National Geo's China issue has controversial pages glued together in China
Marilyn sez, "There are some 5,000 copies of the English-language edition of National Geographic distributed in China every month, but readers of the May issue, which was dedicated to China, found some controversial pages were glued together. "
National Geographic magazine dedicated its May issue to China, but some in China had trouble reading it — because pages had been glued together.LinkReaders of the 5,000 copies of the English-language edition distributed in China have reported that pages 44 and 45, which show a map of China, were stuck together. These pages didn’t make the often-censored slip-up of treating Taiwan as a separate country, but the concern might have been labeling several borders disputed with Pakistan and India. Another map, on pages 126 and 127, showing the distribution of China’s ethnic minorities, was also glued, perhaps because of recent sensitivities over the country’s Tibetan population.
Pages 100 and 101, which feature controversial artwork, as well as pages 128 and 129, on dissent, were also censored, presumably for more obvious reasons...
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well that's bullshit.
normally they rip the pages out - this is an improvement! keep up the trajectory.
So strange; you wonder what the thinking is:
"If we just glue them together, folks will suppose it was just a problem with the printer..." - ??
Like the Seinfeld episode says, there are coincidences and then there are BIG coincidences...
Paul, I originally thought you must be new, what with amending a website and signature to your message. Turns out you have been doing it for months and you haven't even gotten a gentle spam-slap.
Well done for getting away with it for so long, now please stop.
*appending
At least it was censored by the government (or some such local zealot) and not by National Geographic... it would have been a double dose of bad news to watch another prominent company kowtow to this oppressive regime.
Hmmm... The Chinese censors are sticking magazine pages together??? The things that turn some people on!!! :-)
Glue? That's so typical. Faceless mass-production. Just leave it to China. Where's the quality? Where's the love in your work?
Iranian censors seem so much more sophisticated by comparison. http://jturn.qem.se/2006/more-pictures-of-iranian-censorship/ Someone, somewhere, actually takes the time to put black ink on the knees in magazines. And sometimes a sticker on top of that just to make sure. Now, this is real value.
Countdown on pro PRC readers castigating Boing Boing for racism commences....
JJasper @9, are there any "pro PRC readers" of BoingBoing? Sure, there are people who are critical of the motives of people who are backed by the CIA, but that just means there are at least three sides to most issues. Does anyone defend censorship?
Okay, I have seen right-libertarians happily defend the right of corporate media to ignore what it wants, but that's not quite what we mean by censorship.
Are you sure that is actually "glued" together? ;)
Not yet, anyway. That's pretty old-school. In college I took an elective called Library Science (searching up Science Citation Index, etc.), and the professor said that they have a copy of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In the early 1950s Lavrenti Beria made a power grab and lost, mostly thanks to Marshal Zhukov, and executed. Not long afterwards, all subscribers to the encyclopedia, including the university, were sent a page that contained an article about the Bering Strait, and were instructed to paste it over the Beria article.
BJacques, the Soviets were famous for that! Look at Wiki's article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_censorship
It mentions the incident you just did. Notice also how Yezhov's picture was edited out from alongside Stalin. The Censorship of Images link gives a lot more examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union
I've even read how this sort of thing is readily visible in successive editions of the biography of Maurice Thorez, the longtime head of the Communist Party in France!
All this was the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984, whose mission is to continually rewrite history like this.
Will #10, a few months ago Xeni did a series of posts on the Tibetan pro-independence protests. We got visited by commenters defending the Chinese, arguing that Tibetans like being part of China, the protesters are just trouble-making outsiders, etc.
Arkizzle: By golly, you're right. I think I've failed to notice all those .sig lines because PMM writes such distractingly good comments. My penance for missing them is to have to go through and remove them all with long-handled pixel tweezers.
Paul, can you please not post .sig lines on your comments? It's a general rule.
Avram, I've been wondering whether the previous wave was a campaign, and if so, whether those posters are no longer motivated. It'll be interesting to see.
Avram and Teresa, saying the PRC's claims about Tibet are better than the Dalai Lama's is like saying the Union's claims about the Confederacy are better than Jefferson Davis's--it doesn't automatically follow that you think Lincoln was right to suspend habeas corpus.
Darn. Now I want someone to come defend censorship. Anybody?
June 6, 2008, 5:18 am
China Calls Computer Spying Claim ‘Totally Groundless’
China denies allegations of computer spying (AP photo)
Last week we wrote about the report of a U.S. investigation into whether Chinese government officials secretly copied a U.S. government laptop during Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez’s December trip to Beijing.
Today the Chinese government made its first comments in response. “Totally groundless” is how Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang characterized the report, which alleged that China used data stolen from the laptop to try to hack into the Commerce Department’s computer network.
The recent report and other claims that the Chinese military was involved in attacks on German, British and American government computers “are highly irresponsible,” Qin said during a press briefing on the upcoming round of U.S.-China trade talks. “China has made clear our principled position on many occasions: China is opposed to computer criminality, including hackers.”
Teresa, I was thinking that exact thing..
Now someone's gonna have to go through and snip all those comments by hand.
Penance indeed :)
Argon, the sad thing is; there are probably some teenaged (and then some) Iranian boys, squinting at those white stickered pages, holding them up to the light, straining to get a glimpse of a white-bikini'ed bosom.. or hoping for an uncensored knee to slip through the cleansing.
Shit, I would have been.
well that is a shame because i got that issue and read it cover to cover (i'm on my way through a second time.) it really did a lot to educate me about the variations in attitudes of the 1.3 billion inhabitants. they're not all tibet-repressing, corrupt, environmental disaster inducing, neo-rabid consumers... nono, there are several thousand environmental groups compared to a handful ten years ago. some are so deeply ashamed of the way progress has turned to pollution and despoiling important natural resources that they don't seek medical care because they think they are being punished for bad chi. i'll admit, i had a relatively hostile view of china's development policies (or lack thereof) and their (decentralized) government and (hard to enforce) laws... i imagined the entire nation blindly consuming and willy-nilly raping their landscape, greedy and ignorant of the consequences, and thus affecting the rest of their world. it's just a lot more complicated than i could have imagined - knowing is better. information is better. it's too bad if this is true about censoring this issue, because there is a lot of hope and understanding to be found in it. maybe it's just too honest in its assessment of their problems.
Will, what are you talking about? You seem to be posting from some alternate timeline where a conversation is going on that only somewhat resembles this one.
Avram, that happens--I'm a lousy judge of how much connective tissue people need.
I'll trust #10 was clear enough. Regarding #16:
You added Tibet to the conversation at #14, which seemed to suggest that you think censorship and Tibet are linked concerns. I wanted to point out that they are not. We can oppose censorship without choosing the PRC's side or the CIA's.
Since old Tibet was a slave state, the comparison with the Confederacy seemed natural. But I keep forgetting that what was common history is becoming obscure history. My bad.
Will, Tibet was an earlier conversation that JJasper was referring to (somewhat obliquely) with comment #9, to which you responded with what seemed like no knowledge of the earlier context.
Avram, I don't keep up on every discussion about China--that's why I asked about these "pro-PRC" people. I didn't notice them in the Tibet threads I took part in--there, it seemed like the divide was between people who bought the claims of the Dalai Lama's faction and the people who were willing to criticize both Tibet and China.
Well, it's looking like no pro-PRC defenders of censorship will show up, so I'm bored. Catch you in another thread soon, I'm sure!