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I don’t want to sound like I’m being xenophobic towards China or anything, but is it okay to say that I’m not surprised at how Chinese media censored President Obama’s inauguration speech? As someone who hates censorship in any forms, it’s ironic that I can sort of see why they did it, but at the same time I do not agree with it.

Censorship is a mean to hide or prevent information from being known to the common public. However, it just seems odd that the Chinese translation of the speeches are changed, but they left the speech alone in English — but then again, the English speech is already all over the internet, so I guess they can’t do much about it. Nonetheless, I guess the Chinese officials are hoping that most of their people do not access English website or know English to understand the original speech. I do hope they realize that there are multilingual citizens in China, so to censor the information around like that is pretty pointless.

On a more positive note, yay for President Obama! Woo hoo!



« Filmmaker Kimi Takesue talks about “Suspended” at Sundance
Inauguration 2009: Guest blog by Keith Kamisugi of Equal Justice Society »

17 Comments »

That’s kind of stupid to change the translation and not the English part. It’s not like it’s not going to be everywhere!


Gg? It was a good speech too.


You can watch the speech just about everywhere. lol


Go Obama! You’ll probably be able to watch it everywhere for years.


Yeah but not everyone will understand it without the translation. :(


Theres probably transcripts online.


what a shame! its a great speech. they act like if common people heard a few words about communism the whole country would start a riot.


Didn’t Obama visit China once?


i think in this case they wanted to save obama’s face for the chinese common people? I mean, they are all quite incensed with the greatness of communism, so it’ll be rather strange if the “hope-of-the-world” would be heard talking trash about communism.

And obama was saying those stupid things about communism because he knows americans think it’s bad..

Anyway, i wonder if i’ll ever see the day when american media doesn’t use censorship anymore. (i.e. “fuck” and “son-of-a-bitch” getting censored and all) Over here everything’s aired, but over here people know how to contain themselves better apparently so we never had the need for censorship.


Intricate - 01/21/09 8:44 pm

i think in this case they wanted to save obama’s face for the chinese common people? I mean, they are all quite incensed with the greatness of communism, so it’ll be rather strange if the “hope-of-the-world” would be heard talking trash about communism.

And obama was saying those stupid things about communism because he knows americans think it’s bad..


Anyway, i wonder if i’ll ever see the day when american media doesn’t use censorship anymore. (i.e. “fuck” and “son-of-a-bitch” getting censored and all) Over here everything’s aired, but over here people know how to contain themselves better apparently so we never had the need for censorship.

Obama is clearly a well-learned guy. I don’t think he would reduce the whole American population into “communism fearing folk”; not all Americans think it’s bad (whether in theory or in practice). Although Obama probably doesn’t want to do this, we’re probably going to have to bail out the auto industry, unless we want to lose more American jobs. What does that mean? A government-regulated auto industry… feeling hints of socialism and communism there? Yes, but does that mean we’re socialist or communist now? Of course not. I may be getting a little off track, but the point is that rarely are things so simple that we can call it good or bad. The days of Reagan/Bush fear mongering are marked. And with the way things are in the country at the moment, people are willing to think outside of the box, and it’s evident with Obama’s landslide victory.

Are you saying mainland Chinese citizens can’t contain themselves when they hear unadulterated news? Last I heard, all humans are capable of many things when it comes to media, whether reacting with a ruckus or pausing for contemplation. If you’re saying that censorship is necessary in order for Chinese citizens not to go nuts, then you’re basically saying that a government can determine what’s best for billions of citizens.

“Fuck” and “son-of-a-bitch” are not the only censorships we get here in the states, by the way. If you follow news from other countries (which I recommend), you can see how U.S. articles sound grossly different from their international counterparts. I’m not excusing China (censorship in China is an important issue to me) from its actions, but where there is media, there is censorship.


a lot of people see Obama as some sort of savior for the human race. don’t get me wrong, I voted for and love the guy, but you can’t expect the world to change overnight.


Their youth supports communism?


I think all countries do use censorship in some forms or another, which is quite pointless in my opinion.  I mean, okay censoring adult material for children makes sense—though censoring adult stuff for ADULTS makes no sense to me.  But censoring news media like that, where now we have the internet to help spread the facts and information, is just a bunch of blargharoni.

Tiffanie said it the best with:

Are you saying mainland Chinese citizens can’t contain themselves when they hear unadulterated news? Last I heard, all humans are capable of many things when it comes to media, whether reacting with a ruckus or pausing for contemplation. If you’re saying that censorship is necessary in order for Chinese citizens not to go nuts, then you’re basically saying that a government can determine what’s best for billions of citizens.

In a way, preventing the mass population on receiving news like this is a form of propaganda—or at least I see it like that—so to do that only makes China looks “bad”.  Now of course, my definition of bad is different from the Chinese officials, but whatever.  I was just trying to point out the irony in the way they are censoring this when it’s just utterly useless with what’s called the mighty internet.


Every country is different. It’s hard to make a judgment on something we don’t fully understand ourselves.


Ooo Heated debate! haha

@intricate: What country are you from?


“Can’t we all just get along?” lol


why censor stuff…



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