censorship...

just a brief one, this...on a topic that is frequently discussed inour office.

Some of you may know about a rise in recent discussions aboutchinese intellectuals -anyway there is a very good article about ithere: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FL15Ad05.html. It alsoraises the issue of censorship's survival in the modern era.

There are 2 recent barriers to successful censorship: 1 being theinternet: despite the government's best efforts, it simply cannotcensor the internet 100% effectively; people get around it, siteschange, blogs are especially hard to tackle and so on. Apparentlythere are 30,000 people monitoring internet sites, email trafficeetc, on behalf of the government. Everyone in China is aware thatsome sites are blocked etc, but also that many sites are slower thanothers for no justifiable reason. The fast ones are those trusted bythe government!

The 2nd is that a capitalist society means that businesses cannotalways obey government, as they also have to listen to the market.In this case, the media is under pressure to gain advertisers andreaders; if they can do this better by being the first to reportcontroversial issues, then they will (without waiting for governmentauthorisation). And, as is different to the history of advertisingin the UK (according to my media course at University), hereadvertisers are not going to care about being associated with anewspaper that may not be supported by the government, because thecompeition and advertising market is so fierce, businesses will notthink of these issues over and above the bottom line requirements toadvertise.

anyway, i mention this because in Hong Kong there is no censorship(certainly not of the internet anyway), and thus I imagine this is 1small reason why many NGOs and thinktanks for China are still basedin HK, and have not moved to the Mainland. It was a pleasure to beable to follow links and read the BBC whilst I was there!

Today I was discussing with Chris about the legalisation of the HeadOffice of AIESEC in Mainland China again...the above topic is realbecause I have a fear of AIESEC being too successful, raisingattention to itself and so on. Especially if the CSR publicationgoes ahead as planned (after our CSR conference that has a fantasticlineup, with people even flying up from Hong Kong just to deliverpresentations to it!). Well I'll do my best to make us as well knownas possible, only restricting myself to not inviting or talking toany media, and we'll see what happens!

Tonight we had some members cook more Korean food for us, mmm mmm,fantastic and tomorrow work starts again (today was a nationalholiday); so I have some important meetings to lineup and heavyaction to do before the big day on 25th Jan when the CSR day starts.

enjoy your return to work/school, everybody!

Adam