Sadly the main commemorative events only take place in Hong Kong and Taiwan(Macau is not included), but you know the consequence of going against totalitarian government right?.
And you miss the whole point of censorship. It's about making people reluctant to remembering it.
Any attempt at any kind of protest in China is slammed on very swiftly. There have been attempts in the past eg by Falun Gong supporters at Tiananmen Square, but it’s usually all over in minutes as the area is heavily monitored. There is no real independent media, they all have embedded censors, so even when there is a protest it doesn’t get covered. What protests do occur are usually over local issues and foreign media occasionally manage to piece together the story after the fact.
Yes, but another way to look at it, does China's micromanagement of the domestic flow of information result in more or less prosperity for their people? To misquote Hayek: communism is ultimately like telling every car where they should go rather than just putting up street-signs.
* Please add to the debate rather than down-voting. Also Hayek wasn't musing about future autonomous cars, its a metaphor about how deciding what everyone in society should do/think doesn't scale.
does China's micromanagement of the domestic flow of information result in more or less prosperity for their people?
The assumption you're making is that the Chinese government, or any government actually, optimizes for the prosperity of the people. Governments optimize for the prosperity of some people. In China that appears to be the ruling elite. In America it's the wealthy. Here in the UK it's the establishment (which is the existing upper class and the newly wealthy).
I don't think any government genuinely has the interests of all the people at heart, but I am massively pessimistic and cynical so maybe it's me.
It's you. This kind of lazy pessimism strikes me as a peculiar privilege of people who've grown up accustomed to living under a government that, while unavoidably imperfect, does in fact give consideration to the rights and desires of ordinary citizens. They don't take notice of all the ways their government chooses not to oppress them, because they wrongly imagine this is some natural state of things.
On the other hand, immigrants I've spoken to from countries with autocratic regimes, while not starry eyed about the nature of western governments, have no problem explaining why the situation in their countries of origin is much, much worse, and why the government of their new country is much fairer and functional.
They don't take notice of all the ways their government chooses not to oppress them, because they wrongly imagine this is some natural state of things.
If you're looking for a way to describe how good your government is and you come up with "Think how much worse it could be!" then I think the government has failed in its duty.
There's a spectrum of government effectiveness that goes from "actively oppressing the people" to "genuinely helping the people". Too many governments are at the wrong end, and very few are at the right end. Most seem to be somewhere in the middle. That, in my opinion, isn't good enough.
I think most governments do want to improve the life of the people, but it simply gets lost in the power struggle. You can't gain power without agreement from the king-makers and that agreement comes with strings attached. You also have to deal with the opposition and at least in American politics, they seem to be quite unreasonable at times. (Regardless which party is the opposition.)
This. And one reason why I don't think he is pessimistic at all, just the truth. Although the reason for that truth may not be what he thought it was.
I wish more people watch the Documentary, Yes Minster, it perfectly describe modern days politics with sense of humour, and many of it are still true even if it was done some 40 years ago.
I agree, that's the central question: is a government for promoting the prosperity of it's people or perpetuating itself. Would be nice if they could do both but there are so many examples of governments choosing themselves over the greater good.
China's economy isn't by any stretch of the imagination "communist", but telling every car where to go is perhaps the right solution for the future, with computer science making it feasible and overpopulation making it desirable.
However, I'm not sure that's in any way relevant to freedom of thought and freedom of information.
And Google already does it: take a look at the stories of small towns wishing Google would stop routing people through a certain surface road and not knowing how to make that request. People trust their navigation apps because in general those apps have earned their trust.
In general I am skeptical of "Communism is bad because the government will X" arguments where private industry is capable of doing X in as thorough a way for the average citizen's practical liberty and especially where private industry is already trying X.
Yes communism is bad because of other reasons, and because it failed every single time it was tried. Btw. China is not a communist state for a long time.
Central control is efficient, if you can get the right signals to the controller, and do it fast enough to have a tight feedback loop. Humans alone can do none of this at scale, but modern computing can do the "feedback" part easily. It's now the "signals" and "controller" parts that need to be figured out.
Central control is efficient? Despite every government that tried to control the economy utterly failed? You will need to provide some solid source to claim this kind of things. The problem lies with the concept, not with how fast the loop happens.
Will you? Or will the car go to whomever paid most for on-line ads?
(And I'm not even joking. Somebody soon will have the "brilliant" insight that "going to a place" isn't what the consumers truly want - surely, they want for some thing they desire to happen, and they may be flexible about the physical location of that thing, or about who's gonna do that thing.)
Variable, but generally worse. It's much more tightly censored than Wikipedia: for example, edits are manually reviewed by admins before going live. Also, most community features (talk pages etc) have been removed, so it's constantly gamed to push spam, copy pastes etc and the mods don't really care unless it touches a red line topic like politics.