahead of Tiananmen anniversary

“Internet crackdown blocks “young generation” as leading dissident is detained in Beijing”

Visit this link to read the full story on The Guardian website, by Tania Branigan in Beijing.

This is very sad indeed! I was in China in 2007, I was the film maker accompanying a group of young people, youth workers and teachers that visited Guangzhou. We were out there for 10 days, and to keep the parents of the young people informed of what we were doing, I set up a blog so everyone to keep up to date with events.

http://planchina.wordpress.com/

The blog was innocent enough in terms of content, but after about 3 days of being there it was banned by the censors and we could no longer access it. To get around the ban, I had to email the young people’s writing and photos back to England via any email account I could get working to Jemma back in the office, with full instructions (from memory) of how to upload content into the blog.

Luckily we still had access to Flickr so I uploaded photos there, copied the URL to embed the photos, and emailed a whole chunk of HTML that Jemma could be just paste into the blog window. (I’ve never thought of myself as a geek, but it actually worked!!!)

Parents were updated every day not knowing we were victim of the communication block. They would have been very concerned if we/they had lost communication!

I can only hope that the Chinese authority come to their senses and realise that they can’t win the battle to censor the internet. I admit they are giving it a damn good go, but it is a battle they will ultimately lose. If they ban enough sites hopefully it will just crash their servers and their censor wall will come tumbling down.

Here’s hoping that now that this blog will be banned,  it will be the straw that breaks the dragon’s back.

[There's me, top of the photo, concentrating on not dropping anything from the chopsticks!]

Barbie, Disney, Shanghai and the “impartial” BBC

This morning I saw a report by Chris Hogg on the BBC news website titled Chinese kids sold ‘Barbie dream‘”.

The article talks about how Mattel are  opening a new flagship store in Shanghai, hoping to encourge a whole new country to embrace the Barbie brand.  They see China being their largest market in the future.  Also, even though their are “Asian looking” Barbie on sale in this 6 floor store, it is the “blond, stick-thin, traditional model” that is being sold the most.

Of course here I could wax lyrical about the impact of representation in the media and the blue eyed, blond hair aesthetic as the indoctrinated face of beauty that has been imposed on the rest of the world by the culturally imperialist Western world.  (I do believe that but have to get a train soon so no time to really get into it now! ) It is a well trodden debate though that you can find elsewhere.  See this video for just a snippet, based on infamous experiments in the States in the 1950′s.

 

The BBC article then goes on to talk about how Disney have just launched the world’s first ever branded Disney School in Shanghai.  The school will teach Chinese Chinese children how to speak English using “the very latest audio and video technology and of course enlist the help of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and all the famous characters children elsewhere in the world know so well. ”

If the Barbie store is about cultural infiltration by capitalist means, then the Disney School is about the indoctrination of culture on another culture by means of not only consumer choicem but by  the imposition of an educational strategy on the youngest generation of Chinse children.  Disney will no longer be a manufacture of popular culture products, but a trusted provider and source of knowledge, information and wisdom.  A clear strategy to secure the world’s most populous country as your future customers.  (Read Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’ to read about the practice of multi-national corporations and their motive for ‘branding’.) 

In this blog I’m being admittedly subjective and opinionated, as that it largly the function of a blog.  Anyone expected to find impartial journalistic reporting on a blog are fooling themselves.  You would expect to find impartial journalism on the BBC though, wouldn’t you?

At time of writing this, the BBC article states in its closing paragraphs that “there is nothing sinister about it of course. The company has a long history of providing educational materials for classrooms around the world and it has put a lot of effort and research into ensuring the programme works.  But just as with Barbie, their Shanghai enterprise takes what they have done before a step further, in their case by opening and running their own schools.”

So there you have it.  The BBC’s expert critical assessment on the motives of Disney, Mattel and other multi-national that are eyeing the Chinse market.  Not even any mention that most of thse products would have been made in China in the first place and then sold back to them for astronomical prices.

And this just scratches the surface of what all of this is about.

I have a train to catch.  Ironically I’m attending an BBC ”knowledge exchange” research event in London. 

Perfect!

Coming to a desktop near you……?

Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma/Myanmar, China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, UAE, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.

Fpr your info, these are a list of guilty countries that filter (aka censor) the internet.

To read the full article click here.