Bingfeng Teahouse

as a multinational who enjoys a dominating role in the market, microsoft is an easy target to hate, and this time the company sacrificed one of the core values that americans cherish in exchange for business benefits. the angry towards msn is quite understandable, but seems less relevant with chinese netizens. it's less relevant for two simple reasons, first, it's not msn that removed anti's blog, it's chinese internet censorship, and second, like always, such confrontational and emotional outcry has never brought anything positive to help eliminate or alleviate the internet censorship in china.

a few days ago, there were some exchanges between john of the sinosplice and roland of eswn, they discussed why eswn blog hasn't been heavily censored and speculated that english blogs didn't get the same attention from censors for the reason that even the most provoking blog, if it's in english, doesn't reach many chinese readers. it makes me thinking of one chinese forum called "kaidi". if you ever read the forum, you will find that it's full of anti-ccp, anti-china, pro-japan, pro-america, pro-taiwan bullshits, although the forum enjoys a wide popularity among chinese readers, it has seldom banned before. as i know, the moderator has learned something from a commentator called "stainlesssteel minnie" and only censored those comments that ask for taking actions. it tells us two things, the censorship policies are implicit, but no matter how fluid and implicit, they have boundries and a minimum "rationality".

as soon as censorship policies are made explicit, a consensus is reached between the censors and censored, that is that the censorship policies are made based on certain "rationalities", and those "rationalities" could become a base to reduce and destroy the censorship. things like this should be the starting point to fight against censorship, not something like a "boycott msn" campaign.