Intellectual Property Law

China Takes Cue from Shakespeare...Sort Of

By Cynthia Brumfield

Something's happening in Tibet, with apparently widescale outbursts of protests against the ruling Chinese regime there. The authorities are cracking down, sweeping hundreds into prison and a number of deaths reported.

But it's hard to tell exactly what's happening because the Chinese government, which has always dealt a heavy censorship hand, is blocking foreign journalists from entering Tibet and is preventing its own people from watching videos of the protests by blocking top web sites including CNN, the BBC, Google News, Yahoo and YouTube.

Although the Chinese government routinely blocks access to Internet content, filters out foreign news and restricts the movements of journalists, this latest crackdown has sparked an outcry among journalists. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China decried the government's move and said that it ran afoul of China's promise to relax its control over the foreign media before and during the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing.

In Shakespeare's Henry VI, one character, seeking to overthrow the crown, famously said "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," a reference not to the foulness of lawyers (although most people interpret the phrase this way) but to the dismantling of political and governmental power through the murder of the those who know how to wield it. China seeks to do much the same thing, only in reverse: protect political and governmental power by blocking those whose reports threat to dismantle that power.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on March 17, 2008 (boomark / email).