“There are some who make use of the open freedom of cyberspace to engage in wanton defamation, attacking the party and the government. The Internet is full of all kinds of negative news and critical voices saying the government only does bad things and everything it says is wrong.”
Yes, the Chinese government is coming up against that most insidious of terrorist insurgent - a person who goes online and whines about the government fouling things up. Descending into rhetoric usually reserved from the North Korean News Agency, the communist rag went on to say
“In truth, the work of the Chinese government has received wide praise all over the world, even public opinion in Western countries can't deny that,” Qiushi said. “This is a great truth, and overly criticising the government violates that truth.”
So the yardstick of achievement is measured by how much Western countries acknowledge that you've done good things. What's missing is any kind of understanding that it's not what you do, but how you do it.
By the standard of simply "achieving great things", then Hitler's Nazi government achieved wonderful, amazing things by having 100% employment in the country. Everyone was hard at work making guns so that Germany could invade and slaughter people in other countries, and there's the whole Holocaust PR fail, but apart from the that, the economic was powering ahead and plenty of people had enough to eat.
Charles Xue, a microblogger on Weibo with over 12 million followers appeared on TV in handcuffs, telling the good masses how "freedom of speech cannot override the law". Going after criticism online is going hinder the government rather than help it. Driving liberal voices online deeper underground, widening the gulf between the people at the government can only foment more violent outbursts of rebellion, not whip the people into line as it's supposed to.
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