Free Enterprise Ruthlessly Suppressed
January 23, 2008
From Starbucks, we now go to China to see how the government is incapable of making moral judgements in the public interest and how private business really cares about us.
Chinese police have shut down a Web site selling real-time porn and arrested 33 people, state media said on Wednesday, part of a campaign which led to the shut-down of 44,000 Web sites and arrest of 868 people last year.
China launched a crackdown on online pornography and “unhealthy” Web content after Chinese President Hu Jintao said the country’s sprawling Internet posed a threat to social stability.
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7 Comments
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Are there any more substantive accounts of the ethical & political reasons China is hostile to pornography? This is something one can’t chalk up to Christian “Puritanism.”
China is your example of the government regulating private enterprising in the public interest? China? Really?
Interesting question. Despite CW, taboos on sexual conduct seem to be fairly universal. While there are times in various cultures where homosexuality wasn’t given that much grief, one has no difficulty finding examples of homosexuality being condemned in atheistic culture. If I’m not mistaken, pornography was treated as taboo in communist Russia.
Blackadder,
I think it provides decent irony. There are a lot of people, even a lot of Catholics, who would not recognize the rightness of China’s policy. They have slippery slopes to concern themselves with.
I don’t see how shutting down websites and throwing people in jail for criticizing the government (which in all likelihood is all most of these sites and people have done) is anywhere close to being the right policy. If you want to say that we should be more aggressive going after online pornographers in the U.S. then I’m open to argument. But there’s no need to worry about slippery slopes in China’s case. They are already at the bottom of the hill.
Blackadder,
Are you saying that a government cannot make a moral choice because it doesn’t respect freedom of speech? I would hope that we can recognize a morally sound policy without being blinded by our disdain for the government that is behind it.
“But there’s no need to worry about slippery slopes in China’s case. They are already at the bottom of the hill.”
A good study of the attempt by the Chinese government to limit access to the internet by its subjects. The enemy of the Chinese government is not porn, it is the free flow of information through the internet, a true nightmare for any dictatorship.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/
Arewak,
No, I’m saying that I don’t think it’s a moral choice for the Chinese government not to respect freedom of speech.