China Pledges To Purify Internet

So Google, tell us again how that liberalization of China is going to work?

Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has vowed to “purify” the Internet, state media reported on Wednesday, describing a top-level meeting that discussed ways to master the country’s sprawling, unruly online population.

Hu made the comments as the ruling party’s Politburo — its 24-member leading council — was studying China’s Internet, which claimed 137 million registered users at the end of 2006.

Hu, a straitlaced communist with little sympathy for cultural relaxation, did not directly mention censorship.

But he made it clear that the Communist Party was looking to ensure it keeps control of China’s Internet users, often more interested in salacious pictures, bloodthirsty games and political scandal than Marxist lessons.

Of course Google.cn is a tool in the purification process. One of the primary original justifications for Google to custom build their self-censoring search engine Google.cn was to make it harder for internet users in China and Tibet to find scandalous material, just as many western democracies filter out search results for child pornography. Scandalous material in China isn’t like scandalous material elsewhere; in China we’re talking about information about Tiananmen, Tibet, democracy, and the tens of millions of deaths during the “Great Leap Forward.” Basically anything that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want people within China and Tibet to know, anything that threatens their stranglehold on power is scandalous.

Google’s desire to engage the Chinese market with the doe-eyed hope that it would somehow lead to a realization of greater freedom inside China and Tibet (repeat: instituting a ruthlessly efficient censorship and disinformation machine would somehow increase freedom) has fallen flat on its face. Even as they admit their failures, Google continues to charge ahead with a service that cannot do what Google claimed it would do one year ago. Enough is enough - it’s time for Google to close shop on Google.cn and end this shameful chapter of their company’s history.

Technorati Tags: censorship, China, Google, Tibet