Badness.
I look on with more than mild interest to see how this will turn out.
Personally, I’m in the category that assumes the result will be…clusterfuck.
If unfettered internet access is offered to the 30,000 members of the media then some travesty will occur. Protests will happen. People will be killed. The journalists will report. And in doing so, should that sufficiently anger or embarass China causing them to block the pipes (or worse, and a significant possibility, they never open them to begin with) the media will still report (you know, that whole ‘free speech is relentless’ thing that we all cherish). That’s all bad news for China…no matter how you slice it. I’m almost certain that these Olympics could generate more negative press about the country than positive.
I’m not against the clusterfuck at all. In fact, I think the country needs a whole host of additional protests, actions and other general forms of defiance. It’s just that every time China ‘manages’ a situation a lot of people seem to die. I wonder how many people they’ll be willing to kill with the eyes of the world on them.
Heeeee’s baaaaack!
There are ways around everything. The press will be able to get uncensored feeds out, even if they have to do it via satellite. I think you’re right about the embarrassment. China will be under massive pressure not to wrongly (in the eyes of the West, not Chinese law) punish *foreign* law breakers and “rogue” journalists. It’s not like they can resort to shooting them or rolling in with some tanks. China can may be able to suppress its people, but good luck pulling that shit on foreign officials from the most influential nations on the planet.
What I’m scared of is what happens when the world leaves Beijing. There will be some serious clamping down on the poor peasants who’ve had a glimpse into the freedoms of democratic peoples.
Clusterfuck, indeed.
What leverage does the world have then? Or do we go back to the US-style trade policy where we condemn China for its human rights history, but knowingly import the products of child labour?
You need RSS feeds. I cant drag my ass all the way across the internet for every blog I read you know.
There should be a valid RSS feed. I just added it to Google Reader and it found the feed.
I wonder exactly how far Chinese officials would be willing to go…
You say that they couldn’t resort to shooting people or rolling in tanks, but I’m not so sure. From their perspective – why not? Tiananmen Square was a perfectly ‘legal’ and valid police action in their eyes, after all, they had declared martial law so they were within their rights to do just about anything.
Okay, one would expect that with over 100,000 foreigners in their country for the olympics they’d have to tread more lightly…but how much so is unclear to me.