24/01/17 - The real secret of Chinese internet censorship? Distraction John Naughton (40)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/22/chinese-internet-censorship-uses-distraction

This article is about China is the go to country. It firstly started to talk about how China is one of the only countries which gets the Internet and what it stands for - they know how to control it etc. In addition, it also states that they want to modernise and energise China so that it can fulfil its destiny as a world power. For that, they need it to transform their country into a hyper-networked society. But on the other hand, they do not want democracy, with all its attendant nuisances such as human rights, governments bound by the rule of law, transparency, accountability and the like, and they fear that the internet may give citizens ideas above their station.

• The 50c army does exist, they find, but it’s not a part-time operation and it’s more ingenious than most people thought. King and co estimate that the Chinese government fabricates and posts about 448m social media comments a year. But they also show that the underlying strategy is to avoid arguing with critics of the party and the government and to not even discuss controversial issues.
• There was, however, one aspect of Chinese internet management that King’s study did not touch, namely the widespread belief that, in addition to passive monitoring and censorship, the regime also employed legions of part-time bloggers and social media users (maybe as many as 2 million) to post stuff on the net that was favourable to the government or refuted its critics.

In my opinion, I believe that if the Chinese government were meant to be the most powerful countries, in terms of the new/digital media, there would be mixed feelings about this. The pros about this is that Chinese is one of the most spoke language in the whole world so to communicate as they are solving the many different problems on the Internet, it would be more convenient as many people speak it. However, the downsides would be that the country will change; after all these years, the Internet has been widely dominated by the USA and the U.K, as considering that these are two similar countries e.g. In the language they speak, this can lead to many different problems happening conferring that they are also allies in terms of the countries relationship. Therefore, I believe that if and when China become the most powerful country in the whole, this could cause a lot of different types of problems.