The great firewall of China is the popular term for China’s internet censorship system. It’s a nasty business. Most Chinese for example, are under the impression that Mao Tse Tung was a great leader (a chinese acquaintance actually said exactly this to me last month), when in fact he was responsible for more deaths than Hitler and Stalin put together and according to Jung Chang, if he’d had his way, he would have started a global nuclear war and explicitly stated that he would have thought nothing of killing 300 million chinese in order to acheive world domination.
My friend Antranig Basman, is going to China on the 19th and we’re going to try out some tests of how to get content through it. We’ve heard that they have recently implemented a blanket censorship of blogs so I’ll also be trying some pages outside of my publishing system.
I’ve just finished reading Mao, the unknown story by Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, the best seller . Incidently it looks like the chinese censors have been writing some reviews on Amazon – check out the reviews on the link to the book (apparently they also pay people to write spurious blog comments).
“This (lady)liar fooled 10,000,000 readers, July 29, 2005
Reviewer: aChineseperson from China
anybody can come to China and visit any people to find out if there was 3,500,000 people died because of Mao.some book authors in order to make money and attrack more readers,and to make some shameful
new leader happy,or for the aim of anti Mao,who has founded new china,and liberated all the poor oppressed and exploied people,
try to make this shameful giant lie as truth ,though it has repeated countless times,but it is still a lie,and the liar is live on this.anybody ,welcome to china,ask people,in any city or village,to make the shameful lie go to hell.Don’t make your homeland be liar’s paradise. ”
Actually it wasn’t 3.5 million but more like 70 million… so you’re right on that score. But perhaps you could explain how we’d find that out by visiting China?
This book represents an unprecedented amount of information about Mao’s life which appears to have been meticulously researched although of course it could be spurious or exaggerated – but most of the sources are quoted so people are free to check.
It’s a strange book because on the surface it seems to be a history book, but it quickly becomes apparent that it’s not written by a professional historian. It doesn’t have the steely objectivity that you see in Solgenytsin (who also wasn’t a professional historian either but…). The book is extremely negative about him and often uses quite subjective phrases to this end. I guess it’s aimed as a balance to the kind of hagiographical stuff that was churned out by his fans. It’s written with the specific aim of debunking the myth. Nevertheless, even though it’s probably all true, it would be nice to get some insight into how he managed to bamboozle so many people. He must have had a certain charm surely?