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  Stoned4Life, 8 Dec 2005 @ 7:21pm

  
  

  Control

  The only way the government can totally control all information going in and out of China is through total domination of all media aspects. If they drop mpeg leaving only their own codec, they can control what is played through this codec.

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    Anonymous Coward, 8 Dec 2005 @ 7:49pm

    
    

    Re: Control

    I agree. I believe that this has to be rooted in the totalitarian nature of the Chinese government and their attempt to control the inflow of outside cultural influences. Just wait, soon China will announce a China-only internet.

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      Howard, 9 Dec 2005 @ 6:25am

      
      

      China-only internet?

      I doubt that China will cut itself off from the rest of the Internet. There are too many people like me who do business with China. Cutting off the flow of billions of Dollars of trade would produce a revolution. They've already got enough of a problem with the 21+ million young men of approximately military-service age (many with military training) who can't find wives due to decades of government policies that led to massive female infanticide and sex-selective abortions. Capitalism is firmly enough intrenched in China that the current attempts to control information flow (i.e., money flow) will ultimately fail. And we'd better hope they don't really try all that hard, because a Chinese revolution at this point could easily become a world war.
      --
      The Celtic Fiddler

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  melancolico catrin, 9 Dec 2005 @ 8:32am

  
  

  National Firewall

  They have a national firewall, plus they have American businesses like Google and Microsoft helping them out, and a little snitch called Yahoo that exposes dissidents...
  The PRC is on a steady track to have its own internet.

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  Chris H, 9 Dec 2005 @ 9:52am

  
  

  No Subject Given

  The easiest way to control what your population thinks and believes, is to control what they hear and see.

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  blah, 9 Dec 2005 @ 3:48pm

  
  

  blah

  and us Americans keep pouring billions of dollars into China, and then we get all frazzled when they rip us off.
  
  Time to cut China back off. Things were better before then were allowed into the G8.

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  Anonymous of Course, 9 Dec 2005 @ 8:40pm

  
  

  Xenophobia

  Another manifestation of China's xenophobic nature. There is also an economic pressure at work here too. They believe that to lead rather than follow they must develop their own standards. The part about the standards being a vehicle for common development and interoperability seems to have escaped the PRC. So they rush headlong with immense ego busily developing defective standards with a good measure of NOH factor thrown in to boot. I believe they actually think that the rest of the world will accept some of these standards
  giving them a competative edge as the innovators.

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  Adam W, 11 Dec 2005 @ 5:37pm

  
  

  Geo Politics at play

  International standards bodies are almost always a political afair, no matter how utilitarian the subject being discussed. The so-called International Community is heavily dominated by US-UK-EU oriented interests, and other countries are expected to tow this line. China however sees itself as an "emerging superpower" or "awakening giant" and feels it is about time the dominant powers started treating it like an equal.
  
  Regardless of whether or not specific wireless committies payed enough attention to China's needs in this case, there is a 50 year history of the PRC being snubbed in the International arena by Western powers, so now that China has the ecomonic clout (and third world political influence) to asert itself, it will. And if the established players won't let China dictate terms for once, China is happy to use it's state capitalist model to good effect and create a new Beta vs VHS style global market struggle to make a point.
  
  Media and communications formats make a good vehicle for Chinese political manipulation because the Chinese consume "content" so voraciously.
  
  Or, to put it another way: If China is going to be the number 1 producer and consumer of (for example) blank discs over the next 10 years, why should it have to pay Japan for the right to use them?

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