The Great 'Firewall' of China

                    "If you open the window for fresh air, you should expect some flies to come in." 


                     This is a famous quotation of Deng Xiaoping, the then head of China who was the man behind liberalization of Chinese Economy. It is intended to say that, opening the doors of Chinese Economy will lead to allowing of various unnecessary things and unwanted ideologies.

                      The communist government of China imposes internet censorship in the People's Republic of China. Various laws and administrative regulations are brought into picture with respect to the usage of internet. As per these laws, censorship systems are implemented by state-owned ISPs, business companies, and organizations. This censorship is one of the world’s most sophisticated one.

                       As per the regulations, No one can use the Internet to create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit the following kinds of information:

•    Encouraging the breaking of Constitution or laws or the implementation of administrative regulations
•    Encouraging the overthrow of the government or the socialist system
•    Encouraging the division of the country, harming national unification.
•    Encouraging the hatred or discrimination among nationalities or harming the unity of the nationalities.
•    Making falsehoods or distorting the truth, spreading rumors, destroying the order of society.
•    Promoting feudal superstitions, gambling, violence, murder.
•   Terrorism or inciting others to criminal activity.
•   Openly insulting other people or distorting the truth to slander people.
•   Injuring the reputation of state organizations.
•   Other activities against the Constitution, laws or administrative regulations. 

               A project to automatically filter the content that falls under above mentioned category was started in 1998 and went on till 2006. The project was named as 'Great Firewall of China'. The Golden Shield Project consists of standard firewalls and proxy servers at the Internet gateways blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through.

                In China, 

• One cannot participate in social networking, where information will be shared across the globe.
• One cannot call for protests or propagate inflammatory speechs via internet.
• Discussions in forums are not not allowed.

                However, in the other China-controlled territories like Hong Kong and Macau, there is no such censorship.

                In 2006, an activist shared some information to outer world on protests via yahoo.Yahoo was summoned to provide the information of the user. He was later sentenced for ten years of imprisonment.

                It is estimated that, at least 18,000 websites are blocked in mainland China. Certain topics like Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, agitations related to freedom of speech and democracy,  Taiwan independence, Tibetan independence movement etc are blocked forever. Foreign media websites such as BBC News, Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia are occasionally blocked. On the twentieth anniversary of the government suppression of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, the government ordered internet portals, forums and various other sites to shut down their servers for maintenance. When the Wenzhou train collision happened in China, the news reached the outer world after many days. Such an effective internet regulation is operational in China.

               However, one cannot stop the technology and innovation. A search engine called 'Elgoog' was developed. It is nothing but 'Google' spelled backwards. It gave results with all the strings reversed. Thus, they escape the Chinese firewall as it makes harder for the blockages to track on what users are looking for.

              Kapil Sibal is planning for a similar firewall to control internet usage in India. Let us wait and see how it works here.

Is our youth a bane or boon?

Is our burgeoning youth a bane or boon?

                           During the early 1980s, China was in a position that India finds itself in 2010. According to some estimates, the population under 25 years in India is 51% and the proportion of population under 35 years of age  is about 66%.

                           It is believed that China’s current economic boom is the direct consequence of the large proportion of youth population. This dominance of youth in the population will last until 2050. The average age of an Indian in 2020 is expected to be 29 years, the average age for China is expected to be 37 years by that time.

                          When I have read all these survey reports, I felt very happy for the development we are going to witness in coming years. Furthermore, we are going to see our nation as a super power at-least in 25 years from now. as we are going to have the world's largest man power and work force. With proper education, health care and jobs we are sure that we would move our economy in the right direction.

But, there are certain other things which we should think.

                         Recently, my mom had a dental complaint. She called up for an appointment to be made on a Saturday. The receptionist said that the dental hospital will be very busy on weekends as all the appointments will be made 15 days in advance. The reason being... all the IT and ITES employees will be free only on Saturday and Sunday. All of these IT employees are of the range 20-35 years of age.

                         If we see in our office, our senior manager is the only one who is of 35+ years of age., rest are of 20-30 years of age. Almost 70% of IT and ITES sector employees come under 25-35 years of age group. Also, the current birth rate is declining gradually. On an average, a pair has only one kid(am referring to the youth statistics).

                         Now, let us go a little bit forward by 30 years of age. We( 25-35 years of age) would become 50+ years by that time. The same situation that we have seen in the dental clinic can be seen in normal hospitals. We would be some 51% of the population who start concentrating on health care. Among the remaining 49% of the population, 24% will be our children and 25% would  be our parents. Among these 24% proportion of younger generation, we can expect a maximum proportion of 10% to be doctors. So, the patients would increase, infrastructure would be good... but the doctors and staff who deal with the infrastructure would be less.

                        Let us see another instance. We are taking many retirement plans here and then. Many firms are also getting benefited by them. Now, after 30 years, when this 51% of population starts retiring and only 25% of population would be planning for their retirement, just imagine the situation that would arise.

                         If we take the existing educational institutions, all the seats will remain unfilled as we would have very less young aspirants by that time. We should start attracting foreign students by then. We will start outsourcing our work to the then developing nations and we would take up only the management roles. We would go to those nations for operations in-spite of having world class hospitals and equipments only because they are cheap. Whatever may be the sector, we would end up in a deep crisis.

                         We will, by then realize that it is exactly the same current situation of developed countries like Australia, European nations etc. If sun rises here in India, it should set in America and vice versa. Let us wait an watch.

I have decided one important thing... I will have two kids in future..
The family planning symbol may be changed in future from the inverted triangle to a Square..