China milk scandal: Government says milk free of contamination
10.05.08
posted by jason
Tests on 609 batches of liquid milk, as sold in 27 cities under 75 different brand names, were all clear of melamine, the chemical at the center of the scandal, according to the product safety watchdog. A further 129 batches of baby milk powder and 212 batches of other kinds of milk powder were also clean.
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10 ways the Chinese Internet is Different from Yours
05.15.08
posted by jason
59 views
1 comment
Its slower, its growing faster, its monitored, it has less spam, its won't take you to every page you may want to visit - these are a few of the differences between the internet in the west and the Internet in China. Many iConflict users are from China and I would be curious to know if they agree with the limitations on China's internet as presented in this article.
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I think the article is basically right about the Chinese Internet. There are several more points I would like to add.
1. There is much less porn here but still quite a lot.
2. There is basically no on-line gambling at all, although underground gambling is common is same areas of China.
3. There are limits to access "bad" foreign websites. More sophisticated netizens use proxy servers so they can break through most of the blocks easily. I do that evryday. No one has been punished for that, as far as I know.
4. China's BBS need to be registered to the government. But China has most prosperous BBS websites in the world. It's easy for a post to get tens of thousands of clicks and hundreds of followed posts.
5. The censorship is basically a kind of self-cencership system. So when you find that your posts are deleted, just switch to another site. Different websites have different inclinations. Cat898 is very much right-wing and Tianya is a bit left-wing. Normally people don't get punishment because of their dissident voices, but if you have connections with overseas dissident organizations, you may face trouble.
6. Chinese commercial websites rely on news reports and BBS much more than western websites.
7. Chinese commercial websites rely on ads rather than charges as their main source of income. Ebay didn't realize that and it failed in China.
8. Chinese professional and academic websites are much less developed than those in the west.
9. Loads of piracy softwares and musics are there to be downloaded.
10. Chinese netizens and intellectuals are more tolerant of the cencorship and internet policing than western people can imagine. People here has been getting more and more freedom and the change has been dramatic. The tolerance is not because CCP is too strong but because there is some sort of subtle political equilibrium.