Human Rights And Censorship In Modern D

Human Rights and Censorship in Modern Day China China today is very different from the China of the time when Mao Zedong, the communist leader ruled. Mao died in 1976 yet, China remains a communist country, but. In the past 30 years or so China has come a long way in improving the ways its people are treated and the way it interacts in the world. Many would say it is in much better shape than it was many years ago. It still has many violations of human rights and mass censorships, and also works very hard to shut down any kind of gatherings such as protests or any kind of dissident works. The best recent example is the massacre in Tiananmen Square. China also has sickening violations such as torture prisons and labor camps. The Chinese government also wants it people to use the internet and get out in the world through it but it heavily censors it. Many books are also banned in this controversial country. Chinas latest constitution has declared all these things fair game. The constitution created in 1982, contains many civil rights to be free such as free press and speech, worship, the right to trial, and the right to own private property. China may have changed very much since Chairman Mao, but it still has many underlying demons in it. The constitution speaks of free press, but the media in China is very tightly censored, with many people trying and succeeding in finding loopholes in it. The most impressive thing about China to this day is their ability to precisely and efficiently censor the internet inside the country. The country has a weird balance in its internet usage, it continues to encourage the use of the internet for its people, and it has surpassing the USA with the most internet users having 233 million in March of 2013, but it than has to step up its censoring. Censoring which includes topics from popular video games, to controversial news stories and government rumours. They have a very extensive effort to censor the internet, having many tricks and people working around the clock. The government has an estimated 50,000 people who work with 300,000 communist party members to censor the internet. They have a near perfect removal rate and questionable topics are taken down usually within 24 hours, found in a test by Gary King and a team in 2013. They have many ways to censor the internet, the main being their bottlenecking of the internet. Everything that comes into China through the internet goes through three computer stations situated around the country, in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. This slows their internet but it allows them to use special routers. These routers detect if a Chinese internet user trying to access suspicious sites, and if they are they can block the connection. China also relies on self-censorship from commercial websites, having more employees censoring the internet. China also uses outside help to block their people from accessing certain bits of information on the web. US firms such as Cisco, which supplied the routers to block people at the bottlenecks, and google who created a custom search engine for them that blocks some sites and information. Say an American searched Tiananmen Square on google, they will get reports of the massacre from 1989, and the famous picture of a lone man staring down 4 tanks. In China, they will only get tourist photos of the square, and the forbidden City right next to it. The people who censor the internet also try to intimidate people by reminding them they are being watched. They have two tiny cartoon policemen. A male Jingjing and a female Chacha, who appear on websites to remind you that you are being monitored. Off the world wide web, censorship is still around in the press and with books. The Communist party of China has been reported to not have lived up to its constitution speaking of free press. Journalist He Qinglian says the press is controlled by the Communist Parties propaganda department. It is subjected to intense monitoring, with punishment for violators instead of pre-publication censorship. Books are a different matter. All book publishers are required to be licensed by the General Administration of Press and Publication(GAP). This mandates that they must follow certain rules when publishing. If they don’t, they can be shut down. Due to the many rules, there are over 4,000 recorded underground publishing factories in China, causing more bootleg books than actual published ones. Due to this many books the Chinese government holds public book burnings of unapproved, yet popular, books. This is claimed to only boost sales at illegal book stores. Even with the constitution, free press is not very free anywhere inside China. The Communist Part of China also has laws that do not exactly break their constitution, but do provoke controversy with their very existence. These are the widely known “One Child Policy” and the religious laws. For the religious laws, the constitution states “Citizens of the peoples republic of China enjoy freedom of religion. No state organ, public organization or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens because they do, or they do not believe in religion.” Although this part of the constitution only protects what is called “normal religious activity”. This means they must submit to state control. They cannot “engage in activities that disrupt social order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state.” This affects only five officially sanctioned religions. They are: The Buddhist Association of China, Chinese Taoist Association, Islamic Association of China, Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. The other law is the One Child Policy. Due to China’s massive population, in 1979 this was put into effect. Having more than one child is illegal and punishable by fines. This has brought along with it many reports of forced abortions and sterilizations. This law has had no real effect on the rural areas of the country, which are home to roughly 80% of the country’s population. The birth rates in rural areas never dropped below 2.5 children per female. Recently the policy has been revised and now allows ethnic minorities to have more than one child. Finally China does have many things within its country that violate basic human rights that China itself has made laws against. The worst incident so far recorded of this was the previously mentioned Tiananmen Square. Protestors were violently broken up in a massacre using military force. The student protestors had been protesting from April of 1989 to June of the same year, with posters about political issues such as freedom of the press, democracy and corruption. In June military force was used and over 300 people were killed. In current days there are still many cruel things that happen in dark corners of the country. Humans rights groups speak of “black Jails” which utilize brutal torture and other malicious methods to reintegrate inmates back into society. China does not allow outside inspection of their penal system and also does not have these black jails as an official part of the judicial system. The Communist Party of China is starting to do good as well. Labor Camps that used a re-educate-through-labor system. In these camps they detained people such as human rights campaigners and religious activists as well as citizens who complained about mistreatment. They could hold detainees inside the camps for up to four years without a trial. They were remarked as a huge violation of human rights. This reveals China does have violations of its rights still today.
In these modern times, the country of China has come a very far way from the beginning of its communist times, with Chairman Mao in charge. Although they had a dark past with much mistreatment of the people, it has changed very much with a new constitution full of free press and free religious practice. Still not all is good as there is still much disregard for human life in the country, and breaching of privacy with controlled media. It tries very hard to stop and opposition to the government as shown in the June incident of 1989 in Tiananmen Square. The internet is encouraged but much of it is blocked by the government. Same with many books and the press. The constitution declared all these things to be allowed, but they still censor them and breach their own constitution rules for human rights and decency. The ghost of Mao’s wrongdoings still haunts this country in ways with its violations.