Coercive Chinese censorship against Thailand

November 13, 2023 @ 2:52 pm · Filed by under Censorship, Second language

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"Hurting the feelings of the Chinese people", part 572

From AntC:

Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), Taiwan's Foreign Minister, just gave an interview on Thai TV. I thought it a very sober assessment of the current situations (worldwide).  See Taiwan News article here. 
 
Thai TV posted it on Youtube; PRC immediately claimed it "harmed China’s interests and hurt the Chinese people’s feelings." So it got taken down. It has been archived at Wayback — but I don't know how long it will survive there.
 
I'm totally impressed with Wu's command of English — especially given how carefully he has to tread. And of course President Tsai Ing-wen is equally capable.

Watch the Wayback archived interview while you still can.  The PRC will stop at nothing to prevent Taiwan from having a voice.

 

Selected readings

November 13, 2023 @ 2:52 pm · Filed by under Censorship, Second language


13 Comments

  1. Victor Mair said,

    November 13, 2023 @ 3:02 pm

    BTW, China will be deploying its police in Thailand, as they have previously done in various European countries.

    "Chinese police to patrol in Thailand to boost tourist confidence:

    In a bid to boost the confidence of Chinese tourists, Thai authorities have decided to let Chinese police officers participate in patrols in several tourist cities in the kingdom."

    https://www.nationthailand.com/blogs/thailand/policies/40032786

  2. Chris Barts said,

    November 13, 2023 @ 3:45 pm

    Here's the video in a form that's easier to download and mirror:

    https://archive.org/details/taiwanese-foreign-minister-thai-tv

  3. AntC said,

    November 13, 2023 @ 3:48 pm

    Thank you Victor,

    There is a curious comment in the Taiwan News article, which I took to be a messed-up translation [**]

    The [PRC] embassy said any action that "holds a candled to the devil" on issues tied to the territorial integrity of China and "separatism" contravenes the friendship between the Chinese and Thailand.

    "hold a candle to the devil" is an obsolete English expression. Even "(can't) hold a candle to …" (meaning much inferior) is very old-fashioned.

    [**] Usually Taiwan News is syndicating a Putonghua original report. My google-fu isn't up to finding it in this case.

  4. David Marjanović said,

    November 13, 2023 @ 6:27 pm

    Has archive.org ever deleted anything?

  5. Jonathan Smith said,

    November 13, 2023 @ 6:52 pm

    R u sure this was a take-down request / Youtube acquiescence? That would be most alarming. For me it shows "private"; dunno what that means…
    The "hold a candle to the devil" stuff comes straight from the Chinese embassy facebook post, which predictably was promptly flooded by unbridled Thai love for Taiwan…

  6. Jason said,

    November 13, 2023 @ 7:03 pm

    @AntC

    Apparently the expression means "Being civil to a terrible adversary out of fear", so, "putting a light out for the devil." Ironic that the PRC should claim to object to such conduct.

  7. Jason said,

    November 13, 2023 @ 7:15 pm

    @David Marjanović

    All the time, pal. And not just for copyright reasons.

  8. AntC said,

    November 13, 2023 @ 8:45 pm

    @Jonathan R u sure this was a take-down request / Youtube acquiescence?

    My reading of the Taiwan News is: not exactly. It's Thai TV's channel within YouTube. They presumably have rights to put up or take down their own content (within YouTube guidelines). So it was their editorial decision.

    To be fair to YouTube, Minister Wu keeps up an extensive interview round with foreign Press. There are still up easily findable older videos with Deutsche Welle, France24, ABC Australia, CNN for example.

    @DavidM Has archive.org ever deleted anything?

    Yes, for all sorts of legal reasons. For example there was a mass shooting in New Zealand a few years back, which the shooter livestreamed, and which rapidly spread to all sorts of conspiracy channels. (I know because all my friends/rellies overseas kept linking to them — as if I wanted to watch.) This included several scrapes on to archive.org before NZ's legal authorities could extirpate them. That would be good reasons for deleting. (Are the livestreams from what's going on in Israel/Gaza or Ukraine scraped to there? I don't want to look.)

    There's also material from now-dead websites for which archive.org is (was) the only remaining source. Much of it seems to be there forever (so far); but occasionally I go back and pfft! It may be copyright, as @Jason suggests, but some of it was under open licence from the original source. (I don't know the legals of that.)

    So my "don't know how long it will survive there." was precautionary: AFAICT Wayback doesn't have any legal right to retain material; if the original copyright holder wants it taken down, I suppose their counter-threat is: we'll forbid you continuing access to scrape our site.

  9. Michael Watts said,

    November 13, 2023 @ 11:49 pm

    Has archive.org ever deleted anything?

    It is their policy to remove access to any archived page for which the current owner of the domain requests such removal. This applies regardless of whether the current owner of the domain was the owner at the time of archival.

    Obviously, this completely defeats the purpose of archival.

  10. Philip Taylor said,

    November 14, 2023 @ 6:14 am

    Captured as 137MB MP4, just in case it gets taken down …

  11. Victor Mair said,

    November 14, 2023 @ 7:26 am

    Thailand’s plan to deploy Chinese police patrol to boost tourism sparks outcry

    The cooperation with Chinese police was discussed by PM Srettha Thavisin, senior police and tourism officials on Sunday as a way to draw more Chinese visitors
    Thai internet users slammed the move, with many worried the kingdom would become another location for covert operations targeting Chinese dissidents overseas

    Bloomberg
    Published: 3:15pm, 13 Nov, 2023

    https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3241324/thailands-plan-deploy-chinese-police-patrol-boost-tourism-sparks-outcry

  12. Yves Rehbein said,

    November 14, 2023 @ 2:52 pm

    Echange is not an uncommon practice among police. It ought to add experience and possibly broaden their horizon as they must be bound by local law.

    Chinese citizens are probably the least of Thailand's problems at this point. Targeting of dissidents sound more like a special operations move. Policing the media is a different problem, since we had Pimmelgate in Hamburg because of a single tweet, too.

    Turning off comments on the youtube video would be a softer alternative. To take it down if requested is a means of saving face. The free speech crowd does not like this, of course. Perhaps it's more important to not drive traffic to youtube, who aren't a paragon of free speech anyway.

    I know that German state funded media (ARD, ZDF etc.) have attempted to move away this year and came back after mere weeks. I sense subliminal resentment since.

  13. Thaiswat said,

    November 14, 2023 @ 6:18 pm

    A little drama about the aftermath of this issue:

    https://m.facebook.com/story.php/?id=100064883316254&story_fbid=744947987677972

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