China could be doing better at censorship, think tank finds China's censorship regime remains pervasive and far reaching, but the bureaucratic apparatus implementing it is unevenly developed and is not always well funded, according to a report released on Tuesday. The report, titled Censorship Practices of the People's Republic of China," was commissioned by the US-China Economic and …
You have to wonder what the point of tech sanctions is when a US government agency is funding a US corporation to publish a helpful guide for the CCCP "here's all the censorship stuff you're doing inefficiently and could tighten up on".
Seems that in both China and the US, the left buttock doesn't know what the right buttock is doing.
The Chinese aren't stupid. They're perfectly capable of working this stuff out for themselves. However you can't formulate policy if you don't understant both your opponents strengths and weaknesses.
It's also an advantage of democratic systems that they're more open to change. Even in open societies, organisations don't like being told they're doing it wrong, and people don't like to admit they've buggered it up and try to fix it. But that's much worse in dictatorships - where bosses have many more ways to punish dissent. This is only going to get worse in China in the next few years. Before they had a flexible system, of changing half the Party leadership every 5 years, and so the whole leadership team every 10. Thus any official policy position taken by the General Secretary of the Party could easily be changed within 5 years, without too much loss of face. Or if they made it when Prime Minister (the junior leadership position), at worst it would take a decade before they were retired and things could be changed with little loss of face.
People may individually be smart, yet their individual actions can still have the consequence of collective stupidity. Traffic jams are the obvious example.
This can happen to entire corporations (e.g. Microsoft), and even to entire countries (e.g. the US, China).
The article painted an all too familiar picture: a large organisation, nobody seems to be actually taking overall control (but are basking in the claims that they are in total control), resources being spent over here to duplicate effort whilst over there is lacking the necessary to get the job done.
Then was finally reminded at the end, nope, just for once, this is what we *want* to have happen, we don't want an efficient censorship.
Still have a bit of fellow feeling for the grunts at the bottom, just trying to get the day's work done, despite it all.
"a bit of fellow feeling for the grunts at the bottom"
Especially as haphazard-plagued interbureaucratic-redundant suboptimally-mismanaged overworked part-time workers face exacerbated-adherence under the growing threat of "outsourced censorship teams"! Time for the PRC censors to send an S.O.S. to the world, as thankfully prewritten by SOS International defense contractor's messaging in a bottled report (someone call the Police!)!
(Sorry ... sorry ... with such beautiful words in the OP, just couldn't help this amanfromMars1-ism!)
""The practice of imposing unfunded mandates on [government entity] has resulted in suboptimal [results]"
So politicians are the same the world over, and no matter what political system they are under, when it comes to them wanting unrealistic implementation of their utopian policy. Who'd have thunk it??
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