These people running China are literally like the dark creatures from middle earth depicted in Lord of the Rings. It’s patently absurd to simply wipe out another person’s life’s work, and source of income, just because it offended an important government official.
While our freedoms here are considerably greater than most countries in the world, the trend doesn’t look good for freedom. The lies that were told to us, regarding how exporting our capitalism to countries like China would cause reform, is laughable. You know what has happened since we’ve undertaken a policy of extreme globalism, business first, America last?
Instead of changing the tyrants overseas to become more liberal, we’ve become more like them. And that goes for all western societies. China is your future.
At the peak of her WeChat blogging career, Laura Lian was earning about $7,000 a month. Writing satirical articles for more than 220,000 fans, she won backing from an investor and quit her public-relations job.
Then it all came tumbling down. Internet authorities shut down her blog, called Shameless China, with no warning. It happened just after she posted an article mocking Chinese men’s hairstyles, including former President Jiang Zemin’s slick-backed coiffure.
“It didn’t dawn on me how serious the situation was,” Lian said. “I didn’t realize I was never getting back this account and all my followers.”
Lian’s story underscores how precarious the world of blogging remains for many writers in China. Well-known bloggers have been jailed and shamed on national TV. Qin Zhihui, a well-known author on social-media platform Weibo, was sentenced to three years in prison for publishing false information to drive web traffic. A 2013 missive by the Supreme People’s Court and top national prosecutor effectively criminalized defamatory web posts that are read by more than 5,000 people, reposted more than 500 times or caused people to hurt themselves.
As one of the 20 million official accounts operating on Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat, Lian’s account stood out for its blunt and edgy humor about Chinese and expatriate stereotypes. WeChat, which had 762.4 million monthly active users at the end of March, is a mobile app that blends chats, blogging, shopping, digital wallets and other smartphone apps.
Even before she started Shameless, Lian knew censorship was an issue. China polices and aggressively scrubs online content deemed undesirable or a threat to society, from violence and pornography to anti-government commentary. Tencent said in May that it deleted 85,000 rumor articles and that 7,000 accounts were punished for violating regulations “to maintain a healthy internet environment.”
Canny Lo, a spokeswoman for Tencent, didn’t respond to an e-mail and text message seeking comment.
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China can lick my dark Scottish taint – I expose It on their fake islands, where I use their lame sand beaches as my personal braveflaps cat box.
American exceptionalism appears to be on the way out. Maybe it never really existed in the first place but I think a lot of people believed it to be true. Our globalization leaders and corporations have seemed to drum that out of us.