China’s tyranny has the best hi-tech help

You can find anything you want on China’s Internet: sex, fashion, business, travel, entertainment, romance. Anything, that is, except democracy, Tiananmen, Taiwan, human rights, Tibet and hundreds of other subjects.

I guess I’ve known for quite some time now that China doesn’t only have a huge brick wall, but also a huge firewall, keeping its citizens under the control of the Communist Party. What I hadn’t realized however was that apparently several huge US and other world companies are helping the Chinese governement in censoring the Chinese citizens with their technology.

Some of these are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Skype. Google has been my friend for many years and I hope it will remain that way, but I’ll admit that it disappoints me to see that they are apparently not as considerate for their users as I thought… Unless you call censoring a user benificial to that user?

I hope that the UN Human Rights Watch or some other organization can help put some common sense in these companies minds and convince them that it’s not because it’s profitable to censor the Chinese that it’s also ethically acceptable…

[EDIT] Sarennah raised an interesting point on this… How will human rights of both athletes, visitors and native Chinese people be guaranteed when the Olympic Games are held in Beijing in 2008? Was it actually a good idea to host the Olympic Games in China? Can it help lead China to democracy? More on this on www.olympicwatch.org… [/EDIT]