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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (136333)	4/7/2001 7:13:19 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

15,000? How do you find that kind of info? I think the silver lining is we ALL now know appeasement doesn't work worth cowardly bullies. The Communist system is only still in rule there because they are truly harsh capitalists who don't mind killing many children to make a few bucks. Read this link after the rest of this post: dailynews.yahoo.com TheStandard.com Beijing Backs Down on School Explosion Story By Joanne Lee-Young and Sharon Walsh Responding to reports on the Internet and elsewhere, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji apologized Thursday for an explosion that gutted an elementary school and killed 42 people, including 38 children, in rural China on March 6. Zhu issued his unusual apology on national television Thursday, saying that the government bears "unshirkable responsibility" for the explosion, according to news reports. He ordered an investigation of the event. Many Web sites had run reports from blast survivors and parents to the effect that children as young as 8 and 9 had been forced to make fireworks in drafty classrooms to support the school. Zhu had asserted that a deranged adult caused the explosion, and he stood by that story. Nonetheless, his apology, and his order for a full investigation, showed a rare lapse in China's control over news sources. Web reports and chat rooms had buzzed with messages from local reporters and outraged parents who denied the government's official line and said that the government was to blame for the explosion. But those allegations disappeared this week when Beijing ordered the stories and comments removed. Most Web sites in China have monitors on staff who are trained to remove content deemed unfit by the government. Their job is to watch for and remove blacklisted items - mainly sensitive political topics such as Tibetan independence or news from the banned Falun Gong sect. "We may think this is outrageous, but users in China have gotten used to it," says Albert Yen, a Hong Kong-based general manager of Sina, one of China's most popular sites. Sina shut down its live chat rooms to stem the flood of reaction to the explosion story, in compliance with government regulations, but users could still post messages. Other major portals in China, such as Sohu and Netease, did the same thing. All are dependent on the government for operating licenses. Beijing has been harsh with those using the Internet to spread political messages. In February, pro-democracy activist Huang Qi was put on trial for posting messages commemorating those who died in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and for supporting the democracy movement. Recently, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Democracy and Human Rights told Agence France-Presse that a Chinese middle-school teacher had been sentenced to two years in prison for advocating the downfall of the Communist Party in an Internet chat room. But this incident emphasizes the way the Internet has changed the way news is reported in China. Though reporters avoid the real political hot spots, they use the Web for smaller shows of defiance, mainly for needling companies and local officials. "They may have strict rules [for the Internet], but they haven't gotten around to monitoring it well yet," says a Beijing-based reporter. And unlike handling newspaper stories, he said, "it's always easy to post something on the Internet and pull it off later once it has had its impact."