Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
continue accepting and condoning censorship in China while endur-
ing cyber-attacks.
A famous example of how the Chinese Communists require Google
to censor search results involves entering the term “Tiananmen” into
the uncensored, international Google images search engine (images
.google.com) and comparing the results with those obtained by enter-
ing the same term into the censored Chinese version of Google image
search (images.google.cn). Typically the uncensored international
version of Google will include photographs of tanks and gore from
the 1989 Tiananmen massacre among its first images, whereas the first
images retrieved by Chinese version will be mostly of smiling tourists,
colorful Tiananmen historical sites, and the like. But things can get
interesting when graphic photographs of the Tiananmen massacre
make it among the images called up by the Chinese version and
remain up for a few hours or even days before China's army of tens
of thousands of hyper-vigilant cyber-cops finally takes them down.
As might be expected, Baidu, the indigenous Chinese search engine,
is better at Chinese-language searches than Google, whereas Google is
better at English-language Internet searches. Most of China's university
students prefer to use Google, and because this generation of students
will one day be China's leadership, Google's withdrawal from China
in the face of difficulties would constitute a large setback for the up-
and-coming educated Chinese elite and, ultimately, for the world itself.
The final resolution of the Google issue will be an important bellwether
for freedom of expression in China.
THE CHINA THREAT
Mao's old ideas about “people's war,” or fighting off a land invasion
of China by a foreign force such as Japan or the Soviet Union, are
largely regarded as pass´ and irrelevant by a significant majority of
China's military establishment today. Ever since the technological per-
formance of the United States military in Iraq during the first Gulf War,
Chinese strategic thinkers have conceptualized more modern types of
warfare, which they have labeled “limited wars under high-tech con-
ditions.” With this new emphasis on military technology have come
new ideas about how to resist foreign interference in what China
regards as its internal territorial matters, namely the Taiwan issue. In
2000 RAND Corporation researchers Michael D. Swaine and Ashley
J. Tellis pointed out in their now-classic study of China's strategic
intentions in the twenty-first century that:
