MSE goes global!

Voyager2002

MSE has been mentioned and praised in a newspaper article published in mainland China! The Chinese-language newspaper is called Procuratorial Daily, and is produced by the Ministry of Justice in Beijing. It is primarily aimed at officials working within the Ministry itself or involved in the administration of justice, but is also on sale to the general public.

It featured an article about public awareness of the law, and ways in which the level of public awareness can be raised. It used my comments on this issue, some of which (published in the article) were as follows:

Interviewer's question:
> What are the effective ways do you think that will enhance people's
> Law Quotient or legal consciousness? And how about yourself?
>
Perhaps the most important thing is to make people aware of their own
ignorance. Most people have an innate sense of what is fair (perhaps
this sense of what is fair can be compared with IQ or EQ). However, the
courts make decisions in accordance with the law: sometimes the law
coincides with what seems fair to most people, but often it does not. I
have observed many times that when people hear about a disagreement,
they form an opinion about who was right, who was wrong, and what would
be a fair solution. Then they say that they are sure that this is what a
court would decide. In most cases they are completely wrong, because the
law says something different. A good example is the law around divorce:
most people assume that if one spouse has been a good wife (or husband)
while the other spouse behaved badly, had affairs or whatever, then the
court should take account of this when dividing up their joint property.
In reality this does not usually happen: courts have particular rules
for deciding who should keep the apartment and other property, and takes
no account of adultery in making such decisions. Most people feel that
this is not fair (reasonably, I think) but therefore expect the courts
to do what is fair.

As for ways of correcting this situation, the most effective is to
spread stories about what happened to people when they came into contact
with the law. The internet is a very effective tool for this purpose.
You will find several examples on the website called
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com Choose the section called chat forum, where
ordinary people post about their experiences and offer each other advice
and encouragement. The discussion on reclaiming unfair bank charges has
many examples, while there are some dramatic stories in the area about
property (buying, selling, renting).

Martin (or anyone else with a particular interest) I could scan the relevant page if necessary and send it to you. If you want me to do so, please PM me. Do bear in mind that apart from the website URL it is all in Chinese.

nelly_2

Are you there now? Isnt it firewalled they dont like thme looking outside china

MSE_Martin

Wow thank you for that - and for translating it. It's really interesting to read

Edinburghlass_2

Will you translate for me when we get questions from China on reclaiming bank charges

Larfingboy

nelly wrote:

Are you there now? Isnt it firewalled they dont like thme looking outside china

I live in China (most of the time) and have no problem reading the MSE website. The sites that are monitored (and blocked) are mainly those most sensible people don't want to see anyway, such as !!!!!!, hateful sites, rabble-rousing political sites and so on, though there are some blocked for what appears to be no good reason, such as the BBC news sites.
I have no problem finding information or news using alternative sites and Google search!!!:D

Martin_Edney

Larfingboy wrote:

...though there are some blocked for what appears to be no good reason, such as the BBC news sites.

I think you're very optimistic about the Chinese government if you think the BBC news site is blocked for no good reason.

Anything that reports on (amongst other things) persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, the killing of unarmed civilians in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the fact that China tops the league of capital punishment by a long way, or the idea that Tibet was once an independent country before China invaded, persecuting and killing many Tibetans, simply isn't going to go down well with the Chinese authorities, so don't be surprised if it gets blocked.

Let's see whether my quotes end-up censored:

Wikipedia wrote:

There has been international response to the suppression. According to the Falun Gong's Falun Dafa Clearwisdom.net site, there are, as of June 3, 2006, 2,898 reported cases of Falun Gong practitioners dying in police and government custody in China. It has also been reported that Falun Gong practioners held in concentration camps, have been killed for their organs, bones, and tissues, which are sold and transplanted at enormous profit giving rise to allegations of torture and police brutality. The report also alleges that hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been detained, with more than 100,000 sentenced to forced-labor camps.

Wikipedia wrote:

In Beijing, the resulting crackdown on the protestors by the PRC government left many civilians dead. The toll ranges from 200–300 (PRC government figures), to 2,000–3,000 (Chinese student associations and Chinese Red Cross), although the PRC government asserts and most independent observers agree that these deaths were not in the square itself but rather in the streets leading to the square.

Wikipedia wrote:

The People's Republic of China performed more than 3400 executions in 2004, amounting to more than 90% of executions worldwide.

Wikipedia wrote:

In 1950, the People's Liberation Army entered the Tibetan area of Chamdo, crushing minimal resistance from the ill-equipped Tibetan army.

Tibetan exiles state that the number that have died in the much unwanted Great Leap Forward, of violence, or other indirect causes since 1950 is approximately 1.2 million, which the Chinese Communist Party denies. According to Patrick French, the estimate is not reliable because the Tibetans were not able to process the data well enough to produce a credible total. There were, however, many casualties, perhaps as many as 400,000. This figure is extrapolated from a calculation Warren W. Smith made from census reports of Tibet which show 200,000 "missing" from Tibet. Even The Black Book of Communism expresses doubt at the 1.2 million figure, but does note that according to Chinese census the total population of ethnic Tibetans in the PRC was 2.8 million in 1953, but only 2.5 million in 1964[citation needed]. It puts forward a figure of 800,000 deaths and alleges that as many as 10% of Tibetans were interned, with few survivors. Chinese demographers have estimated that 90,000 of the 300,000 "missing" Tibetans fled the region.